Jody Hobbs Hesler
When Everything You Love Fits in Your Hand
Amelia bolted out the front door in her floppy slippers, her nylon robe fluttering in the wind behind her. That blasted garbage collector. Or maybe it was the truck itself. She never made it outside in time to see how dregs of trash managed to fly from the truck and land on her specific lawn every week. The truck’s gears screeched and the truck lurched, while she waved one hand in the air, the other clutching the front of her robe closed, and shouted, Hey hey hey! to no avail. By the time she reached the sidewalk, the truck had disappeared onto the next street.
A discarded plastic container now roosted in the early blooms of her quince bush. She’d have to go back inside to fetch a plastic bag from the pouch where she saved bags to recycle. She refused to touch an invading piece of trash with unprotected hands.
Inside, her kitchen gleamed from its first wipe down of a new day, and coffee chortled from the walk-in pantry. She selected the cleanest looking bag she could find from her stash, bristled when two others wafted to the floor. She preferred to wash her hands the moment after she stowed a new bag and be done with it forever. Who knew what muck they mingled with at grocery stores? The newspaper’s plastic sleeve was worse, lying in the dewy grass for hours, subject to the sniffing whims of every passing dog. The thought sent a shiver up to Amelia’s shoulders. All because of that careless garbage collector.
Outside, the yogurt cup waited, tilting precariously, threatening to fall deeper into the bush. If it fell, Amelia was sure the quince’s twiggy branches would scrape her skin as she reached in to retrieve it. The germs the container smeared on the branches and leaves on its way down would shuttle into little scratches along her wrist. Her arm tingled as if the shuttling had already begun. She cursed that garbage collector under her breath once more, hoping her first swoop to scoop the cup into the bag wouldn’t dislodge it further.
With the bag inverted like a glove, she slithered her hand toward the cup and reversed the bag around it. Now the cup’s mouth gaped at her through a haze of plastic. Where once she’d seen the last scrapings of something like strawberry yogurt clotted with bits of debris and possibly mold (she hadn’t wanted to look too closely), now she saw something quite different.
She held still, staring into the cup, unwilling at first to believe her eyes, because how was it possible? There, minuscule and in her hand, lay the strip of beach she and her siblings had run along every summer as children. Every summer before their mother died.
If she leaned closer, she could hear it too. Not just the crashing rumble of the sea, but her little brother and sister’s squeaks and laughter. She remembered the velvet feel of wet sand beneath her feet. Their vacations always fell on the early end of the season, so the sand was cold, the ocean not yet tempered for summer. Sometimes it was so cold the sand made the bones of her feet ache, but still it felt splendid. Imagine encountering that here, inside a piece of trash tossed sloppily into her yard.
More memories spilled into mind, and Amelia pressed her eyes closed to better receive them. The sticky cream cheese and jelly sandwiches her mother packed for lunchtime, how she and her siblings clustered together to eat them under the wide beach umbrella their mother spread open at the beginning of the day. Red and white stripes, like a peppermint stick, and the sky blue, the sun blinding beyond it. The gulls screamed and dove for their dropped crumbs. Their mother tsked and waved her open book to scatter them again.
All this, before. Before their mother died, before they went to live with their grandmother, before the foster homes after their grandmother died. This was back when a little grit in a sandwich meant nothing more than beach sand and wind and summertime. Back when Amelia’s body was an organ of pleasure, her life a series of gifts. Before she knew that people could call themselves parents when they were distinctly something else. That they could make you do awful things, and no amount of cleaning would get rid of the traces.
Amelia stood in the yard, unsure what to do next, with her robe flying wildly open in the breeze and her toes, sticking out from the edge of her slippers, turning red from the cold. She was afraid to throw the cup away, but also afraid to clean it. She wanted to stand in the yard and simply gaze into it. See what else it would bring.
Her next-door neighbor, Albert, familiar with Amelia’s annoyance with the trash collector, called across their yards, “Another piece of trash?”
