“We're planting a butterfly garden,” she says.How will the bees feel about this? Buzzing in the thatches of purple spear salvia, singularly focused, they won't pay mind to the construction in the next door lot. And the hummingbirds? They have the honeysuckle trumpets and sugar water hanging from the eaves.

“I only want to eat flowers,” she says, easing her long body onto the grass and nibbling a nasturtium she plucked from the tumble between her garden and mine behind the quaint old homes neither of us own. She is usually not so whimsical; I pay attention.

“I don’t have the moxie for it,” she says when I tell her that on frozen days I go to the women-only baths to soak naked in the pools.

By Sarah Childers. I come from one of the quietest places on earth. There is a difference between quiet and silence. Quiet feels like being held. It is the contented squeak of something small and furred sleeping curled into itself. Silence is the unsaid, bound and gagged.

The morning after Inauguration Day we waited in a crowd along Jackson Street to join the Seattle Womxn’s March. Behind us, a tofu factory. Across the street, an art school. Above us, blue sky and later, after we had passed, a pair of eagles. 

The teacup drops from my hand unprovoked. It simply falls to the tearoom’s wooden floor and wobble-rolls under my chair.  The cup is empty; there’s no splash or mess, only the noise of the cup’s landing that may have been a firework for the look the woman across the room gives me. Cocooned on the couch, the woman pulls the plush white robe she must have brought from home closer around her neck and returns to her journal.