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Issue # 41 Fall 2019

Fiction

Edited by Dorian Gossy

 

Rebecca Moody
Lightening

“Mama,” came the whisper. The boy put his hand on her cheek, standing barefoot beside the bed.

“Yes, Michael,” she answered, still asleep.

“It’s doing it again,” he said. Thunder shook the panes. The bones of the old house rattled. The boy crawled over her hurriedly, pulled the quilt up to his chin.

“All right, baby.” She patted his back. “Go back to sleep.”

Lightning flashed, illuminating the room.

Helen was awake now.

She counted, waiting for the clap that would follow, judging distances, imagining the sound rolling over the plains. Seven seconds. What did that mean again? Seven miles?

In the dark, she waited for the boy to fall asleep again, listening for his deep breathing. She tried to remember the way the nights had sounded before the storms. There would have been crickets, katydids, stillness. Now, there was almost always the steady fall of rain or the crescendos of the storm. The mattress creaked when she rose from the bed but the boy didn’t stir. She felt for her slippers under the bed and shuffled down the hall to the kitchen.

The power was back on. The stove clock flashed 12:00.

Helen drank some water. Out the window above the sink, her fields gleamed amber beneath clouds streaked in pale blue veins. Yesterday afternoon, she’d locked the herd in the barn. In the softer moments of the storm, their grunts were audible from inside. They were complaining. It must be closer to dawn than she’d thought.
Flipping on the television she found another special report. The local anchor, bleary-eyed, looked as though she, too, had been dragged from bed in the night.

“Good morning, Fulton. It is now 6 o’clock. We are in a state of emergency again this morning as the third electrical storm of the week is underway. Frequent lightning strikes are occurring in and around the Fulton area. We urge you to remain indoors, away from windows. We have had word from Mayor Douglas that schools and all city businesses will be delayed or canceled again today as the storm continues. Stay tuned to WKLX for more information.”

The telephone rang. It was Pete.

“You watching the weather?” he asked.

“I am.”

“Did you see that lady died?”

“No. Who?”

“I didn’t recognize the name. Someone down by Outerbank, I think. She was taking a bath. Lightning came through the pipes.”

“That’s awful,” she said.

“I’m coming to get you.”

She was silent. The thunder rumbled.

“I was about to call anyway,” she replied. “I want you to take Michael.”

“You’re not coming?”

“Not yet.”

“Dammit, Helen.”

“What time will you get here?”

“I’m about to leave.”

She went to the boy’s room, tiptoeing around fire trucks and trains, plastic farm animals scattered on the floor. She took his suitcase from the bottom of his closet and began filling it. Helen was always struck, looking at his clothes, by how little he still was. He seemed so large in life, so full of energy, imagination, force. But here his shirt was scarcely bigger than her two hands.

Michael appeared in the doorway, rubbing his eyes.

“Daddy’s gonna come pick you up later today. Doesn’t that sound fun?”

He nodded his head without enthusiasm.

“You hungry?” she smiled. “Wanna help me with some oatmeal?”

Standing on a stool in the kitchen he added the blueberries, helped her drizzle honey, dash cinnamon. Then he sat across from her, swinging his feet under the table.

“I bet Daddy’ll take you to the park,” she said.

The boy’s eyes widened. “For popsicles?”

She nodded enthusiastically, stood and tousled the boy’s hair. Pete would arrive soon. She went to her bedroom and took off her pajama shirt, put on a bra, a clean tee-shirt over her leggings. Outside, the wind howled. Rain slapped the panes of glass.

There was a knock at the door. Helen went out into the hallway.

“He’s here!” the boy called, opening the door.

“Mikey!” Pete shouted. He had the boy up in the air, kissing his face. “I’ve missed you, bud.”

“They canceled school today! That means only five more days of school till summer!”

“Wow, bud, that’s pretty cool!” he caught Helen’s eye for the first time. “Heya Mikey, wanna go get your shoes on and play for a bit while I talk to your mom?”

The boy’s shoulders slumped. “Yeah, all right.”

As he walked past, Helen tousled his hair again. “Love you, kiddo.”

When he was safely out of earshot, Pete began, “What’s the plan here?” He was agitated. She imagined him rehearsing this dialogue all along I-65. “You’re not seriously staying?”

She bit her lip. “What else can I do?”

“The governor is supposed to issue an evacuation later today. This is no joke.”

“Seventy-five cows, Pete, that’s my inheritance,” she said.

“I know.”

“No 401k, no retirement fund. My parents left me cows and land. The same cows and land their parents left them, going back a hundred and fifty years. The product of six generations of cattle farmers.”

“Yes.”

“So what do you suggest I do?”

“Call your sister. Get her to pay to move them, board them somewhere.”

“Tried. She says it's time I sell the farm.” Helen gave a half laugh. “Like anyone’s buying.”

“There’d be worse things than moving on.” Pete looked at her hard. The wind blew loudly outside, whistling around the corners of the house.

“I just never figured it would get this bad.”

He was silent a moment. When he spoke again his tone was softer. “Just set the herd out to the low pasture, get Dale to come check in on them—”

“Dale left for Memphis yesterday. Tremble too. Half the town’s gone or leaving. Besides, that was the first clue—”

“What?”

“All those deer they found dead out on Atawah Bald last summer. Then the geese,” she was keeping track on her fingers. “Then poor Mr. Allen. Then that entire field of centennial pines. I don’t know where’s safe. I don’t know where to take them.”

“So you’re just going to stay?”

“It’s one idea. No one’s been struck inside, have they?”

“The bathtub lady.”

“So I won’t take a bath.”

“It’ll happen again. It’s a matter of statistical probability. They said this lightning’s the strongest yet—strong enough to overpower grounding. Not to mention how you’re going to get on, with the whole town leaving.”

“Who knew it could get worse?” she said. 

They were both quiet. There was a low rumbling, further off.

“Just go to your dresser, throw your clothes in a bag, and come with us.”

“All right,” she said.

But she didn’t.

Instead, standing under the awning of the coach gate with the rain spilling over the gutters around them, she gave Michael a hug so tight she felt his heartbeat in her chest, burying her nose in his neck and breathing him in. She helped him into his booster seat. “Be so, so good to your father!”

“Okay, Mama,” he said, hardly looking up at her. He rolled his fire truck along the back of the passenger seat.

“I love you,” she said, “all the way up…”

“To the moon and back,” he completed, smiling up at her at last.

They peeled away from the house, heading down the highway. Pete said he would call her when they arrived back in Clarksville.

Inside, she heated up some coffee she’d saved from yesterday’s pot, pouring it into a travel mug. She sat for a moment in the kitchen, the house creaking about her. Then she went to her bedroom, changed into jeans. She headed outside, climbed up into the old pickup that had been her father’s. It still had the smell of him, somehow, the scent of cloves from his cigarettes woven into the torn canvas of the seats.

The clouds hung low over the fields. All along the road into Fulton, in pastured land, ungrazed, she saw the looming bodies of lightning rods in the mist. That had been the first phase, men showing up from the weather service, peddling those tall silver spines, swearing life could go on as before.

In the distance, Helen saw Dawn Hill, half eaten away in black now, a charred crater where its eastern slope had been. One of the only hills in the county, it rose out of the flats of the plains like a wave, the grain rippling in the wind. As a girl, when it snowed she would cross her family’s farm, carting a laundry basket. The other neighborhood children would all be there, some with lunch trays, or storage box lids. The rare child owned an actual sled—Fulton only saw one snow every year or two, if that. And yet they all knew Dawn Hill, knew to come there and slide down its slopes. As if they were drawn to the spot by a biologic imperative, the way salmon know to swim upstream.

“Fulton Welcomes You,” a sign read as she entered the city limits.

When Helen was younger, Fulton was a bustling little town, full of shops and industry. It was home to a lighting factory, and most of her friends’ parents, the ones who weren’t farmers, made their living assembling lamps and artisanal bulbs. That is what Pete had done, had thought he would always do. He didn’t love it—had a passion for fishing, really, and would have loved to spend all his time outdoors—but it paid well. Their first year of marriage they bought a pontoon boat, painted yellow. They spent their weekends out on the river. Helen would read while Pete fished. Sometimes they would stay gone past light, making love on the floor of the boat with the stars overhead.
But then the factory closed—moved somewhere else—and the town had sputtered along. Walmart came in. Half the shops on the square closed, and a highway was built five miles outside town. The remaining jobs were there. Now in Fulton, you were either a farmer or a fry cook at Chick-fil-a.

Or gone, Helen reminded herself. Now in Fulton, you were gone or leaving.

Some blamed the factory for the storms. There were rumors that run-off from the plant contained heavy metals, that they’d been letting it seep out for decades, the waters and soil of Fulton now something fusible and conductive.
But some said it was God. The apocalypse had begun in Fulton, they said, and while the rest of the world seemed to go on as usual, it was only a matter of time. All would be lost to thunder and lightning in the end.

*

 

The sign from the Dollar General flickered. She pulled up to the door, ignoring the yellow loading zone lines painted onto the asphalt. The shelves inside were mostly bare. Ray looked up casually from a magazine. He still wore his high school football jersey, decades old.

“Busy morning, huh?” Helen said, smiling, gesturing towards the vacant store, the empty parking lot.

Ray frowned, thin-lipped.

“Kidding,” Helen said, shaking her head and feeling silly.

She filled her buggy with pre-cooked cans of soup, peanut butter, and the last remaining loaves of bread. Checking out, she asked Ray how much longer he was staying.

“I’m leaving tonight,” he said. “You?”

“I’m not sure.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

She shrugged. “The cows, you know?”

“Ah,” he said. He pulled a key from inside the cash register, handed it to her. “If you run out of food—I won’t mind. I think the insurance is covering all this—this whatever it is.”

“Thanks.”

“Of course. Be careful.”

The rain was falling hard when she left the store. Helen ran to the truck, threw the groceries in the passenger seat. She circled the town square once before heading home. The front window of the general store, closed since April, had shattered, though she couldn’t tell if it had been looters or the weather. The statue of Major Clayton, the town founder, was charred and cracked, struck months ago. At the time, it had been news. Now, it seemed only deaths were noteworthy.

 

*

 

Back home, Helen found the electricity had gone out. The battery-powered radio was on the counter. Seldom used in the past, it had an old coat hanger as an antenna replacement.

“Transformer out—government closed—warnings to stay inside—”

She dug around in the base cabinets for a phonebook and called a farm vet in Alta Vista who directed her to an animal rescue outside Memphis, an hour away. If she had her own trailer, they said, she was welcome to bring the cows there, all seventy-five of them.

Her trailer fit five cows at a time. She’d used it to take cows to the vet, or to the fair in Shelton.

“Crazy, those storms,” the man said. “I thought they’d closed the town.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, trying not to cry. Out in the barn, she could hear them bellowing. She couldn’t think of a time they’d been cooped up so long.

Helen opened the back door to a solid gray sky. The clouds hung low but soft, foglike. It was cool, a crispness that felt more like autumn than spring. She hadn’t heard thunder since she was on the square. 

She ducked low as she ran to the barn and unhooked the door. The cattle pressed forward as she released them. They shouldered their way to the pond, moving fast, snorting and grunting as they went. Helen ran back inside and watched them disappear into the clouds from out the kitchen window. The wind was picking up. The house creaked loudly.

 

*

 

Once, when she was a girl, a tornado had come to Fulton.
Her parents kept the weather on all day, watching the red glob of the storm inch closer to them on the map. “It will reach Fulton in the night,” the forecaster said. “That’s a primary concern, as people can sleep through weather advisories without taking proper preparedness steps. We encourage you to keep a weather radio with you at all times this evening.”

Helen’s mom set up a fort in the basement, brought down a stack of board games and some Oreos to Helen and her sister. Helen kept her eyes on her mother while they played; she was so calm, so placid. She didn’t even flinch at the pop of the oak tree falling in the side yard. Helen’s father was more anxious, taking the trip up and down the stairs many times to watch the approach of the storm, only staying downstairs when they could hear the telltale whistling of the tornado outside the house.

