Willa was in the two-by-six patch of lawn that separated her driveway from the one beside it. She dirtied her knees as she combed through the grass at the foot of their conjoined mailboxes. She could hear herself being scolded for letting the frills on her sleeves turn to anything but white. But that was unimportant to her. That would come later, but right now her wrists were too animal to be subject to frills. They impeded her hands, her hands which so dutifully traced each blade of grass, each weed, in search of nature’s anomaly. She’d overheard Sally in the schoolyard talking about it. Like it was a secret. All the girls were sitting on the steps as they did every morning when Willa passed by them. This time, she had passed a little closer. Two or three feet closer. So much closer, she heard Sally say, as if she’d stumbled upon treasure, that she’d found a four leaf clover.
Willa’s grandmother shouted from the window of the kitchenette that she better not be dirtying her frilled sleeves. She’d only just taken the shirt off the clothesline that morning. Willa ignored her, bending closer to the cluster of clovers around the wooden stake of the mailbox.
Sally had said that her sister’s friend’s cousin had said that clovers only showed themselves to the fairest girls. That the fourth leaf would rise when they were near, and shrivel into a weed when they were away. Willa had always thought herself quite fair but it didn’t seem to her that too many agreed. This clover would be her proof. She knew she’d find one.
And so she didn’t care that she was flattening the grass with her body, or that the frills on her sleeve were now turning to a strange color between green and brown. She did not care because she knew she was fair and that this clover would doubtlessly agree. She sat up in defeat. Hands in her lap, she thought maybe that the little clovers just hadn’t gotten a good enough look at her. And so Willa sat before the clovers, in their wry piling. She sat before them in the most fair and charming of poses and wondered whether each quiver was a breath of the wind or the rising of a fated fourth leaf.
Nothing. She’d searched them all and there was nothing.
Scorned, she let the weight of her body fall backwards, she wanted to look at the clouds. Before meeting their gaze, she found herself at the mercy of a great pang in her shoulder. One so intense, it was as if she’d dropped herself against a needle. But this was far worse. This was far worse because with the needle there had been a kind eyed nurse-lady and an apple-cherry sucker. It was far worse because she was lying in the grass dirty-sleeved and alone and she hadn’t found a four leaf clover. She only knew this pain in her left shoulder and the soil beneath her fingernails and that the cloud above her was shaped like a turtle.
She called for her grandmother who responded again from the kitchenette window to give her “just a moment.” The turtle cloud passed on slowly while Willa waited with this pain in her shoulder that she began to think of as the coming of death. A heart attack. It was her left shoulder. Cardiac arrest seemed only feasible. She imagined the Grim Reaper as he’d appeared in the cartoons her grandmother hated so direly. She’d imagine his placid face, his emaciated figure. She wondered, had he ever found a four leaf clover? And so she lay there, beneath clouds, anticipating his arrival, praying her grandmother would make it to her in time.
And that she did. She cursed as she gripped the railway, coming down the stairs in the way a grandmother would, tongue hot with anger at her granddaughter for so selfishly lying in the dirt in her perfectly-pleated white dress.
“Lying here like a dog,” she said. Willa, of course, did not have time for this as she was dying. She told her grandmother calmly and without rising: that there was a great pain in her left shoulder that foretold the beginning to the end of her heart.
Shuffling to the opposite side, her grandmother poked at her with her wooden cane, “Sit up.” Willa obliged, hinging at the waist as one would from a coffin. “Oh mercy,” her grandmother cursed again, “you’ve dirtied your dress and killed a bee.”
Willa was confused. Then she remembered how the school nurse had placed her hand upon the shoulder of a crying boy as she told him that the bee was crying too. That it had a bee family who was also crying. A bee spouse sorting through funeral flowers and condolences. Because after they sting you, they die. And Willa had been stung by a bee.
“We need to take the stinger out—it’s still there, I can see it. Oh dear. This’ll be hard. My eyes are going you know.” Crouching over, her grandmother reached for Willa’s left wrist. “The frills Willa, the frills! I bend over the sink and scrub each cotton link! And look at what you’ve done.” She dropped Willa’s wrist but did not stand up. She was looking past Willa’s hand. At the grass.
“Funny.” Her grandmother said, running a finger through the grass. “It’s a four leaf clover. I’ve never seen one before.”