Shorter Days by Anna Katharina Hahn

seawater nose drops, and Band-Aids. She takes some every night—sometimes more, sometimes less. The bottle is labeled Biotin: for hair, skin and nails.
    The weak sunbeams warm Judith’s face. This is probably the last day they’ll be able to sit outside like this. She hears the children’s voices. They’re acting out a fairy tale they’ve learned at the kindergarten: “Rumpelstiltskin.” Uli is playing director and Kilian readily complies. “Perhaps your name is Shortribs, or Sheepshank, or Laceleg?” They laugh at the names, try out new variations. The boys go outside even when it’s cold and drizzly, hacking up the thin sheets of ice that form on the rain barrel after the first frost, stirring mud soup in old pans with wooden spoons, or digging caves in the sandbox. They could never do such things at the children’s farm around the corner. The grounds are nice, but Judith is suspicious of the clientele at Wren House. The garden, on the other hand, is practically an extension of their apartment. Here Kilian and Uli can watch crocuses, snowdrops, and tulip leaves emerge from the earth, pointy as witch’s hats; they can watch the leathery knobs unfold into sticky green leaves on trees and bushes; they can wait for the starlings to return. The scrubby lawn is bordered by a narrow flower bed in which veteran roses display their last blossoms. A frail fruit tree stands in each corner: apple, damson, and pear, as well as a magnificent elderberry bush whose black-draped clusters attract an astounding number of blackbirds and other songbirds every September. Their violet droppings make a mess on the wooden rim of the sandbox and the roof of the little hut—the children use it as a playhouse, laughing among the gardening tools and watering cans. There’s a faucet on the wall of the building, directly under the Posselts’ living room window, where Judith or Klaus can fasten a red hose in the summer to water the plants and let Uli and Kilian splash around. Each child has his own little bed. There are still a few marigolds in Kilian’s—thanks to the shelter of the wall, they have escaped the nightly frost.
    Judith closes her eyes and tilts her head back. Neighbors come to the windows to look down at her and the children. She waves to the few she knows and ignores the others. She can feel their jealousy, and remembers how she too had once looked down greedily at this walled bit of paradise from the third floor.
    She conquered the garden for her children, proceeding strategically from the moment when her belly had begun to swell over the still amphibian-like Uli. She’d sat for hours at the bedroom window, arms propped on pillows, staring down into the greenery and imagining herself swinging in a hammock, the leaves casting green and gold shadows on her face, an infant at her breast. She saw marveling eyes following the flight of bumblebees through blooming ivy, bare feet taking their first steps on grass instead of asphalt and stone.
    Judith’s idyll was disrupted by Herr Posselt, who made regular attempts to pare the knee-high grass with a mechanical mower. He wore light Bermuda shorts and braided sandals on his callused yellow feet. Varicose veins crawled over his scrawny calves like blue earthworms and tangled into nests in the hollows of his knees. It was disrupted by Frau Posselt’s birthmark-blotched, limp flesh hanging out of her sleeveless summer dress, and by her phlegmy coughing over a tray of cookies and mugs of Nescafé. The worst was when they fell asleep in their deck chairs. Their heads would sink to the side or flop on their necks like crash victims, their limbs hung slack, their mouths gaped and drool dripped. The background hum of traffic on Olgastraße absorbed the garden’s subtler noises, but Judith was sure they both snored.
    Frau Posselt’s complaints about the arduousness of gardening found a sympathetic ear with