“We love you girls more than life,” her mother said then.

In the morning they found that one of the worst tornadoes in Tennessee history had whirled its way neatly through the 100 yards between their house and barn, taking an oak tree as their only casualty.
Helen stood with her father out in the yard, the gnarled roots taller than a man splayed between them. He was smiling.

“It’s a miracle,” he said. That night at dinner they all bowed their heads while Helen’s mother thanked God for his goodness.

The storm killed thirty-two people in Fulton County alone.

 

*

 

The telephone rang.

“We made it,” Pete said brightly. Michael was chanting in the background. “Popsicle park! Popsicle park! Popsicle Park!”

Helen smiled. “He doesn’t sound too homesick.”

Pete chuckled. “Not yet, anyway. But he’ll miss you if you don’t come soon.”

“I know.”

“Any ideas?”

“I’ve let them out. The storm’s not too bad just now.”

Helen could hear the siren from Michael’s toy fire engine, loud.

“Helen, you’ll have to leave them.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Soon?”

“Soon.”

 

*

 

For six months after the factory closed, they had lived off the income of the farm. Pete hadn’t minded it so bad. Michael was just a baby, and the three of them loved spending their days together, out in the fields first thing in the morning, Michael on Helen’s hip, Pete riding the tractor.

Slowly, they began dipping into their savings. There were loans to the bank for equipment, things they’d had to buy to keep up production. They’d never felt the cost before when Pete was working. At first, they thought of expanding, but they couldn’t quite swing it. They stopped talking about having a second baby and sold the boat.

And then Pete woke her up in the middle of the night. There was a job in Clarksville, a union job, good wages. He was going to take it. He spoke almost crying, kept saying things like, “Helen, just listen, they have condos there, nice homes. Mikey’d have a swimming pool,” sounding guilty as hell.

She had just lain there in the dark, hardly speaking. “We’ll keep thinking about it,” she said at last. The next morning, Helen sat as she often did on the glider in the orchard, where her mother and grandmother had sat before her. She’d sipped her coffee, watched the land pink and glowing in the dawn, watched a deer, lost in the meadow, peeking out from the grain. She could never leave Fulton, she told Pete. It was a part of her soul, holding the memories, the bodies, of her parents and grandparents and theirs.

They had never divorced officially. Pete went back and forth, picking Michael up for weekends.

Helen visited him only once, at the beginning. She’d slept in his white bed in his white room, had danced Michael around the new swimming pool. She felt lost, absent. She cooked them dinner on the new stove, served it on the new table. She kept wondering, Who made these walls? What field was here before this? What trees plowed down, what marshes filled in?

After Michael had gone to sleep, Pete looked at her searchingly.

She couldn’t speak, just sobbed on his shoulder.

That night, she dreamt she was blown through the air like thistle down, unable to land.

 

*

 

At supper time, Helen fixed herself a sandwich. The wind was picking up, the cedars out in the front yard bowing like dancers, or like those frantic waving balloons at car dealerships.

The house groaned. Then there was a bright flash of lightning, almost blinding, the ordinary objects of her house shining in surreal illumination. Thunder clapped immediately after.

“Jesus,” she said, jumping.

She heard breaking glass upstairs. She took the flashlight and made her way through the empty rooms, most of them unused since her childhood. In the room that once had been her parents’ she found a shattered window. Rain was pouring in on the floor.

She piled towels beneath, taped a trash bag up—slowly, methodically, the way her mother would have done it.

When she was finished, water still dripped down from the sill. She would replace the towels as they filled. She could handle this.

Helen lay on her back on her parents’ bed. She would leave tomorrow. The cows would die out in the fields. They would gather close together under the scarlet oak in the low pasture, the way they always did before a rainstorm, their knees tucked beneath them. They would die at the mercy of whatever this was. And she would lock the front door, leave the house to shift, dismantle. She would abandon the only home she’d ever loved. Helen fell asleep in that bed, trying to resurrect the comfort it had given her when a child. The way her mother opened her arms to her each morning. The sweet smell of her, the softness of her skin. This reminded her of Michael.

 

*

 

When she woke later in the night the storm was in full force. Outside the back window, the fields glowed gold, the wheat bowing and swelling, alive. Warblers and swallows rose and fell from the brush. The white sycamores along the creek and the old elm in the side pasture loosed their leaves.  Helen felt for the first time as if she saw the breath of the earth, could sense its lungs pressing from beneath the soil.  The air hummed with the wind; the house shook with it.
She hurried downstairs. Picture frames jumped from the walls, the floorboards snapping. A pipe had burst in the bathroom and water spilled out into the hall. She ran down to the basement, flipped the water off. The thunder knocked and crashed, deafening. She rose to the kitchen and tried the radio, but everything was static and storm. The lightning flashed without pause like a midnight, neon sun. The windows were breaking as she ran to the hall closet, crouched down, pulled coats from their hangers and hugged them over her to dampen the sounds.

If I die, this will not have been worth it, she thought. But then, how beautiful the fields had looked in the light.

 

*

 

“Helen,” a voice whispered, close by her ear. She jumped awake. The house was still. She’d been dreaming. She opened the closet door slowly. Outside, a steady rain fell.

Helen tiptoed past her grandmother’s china, slivers of the porcelain roses all over the hall floor. She found her work boots, made her way from room to room, assessing damage, trying to tally up the cost.  

The phone rang while she was upstairs. It took her a while to reach it. When she finally answered, there was a deep gasp.

“Oh, thank God, you’re alive!” Pete said. “I’ve been so worried.”

“I’m fine, really. The house is pretty well torn to shit, but I’m fine.”

“And you’re leaving?”

“And I’m leaving. I was just about to head to the truck.”

Good. Now’s a good time. They say it’ll be worse again this afternoon.” He paused. “How’s the herd?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know that I care to know. If they’re not dead now, I imagine the next one will get them.”

“Me too.”

Helen got a duffle from the hall closet and went to her bedroom, threw in a few tee shirts and jeans. Part of her knew she should be trying to save things. Her wedding dress, maybe, or the photo albums her mother kept somewhere upstairs. Instead, she went to Michael’s room and grabbed a few toys, the blanket she’d brought him home from the hospital in.

She was in the pickup when she stopped, the rain slapping the windshield.

Helen breathed deeply, closed her eyes. She remembered a gray morning like this. She had been young, quite young, and her mother had woken her and her sister up early, taken them down to the barn where a calf had been born in the night, all wet and wobbly-kneed.

She knew it would make no difference, but to see them, she thought, would be something. To know that she had stayed until the very end.  And then she would find sunlight somewhere—with Michael. Helen got out and slammed the door of the pickup, leaving it running.

She made her way quickly past the house, the glider, her work boots brown with mud as she nearly tripped over some bricks from the chimney that had fallen in the storm.

And then she was out in the back pasture. Her voice cracked as she yelled for them. Here and there, she saw some displaced object, shadow-like in the gray: the neighbor’s porch swing, a rusted wheel. The rain was falling harder. She wiped some hair out of her eyes, squinted to see through the fog, the mist. Far off, she heard the thunder, rumbling low.

 

 

 

 

 

William Orem
Cemetery Dancing (Excerpted from the novel Miss Lucy)

 

At Highgate, Bram suggested they take refreshment. Miss Lujzi was cautious on entering the three-penny ordinary, but on being presented with a dish full of carrot-raisin sandwiches she ate with a focus that was almost severe. Her motions were visibly taut as she forced herself to chew with dignity, the obvious hunger pushing against all restraint with an intensity that was almost animalistic. To provide for her need, he ordered extra bread and some candied orange rinds, which he feigned having changed his mind about, leaving the dish and yawning politely into space. An elderly couple by the door noticed Lujzi’s behavior, the gentleman beginning to frown. He had a skeptical look, centered on thick, rheumy pupils that stared in unkind estimation. Now Madam West, Bram said aloud, patting her wrist to show that all was quite as it should be. Abruptly she appeared darker in feature than he had ever seen. Do not overtax yourself. You shall be unwell.

It is good bread, sir, she answered quietly, downcast eyes shining. She placed, with painful deliberation, an uneaten crust back in the plate.

Entering the cemetery they went more at their ease—for who, that either one of them might know, would be walking this early afternoon in a Camden boneyard?—among winding pathways that rose and fell as they passed among cedars, around hills dedicated to remembrance, through anonymous, dripping alcoves. A copper-haired fox, thin as sympathy, loped out from among the tombstones. Bram curved an arm across Lujzi’s back, as if to shield her from the beast. He felt the little shoulder in his palm.

Be off there, Reynard! Shoo. Shoo.

Together they wandered the various sections dedicated to graves. Highgate Cemetery was magnificent, as justly celebrated as Père Lachaise, an ornate, multi-part burial ground larger than a city block. The trodden dirt pathway they had chosen led through a tunnel of yew trees to a silent, hilly region, overcrowded with carvings. This was the Egyptian Avenue, its columnar style made popular by British exploration. Beyond it, the “circle of Lebanon,” a ring overhung by imported cedar, and a more classical feel. Only persons of real means could be enshrined in these tunnels of ivy; even in death, there was differentiation of rank.

Around them now was the smell of wet needles, softly compressed underfoot. At last Miss Lujzi and he might be relaxed; at last they had real privacy. A small, flowering bush cupped the light, and Bram dawdled on it with his thumb. Now and again he spied another couple arranging a wreath somewhere, a small, hunchback man who might be a groundskeeper, but it was easy enough to steer their path away. Increasingly their surroundings lent a reflective feel. He followed her into the shadow.

Tragedy, Bram said, gesturing toward a wall broken by a few doors, wherein lay a dozen ossuaries. You wished to understand. Tragedy is the fall of what had promise. Loss, where there was potential. What you see around us here, in these silent communities of the dead, is tragedy.

He was proud of his sensitivities, but she seemed unmoved. You do not understand?

No, Abraham. These . . .

. . . sepulchers . . . loculi . . . the words are difficult.

These are lovely.

Of course she had never seen memorial carvings, or fine architecture of this sort. Before them in one direction stood a majestic family obelisk, taller than a man, of glossy bluish stone. In the other, a crowd of weeping figures, half-emerging from the front of a vault, their features discernible through cleverly suggested veils. Discoloration, accidental yet aesthetic, dripped greenly from an urn of oxidizing metal. What must a Szgany graveyard be in the wild hills of Styria, or Kingdom of Hungary? It would not even be that village church she had mentioned, with the tall windows. A level, dry patch, frozen most of the year, set off, perhaps, by some superstitious marker. Nothing more.

Lovely, she repeated, her features alight. So many. Here I should like to stay forever.

Do not say so, Miss Lujzi. You tempt the fates.

Bram stepped away for a while, sending his thought with his directionless heel. How pleasant to be able to share daylight with her, alone now, unmolested, where they could finally linger, at their ease. The air in these tree-lined passageways was moist and restorative, smelling of freshly turned earth. Here was a drift of leaves, fallen over a family stone and returning to skeletal paper. Each leaf had left its ruddy imprint, ghosts of the springtimes that had been. What courage was it that caused him to act so dashingly at the sweatshop in Whitechapel, so like the man he wished to be? In memory his deed became greater: he had stood toe to toe with a blackguard, keeping his level beard fixed. Take this. The woman is worth a dozen of what you pay her. Had those been his words? Something like.

The action itself, of course, had been madly incautious. Of all the risks he had undertaken so far, today’s was by far the most reckless. Might word of his Acting-Manager’s unusual interest in a seamstress reach Irving? And what would be the consequence? He must not deceive himself as to how, if word of it got out, this afternoon would be perceived. The Lyceum’s public face had taken away one of its needle-women, after making a scene; he had been noticed strolling Highgate in this same surprising company, while his abandoned wife hosted an event by herself. It was exactly such scandal—precisely the appearance of moral corruption—that Irving had vowed to purge from his theatre. No one associated with the Lyceum (Irving had thundered over cast dinners, grinding his fist in the tablecloth), no one in his employment would be spoken of in a negative light. There was nothing the papers would enjoy more than a scandal, and the first transgression would merit reprisal.

