The rotary saw was painfully loud, a metal-on-metal scream that bled sparks. Shy claimed that was why she cranked her car radio so loud, but I thought she might just like the music. It was something old, seeded through with electric guitars, static, distortion. I could admit that the saw blended in well with the singer’s screaming. I still kept my hands slammed over my ears, scoping for cops or worse, HOA. I already regretted my short skirt, but the hope was that if we got caught, we could say we were clubbing. Shy’s leather and my tight crop top should sell the lie.
It didn’t take long to cut metal bars off the middle of a bench. Shy added them to the growing pile in the backseat, yelling along with the song while I made sure the saw was secure in the trunk. Shy accelerated before I even had the door closed. “On to the next, the next, the next!” she shouted, grinning. I grinned back, heart pounding.
That was the first night we kissed.
Shy looked up at the heavy clouds, sticking her tongue out to catch raindrops. At the taste, she coughed and spat it on the ground. “You sure the weather’s gonna hold?” she asked, brushing back her mullet with tattooed hands.
“No.” Ice storms were common even past the start of summer.
“Sure these plants are gonna survive?”
I shook my head.
Shy sighed heavily, huddling into her patched coat. “You gotta be kidding me, Tiff.”
I reached into my pocket, casting the seeds of carefully collected spring wildflowers on the ground. They trickled through my fingers like grains of sand. “Worth a shot, right?”
Shy groaned. “But it takes so long!”
“Slow things are important, too.” If these seeds could get properly established, I hoped they would be impossible to fully remove, but we’d have to wait and see.
We walked through the suburban rain. The taste of gasoline left a slick sourness behind. I kept scattering wildflowers into stringy, patchy grass. When a car went by us, we both tensed.
“We should get a dog,” Shy said. “Good excuse to be out walking in all kinds of weather.”
“You want to get a dog? With me?”
Shy blinked at me. “Who else would I get a dog with, Tiffany?”
The city replaced the benches with ones that didn’t have bars in the middle.
“Not as good as housing,” Shy grumbled, scuffing her boot heel against the concrete. “And the bus is still late.”
I tapped her shoulder, pointing at the nearby grass. Tucked tight to a hydrant, little white flowers bobbed their heads. They were growing more seeds even now. “Change takes time, Shy.” I smiled at the wildflowers I’d planted.
“I hate waiting.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to start a food drive next month.”
I laughed. “Let me know how I can help.”
The food drive became a quarterly event. Shy had had the idea to make it a competition, and it turned out that people loved to compete.
I had donned my best demure yellow dress to talk to different churches. With her piercings and tattoos, Shy only talked to them over the phone, not in person. It made her annoyed when those churches kept winning, but that was hardly the point.
“Are you sisters?” One of the kindly old church ladies named Ruby asked me.
I bit my lip. Smiled, and felt my cherry red lipstick sticking on my teeth like blood. “Friends. Since university,” I half-lied.
“Oh. Well that’s just lovely, dear. I remember my gal friends—”
These things take time, I reminded myself. I couldn’t help but wonder who I’d be if I hadn’t met Shy.
We didn’t have much luck at city hall. Small concessions, inch by inch. But over time, I began to notice that we weren’t the only ones fighting.
Outside of city hall, wildflowers had started to spring up. They were cut down by the mower to preserve that perfect green lawn, but their roots were in the ground. Their seeds were in the wind.
I saw a flower sitting low enough to duck the mower, and smiled.
Biteor (Bitey, Eor) died. She was always going to. Dogs do that. Shy and I walked our usual path in remembrance, the rain coming down bitter.
“Why did you pick Biteor for a name?” I asked. “Were you thinking about meteors? Was it from a horror movie?”
Shy shrugged, looking down at the wildflowers dotted beside us. “Seemed funny at the time.”
The gasoline smell still cut through sharp, clogging the back of my throat, making my eyes sting. “I’m naming the next one, okay?”
Shy tried to smile. “You’re going to name it Muffin or something, aren’t you?”
A door opened, and we both froze. Old instincts.
“Where is that lovely little pup?” Ruby asked us from the doorway.
I burst into tears. Shy pressed tight to my arm.
Ruby tutted. “Oh, dears. Come inside for tea, won’t you?”
It was strange, not to fear being noticed, being driven off. To become an accepted part of the community. To have deep roots.
“I would’ve left,” Shy said.
I turned to her where we sat together at the bus stop.
“I wanted to make a difference,” she continued. “I would’ve left, and kept chopping metal bars off benches. And they’d just get replaced. But you did the seed thing, and I…I wanted to see it. So I stuck around.”
“You cut plenty of bars off of plenty of benches. Ran a food drive—”
“Named a dog.”
We watched a pair of cyclists go by. The city had a dedicated bus-and-bike lane now.
“I don’t know if I would’ve made a difference on my own, Tiff.”
I clasped her hand in mine, leaned forward to kiss her. “And I wouldn’t have tried to make a difference without you. That’s why we work together.”
A.C.Franklin Fiction 
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