write a oddly specific, detailed and sad description of a leaf falling off a tree, as the leaf replayed its entire life, unsure of what the future will hold

The leaf let go at 4:17 on a Thursday afternoon, while the woman in the house across the street was rinsing a teaspoon she would use again in less than a minute.

There was no wind worth mentioning. A bus had passed. Somewhere, a dog was being told to leave something alone.

For three days, the leaf had been holding on by a strip of stem no wider than the pale scar on the woman’s thumb. It had mistaken this gradual separation for a temporary problem. Less water, lately. A stiffness at the edges. The branch withdrawing into itself, becoming difficult to reach.

Then the strip gave way.

The leaf’s first thought was that it had done something wrong.

It dropped six inches and caught on a lower twig. For a moment, facedown against the bark, it believed it had been given another chance. It tried to settle there. But its curled tip could find no purchase, and when the twig shifted, it slipped off.

It remembered April.

It had begun inside a bud crowded with other beginnings, folded so tightly that it could not imagine being flat. The first morning it opened, a bead of water sat in the notch between two of its points. The water was cold and surprisingly heavy. All morning the leaf leaned beneath it; then the sun took it away.

That had been its first experience of losing something.

By May, it had grown broad enough to touch the leaf beside it. They overlapped whenever the wind came from the bakery, and separated whenever it came from the railway tracks. Its neighbor had a small hole near the central vein, made by a caterpillar on the ninth day of rain. Through that hole, at a particular hour, the leaf could see one yellow square of an upstairs window.

It had believed this arrangement would continue.

Turning now in the air, it saw the window again. No light. A gray sock drying over the radiator.

In June, a boy had stood beneath the tree and cried without making much sound. He wore a navy school jumper despite the heat and kept rubbing one shoe against the back of the other calf. The leaf had shifted above him, casting its small, five-pointed shadow briefly across his forehead.

It had been the nearest it ever came to comforting anyone.

In July, there were ants, three violent storms, and a stretch of eleven days when everything tasted faintly of dust. A bird rested on the branch and warmed the wood with its feet. The leaf remembered that warmth arriving slowly through its stem. It remembered making sugar all afternoon while a man below searched the grass for a screw he had dropped from his glasses.

The screw was there for the rest of the summer. The leaf could see it. The man could not.

It was falling faster now.

A current lifted it by one edge, rolled it, let it down again. For an instant, the sky occupied everything. It was much larger without the branches dividing it into familiar pieces.

August returned in fragments: rain striking its underside; the sour smell of split plums in the neighboring garden; the caterpillar, older and less beautiful than expected, eating steadily along its neighbor’s edge.

September was mostly waiting for warmth.

Then the neighbor disappeared during a night of hard wind. In the morning, the leaf had leaned into the empty place and remained there longer than it needed to.

It wished now that it had paid more attention to its last green day. There must have been one. An ordinary afternoon when it still contained enough summer to be entirely itself, though perhaps already tired, perhaps already freckled brown at the tip. It had spent that afternoon waiting for something else: rain, or evening, or the sparrow that sometimes shook the branch.

Below, the pavement approached with its embedded pebbles and old black circles of chewing gum.

The leaf did not know whether falling ended when it reached the ground. It had seen others dragged along the gutter, lifted again, pressed wet against car tires. There was soil beyond the fence, but also a drain with thin iron bars. It could not choose between them. It did not even know what a good place to land would be.

It came down beside the lost screw.

For a while, nothing happened.

Above it, the branch moved slightly. The leaf waited for the familiar tug at its stem, the small correction that had always followed a gust.

Across the street, the woman put the teaspoon in the sink again.