And reprisal was in Irving’s hand. Bram had seen him discharge a worker already . . . a cocksure fellow from Brighton who had spoken, in a lax moment, of the favors he enjoyed once of a certain front-row winger in a music hall. That one, Stoker. Sever him. Bram had been constrained to release the offender from all connection to the Lyceum in the instant; the gasping youth had found himself wholly unemployed, with neither recompense nor recommendation. And Bram had heard tales even more draconian than this. Rumor held it that Mister Irving had been riding home after a performance one night at Hyde Park when his own wife—his own wife!—risked a dismissive remark concerning actors. Irving had hammered the cabbie to halt, exited, and never spoken to the agape woman again.

Never.

Bram stopped in his tread, raising a gloved thumb to his brow. He felt like he was awakening from a daze. What softening of his self-preservation had allowed him to be here, walking these unauthorized trails? Hunger, child, Mrs. Kirwan’s voice whispered across the years. Hunger will make you do anything. And it was true; this sad, lovely immigrant with the light step and the hazel eyes filled a hunger in him, something deep as his soul. But the longer he had persisted, the greater the likelihood of catastrophe. Conclude it then, have done! He had played the hero, had indulged some need in himself. Now, this risky thing must end. When Bram turned to look behind him, the pathway was empty.

Miss Lujzi?

Bram retraced his steps, but the seamstress was gone. Anxiety began to turn in his gut. He tried to recall whether he has passed a particular grave: this one, marked with a seaman’s anchor, and surrounded by grey, draping chain . . . was it here, or another like it? Miss Lujzi? At the bend of the pathway a stone angel reclined luxuriously on an overgrown slab, wings in the dust, a crowd of crosses and headstones spreading along an ivy-covered hill. Overhead the clouds had once more begun to gather, casting their grayblue penumbrae. There were skulls, sleeping children, mourning cherubim, a menagerie all around him, but no living form. Bram tasted metal, looking left and right. Death was all encompassing, death extended mournfully in every direction. The world underneath these damp branches was nothing but a limitless expanse of graves.

Miss Lujzi? He felt awkward calling the foreign name aloud. Lujzi . . . ?

Then he saw her, just as he had been preparing to run. She had left the path to ascend an embankment, and was pirouetting among the graves. Her delicate arms were raised lightly, holding in one hand the Japanese fan, in the other the material of her dress. She had removed, too, her tattered shoes, and her thin ankles were quite visible.

The act was fantastically forbidden, a violation of so many laws that Bram fell helpless before it. But he was captivated by the sight of her, and of her barefoot dance, as if it were a kind of vision. He remembered the first time he could walk on his own, the year the paralysis left him, standing outside his family home and spontaneously beginning an awkward, stumbling gambol of joy. He had fallen to the grass laughing and stared up at the world. Now again he stared, a pair of eyes hidden in the dripping. He was the spirit now, not she, he the watcher from the corner of the stage.

See her dance! She was so full of the wine of fresh beginnings.

Coughing loudly to give her a chance, Bram drew closer, pretending to examine a carving of veiled grief. But Miss Lujzi was indifferent to his cues, still turning herself, slow as a drifting leaf, among stones. A sepulcher watched over by a gryphon, another guarded forever by a loyal bloodhound. Shaking his head, Bram strode helplessly forward.

My dear, my dear. Do you not fear censure?

But she had climbed the embankment the rest of the way, setting herself by a tall, lamenting angel in white, as she had been when he first saw her.

Look at her, Abraham! Beautiful!

There is a certain glamour to the melancholic, he began, but this was neither the mode nor the place in which to give instruction. Come away now. We must not be noticed.

But Miss Lujzi was enthralled, her soul captured once more by beauty, and climbed with her bare feet the little grey pedestal. Reaching around the angel’s robed torso she clasped its midriff, as if to breathe in the luscious mineral. Looking quickly around, hardly believing himself, Bram stepped off the dirt path as well, picking his way up the unclipped embankment until he stood at her side. Their faces were just level.

Now Miss Lujzi. We must not draw attention to ourselves in this way.

Sometimes . . .

Yes . . . ? He had not realized she was speaking. She had leaned her face against the moss-spotted surface, her eyes glassy. She could have been a sleepwalker, talking in a dream.

Did you say something?

Sometimes I think I belong dead.

Bram could feel the tapping in his ears, at his throat; he could feel his chest tighten. Miss Lujzi, you, of all creatures, do not belong here. You are more alive than many, oh, than many I have known. More, even . . . The firs overhead swayed secretly in a breeze, knowing his heart. More, even, I fear, than myself.

He could not help it: he was leaning his face toward hers. His hands too had found her hands, the little wounded fingers clasping him tightly. They were coming together, pulling their lips toward each other with between them the uncrossable stone, their arms in a ring now around the sad, lovely angel whose task it was to keep parted forever the living and the dead.

 

                                                                   Miss Lucy © 2019 by William Orem. By permission of Gival Press.

 

 

 

Kevin Baggett
When the Dead Came Back

When the dead came back, it was a pretty big deal. For months, round-the-clock cable news coverage and declared national states of emergency from just about every nation was the norm. Our planet, already crowded in most places became even more so, which is understandable when you think of just how many dead people there are to the amount of us living. But, over time the dead just became a part of our everyday lives.

The good news is not all of the dead came back, only a small percentage of them according to our best demographers. It was estimated around twenty percent of all dead people, ever, returned that day. There were no identifying patterns as to who came back and who didn’t. The other good news is that the dead didn’t need anything in the way of shelter, healthcare, food, or water. They weren’t a drain on already scarce resources. They don’t eat or sleep. They’re just there, wandering about the place, sort of shimmering in that distorting light they have about them. I don’t want to use the word ghost because they speak as clear as they did while living and are more solid than you would imagine a specter to be. When the dead came back, they weren’t grotesque like you’d think, bodies rotted and in various states of decomposition like something you’d see in a zombie movie.

Not to imply that the dead returning was necessarily a good thing. Marriages ended when former spouses showed up on the scene and families were split apart. Those who lost children prematurely were given a second round of heartbreak when their child did not come back for whatever reason while others’ kids did return. Some acted as if it were the end times as cults flourished in the immediate period after The Return and religions scrambled to hold onto their flock by absorbing the message of the dead’s arrival into their established canon. It was all part of God’s plan; it is all right there in Revelation if you just squint at the words a little.

Businesses popped up overnight promising homeowners they could rid their homes of the dead pests like in the Ghostbusters movies. Many of the new businesses took that name or some variation of it for their company.  

When asked what was on the other side of death, a Previously Deceased Person would just say it was just nothingness. Darkness. They were here and now they were back and it was all very disorienting so please just stop asking. The theologians in my department at the university still tried to make too much of these statements instead of just taking them at face value. 

There were famous people among The Previously Deceased and they of course received lots of attention. The Founding Fathers were asked to come to Congress to talk about the political issues of the day. Some were game for it. John Adams, for instance, was happy to give his opinion on everything from gerrymandering to regulation of goods that had been invented well after he died. It was his idea that we stop calling them the dead and start referring to them as The Previously Deceased. Thomas Jefferson arrived at Monticello and wouldn’t leave, but it is said he gives private tours to wealthy donors after closing his place to the public and needing the cash. Ben Franklin discovered the wonders of the internet at the Free Library of Philadelphia and doesn’t ever leave. The less I say about what he does there the better.

Elvis was nowhere to be seen, which led many to continue to believe he was alive. John Lennon and George Harrison came back and John wouldn’t commit to reforming The Beatles for a reunion tour as he somehow blamed Paul for his murder. He moved back in with Yoko, who seemed to not know what to do with a man she was married to almost a half century ago, so she leaves him alone at The Dakota, where she hardly visits except for occasional interviews with Time and Rolling Stone.

Arrests were finally made in the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, when those two were able to identify their killers, setting off an entire branch of jurisprudence and trial evidentiary rules regarding dead people’s ability to testify in court. You cannot escape a new Tupac/Biggie rap collaboration on the radio these days.

I always had fantasies of meeting a famous dead person even before they reappeared. I would run through my head conversations we could have about a variety of topics while I acted as their own personal Virgil helping them navigate the modern world and talk about all of the history they had missed since they died. You’d think that being a philosopher by trade, I’d want to talk to Plato or Leibnitz, but I would take just about any cast member of I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners over those dead white guys if given the chance. But I haven’t met any famous dead people. They seem to be as remote and unreachable to me as living celebrities and the regular-Joe-type dead people interest me about as much as the living.

And then there’s Maude.

Maude showed up a week or so after the arrival of The Previously Deceased. According to her, she had lived in our house back in the early fifties. She raised two boys here and attended to a husband when he bothered to come home from his traveling around the state selling vacuum cleaners and wooing other lonely Maudes. She suffered from depression and swallowed a bottle of pills one afternoon before her sons came home from school and now wanders around our house in the same funk, sometimes flipping through my wife Emma’s magazines, other times straightening the house in a flurry as if her absent husband was set to return any moment now. She spends a lot of time on Wikipedia and watching daytime talk shows to get caught up on the world that she left behind.

Here’s the thing about Maude, and you can see why having her around hasn’t been easy on the home front aside from her cleaning, which at first was helpful and nice but now gets on Emma’s nerves like we aren’t capable of doing it thoroughly enough for her, but Maude is exceptionally beautiful. Like cover girl from the magazines back in the day beautiful.

And Emma wants her gone yesterday.

But this was her home and where else does a dead person go? I will admit having a stranger in our house, invading our marital space and becoming privy our boring routine, even probably passing judgement on our own domestic disequilibrium and struggles, was disconcerting. 

“I know why you want her to stay,” Emma says during one of our worst fights about it.

“She’s sad and doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“You want to fuck her. You want to live like some Ottoman sultan with a harem.”

“First off. Two women, one living and one formerly deceased, hardly make a harem.”

I probably should not have said that bit.

“Second, have you ever touched a Previously Deceased Person?”

Emma has. She touched Maude lightly on the arm once on that first day to comfort her and to get her to stop crying in our kitchen. She said it felt like sticking your fingers in a bowl of ice water.

Once a news story broke out that touching them brings on a chill that reaches into your marrow and lingers there for days, everyone wanted to touch a Previously Deceased Person to see what it felt like. That’s just human nature. The thing is, though, no one wants to touch them a second time.

“I don’t even think they could have sex. Could you imagine what that type of cold would do to a penis?”

Emma wasn’t convinced, and she was right about my attraction to Maude, but that was all it was. A simple attraction with a heavy dose of absolute fear.

 

*

 

Emma tried everything to get Maude to leave after a few months of having her around. One night, they went surfing on Facebook together trying to locate her sons, who would be in their seventies now if still living and might not even be on that particular social media platform. They had no luck. They could still be living, they could be a Previously Deceased Person, or they could be dead-dead. There were too many possibilities. Google searches of their names didn’t generate any hits other than a little news story archived on a website about Maude’s death, after which seeing that Emma closed the laptop.

Emma said to me that night, “Maybe she’d be happier in one of the camps they’re setting up for them out West.”

“Camps. Why is mankind’s answer to a perceived problem population is to throw them in camps?”

“This isn’t racism or jingoism. She’s white. Besides, these people had their chance at living and they’re cramping our current lives.”

What I didn’t say was, what exactly are we doing with our chance at living? I learned a long time ago in marriage to keep those nuggets of inquiry to myself. What I did say was, “huh.”

“What about one of those services? The Ghost Dudes or Spirit Extractors.”

“Those guys are crooks. They never actually say where they take the Previously Deceased People. For all we know they just dump them out in the desert somewhere.”

“I just don’t understand why someone like her came back. She was miserable then and she’s miserable now.”

“Only the happy ones should have come back?”

“I’m not getting into this with you, Socrates. I would have much rather seen my grandfather again than deal with a bored, unhappy housewife from the Fifties.”

