Quail Meadows, USA
/Brenna Collins O’Donnell
What if the world ended at the perfect, green limit of the hedgeline?
And what if this fact never bothered you?
Because you would never so much as wonder where exactly the world extended to,
or when exactly it stopped.
This home is a museum.
Antiquated dreams and petrified intentions of someday going back to California but never making it there.
Every clock in this house keeps a different time and the clouds outside are always blooming upwards and
billowing by, so it is easy to have life pass at the same pace and not pay too much attention.
For a reason removed from logic, dust does not gather on the surfaces here.
But the nectarines on the counter have started to rot from the inside. The Cadillac’s battery dies.
The lizards dart through the sun room.
The soda goes flat and the light bulbs burn out
and somewhere the world forgets, but I can’t.
So I don’t.
I am the only historian left standing, in the same white-tile kitchen, all these years later.
This is the place where I try not to outright hate myself over my mistakes because this house is home to
the ones I’ll never be able to take back.
The only calls that come to the house phone are from a man named “Matthew” who asks to buy the house
in cash. I say no. He takes two breaths, says nothing at all, and hangs up. It scares me. For more reasons
that one might think.
Author’s Note: Quail Meadows is the name of the neighborhood where my grandparents' home is located. My immediate family inherited the home a few years back and this piece was written while quarantining there in June of 2020.
Brenna Collins O’Donnell is a journalist and nonprofit worker based out of Alexandria, Virginia. She holds a BA in Writing from Ithaca College in New York, where she was Editor in Chief of the Department of Writing’s literary magazine, Stillwater. Her creative writing has a home on Instagram: @brennacollinsodonnell.
