Too Much Room
by Julia Hands
The daughter finds a jar in the laundry closet as she puts away her soccer cleats. The glass is stained yellow with dust, the inside of the rim browned with rust-colored grime. She hides it under her coat when she goes outside, her parents not meeting eyes as they sit on opposite ends of the table. In between them sits a pile of paper and a pen.
In the sandbox at the corner of the backyard, she sets the jar between her legs. The wet grit is cold beneath her, and she knows her jeans will be soaked when she stands up. But she settles into the box. The daughter draws a square before her like a desk like the alcove where her mother now chooses to eat her meals. Twigs from the trees have blown into the box from the early autumn storms and she lays them like pens. She piles rotting leaves and places a rock over the pile like a paperweight. At the center of her makeshift desk she places a rock.
She’s too old to play in the sandbox. At school she has her own locker. Instead of her father picking her up from carpool on his way home from work, she takes the bus with her friends to soccer practice. Her mother used to pick her up after and her father would have dinner waiting for them, since he got off earlier. Now, when she can’t convince her friends to invite her over for dinner or to help her with homework, she goes straight to the backyard. It’s quieter than her room and there’s an overhang for when it rains.
The daughter feels out the cracks in the glass, the nylon blue threads of her gloves catching in the seams. It looks as old as her parents. She keeps her back to the kitchen window, hiding the curves of her toy underneath the damp fall leaves. Not that they’ll look outside anyways. Autumn sunlight casts a dying orange reflection in the glass, staining the jar dull as it breaks against the brown and cracks.
Her homework waits inside and she can’t tell if her parents are fighting so instead she fills the jar with the stones around her: black-grimed stones and clumps of dirt held together by pressure she drops in as well as handful after handful of sand. She stops only when her hand scrapes the wood of the sandbox but the jar’s only filled halfway. Feeling around her, she finds the necklace she left there years before when the family had done a tea party at the beach. Plastic blue pearls seized with grime fall into the jar and she digs around in the sand for more. On the opposite of the box, she finds a Pepto-Bismol pink cup absent from the house since preschool.
Filling the cup with sand, she dumps cupful after cupful into the jar. Half the sandbox is emptied into the jar but it’s still only half full. Frustrated, she stomps to the rhododendron behind the sandbox and looks to see if her parents are watching. They’re talking to each other now, frowning. Her father’s face turns red. The daughter yanks off handfuls of leaves. Her parents never look out. She carries all the leaves over to the jar and dumps them in. The last blooms of the bush go into it too, wilted red cups of petals slipping from her hands as she carries them over. Even with the layers of dying plants, the jar doesn’t fill.
The only thing left intact in the sandbox is her desk. The cup breaks the square as she pours the last piles of sand into the jar. Her pens follow as do the leaves, the rock paper weight. There’s no sand left in the box, it’s all in the jar. She dumps more and more rocks and clumps of dirt into the container, now crossing back and forth across the yard to grab more things: the clippings her father cut last week, her mother’s perennials that line the edges. Any moment now her parents should see her, call her back in, yell at her.
Within the window, mother and father look away from one another, eyes watching the table instead of the girl outside tearing up their backyard. The daughter takes the last things, the weeds from the dumpster and drops them in the jar. She looks at her parents and sees they’re looking at nothing at all. The paper and pens haven’t been touched. She could stay outside, continue filling the jar until they notice. Through the glass, she can see the remnants of the rhododendron smashed by clumps of gray sand that mixes with the darker dirt. In the midst of the debris, she can see the leaves, the roots, the branches, her entire backyard barely brushing the midriff of the jar. There’s still more to fill.
She tries to pick up the still half-empty jar. Her fingers wrapped around the bottom edges, she lifts, expecting it to come with her. It’s only half empty. The jar doesn’t budge. She digs her fingers deeper and tries again. It’s like it’s glued to the ground. Crouching low, she lifts with all her might and yelps, falling back, her fingers stinging from the weight of the jar.
At the yelp, she hears her parents burst into the backyard. They see the torn up yard and the empty sandbox. They burst through the screen door, screaming at her to get inside. Shoulders hanging, the daughter massages her fingers as she leaves the jar behind.
The jar waits in the empty sandbox. A wind blows, and a few leaves from the trees above fall through its rim. As it starts to rain again, water fills it too as well as the aphids that fall in with the leaves and beetles who crawl over the rim, scaling the cracks of the glass. From inside the house, the daughter watches the jar fill as her parents yell at her about the yard and then each other about who should have been watching and then back to her as if she’s to blame for it all. More and more pieces of debris fall into the jar. Still, it does not fill. There’s too much room for this space.
JULIA HANDS is an editor and organizer from Seattle and Works with a variety of organizations, including Write Our Democracy, Crab Creek Review, and Lit Crawl Seattle. A graduate from Western Washington University’s MFA program, she worked as the Assistant Managing Editor for Bellingham Review from 2015-2016. You can find her work currently or forthcoming in 5×5, Blink-Ink, Evansville Review, Dime Show Review, and Cream City Review.