She pops back intermittently to check on the bulbs. Sometimes the new resident husband spies her hovering among the garden’s shadows, sometimes the wife. They seem unperturbed by her presence: both smile when the irises bloom. She guesses she’s one of them now, the bulbs—flowering, sometimes, from the dirt.

Linda Kohler lives on Kaurna land in South Australia. Her work has appeared in The Marrow, the Ekphrastic Review, Bracken Magazine, and Meniscus, among others. She can usually be found near water.