Slingshot

April 26, 2026

The house stood on the corner of Acacia and 119^th Street.  It was unlike any of the other houses in the neighborhood which were modest stuccos in pastel colors with five steps leading up to the porch and front yards with open lawns.  This house was clapboard and had a high pointed roof.  A tiny window sat in the middle of the roof’s V-shape, an attic or perhaps meant as a child’s bedroom.  It was so old that the house which may have once been painted white was now streaked grey. 

The yard surrounding it spacious but crowded.  Bushes of all sorts – rambling branches of white datura lilies with hanging trumpet flowers; roses of all sizes and colors, yellow, pink, white, orange; night-blooming jasmine, tiny and pale and blooming in abundance amid their deep green leaves; brilliant pink camellias on their low trees and looking out from petalled faces-all made a small forest of the place, while on the side opposite the street, that forest not only continued, but flourished. It took up the whole lot.

A 4-foot fence surrounded the perimeter with a wire lattice that had been repaired many times.  A gate opened to the narrow, block pavement path which led to the sagging wooden porch where a swing with a faded comforter lay rumpled.  A single wicker chair with a high, rounded back, pale with weather, sat opposite against the house.  Above everything were two date palms with thick trunks rising high above the pointed roof.  A canopy of fronds reached up and over in arcs at the top of the trees.

The palms were havens for the band-tail pigeons which flew throughout the neighborhoods.  They could be heard cooing and chattering, rustling the fronds in a friendly, busy way.  At times crowned parrots with brilliant green bodies in their loud, tight flocks would also stop by.

My best friend, Tommy Bowker, and I would ride our bikes as far as the corner across the street.  He rode his new, second-hand Sting Ray and I my red Schwinn.  We were allowed to ride as far as that corner on Acacia and 119^th, a block from our tidy, young-family neighborhood.  We didn’t know anything about the old woman who lived in the house, not even her name.  We didn’t know where she came from or how long she had lived there, but we figured she had been there always and had never been other than what she was now.  We were fascinated by her and made up stories about her though we were also a little afraid.  Was she a witch?

One day when we stopped at the corner to look across the street, we saw her standing in the yard completely still, eyes peering up into one of her palm trees, mouth set determinedly in her creased face.  She had dull, silver hair pulled back in a low bun at the nape of her neck and wore a gathered skirt made of a practical material like cotton with tiny designs on it, ashen and well-worn, reaching her shoes.  Her drab, long-sleeved shirt was tucked in but hung loose on her body.  She was a small figure in shades of gray.

She reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out something we’d never seen before.  In her fingers was a shape like the wishbone from the Thanksgiving turkey, but a dull brown and much thicker.  At the widest point between two ends was strung a mustard-colored strap that hung limply.  The sun was starting to set and soon we knew it would be time for dinner but, just as we started to turn our bikes, a ray of sun caught the strap and turned it into a brilliant, translucent gold.  We stayed.

She stabbed her free hand into her other pocket and pulled out something round and small, held it in the center of the strap, and raised both it and the wishbone in front of her eyes.  She pulled back the shining, golden strap with a strength and intention that took our breath.  The walnut, or whatever it was, whipped into the palm fronds, scattering the pigeons cooing and chattering in the tree, except for one.  Its soft, silver-gray body fell and thumped into the grass.  For the first time since we spotted her, she smiled.  She called to two round cats who had been on the porch, brown Siamese, one larger than the other, who both came carefully across the yard.

Tommy and I stood holding to the handlebars, feet shaking on the sidewalk, bewildered by the old woman and the dead bird on the grass.  We stood and said nothing, with wide, open stares.  Years later, I still remember that slingshot.