'Baby-face moon,' I countered, my head on her knee. She lifted her face to the singed moon, bathing in its glowering beams. In the Santa Anas, eucalyptus trees burst into flames like giant candles, and oilfat chaparral hillsides went up in a rush, flushing starved coyotes and deer down onto Franklin Avenue. Don't forget who you are.'ĭown below us in the streets of Hollywood, sirens whined and sawed along my nerves. Fear only feeble old age and death in bed. 'Hairy savages who hacked their gods to pieces and hung the flesh from trees. 'We received our coloring from Norsemen,' she said. She didn't want to know the future anymore. She used to lay out the cards for me, explain the suits: wands and coins, cups and swords, but she had stopped reading them. 'We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.' Her beauty was like the edge of a very sharp knife.

The edge of her white kimono flapped open in the wind and I could see her breast, low and full. I sat next to her, and we stared out at the city that hummed and glittered like a computer chip deep in some unknowable machine, holding its secret like a poker hand. I wished things were back the way they had been, that Barry was still here, that the wind would stop blowing. I was twelve years old and I was afraid for her. My mother was not herself in the time of the Santa Anas. 'Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.' She held up her large hand and spread the fingers, let the desert dryness lick through. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blond hair like a white flame in the light of the three-quarter moon. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. T HE S ANTA A NAS blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw.

White oleander by janet fitch