“Maybe she is a test for us.”

“Don’t start that again.”

Hundreds of thought pieces have posited that the dead came back to serve judgement on our own failures, whether on an individual personal or societal level, and to help us make adjustments as needed. Others posit that the living had done such a crummy job of being alive that they were given a second go around.

For example, the Founding Fathers came back to fix the republic was a popular sentiment in the political rags. If that is true, then how does that explain the fact that James Monroe took one look at cable news and was never heard from again or that Franklin is addicted to internet porn? Adams did his best to explain how the Second Amendment as it was intended didn’t envision mass murdering of children in schools with AR-15s and was dismissed as a bleeding heart by the right.

John Muir and Rachel Carson have been vocal about the impending environmental crisis and have had little success in convincing climate change naysayers on the debate circuit.

Hollywood was ecstatic that Bogart and Bacall wanted to pick up right where they left off and make good movies again, but the writers out there do not seem to know what to do with them as all three films they have been in since their return flopped commercially and critically. Honestly, Bogie should have never agreed to be in a Marvel movie. 

On the micro level, testimonial memoirs about a Previously Deceased Person coming into some nobody’s life and causing that person to reevaluate their own trajectory have dominated the bestseller lists and Lifetime television shows about it seem to be ratings gold. Some have invited the Previously Deceased into their homes and now consider them a member of the family. Lonely, elderly bachelors and widows now have welcomed companionship. Previously Deceased people remind us of the chances we the living aren’t taking. 

If this theory carried any truth at the individual personal level, what did Maude’s arrival mean for us?

 

*

 

The night of my department Christmas party finally brought things to a tidy finish on the Maude front. Emma and I had long since eschewed our spousal support roles in attending our respective department functions since we had earned tenure. She found the philosophers in my department, who were all men, a stuffy set of snobs who stared too much at her chest and I found her all-female sociologist colleagues flighty and stared too much at her chest.
Just to get out of the house and away from Maude, Emma informed me that she would be accompanying me this year. Maude, bless her heart, threw a wrench into those plans.

“Where are you going all dressed up?”

Emma and I were doing our last-minute grooming checks in the foyer. Maude speaking to us without our prodding her with questions or comments was near unheard of even though she had been with us for quite some time.

“Department Christmas party,” I said. “Big to-do every year.”

“Oh, that sounds fun! I love Christmas parties. Rick used to take me to his company’s party every year. I’d dress up, dance, and drink a little too much eggnog.”

“Well,” I started and stopped when I heard a low growl emanate from Emma’s throat. “I mean, you could come if you want.”

“It’s a terribly boring affair,” Emma said. “I’m only going because I have to as the loyal wife.”

I snorted at this and received a quick elbow to the ribs.

“I doubt that,” Maude said. “You two would be fun enough company I bet. Getting to cut loose a little after your busy semester. But I don’t have anything to wear.”

Emma sighed in the mirror.

“Come on, Cinderella. I bet I have something still in my closet that wouldn’t swallow you completely whole.”

I straightened my tweed blazer, plucked the few white hairs that had invaded my beard over the past year and took a seat on the couch. Emma is a low maintenance dresser and wears little to no makeup and somehow still takes a fortnight to get ready. Maude, although she has never changed out of the clothes she died in, could probably take even longer.

Emma shot me a glare that will most likely be held against me until the end of the year due to the look on my face when they reappeared in the living room. Maude filled out a green, strapless dress that Emma had worn to the first department Christmas party nearly ten years previous when I was still an eager-to-please junior and untenured professor and she was still a junior and untenured professor unafraid of showing a little skin to grease the horny wheels of academia. Emma had also changed from her shawl-wrapped floral ensemble and into a black cocktail number of her own. My wife is and has always been a beautiful woman and Maude literally shone next to her.

“Wow, look at you two,” I said.

I bent to give Emma a kiss on the cheek and opened the door for her to pass. I reflexively placed my hand on Maude’s bare back to lead her out too. For a brief few seconds, I couldn’t feel my fingertips, my arm, or the right side of my body.

Now here’s the thing. Previously Deceased People and the living do not exactly fraternize in public. Sure, it’s fine if behind closed doors because you have one staying with you, but a lot of businesses do not cotton to having non-paying and non-consuming customers in their place. The Previously Deceased, for their part, do not appreciate the stares and hushed tones their presence engenders when they venture out in public. Bringing one unannounced like this to a stolid function such as an academic department’s holiday party is kind of breaking the new and developing rules of social etiquette.  

“How about I drive us over to Biloxi instead? Try our hands at the blackjack table. You two are dressed too nice to waste on philosophers.”

“Present company included in that statement?" Emma asked.

“You’re really kind to say so, Mr. Beale,” Maude said from the back seat.

I looked over at Emma who rolled her eyes so hard I thought they would fall out of the Prius.

We arrived at my department chair’s Georgian columned house right on the beach a solid thirty minutes after the party start time. Driving by these leftover plantation houses, I often wondered if any of the slaves that used to live there came back as Previously Deceased and what would they do if they had. Historians, whose careers are in utter orbit these days since the dead-returning event and are making mints on book sales by now being able to just interview their subjects in person, would have been all over it if any slaves had come back. I assume they had enough of this world when they were alive.

The party was well in swing by the time we arrived, which meant my colleagues had already broken out the brandy and cigars in the front sitting room as a hazy ring of smoke hung close to the base of the Christmas tree and a fruity, pungent odor spiced the air. The stoic just- past-middle-age second wives of my colleagues talked over one another in the kitchen. A gaggle of our graduate students were in the foyer centered around Ian Schumpter, an impeccably dressed and charming student whom I advised and the only real potential scholar with a future in that bunch. Ian was the first to glad-hand me when I stepped over the threshold and he planted a kiss on Emma’s cheek, who winced at the gesture. We had Ian and his wife over to dinner twice when he first started his coursework, which was enough times for me to remember I don’t care for socializing with grad students outside of campus. He spent those evenings flirting with Emma, who seemed to warm to the attention and ignoring his wife, which is probably why she is now an ex-wife. The kid had earned a bit of a womanizing reputation in the department.

“Wow! Who is this?” he said, loud enough to record scratch the party into a hushed quiet as Maude made her entrance. The chatter in the smoke-infused sitting room stopped abruptly as all heads turned to see a Previously Deceased Person enter the house. Knees cracked in symphonic unison as a half dozen sexagenarians tried to stand to greet us.

“This is Maude, everyone,” I said. “She’s been living with us. Since the day of the Return.”

Introductions were made, handshakes were not given as no one wanted to touch a Previously Deceased Person, especially not anyone as close to crossing to the other side as this bunch, and Maude ate up the attention from the lecherous old men. Our department chair’s wife emerged from the kitchen and greeted us with all the graciousness of a good Southern wife, then whispered something to her husband on the way back to the kitchen.

Emma went to do damage control and make nice with the wives while everyone got to know a little about Maude.

Eventually, she tired of us old men and she was swept up in conversations with Ian and his gang, which only made sense given their respective ages, or whatever age Maude would be considered now.

The party dragged on as these things do and the chair of our department, a mid-fifties Spinoza scholar, cornered me by the Christmas tree at one point during the evening.

“So, that is your house guest,” he nodded towards the other room where Ian’s group and Maude had all moved to. “You didn’t mention she was pretty. How does Emma like having her around?”

“Em’s been trying to get rid of her since the beginning.”

“But you don’t mind, do you?”

“She’s become a regular part of the family. You don’t have any staying with you here?”

“If I did, I’d send them out west to one of those camps or call the Ghost Dudes. Unless of course, they looked like her, then maybe I would reconsider,” he chuckled.

“You ever wonder what all this is going to have on retirements?” I ask. “I mean, people die these days and some don’t stay dead.”

“It’s certainly done a number on the homicide rates. Lot less killing these days if you’re worried your victims are going to come back and take the stand against you. Speaking of murder, Emma doesn’t look too happy.”

I glance up to see my wife striding across the room towards us.

“Do you know what they’re doing in there?” she asked, and without waiting for an answer she said, “she’s holding mistletoe over her head and asking if anyone wants to kiss her.”

“That doesn’t sound like Maude. Wait, no one took her up on it did they?”

“Ian did!”

“Huh, I thought that boy had more sense.”

“I better get in there and see what the fuss is all about,” the department chair said and laughed.

We left the party not too long after and drove home, Emma sat in the front seat overly perturbed for some reason or another while Maude chatted in the back seat about how much fun she had.

The next morning, Maude was gone.

 

*

 

Emma and I spent the Christmas holidays feeling like empty nesters. She was in a celebratory mood, moving through the house like she was reclaiming her space again. A joviality I hadn’t seen in her in years had replaced her recent dourness. She even invited my parents to come spend Christmas Day with us, wrenching them away from my siblings who have grandkids for them to spoil. I kept wondering where Maude got off to. The Previously Deceased had not left en masse or anything; I would have heard about it. No, it seemed as though she left on her own volition. I had my suspicions about where she went, but needed to wait until an opportune time to confirm them.

The day before New Year’s Eve, Emma said she had a bit of errands to run and would be out for a few hours. Normally, we would run errands together, but I didn’t press the issue because I had a bit of investigating to do. As soon as our Prius was out of view on our street, I grabbed my coat from the rack by the door and headed in the direction of campus.

I remembered roughly where Ian lived, a two-story complex with a courtyard just a few blocks from campus. It would be a thirty-minute walk for me, but I needed the exercise after the holiday excesses. As I walked, I tried to figure out why I cared so much about where Maude went. I wasn’t a jilted lover. I wasn’t her father and feeling the pain that one associates their daughter moving out of the house. No, Maude was a dead person who lived with us for a while and now she was gone.

When I finally arrived at Ian’s complex fully winded from the walk, I saw a curious sight. The Prius, our Prius with the missing front left hubcap, was parked slantways amongst the older model cars broke graduate students drove. I was sure there’s a good explanation for this, so I rang Emma on her phone. Maybe she stopped off to visit with one of her own students for a chat or something. The call went directly to voice mail and I put the phone back in my pocket.

If I remembered correctly, Ian’s apartment was on the second floor and to the far left. I climbed the stairs and passed brown rust-colored doors until I reached his. A blank sticky-note, which I thought was curious, was placed on Ian’s door. A signal of some sort? A brick full of cigarette butts lay on the ground next to a metal folding chair. I peered inside an opening in the blinds before knocking to see Ian’s buttocks moving rhythmically into the couch, a woman’s legs wrapped around his torso and heard a familar sounding moan.

 

*

 

When I returned home, Maude was the last person I expected to be there to greet me at the door especially since I had other pressing matters to attend to. 

“Hey, where have you been?” I ask.

We sat on the couch together and she told me she went looking for her boys in her husband’s old hometown, asking around to see if they ever lived there. She found her husband’s grave, who was buried with his second wife in the Nineties, but came up empty in regards to her sons.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“That’s okay. I had to try. Mr. Beale, why do you have blood on your trousers?”

“That. That’s nothing to worry about.”

A sudden shift in the atmosphere soon permeated the air around us. I assumed it was because we were alone and now had nothing to say to one other. Maude glanced over my shoulder, and I felt whatever it was she was looking at before I even turned around. I watched as Emma suddenly shimmered into view on the couch next to me, looking none too pleased.

 

 

 

 

 

Ryan Kelley
Water Flower

It rained for six days straight after his wife and son left for the city.  Ben sat in a faded old papasan chair in the front room near the driveway.  It was a small, three-seasons room with an aged, wood-burning stove that coughed up whiffs of ash when it caught a strong wind.  A hunching, grey-haired repairman had deemed the stove and the living room fireplace safe to use soon after they had arrived.  Both the stove and chimney had been caked with creosote.  The firewood cut by the previous owner had not been stored properly, said the repairman.  The wood was half-rotted and would need to be replaced.  Indeed, a quick look found mold had taken hold of nearly every piece of cordwood in the shed.  Ben contracted with a logger on the on the other side of the bay and spent Labor Day replacing the waterlogged cords with the new, dry wood.

