Moisture, from the undersides of descending clouds had invaded the porch and now tunneled into her lungs through her nostrils and possessed her with a silvery shudder. Inside, Milad still slept an intoxicated sleep, buoyed on the downy warmth and thinning air from which the kerosene stove had sipped oxygen throughout the night, radiating heat, silently, faithfully.
She pulled the two halves of the door shut with a polite thud, they lodged comfortably as they had been accustomed, left before right, held firm by the reciprocal pressure they exerted on each other. Two halves of a heart, her husband used to say when Changiz was young, like us, That’s how we’ve kept warm all this time. Except that now he was gone and the door still closed and the nights of early spring were warm but lonely.
With a series of shuffling steps she turned away from the door, feet first, thighs then hips, taking pains to turn fully about face before she made toward the gate of the porch, really just a fraying square Changiz had cut from the side of a discarded shop fitting, held in place by a length of synthetic twine hooked round a nail. The sandals and plastic baskets had the neglected look that things left outside take on in the morning, protesting their hours outside your ken by remaining exactly where you left them, colors a shade closer to gray than their more vivid presence in the daytime.
She pushed the gate out in front of her, sliding her hand across the cracking grain of paint on its surface towards the hinge. She felt the reciprocal force grow against her hand, the way all things pushed back these days. With her upper body, right hand pressing the wall for support, elbow bent behind her, she sent the cast-off panel past the point where it would not swing shut again. It congratulated her with a creak and bounced, indolent against the painted adobe, straining slightly at the screws that her son had bored directly into the wall rather than replace the rotten wooden post on which the old gate had hung.
