August in the garden. Maud was engrossed in weed removal, making room for the late-summer blossoms, tending the precious beds of pansies. Wind high in the maples at the front of the building, breezes closer to the ground.

Maud looked at the child. He was so beautiful there in the garden in mid-August, his fair hair illuminated by sun and moving gently on the current of the air.

“Lovely boy,” she said quietly, brushing a lock of golden hair out of his eyes.

“Lovely boy,” he replied, ignoring her caress.

The garden gloves made her hands look like two small kittens curled on the pattern of her apron. She rested for a moment, kneeling on the grass, shadows of leaves on her hands, her shoulders.

Maud sensed the chrysanthemums of early autumn stirring, twitching their roots below the ground. Everywhere on the grass there was light and darkness, moving and changing. Beside her lay a collection of dead, discardable blossoms. Sweet odour of decay.

She was wearing her mauve cotton dress and had opened it at the collar to let the breeze touch her throat. Inside the gloves her hands were ringless, all jewellery left behind in the house. Happy, absorbed in her activities, she began to sing. A thin sound, carried all over the garden by the wind.

The child moved towards the picket fence that separated the front yard from the street. “Man,” he said, very quietly, under his breath.

Maud stopped singing. She assumed that he was referring to the small tree he stood directly in front of.

“No,” she said, from force of habit, “Bush.”

“The man,” said the boy, louder this time, gazing past the pickets out into the empty thoroughfare.

“The road?” questioned Maud. “Don’t you mean the road?”

It was so dry in this season that tiny whirlwinds of dust moved up Main Street borne on the back of the breeze. The child watched one of these make its irregular progress past the front gate.

“The man,” he said again.

Maud pushed her spade into the arid soil and rose slowly to her feet. She walked over to the spot where the child was standing and, placing one hand on his shoulders, scrutinized his line of vision, noticing the whirlwind as she did so.

“Dust,” she said emphatically.

“The man,” replied the child, searching up and down the street.

“The man?” asked Maud, and then, speaking mostly to herself, “What man? There is no man.”

“There is no man,” mimicked the boy. He was silent, serious for a few moments. Then he began again.

“Where is this man?” asked Maud. “There’s no man here. Who is this man? Why are you talking about a man? Flower,” she said, drawing his attention towards a yellow rose.

“The man,” said the boy, entirely disregarding the flower.

“All right,” said Maud, resigned. “The man.”

The child’s small face lit up like a lamp. “Oh,” he said, looking at his mother. “Oh, the man.”

What was this, Maud wondered; why, now, this repetitive word?

“Oh,” responded the boy. “Oh, the man.” He paused. “Swim,” he said.

Maud turned abruptly back to the garden, tired, so tired of arbitrary words.

“Forest,” the child said, following her to the flower-bed, his features filled with animation.

“No!” said Maud, suddenly straightening her spine and shaking her head, these disembodied nouns making her oddly uncomfortable. “No more of this today.” She waved the child away. “No more words,” she said. “In fact,” she continued, “no more sounds.”

“The man,” said the boy sadly as he turned away from his mother.

Maud removed seven weeds in rapid, angry succession, then sat back on her heels as if waiting for the garden to grow, or for a flower to unfurl before her very eyes, to show her, in an immediate way, that some of her efforts produced results. Nothing, of course, changed at all.

It seemed to her that only in her absence could miraculous transformations occur; only while she slept or lapsed into forgetfulness. Then the river released its dead, the child spoke, her garden blossomed, the season changed. But never under her direct gaze. A phrase… the man… had slipped into the child’s mind. Where had she been when that happened?

As she raked the earth with her garden tools she relaxed, forgetting, and began to sing again. Soon she heard the child, his voice mingling with her own. Singing too, perhaps. Then she heard the words rise above her own voice.

“O my God, my God!” he wailed in a shrill woman’s voice. “What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

He had made a tiny burial mound out of the garden dirt. The chief mourner, he was a woman hysterical. The sound of pure female grief filled the garden coming, it seemed, from each direction until Maud covered her ears to be through with it.

The child was rocking back and forth by the little toy grave, sunlight and shadow dancing all over the grass.