Looking out now across the gravel driveway towards the shed, Ben wondered if the old structure would keep the wood dry under so much rain.  His wife had left the car parked nearby, under a small carport held up by two rusted white poles.  He had sat in the same papasan as they left, his wife taking his son’s hand and walking down the long tree-lined drive to meet the car waiting at the road.  His son shuffled slightly behind her as she kept an even pace, putting the cabin steadily behind them.  There was something so dignified about it all that Ben just tilted his head to one side and watched them leave.  It was only several days later that he realized he had never said goodbye.

It had been two weeks since his wife had gone to the little market in town.  He had eaten eggs twice a day—morning and night—and filled in the rest of his diet with black coffee and bourbon.  Now, however, his supplies were dwindling, and as he watched the half-cup of coffee shake in his hand, he knew it was his last.  The rain beat persistently against the canopy of trees lining the driveway.  It hit clean against the windows of the room, sliding down in large, straight drops that patterned the window.  He closed his eyes and let the rain lull him into semi-consciousness in the chair until early afternoon.  He was not sleeping well at night.

He ventured out to the highway that day—the last day of the rain—to the tackle shop that stood where the highway cuts northeast to avoid the mountain.  It was the last commercial building before the bare trek into town.  It would be weeks before Ben would see the town again.  He filled a large cooler with beer, bourbon, milk, eggs, bacon, canned beans, cornmeal, flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, and butter.  Mounted heads of wildlife watched him as he shopped.  White-tailed deer, caribou, fishers, foxes and one particularly unpleasant Canada lynx sneered at him from perches on the walls.  Ben tossed a handful of long beef jerky tubes into his bag as the man rang him up.  He ate one as he drove home, pretending it was the flesh of the lynx.

At night he sat on the floor of the living room as he ate, listening to the whispering of the fire as it popped and crackled.  The wood was good pine.  Dry.  Clean.  He stuck his arm in the fire and let the wide flames begin to lick the palm of his hand.  He drank a lot at night and left the fire burning when he went upstairs to bed.  The smell of the pine and the thought of the flames made him feel burned away and empty.  The memory of the flame helped him roll over and sleep for a few hours.

He drove each evening to the tackle shop during those first few weeks alone.  It was October before he found himself parked by the pier—not the actual working pier but the tourist pier.  The large blue building there was once the town’s main sardine cannery.  Now, the long structure housed a labyrinthine collection of boutiques and overpriced restaurants set-up for the summer people.  In the little tourism bureau back of the building, grainy photos of the old workers showed that the cannery had changed little since the 1900’s.  The bureau sat away from the road, in a broad, two-story portion of the cannery that jutted out to a sloping shoreline of rock and sand and muck.  The town clerk’s office stood on one side, on the other an accountant’s office with a sign that read ‘Closed for Season.’  Beyond these was the unadorned wood shingle of a curio shop.  Later Ben tried to recall the name of the shop, but he never remembered.

Inside was a small warehouse with metal and wood shelves spaced into broad aisles.  At a far corner a studious-looking man with unkempt gray hair sat hunched over a drafting board, leafing through what looked like old circus broadsides.  He sighed as the entrance bell clattered and waved a hand in Ben’s direction without looking up.

“There’s more in the basement.  Haven’t had time to go through it all.  Let me know if you need a price on anything,” he said.

It was an extraordinary collection.  Each aisle had been arranged thematically.  One aisle contained pistols, swords, and knives dating back two hundred years—another featured ticking cuckoo and grandfather clocks all set six hours ahead.  The back wall was lined with two dozen oil paintings—portraits of stern men, each one more grim and determined than the last.  At first glance they appeared to be the same man, but their clothes, European in style, seemed to begin with the doublets and jerkins of Tudor England and end with the frock coats and top hats of the Gilded Age.
Past the portraits, framed on either side by walls of strange gears and levers, was a bare doorway leading to the basement.  The stairs were narrow and creaking, with the next to last stair missing entirely.  The basement was cold, surrounded by cracked brick walls wet with condensation.  In the middle of the room was a large square table covered with tall piles of women’s clothing and old dolls.  Beyond this was a smaller room with the remains of a wide conveyor belt flush against the back corner.  There was barely enough room to pass between the clothes table and the small room.  Ben knocked one of the dolls onto the floor as he passed.  It landed on the stone—its voice box letting out a muffled mrr-ahh-haa.  He let it lay and entered the room beyond.

The second room was damp and bright.  Puddles the size of dinner plates dotted the floor.  A bright blaze of morning sun shot through a rusted metal window at ground level.  The light illuminated the dust floating in the air and gave the whole room a whiff of dewy fairyland.   Two more wide tables dominated the room.  Below and above they were crowded with cardboard filing boxes.  Ben rifled through several boxes of magazines and a few with more with more old dolls.  On the old conveyor belt sat a large framed black and white photo of an orchestra.  A brass plaque underneath read “Claude Meriwether and His Whispering Orchestra, 1924.”  Ben looked hard at the bandleader.  His hair was slicked back to one side and a pencil-thin moustache decorated his lip.  He looked up towards the camera and smiled, a sort of uncomfortable, begrudging smile.  The lines around the mouth and cheeks were the same, the long, gaunt face, the stern eyes—all the same as the portraits of the men upstairs.  Ben shuffled on his feet and crouched down for a better look at the photo.  His right foot slipped and sank ankle-deep into an unseen puddle.  He pulled the foot out and shook the water from his boot.

A faded brown cardboard box peeked out from underneath the conveyor belt.  The corners were held together with brown masking tape, dingy with age and beginning to peel.  The box moved and shifted, almost slipping through his hands as he placed it in front of Claude Meriwether and his associates.  A strange blue-green packing material filled the box.  The material was long and thin, natural like straw but with an uncanny polystyrene quality that, for a moment, Ben was afraid to handle.  The packaging was moist to the touch.  Ben gently brushed the material aside, digging slowly to the bottom of the box until he saw her.  A face.  A face with closed lids and a soft, seafoam green complexion.  More brushing revealed small, beautiful lips drawn tightly together at the center of the mouth.  The ends of the mouth curled faintly, stopping just short of a smile.  She had high cheekbones that sloped gracefully towards a small, beautifully rounded chin.  Her nose was thin and arched dramatically towards deep-set eyes that accentuated the near perfect symmetry of her face.

He brought her into his hands, expecting there to be more than just a face.  She was a mask—a plaster mask.  He turned her over and put her near his face, hesitating before placing her against him.  She was small.  He could feel his face ooze out from underneath her.  His jowling cheeks, the beginnings of a double chin, folded over his beard and slipped over her edges. He flipped her over quickly, self-consciously, and stared at the closed eyes.  He smiled at her and traced the curve of her cheek with the backs of his fingers.  She was young—no more than 20 years old, he guessed.  He weighed her in hands.  She was light—fragile, too.  He wondered how long she had been left in the box and a small flush of anger warmed his cheeks.  Clutching her to his chest, he grabbed the warped box and tossed it back under the conveyor belt.

Upstairs the man with the unkempt gray hair still toiled at the drafting board.  As he turned, Ben saw his face for the first time.  It was the same stern face in the portraits—the same stern face of Claude Meriwether.  He looked at her and frowned.

“Where did you find—that?” he asked, thrusting a finger in her direction.

“Downstairs.”

“It’s a death mask,” he said plainly.  “Drowning victim.  Taken post mortem.  It’s very old.  I suppose you want it?”

“She’s—it’s quite unique,” Ben said.

The man looked vaguely at her.  “It’s been with me for a long time.”

He continued to stare.  Ben wrapped his fingers tight around her and the man shook away an unspoken thought.

“It’s no bother,” he said.  “Take her.  I’ll be glad to be rid of her.”  He quoted an exorbitant price.  Ben talked him down slightly and left the store with her under his arm.

Clouds had rolled in off the ocean and a cold drizzle began to fall.  He sat her on the passenger’s seat and wiped the raindrops from her face with the sleeve of his coat.  She looked cold.  He ran to the trunk for the wool blanket and placed it under her, wrapping the remainder of it up around her chin and cheeks.  She could barely move and looked at him as if to say ‘what have you gotten me into this time?’  He laughed and drove home.  Autumn was vibrant and bright, despite the coming storm.

It took the remainder of the day and evening to find a suitable spot for her in the cabin.  He sat her on the kitchen counter while the last of the eggs and bacon sizzled on the stovetop.  When night fell he sat her on a pillow next to him by the fire.  There were several options, he thought.  The most prominent spot was over the fireplace.  There she could be seen from nearly every angle on the first floor.  He liked the idea of showing her off there, but perhaps someplace more secretive and intimate would be less distracting.  There was a smooth stretch of wall above the stairway, visible as he walked downstairs.  There he could see her at the start of each new day.  He poured long streams of bourbon into his mug and watched her happily on the pillow as he emptied his coffee cup again and again.  Sometime after midnight he decided he needed to see her throughout the day.  She would stay above the fireplace.  The fire had grown low when he placed her on the wall.  He held her in his hands for a moment before sliding her onto the plastic wall mount. 

He pushed her flat against the wall.  She seemed to tense for a moment and then softened, a thin fwoooh exiting her mouth.

On the carpet, legs crossed under him, he watched her in the dying fire.  The dim light cast strange shadows on her, animating the mouth and eyelids.  One pop of the wood and she seemed sleepy, another and she was happy.  When the wood rolled and a long slow lick of flame curled upward, she seemed to be—almost—flirting with him.  She was warm.  She was safe—and after finishing the remnants of the bottle so was he.  He said goodnight and climbed the stairs to his bedroom.

That night she bloomed for him in restless dreams.  From the depths of a moonlight sea, a water lily rose to the surface—white with a center heart of red and purple that seemed to pulsate as if it were alive.  It opened for him there on the surface.  The moment it reached full bloom it popped, the petals showering down on the surface to become new flowers.  Hyacinth and lotus and marigold sprinkled the moonwater sea over and again in a bright blaze of color until his brain seemed to ignite and burn in bright strips of flame.

Standing before her the next morning, coffee cup in hand, he made small talk and said nothing of the dreams.   A small, almost imperceptible, change in the curve of her smile told him that she already knew about the dreams.  For the first time, he felt that they shared a secret.  He shook his head and tried to broach the subject, but she demurred.
That morning was the last of the coffee.  A trip to the store would be necessary.  The thought of leaving her sickened him.  A car ride was dangerous, given her current state—plaster.  It would only be for twenty minutes or so, he thought.  She had no way to leave him, at least not in such a short amount of time.  He sat on the couch and watched her, tempted all the time to pull her down and sit her beside him.  She looked peaceful hanging there above the fire, though, and he was content to leave her.

Soon the afternoon shadows had lengthened over the drive and Ben realized there was no wood left in the copper bucket by the fireplace.  He walked outside, hesitating as he crossed the threshold of the front door.  He shuffled across the leaves covering the drive and opened the woodshed.  He smiled—hit suddenly with the smell of cedar.  The wood was stacked beautifully—efficient, dry.  He piled his arms with logs and carried them inside.  He dropped them clumsily into the bucket and thought he heard her laugh at him.

“Hey, I’m doing my best here,” he said, smiling.  His face grew serious.  “I have to go away for a little bit.”
She frowned.  Her eyebrows wrinkled and she stuck out her bottom lip.  “Now, now.  It’s just for twenty or thirty minutes.  I just have to get groceries.  Okay?  Just groceries.”

