Pollen – Nora Mitchell

April 20, 2026

I left my apartment to go to the grocery store that day. I walked out the door and the sky was yellow. There was yellow dust two inches high covering the ridges of iron gates, cars, the sidewalk, the trees. I didn’t know what it was at first because I’ve never seen so much pollen in my life. I walked to the store itching and sneezing. Tears ran down my face. I looked in the window of an eyeglasses store and saw my reflection heartbroken, raccoon-eyed, black mascara driven down my cheeks like muddy tires. It felt impossible to make it all the way to the grocery store. Pollen rained down harder and harder. I started to feel like I needed to lie down. I noticed the park across the street, the usual grass now a big yellow bed. I fell into the pollen, red and soft, leaking. I became very hot. I took off all my clothes. Through my puffy eyes I saw I wasn’t the only one. There were twenty or thirty other people lying down too, naked and peaceful. I wasn’t afraid or sick anymore, my eyes closed heavily.
        I woke up in my grandmother’s house that morning. I slept in a bedroom over the garage. The sun rose slowly through the window and made a bright rectangular impression on the wall, with the perfect shadow of the window frame and leaves outside, the shadow grey-blue. It was a perfect portrait of the window, like a negative. I stared at it, rolled over in bed. The shadows shifted as the sun moved up in the sky, its painting occurring in real time, leaves shifting in the wind too, painted over and over.
        “Put on the rainboots since we’re going into the woods.” My grandmother called from the yard. “Can I borrow a pair of socks?” I called back, standing by the door. I only had my summer flats, worn barefoot. “They’re in the closet in the drawer, the third drawer down.” I walked into the closet and sorted past my grandmother’s silk nightgowns. My eyes warmed when I found a pair of black and white zebra-striped ankle socks I had in high school. I sat on the floor to put them on. I remembered the stringy webs of thread made by the zebra-stripes on the insides of the socks, how I had to hold the socks all the way open to get my feet in without getting caught in thread. To find a fifteen year old artifact of my life amazed me, kept without purpose, sentimental only in retrospect. It touched me that something of mine had been kept in a safe place so accidentally. I lose everything, even my best clothes. I even lost my two favorite teacups.
        My eyes fluttered open to a dark blue sky. I sat up gently on my elbows. I looked down at my naked body, pink and shimmering, dusted with pollen. There was a man sleeping next to me now, his clothes in a pile between us. He looked like the statue I would have made had I been sensitive enough to know exactly what to carve. I was past the point of sneezing now, we all were. The pollen world was the new world. The man’s chest moved up and down, breathing deeply. I wanted to hold him, I wanted to do his laundry. I lay back down close beside him, pressing the curve of my body against the curve of his. He sighed deeply and hung his arm over my chest. I turned to face him and his eyes opened slowly. We looked at each other for a moment and I brushed some pollen off his mouth with my pollen-covered finger. He kissed me deeply, and the pollen on his lips covered the pollen on mine.