The Adoration of Borders by Gary Fincke

Once, Alex ate the same cereal for nine months because each carton earned a square inch of Alaska. “Eighteen, all told. You earned them,” his mother said when Alex was thirty-one, handing him the deeds the summer before she died. The center of each deed was bordered broadly enough to downsize his claim to the exact limits of his property.

*

Lately, at the farm that abuts where Alex lives, surveyors have arrived to arm a developer with the ammunition of deeds. They define dozens of half-acres, measure a small number of what are now larger, corner lots, remaking the fields with borders that instruct everyone, with signs, not to breach, the last crop stubble a carpet of knives.

*

Alex’s wife studies their border now, analyzing the suggestions offered by the height and thickness of hedgerows. She describes their future privacy, how they can be invaded only from overhead. She tells him that borders funded the invention of guns. She says, “Each of our square yards is a bullet; each of our walls a bomb.”

*

Alex’s friend insists that German deer, even now, do not cross the Iron Curtain, decades of generations stopping where freedom, for years, began or ended. He describes how hunters crouch in blinds near that border where deer pause as if downwind from danger. Illuminated by November’s moon, their breath is cauliflowered in the air.

*

To win the local election, a candidate says the town should refuse other cultures. When he gives examples, the gods have exotic names. Their languages, he tells Alex, remind me of pilgrimages. Their food smells like difference. Imagine what resistance can do, the candidate says, how it will erase problems before they cross our borders.

*

Trenches from his grandfathers’ war waited a century for Alex to visit. The guide said, ‘Annexed is a synonym for stolen, but history says, “only rented,” and half of the tour group grumbled. Apart from his wife, Alex stood deep in the silent half, thinking how everyone was alone in their bodies, ones whose borders were easily breached.

*

Alex’s father, nearly ninety, loves the slow drives through neighborhoods where the ghosts he knew still live. The houses, like his aging sisters, turn their best sides toward the car until his voice emerges from the hush of sweaters that swaddle his thinning body. “Back then,” he begins, the tone no longer reedy, while Alex and the future hold their breath for a moment before returning to their work, sanding the loved names from the elaborate woodwork of the past, yet leaving the borders intact.

Gary Fincke’s newest flash collection is The History of the Baker’s Dozen (Pelekinesis 2024). His newest book of poems is For Now, We Have Been Spared: Poems (Slant Books 2025). Fincke is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.