She lowered her eyes.  A single tear rolled down her cheek.  He stepped onto the front hearth of the fireplace and reached for her.   She froze, her eyes still cast downward.  He let the tear fall onto the end of his finger.  He traced its path upward on her face and wiped it away.  That seemed to calm her, though she remained quiet, motionless.  The moment closed in on both of them.  He felt the sounds of the sea-tide rise in his ears.  The beauty and mystery of her face pulled him out towards her, into the depths.  There was a moment of hesitation before he placed his hand on her cheek and lifted his mouth towards hers.  She was cold at first, hardened, no doubt, from her mistreatment in the curio shop.  Her mouth parted suddenly and she softened into him, kissing him back.  When he stepped back onto the carpet she was stoic once again—eyes cast downward, that soft, mysterious smile rising ever so slightly on her seafoam lips.
The wind had picked up when Ben walked to the car.  It filled his ears like high tide.  The orange and red leaves turned cartwheels over one another in the darkness.  Ben breathed in the cool air.  He could smell the ocean in his nostrils and on the ends of his fingers.  The corner store was alight with activity.  It was Friday and families busied themselves planning for the weekend ahead.  There was laughter and light—even the caribou, foxes, and lynx on the walls were in good spirits.  They smiled and nodded their heads at him, as if they knew the wonderful news Ben was keeping inside. 

The shelves had been picked clean.

“Weekend storms coming,” said a cheerful little squirrel, as if answering Ben’s thought.

Ben came back to the cabin with a carload of brown paper bags.

“I thought we’d wait out the storm inside this weekend,” he declared.

Sleeping.  She had fallen asleep.  He put away the groceries and lit a small fire; half hoping he would wake her. 

She sleeps like the dead, he thought.

His dreams were once again restless.  He stood before the same old-dark sea dusted in moonlight.  From the edge of the shore he peered down to see if there was a bottom to the sea—that’s when she rose.  There was nothing of substance at first, just the vague green outline of a head and slim shoulders.  She stopped just below the surface and her hands reached for him.  He placed her hands in his and began to feel the pull downward.  Her eyes opened.  Black. 

Nothing.  He leaned forward towards the darkness.

It was still night when he woke.  A thunderstorm raged outside.  From the bedroom window, Ben could see the driveway beginning to flood.  It’s not level, he thought.  I’ll have to do something about that in the spring.  He crawled back into bed and lay on his side for a long time listening to the storm.  It might have been an hour before he realized the new sound coming from downstairs.  A sliver of wind had somehow splintered off and made its way inside.  Instead of a howl, a soft sobbing—a whimper like a frightened child—blew up from below.            

Ben walked downstairs slowly, half afraid of what he would find.  The fire was almost dead, but threw enough shadow to reveal the contortions in her face, moving more than he had ever seen.  She was quietly weeping, twisting on her hook so much that Ben was afraid she might tumble and shatter on the hearth.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She continued crying for a few long moments before composing herself.

We should not have kissed,” she said.  Her accent was strange and archaic, like a rustic, near miss Danish.  Ben opened his mouth to speak.

“It is not proper,” she said.  “It is not right.”

She turned away from him and he was again afraid she would fall off her hook.

“I need to be alone.  Please.  Yes.  Please.”

Ben did as she asked.  The storm continued outside as he lay in bed and grew sleepy.  Her tears fell like rain in his dreams, hitting the moonlight sea, turning somersaults in the black and rising to the surface as pulsating water flowers of purple, blue and red.

The next weeks were magic.  She opened for him there by the fire, telling stories of her life before she came to live with him.  Her memory was chunked with holes—bits of her life revealed themselves only in small fragments.  The day after the crying, he asked what he should call her.  She said she had been called many names, and that one name was as good as another.  She said he should call her whatever he wished.  Likewise, she had no memory of where or when she was born.

“Everyone seems to have a different fairytale they like to believe,” she said, looking rather puzzled.  “You may pretend I was born anywhere or everywhere.”

She was told quite often over the long years that she had drowned, but she had no recollection of it.

“I imagine it to be quite peaceful,” she said.  “Like falling asleep—just blankness and darkness enveloping you, wrapping itself around you like a blanket.”

She looked quizzical again, her thin lips pursing together.  “Perhaps there was a struggle.  I really could not say.”

Her first memory was of waking in the darkness of a dull brown morgue with high ceilings and wide walls.  A nervous little coroner held her up to the gaslight.  He smiled a faint, thin-lipped smile at her while a fat, lumbering assistant in overalls stared at her a few feet behind.  The two men whispered of her beauty.  She felt formless, voiceless in his hands—and it was long months before words came to her.

The coroner sat her on his desk in a dark office.  She passed long hours there waiting for the end of the workday.  It was then that the coroner sat down at his desk.  He was a busy, hurried man, but he sat down for an hour each day to take a bit of snuff from a small enameled tin while he completed reports at his typewriter.  Once or twice, the coroner’s attention drifted towards the corner of the desk and he would look at her for a few minutes in a sort of half-daydream before returning to the click-clack of the typewriter.  Her heart would open up as he looked at her, and she felt a yearning to help the coroner, to somehow become something for him—to be an ideal, to be beautiful.  She waited, watching him, hoping he would call her beautiful again.  She wanted to speak to him, but she had no words.

On Saturdays a sighing old woman came to clean the office.  When the old woman first saw her sitting by the typewriter she was frightened, but she soon took to calling her mon petit oiseau—my little bird.  The cleaning lady had a broad, kind face and eyes that, though tired, had a shine in them that whispered of a lost beauty the woman once possessed.  Her hair was long and brown, held up by thin pins.  Often she sat at the desk and adjusted the pins, sweeping her hair tight against the back of her head.  The old woman talked to her as she sat, and often sang a lullaby.

From her hook on the wall, she sang the words back to Ben as she told the story:

 

   Au clair de la lune,
   Mon ami Pierrot,
   Prête-moi ta plume
   Pour écrire un mot.
   Ma chandelle est morte,
   Je n'ai plus de feu.
   Ouvre-moi ta porte
   Pour l'amour de Dieu.

  

“What do the words mean?” Ben asked.

She thought for a moment.

“Well, let me see,” she said.  “By the light of the moon, my friend Pierrot, lend me your, ah—what’s the word—your quill, to write a word.  My candle is dead.  I have no fire.  Open your door for me.  Open your door for me.  For the love of God.”

She was quiet after reciting the words.  The fire crackled and Ben shifted awkwardly.

“Words came to me quite easily there with her.  The old cleaning woman worked to take care of a granddaughter.  She said when she thought of her granddaughter, her work became quite a happy thought.”
She paused.  “Do you want to know something the old woman once said?  She said ‘we breathe life when we give meaning.’  Is that not a curious thought?  Those words have stayed with me throughout my—my—existence.”

The coroner took ill unexpectedly and the old woman was sent away.  The fat assistant spent several months in charge of the coroner’s office.  In the evenings he drank from a bottle hidden in a desk drawer.  He talked to her often, telling her that she was beautiful—a work of art made just for him.  He took her from her corner and sat her on his lap as he drank.  He told her things in the drunken darkness, things she could not repeat.  The coroner died and the fat assistant was sent away.  Her last memory of him was the sound of his screaming for her from a far-off room.

“Words slipped from my mind not long after,” she said.  “I was formless again.  A void.”

“Were there—others?” Ben asked.

“I seem to remember there was a war,” she said.  “There was a quite handsome doctor.  I soon discovered that I could, well—do—certain things.  I caused a flood in the hospital.  I felt quite embarrassed, but the doctor was so lovely about it all.  He explained that human beings are sixty percent water.  Did you know that?  Sixty percent—and the lungs, the lungs are eighty percent.  So really, I am just a little more water than most.  Yes?”

Ben nodded.  He could feel the sea-tide rising in his ears again.

“The doctor was an officer in the army, and there were bodies.  Everyday more and more bodies.  He tried his best to shield me from them, but there were too many.  Young men with faces like children.  By the time the bodies stopped, the doctor had begun to go gray at the temples.  And he was tired.  Very tired.  He went away, too, and somehow—I don’t remember how—I ended up in Paris.  Oh yes, beautiful Paris.”  She smiled at the thought.

In Paris she hung on a wall in the 8th story apartment of a brooding, passionate painter.  The painter spent his days in the cafes of the Left Bank.  At night he threw raucous parties where writers and other artists spent hours discussing her beauty and inventing elaborate stories of how the pretty little flower had died.  Once, a dancer from the Folies Bergère took her off the wall and wore her as a mask, tied tight against her with a silk stocking.  The painter twirled the dancer around all night and, when it was time to say goodnight, he pressed her close to him and kissed her.

She thought about the kiss for a long time afterwards and soon she began whispering to him from on the wall when he returned home each evening.  He came to her each night before bed, stripping himself naked, and kissing her goodnight there on the wall.  For months the goodnight kisses grew in intensity until, one spring night, the artist threw himself from his window.

“Do you see now why we mustn’t kiss?” she said.

Ben nodded and watched the embers of the dying fire.  “I should put more wood on.”

“Oh, please do not,” she said.  “It gets terribly hot above the fire.  I am always so chilled, but above the fire is too much.”

“Would you like to be moved?” he asked.

“Yes.  Perhaps on the sofa?”

Ben stood on the hearth and gently lifted her off the hook.  He sat one of the firm throw pillows flat on the couch and placed her on top, propping her against the back and facing her towards the fireplace.

“That is lovely,” she said.  “You are very kind.”

The fire faded as they watched it from the couch.  She was tired and soon fell asleep.  Her breathing grew shallow until it was a strange, liquid gurgle.  Hollow.  Cold.

“So chilled,” she mumbled in her sleep.  “The water is so cold.”

Ben left her there on the couch and went to bed.  For a while he dozed, but soon woke with the sensation that she was slipping away from him somehow.  Misty shadow images formed in his brain.  He saw her sitting on the desk of the coroner, yearning for his attention like a schoolgirl.  He saw the fat assistant holding her in his hands, the handsome doctor teaching her, and the painter standing before her naked, his mouth pressed against hers.

The storm had calmed.  A light rain was falling.  Ben sat at the edge of his bed and watched the rain for some time before walking downstairs.  She was still asleep on the pillow where he had left her.  He poured himself a drink in the kitchen and sat on the stairs leading to his room.  Dawn was only a few hours away.  He would watch her until then, he thought, to protect her.

She stayed on the sofa every night after that.  He carried her around the cabin in the daylight.  She knew nothing about cooking, but enjoyed being in the kitchen with him while he prepared meals.  His trips outside the cabin grew less frequent.  When he did leave her, he felt the same sensation of sea-tide in his ears.  A strange hollowness began to eat away at his stomach each time he left.  After a few months he began taking her with him.  It was obvious that the car rides frightened her, but she put up no protest other than a sort of gurgling sigh when he picked her up and walked towards the front door.

The new year came and winter semester began.  There were several calls from the university and his wife, but those largely went ignored.  He assured them he was fine.  Staying up here was good for his soul, he told them.  There was no need to check on him.

She grew more lovely and precious to him each day.  He was increasingly aware of his inadequacies.  It would be a short time before she grew bored with him, he thought.  In late January a man had noticed her in the car and complimented her.  She smiled at him—that same, half-smile she used with everyone—the same smile that drew him to her in the curio shop.  He yelled at her for her indiscretion.  Tears poured from her, pooling in the passenger’s seat and onto the floorboards.

There were several apologies that night.  Ben touched her cheek and was ashamed, unable to look at her.  She was sorry she had upset him. 

“If you were that upset, I must have done something wrong,” she told him.  Her eyes welled with water and the fire began to smoke.  “Please forgive me?”

That night was the first time he asked about the curio dealer.  Had she been with him long?  Would he ever come looking for her?

“We passed many years together.  We were quite happy,” she said.  “I wonder why he could toss me aside so easily?  He was rather quick to be rid of me.  Might I have done something wrong?”

Ben rubbed his beard and tried to look thoughtful.  “Some men are just like that.”

This seemed to puzzle her.  There was a long silence.

“Would you face me towards the bay tonight?” she asked.

“You can’t see the bay from here,” he said.

“Oh, I know, but I can feel it,” she said.  She closed her eyes tight and smiled.

“Well okay but—“

“The front room,” she said.  “That faces the bay.”

“It’s freezing tonight,” he said.  “You’ll be cold.”

“It’s no trouble.  I promise,” she said.  “Perhaps a blanket would help me.”