A feeling washed over her that she couldn’t name, but part of it was sadness because everyone who knew her now only knew how finicky and irritable she could be. They had never heard her childhood laughter because after the foster families, her laugh lost its luster, came out rusty and sharp if it came out at all. She would whip up casseroles if you were sick, buy peanuts from Boy Scouts, cookies from Girl Scouts, donate to every marching band, chorus, orchestra, and sports team from the local schools. She would cut flowers from her garden if someone in your house was celebrating something. She was kind to people but quarrelsome with life. She closed her eyes again, even though she knew she should return Albert’s greeting. Ask about his wife, if her knee surgery went well, and when she opened her eyes again, she would.
Only, when she opened her eyes, she wasn’t in her yard anymore. The roar of the ocean startled her, so near, and the spray of it, icy on her now bare arms. She looked down at herself and recognized the bathing suit from when she was seven or eight years old, a navy one piece with a red band around the middle like a sash. She touched it and felt the surprise of nylon against her fingertips, the ribbing of the edges of the sash, the small delicateness of her own hands.
Another wave surged and bubbled into the shore, and this time it licked her toes. She leapt aside, and the sound she made, the high-pitched shriek, rang like bells inside her. This was what joy felt like. And indeed, there was little Josiah, only three, and Bettina with her sand-colored curls. They rushed toward her with their buckets full of sand, and she knelt with them, dumping the buckets into castle shapes. Digging moats with her hands, as water rushed in and ebbed away. No matter how big and good this castle would be, it would be gone by nightfall, and that was the point, not a sorrow but part of the thrill.
“Amelia?” It was Albert again, kneeling beside where she’d fallen in the grass. Now quince blossoms dappled her view upward. Otherwise, the sky looked the same as the one she’d just left, but for the cast of light that suggested a different season. The plastic bag with the dirty yogurt cup had fallen from her hands. Tilting in the grass beside her, it was clear it had become nothing more than trash again.
“Are you all right?” Albert was nervous for her, as if aware he’d stumbled into something essential about her beyond her everyday indignation. Or maybe, despite everything, people could sense what she’d been before all the befores that made her who she was now—a lonely older woman, living alone, suddenly stricken prone in her front yard, in her old robe and tattered slippers, with no one else to find her but her neighbor.
Eventually she allowed Albert to help ease her from the ground. When she laughed to excuse herself, the sound came out less raspy than usual. Then her life rushed in on her again, bringing a nearly unbearable urge to scrub her hands and shower dirt and grass from every inch of her backside. She wanted the hot cup of coffee that waited for her inside. Inside, where everything was quiet and clean. She wanted to feel okay again.
She glanced once more at the yogurt cup, still wrapped in the plastic bag, and lifted it gently back into her hands. What she wanted most was to return to where it had taken her, to move forward from there toward a different life.
Swallowing the urge to clean herself, she let small talk with Albert ebb naturally, then walked at a normal pace back into her house. Alone again, she hurried to the laundry room and dumped her clothes directly into the washing machine, stepped into the shower in the downstairs bathroom, and let hot water course over her while she scoured and scoured, pretending to hear seagulls in the distance.
When the garbage truck rumbled up the street a week later, Amelia stood on her porch, already dressed, with a clean plastic bag in her hand.
Jody Hobbs Hesler (she/her) is the author of the novel, Without You Here (Flexible Press, September 2024; Winner of the 2025 Independent Press Award for Literary Fiction and finalist for Southern Literary Review's Book of the Year) and the story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better (Cornerstone Press, October 2023). Her words also appear or are forthcoming in Swing, South Dakota Review, The Pinch, Necessary Fiction, Gargoyle, Electric Literature, CRAFT, Arts & Letters, and elsewhere. She teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia; writes and copy edits for Charlottesville Family Magazine; and serves as assistant fiction editor for the Los Angeles Review.
