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upon the landscape—winter killed it all and spring brought it back to life like Lazarus. The in-between was nothing more than a waiting period for one of the two extremes to grab hold and dictate its dominance. The old man’s lack of action gave respect to the seasons for their true identities, not offering any kind of interference to the will of Mother Nature. More likely, though, Zephyr was reading into the man’s absent home landscaping further than was necessary. It was possible that he was just a lazy man. Or just too elderly to bother.
    Poking out from the back of the house, just beyond the trellis, was the edge of a shiny glass greenhouse. Thick rolls of insulation were draping some of the inside of the structure, which Zephyr assumed was part of the winter preparation process that was so common for Mainers. It looked as though he had started to remove the protection, but not all the way; for every drop of sweat you shed in the fall was a dollar saved in heating through the stretchy dead winter.
    Zephyr approached the door.
    He pulled back on the brass knocker, releasing it with a thud against its rusty base. When he heard no sounds from inside the house, he knocked again, this time with his bare fist on the stark white door, its paint beginning to chip away in beefy slices around the quadrants of paned glass.
    It was on the second knock that the door inched open, just enough so that Zephyr could see a glaring eyeball that studied him from foot to mane. “Who’s that?” the eyeball asked. Zephyr was surprised that the eyeball could speak with such clarity, given that it had no discernible mouth.
    “ I’m from Richter’s, sir,” Zephyr replied to the shifty retina, lifting the bag of groceries in his hand to better meet the line of sight of Mr. Rattup... he could only assume that Rattup was the man behind the eye.
    “ Well, that’s splendid. But you haven’t answered my question, boy. I asked who is at my door, not intentions or motives of said person, but who . I asked for nothing more than identification. Since I cannot recall ever making your acquaintance before, I deem it reasonable enough to start with the basics, do you not agree?” he shot back, a tone of agitation buttering his scratchy aged voice. “So let’s try this a second time. Who are you? And when I ask that question, I mean for you to identify yourself , in case you have never been asked such a thing in previous instances of your seemingly undignified life. This is how human beings greet one another.”
    “ My name is Zephyr, Mr. Rattup. Pleased to meet you,” Zephyr replied, lying about the pleasure part. He was accustomed to such treatment in his daily work at the market, but he never felt anything better than garbage when spoken to in such a way. If it wasn’t a co-worker, it was a brash customer, seeming to have an air of entitlement about their very attendance in the store. Being addressed as boy was a lot more common than he would have liked to admit. This was most common in older folks that seemed to have not forgotten slavery, though now they applied the hateful term to all races, creeds, and ages.
    The man at the door (Rattup?) snickered to himself, blinking his sliver of visible eyeball once, and then a second time, still the only feature of the man that Zephyr could detect through the slim fissure between the frame and door. It reminded him of the mechanical eyeball that greeted the droids outside of Jabba’s Palace in Return of The Jedi . Zephyr told himself that if Rattup swung open the door and revealed himself to be nothing more than a Cyclops, that he would run for his car and drop the groceries along the way. “What are you, some kind of hippie? What kind of name is that? Zipper ? Was your silly mother a goddamned seamstress or something? Of all the names...” he trailed off, the eyeball disappearing and reappearing as the man shook his head from side to side.
    Zephyr hung his head for a moment. It was a typical