He left her that night in the three-seasons room, facing the window that looked out over the driveway.  He tucked a small fleece blanket between her chin and her pillow.  From his bedroom, he listened as she mumbled herself into a gurgling, listless sleep.

It was 3 a.m. when he woke to the sound—soft, but yes quite clear—of laughing.  He walked downstairs quietly and sat at the bottom step.  She was laughing in a strange voice.  It was low, and the laughs came in long rolling bursts before drifting off into strange liquid sounds that caught at the back of her throat.  She was listening to someone.  Ben grimaced and threw his head into his hands.  Finally he stormed into the room and snatched her from the pillow.

“Oh.  You startled me.  You mustn’t frighten me like that, Ben,” she said as he carried her upstairs. 

“What—what’s happening?”

Realizing there was no hook, Ben took her downstairs again, pulled on his boots, and took her with him to the shed.

“Ben, it’s freezing.  You could freeze out here without a coat,” she said.  He could feel her trembling in his hands.  He rifled through the toolbox that had belonged to the former owner and found a hammer and a thick nail.  Ben shook the hammer in his hands.  The grip was cracked where the wood met the metal and held together with yellowed masking tape.

“You’re frightening me, Ben,” she said.  “I don’t like hammers.”

Back in his bedroom he hammered the nail squarely into the wall opposite his bed.  He forced her down on the nail and watched her hang.

She trembled on the nail for some time.  He stood watching her.  When she had calmed down she cleared her throat.

“This is not right,” she said flatly.

“I like you better in here,” he said.  He tilted his head to look at her.  She was always most beautiful in those moments just before the tears.  He took her with both hands and kissed her deeply.

She struggled in his hands. 

“No—please—no—please, no.  Please.  Please.  Please.”

“See?  It’s fine,” he said afterwards.  She began weeping in earnest now.  The sea rushed into Ben’s ears.

“If they can kiss you, so can I.  What’s the matter, you don’t like the way I kiss?” he asked.

But she just kept crying.  Soft little sniffles that lasted half an hour or so broke into wails that rolled on for five minutes or so and dissolved back to sniffles.  Ben pulled his pillow over his head and felt the briny sea sweating out of his pores.  He snapped at her several times to shut up, but that only made the wailing more forceful, more persistent.

The bedroom carpet was saturated in the morning.  Ben knew it would need to be pulled up and replaced.

“Good morning,” he said as she sniffled on the hook.

“You’re making too much out of this.”  He bent down to try to meet her gaze.  “Do you understand?  You’re being dramatic.”

He left her there sniffling to go to the store.  She was still sniffling when he returned.  He grabbed her from the hook and put her back above the fireplace.

“There,” he said.  “A happy medium.”

There were no tears that night and for several weeks she was motionless, lifeless.  The night sweats continued.  Ben woke each morning with the smell of the sea on his skin and the taste of saltwater in his mouth.  He stood by the fireplace each morning and she seemed inanimate, just a lifeless plaster mask.  Ben wondered if it had all been some sort of dream.

February was brutally cold.  Ben realized the cabin was porous with strange, hissing drafts that seemed to materialize from nothing and vanish.  At night he heard low hissing sounds in the cabin’s unused rooms.  Often he woke in the middle of the night to check a coat closet or spare bedroom; sure he had found where the noise originated.  Once he had checked, however, the hiss had moved to another room.

One night the hissing began to crackle and pop.  Ben lay in bed for close to an hour before realizing that the hiss was now a series of indecipherable whispers.  He hopped from his bed and ran downstairs.  She was whispering on the mantle.  She smiled softly.

“Hello, Ben,” she said.

“Who were you talking to?” he asked.  He walked towards her.

“What do you mean?” she asked.  “Ben, your face is pallid.  Are you ill?”

Ben marched to the kitchen and pulled the taped-up hammer from the drawer where he had left it.

“Talking.  Whispering,” he mumbled.  “I’ll smash you to pieces.”  He stood on the hearth and lifted the hammer over his head.

“Are you sure you can do that?” she asked flatly.  She motioned to the hammer.

Ben glanced at it over his head.  The masking tape was sticky, almost liquid.  The bulk of the hammer leaned forward for a moment before tumbling off the grip and onto the floor.  He dropped the remnants of the hammer and lifted her off the mantle.  There was a long, thin scarf in the front closet.  He wound it around her mouth and tied it tight behind her.  In the front room sat a deep chest full of blankets—one of the last traces of his old life remaining in the house.  He pulled the blankets and stuffed her inside.  She tilted her head and studied him quizzically with her eyes.  He tossed the blankets on top of her and closed the chest, locking it with a small brass key.  Shoving the small key into his pocket, he fell into the papasan.  He sighed.  Quiet.

For a week there was quiet.  The sun punched through the clouds and the last of the snow from January melted away within a few days, leaving deep pools of water in the valleys of the gravel driveway.  Ben started taking walks around the land.   There was a small pond covered in brambles near the back property line. It would be easy enough to remove the shrubs in the spring, he thought, and maybe stock it with some fish.  Something in the air felt strange during the walks.  The hairs on his arms stood on end and his hands trembled.  He felt an overwhelming urge to open the chest and check on her.

The wind picked up that night and a light snow began to fall.  Through the morning and into the next day, the sound of the wind grew louder—an unnatural hum-whistle that caused him to bury himself under his pillow.  By late afternoon, the house was flooded with the sound and snow had piled up at the doorstep.  After dinner a rattling bap-bap-bap drew his attention outside.  The wind had whipped open the shed door.  Ben threw on his coat and walked outside.  The hum-whistling increased once he was inside the shed.  He ran his hands over the stacked wood.  Ben smiled.  It was still dry.

He latched the door and started back to the house, struggling against the wind.  Snow whipped from off the ground and surrounded him in a white swirl.  Suddenly he was knocked off his feet, his head snapping back against the ground.  He remained unconscious for some time.  We he woke the sun had set and a thin layer of snow had covered him. He crawled to his feet and saw a thin layer of dry vomit caked down the front of his jacket.  The hum-whistle remained in his ears—as deafeningly loud as before.  He stumbled to his feet and walked a few steps before the funnel cloud of snow engulfed him again.  He struggled against the wind and stumbled into the cabin.  Inside, the humming was quiet, barely audible in the blanket chest.  He sat on the floor for a long time catching his breath.  If I had been out there much longer I’d be dead, he thought.  He pulled his coat off and crawled to the blanket chest, resting himself against the wall and fishing the brass key from his pocket.  He casually opened the chest with one hand and pulled her out without moving from his resting place.

The scarf was loose around her mouth and had fallen down around her chin.  Her mouth was open and wide, a black hole producing the hum-whistle.  He held her up and looked her over.  She closed her mouth.  Ben rose awkwardly to his feet.

“Let’s see how you like it out there,” he said.  He opened the door and reared back to pitch her out into the storm.

She laughed.  “Oh, Ben.  La neige est de l'eau.”  The words amused her.  She continued laughing.

Ben held her in his hands.  “Wh-what?”

“La neige est de l'eau,” she laughed.  “Snow is water.  Snow is water.”  She was taunting him now.

“Cut that out,” he snapped.

She sang the words to the tune of the old woman’s lullaby.

La neige est de l'eau,
Mon ami Pierrot.
Ma chandelle est morte,
Je n’ai plus de feu.

 

   The rest of February passed uneventfully.  She stayed on her pillow on the couch and he stayed on the floor near the fire.  He tried once to place the scarf back over her mouth, but she hissed so unnervingly that he never tried again.  Each night, after the bourbon and the fire dwindled, he walked upstairs to bed and told her he would take her back to the curio shop in the morning.  Each night she was silent.  Ben again began wondering if he had imagined her. 
This continued for a month until, one bright morning in late March, Ben found himself standing in the curio shop.  The owner held her in his hands and smiled.

“Well, well,” he said.  “An old familiar face.”

The owner opened his ancient cash register and insisted on buying her back at a premium.

“No, no,” he said, waving Ben’s protests away.  “You deserve a little something for taking such good care of—it.”

Ben drove back to the cabin and slept for several days.  When he awoke the last traces of the winter had melted away.  The sun was bright overhead and life was sprouting all around.  After the pond had been cleared, green and purple water lilies bloomed in full force on its surface.  In the shed, the winter thaw left the wood infested with mold.  It would all have to go.  The blooming life and rot turned his thoughts back to her, and he decided to buy her back and apologize for everything that had happened between them.

The curio shop was gone.  The windows of the old warehouse were now boarded.  Boarded up for many years, Ben thought with a sudden crawl up his spine.  The rusted basement window was uncovered and, after avoiding the gaze of the town clerk leaving for her lunch break, Ben kicked in the glass and metal and slid inside.  Standing water half an inch deep covered the ground and the smell of mold spores coated the air.  Water droplets fell from the ceiling onto the conveyor belt.  He knelt down to the dark spot underneath where he had found her.  It was dark and musty, but she was nowhere to be found.  A drop of water rolled down the side of the old conveyor belt.  Ben held his hand underneath it and let it fall on the knuckle of his forefinger.  It balanced there for one brief moment before sliding down his palm.  He clenched his hand to grab it.  It slipped through his fingers and fell to the ground.

 

 

 

 

 

Peter J. Stavros
Tattoo

Sadie has a tiny black heart tattooed on the inside of her left wrist, directly over that one vein that’s pursed and crooked and bluish and juts out whenever she gets anxious. Sadie made certain for the tattoo to be placed precisely in that position, directly over that “obnoxious vein,” her words, so when she presses it with the index and middle fingers of her right hand she can close her eyes and imagine the pulse of that touch slipping into her bloodstream and sliding the length of her arm and across her chest to give her real red beating heart a subtle jolt. Sadie doesn’t press the tattoo all the time, only when she needs the extra boost, to pull her out of a lull, to snap her into place, to get her going again, her own personal reset button. But she’s been pressing it more and more often—I can tell.

Sadie says she wants another tattoo, and another after that, as many as her slight body will allow, to cover the empty space she’d rather replace with something else, not what God gave her but something of her own intent for once, a symbol or a drawing or a quote from a favorite poem. And besides, she figures why not, where’s the harm, at her age, crossing the other side of fifty. There are less years to bemoan a bad tattoo, to live with the regret of that, and when she’s already had her share, and then some, of regret to have to live with. Sadie tells me it’s something she’s always wanted to do, to get tattooed, just like the cool kids back in school, with their rock ’n ’roll t-shirts and torn jeans and unfiltered cigarettes. Even now she’s keen to notice everyone with tattoos. “Everyone has a tattoo!” She’s incredulous, suddenly struck with an unrelenting tattoo envy—her of all people and that makes her laugh.

Sadie never got around to it, not until lately, not with all the distractions and disappointments and do-overs, and with her too worried about matters that never quite happened, too concerned with what people might think, or say, too afraid of the pain, but not really the pain, the anticipation, the thought alone of the unknown. Yet the pain turned out to be nothing to fear, nowhere near, not once Sadie bounded off the sofa and resolutely strolled over one sunny summer afternoon on a whim and a mission down the street to the new tattoo parlor with the shiny chrome furniture and plush carpeting and bright neon lights that opened at the shopping mall next to the nail salon and across from the gourmet popcorn kiosk and cattycorner to the movie theater. It wasn’t the pain, but the foreboding buzzing of the tattoo gun, particularly in that split-second that felt like a “goddamned eternity” before stabbing metal pierced delicate flesh, that caused her distress. Sadie’s been through worse than whatever a minuscule needle she could scarcely see without her readers could impart. Oh please, she thought. Sadie didn’t mind the pain, indeed she somewhat enjoyed it she confessed, this sort of electric burning sensation that sent charged shivers somersaulting over every nerve and synapse.

The pain let Sadie know she was alive, always had, what she finally came to realize—and accept.

