After Working at the Electronics Plant

My name is Nora Xavier. I have been dead for four years. It is now April, just past the plum rain season in the South. The air is heavy with an unshakable damp moldiness, like waterlogged old books—stifling and suffocating. I drift three feet above the ground at the entrance of the electronics plant where I once labored; beneath my feet lies a weathered concrete floor, its cracks cradling last autumn's fallen sycamore leaves. The red paint on the iron gate has peeled away in large patches, revealing mottled rust beneath. Those rust patches cluster as one, much like my brief and fractured life. When the wind stirs, the gate creaks with a familiar groan—the very sound the hinge made when I left the dormitory, four years ago. The sycamore tree at the entrance has grown much taller than it was four years past. The tree trunk had thickened by a ring, and the grooves on the bark had deepened; its shade now covered half the entrance to the plant premises. I remember the year I first joined the plant, this tree was only as thick as the mouth of a bowl. In the summer, when the sun was so scorching that we couldn't keep our eyes open, a few of us women workers would cram together under its shade to eat our boxed lunches. Now the tree has grown, yet those who once shared meals here have long since disappeared without a trace.