Sadie jokes, or I hope, at least assume, that she’s saving for a sleeve, a contiguous amalgamation of colors and designs tattooed from the top of her shoulder to the crux of her elbow, maybe lower to her wrist. I’ll catch her on her laptop late at night, when she can’t sleep, which is most nights, when she’s given up on tossing and turning and trying to find the cool side of the pillow while the air conditioner, even in our modest Cape Cod, struggles to reach the second floor, especially during these muggy spells. The shimmering glow of the computer screen casts curious shadows to the ceiling, nudging me awake, as Sadie scrolls through photo after random, anonymous photo of tattoos, seemingly newly made, fresh ink in the parlance, snapped at the instant of fruition and posted to the Internet for the wide world to admire, the lines raised and tinged in a blushing pink silhouette, some with splattered droplets of crimson, these varied decorative wounds. Sadie stays up late, sometimes all night, searching for what she wants etched into her skin next.

“How many tattoos are you going to get?” I’ll ask her.

“As many as it takes,” she replies.

 

 

 

 

 

Esther Yin-Ling Spodek
Courting Holy Water in a Dry House

 

   The sound of hammering has become unbearable for Kaye now that she has finished her second Macallan’s and is sucking on the scotch-coated ice cubes.  Sitting on the back steps, playing with the ice in her mouth, she watches over the vast newly mowed lawn to the garage.  Long ago, as a graduate student with Eric, she could never have imagined herself as matron over such a lawn, a short distance from Lake Michigan, whose strands of grass are uniformly cared for, free of invasive species, and cut to a velvet appearance by the weekly crew of  immigrants.  Now, Eric and their seventeen-year-old daughter, Clara, are in the garage building a boat, something that they have taken on together, without Kaye.  But then, she grew up in land-locked east-central Illinois.  She knows nothing about boats.

How many times have her friends told her, thinking that it would make her feel better, that teenagers argue most with the parent of the same sex?  Does this make the fuck-you moms and the incidents where her daughter completely disregards her better?  As Clara abandons her mother at every possible interaction, Kaye feels it is unique and unwarranted.  Frequently, Clara will run directly to the garage when she comes home, refusing to answer her mother’s questions, help prepare for dinner, instead bonding with her father.  Kaye doesn’t understand Clara because Clara’s personality is one hundred eighty degrees different from Kaye’s at that age.  Then of course, everything is different since Kaye was that age.

There, standing on the deck listening to the electric saw and the dim radio noise from the garage, she laughs at herself.  (She is always laughing at herself.  Eric and Clara do not think anything she says is funny.)  Her own parents were a mess at this teenage point of Kaye’s life.  It has taken some years of therapy and self-indulgence for her to reach adulthood and realize that they had been too self-absorbed to pay attention to their daughter.  She has tried not to fall into the pattern they established, but it isn’t easy.

Clara has a busy and full life that Kaye would have envied.  She loves junk food, pop music, and fashion.  She has sociable friends.  She starves herself to fit into tight jeans.  She sings in the shower.  Could all of this come out of parental love?  After all, Kaye and Eric do love their daughter, even though, Kaye recalls regretfully, it was not her idea to have children.  Does Clara’s attitude come from feeling so safe with love that she can hate her mother and feel good about it?  Does Kaye love Clara enough?  Does Eric love her more than he does Kaye?

Kaye sips melted ice from her glass.  She watches as the empty tire swing that hangs from the cottonwood tree sways in the wind.  Once, Clara and her friends spent a lot of time on this swing.  Kaye would bring them snacks and set up art projects.  Now, they hide in Clara’s room, or they leave and wander the neighborhood.  Once, Clara would speak civilly to her mother.  She would even ask for advice.  Now she barely gives her a word.

Clara goes to her father for parental companionship, perhaps because he is less questioning, less judgmental.  And he laughs.  Sometimes Kaye hears his large, booming laugh from the garage across the back lawn.  Kaye sees Eric’s demeanor, his inability to discuss anything serious—behavior she thinks is uncommunicative—as a flaw.  Clara appears to see it as a virtue.  This means that she can work alongside her dad without the persecuting questions about whom she is with and what she does with her spare time, when her mother isn’t watching over her. 

Kaye makes her friends laugh.  She says things she thinks are true and they laugh at her hilarity.  But her husband and daughter do not think she is funny.

The strange thing is that Kaye knows that she overanalyzes.  Just as he was leaving the house to go to the garage, Eric said again, “Could you bloody stop doing that?” when Kaye reminded him of the exam Clara needed to study for, and her math homework (information she had from friends with kids in the same classes), and the chores she was supposed to do while she was out in the garage wasting time.

Naturally, math homework and exams are not funny.

Kaye said, “ I just wanted you to be aware of what your daughter does to avoid me.  She is a boiling pot of drama.  She is pulling your leg wanting to avoid me and avoid learning to take care of herself and be responsible.”

“And learning to work with power tools isn’t learning to take care of yourself?” Eric asked, insisting on the obvious answer.

Still, Kaye couldn’t tell how serious he was.  “She has homework.”

“Which she can do later.”
Kaye turned away.  “I just want her to empty the fucking dishwasher and put her clothes away before she goes to have fun!  Is that too much to ask?”  All not humorous exercises.  But it didn’t matter.  At this point, Eric had entered the garage across the lawn, turning on the table saw, and was far away and unable to hear his wife.  Yet she felt the need to finish her thoughts.  “It’s like she is avoiding growing up and being responsible for herself.”

She takes the last whiskey-coated ice cube between her fingers and puts it in her mouth.  The sweetness fades.
Today, the temperature outside was warm, but now Kaye can feel the cool coming in front Lake Michigan, a mile-and-a-half away.  It floats in a traveling mist, the cold air mixing with the warm that hovers close to the ground.  The air feels wet and clean now.  As evening progresses and the light in the sky wanes, the garage windows begin to glow steadily and grey shadows move behind the frosted glass.  Kaye thinks of the spiders and mice that live in the corners and cracks of the garage floor.  She involuntarily twitches and moves through the double doors of the back of the house into the family room, and pads quietly through the dark hallway to the kitchen.

There, she thinks about preparing dinner, though it’s late.  She remembers Eric in graduate school.  She followed him for a visit to his home in a suburb of Edinburgh to meet his parents.  In those days she’d had more energy, and took a cheap overnight flight standby to London, then transferring to a high-speed train north for another five hours.  It had been a dank Scottish summer, but she hadn’t cared that her feet were always cold and that it was always raining.  Or that Eric’s parents set them up in his tiny boyhood bedroom sharing a single bed, (odd for Americans, but then Eric’s parents were rather progressive).  Eric was an adventure, fast talking, loud, enthusiastic.  Now, he is difficult to understand, bossy, and spends his time building a boat         

In the beginning, more than twenty years ago, he had impressed her with his enthusiasm, his ability to absorb everything around himself (qualities she now sees as head clutter and adult ADHD).  He’d loved her, he loved Vikings, he sailed boats.  At some point in their courtship he revealed that his love of Vikings spread to Scandinavian cuisine, and after the all-nighters in the computer lab, they would pile seven graduate students into the then old Honda Civic and drive to Andersonville for Swedish pancakes and cinnamon rolls, crowding around a table at a place that offered large portions at a cheap price.  At these times, in the exhaustion of staying awake all night, Eric made Kaye laugh so hard that she forgot her fatigue.  She wonders where the humor has gone in the intimate setting of husband, wife, and daughter.

Now, years later, Eric has things to keep him busy and separate from his wife, a Scandinavian cooking class one summer, a kayak another summer.  Occasionally, they do things together as a couple, but find themselves speaking in skewed lines.  Kaye experiences his gregariousness as overwhelming where she once thought it a useful quality to balance out her own shyness.  It was entertaining.  Now she knows all of his jokes.  In the garage with Clara, he can talk all he wants.  Kaye doubts Clara listens.  But, maybe she does, as long as Eric doesn’t ask her about her personal life.  Sometimes Kaye thinks she hears Clara speaking with her father’s Scottish accent.  It’s something she finds funny, but when confronted, Clara denies it and accuses Kaye of micromanaging her life.  (Not, Kaye thinks, that one has anything to do with the other, but who can understand the organization of a seventeen-year-old brain?). Kaye, instead, knows her friends will accuse her of allowing Clara to raise herself, because, overall, she doesn’t manage her enough, and Clara is turning into a distasteful person.

Kaye draws a corkscrew from the utility drawer and takes an unopened bottle of white wine from the refrigerator.  Thank God, she tells herself, for the mercy of wine, that glass she drinks while chopping garlic, squeezing limes, and pouring olive oil into a large plastic container with chicken breasts.  Alcohol takes the bitterness off of her life, helps her to speak out where she was once shy.  She places the chicken container into the fridge and takes a tomato and some lettuce to make a salad.  Sometimes, she feels, she can perform these tasks in her sleep.

 

*

 

When Kaye opens the garage door and asks her husband and daughter when they will be ready for dinner, they say they don’t know.  So, she closes the door and walks silently away.  In the light of the patio, she cooks the chicken on the gas grill.  Eric and Clara have not even left the garage to use the toilet.  Kaye wonders who will eat the chicken as she tops off another glass of wine from the bottle she has brought outside.

The chicken and salad are good.  Kaye knows she is a good cook.  It has taken her the years of marriage to move beyond cooking ground beef in a frying pan and adding canned soup and frozen vegetables.  She supposes, sitting on the couch in the family room with her dinner plate, the wine, and CNN, that cooking is something marriage forced her to learn.

 

*

 

 

   She wakes at the hint of dawn, at least she thinks it’s dawn.  As she comes to, she realizes that it’s her neighbor’s backyard floodlights.  Someone has covered her in an old quilt that had belonged to her grandmother.  It is soft from years of comfort, a tiny gesture of affection from Eric.  Kaye keeps it in the back of the coat closet and doesn’t remember how it came to cover her.  Her mouth is dry, furry, tastes bad and she tries to cough for relief, unsuccessfully.  Vaguely, she begins to put together the scenario of last night, the lights on in the garage, her late dinner alone, finishing the bottle of wine, falling asleep on the couch.  In the kitchen she finds that the dishes have been cleaned and that the remaining chicken is in a container in the refrigerator.  Had Eric and Clara eaten while she was asleep?  She assumes so.  Her head throbs, her legs are stiff as she climbs the stairs to the bedroom she shares with Eric.  His body forms a mound under the comforter.  She lies far away from him on top of the blanket, in her clothes, and drifts back to sleep, not touching him.

 

*

 

Kaye opens the door to a skinny young man with a soul patch and full lips.  “Yes?”

“I’m here looking for Clara?” he says, tentatively.  “Does she live here?”

“I’m her mother.”

He stands on the concrete landing below where Kaye has opened the porch door.  They are eye level.  He seems old for Clara, maybe twenty-five?  And it’s two-thirty in the afternoon.  Clara is still at school.

“Is she home?” the young man asks.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Jared.  I arranged to meet her here.”

“She’s seventeen, Jared.”

Jared’s pale face turns scarlet.  He palms his shaggy blond hair and looks at his shoes.  “Sorry?”

“She’s still at school now.  She’s not due to come home for another hour.”  Kaye grimly reminds herself that the legal age in Illinois to have sexual relations with an adult is Clara’s current age, seventeen.  “Did she tell you that she is a high school student?”

“Oh!” His hands are now in his front pockets.  “I’m not her boyfriend.  I’m here about the room for rent.  Maybe you are the one renting it out?  Craigslist?  A room in Northwest Evanston?  Not far from the Northwestern football stadium?  Near a bus stop?  Kitchen privileges?”

“What room?  No, I’m not renting a room.”  Kaye begins to wonder what Clara has been doing.  And as she considers this—as she has been thinking of the past months—that she will be rid of Clara in a year when she goes to college.  Would it be better to have a lodger than a daughter who hates her ?  “She put a room for rent on Craigslist? 

How the heck did she do that?

“I suppose it isn’t for rent, then”

Kaye had always thought that teenagers were idiots with undeveloped brains, trying to operate as if they knew what they were doing.  She isn’t changing her philosophy, but momentarily she is almost impressed at what her daughter has done.  What has happened to the girl who cried when Kaye left her at preschool to fend on her own, because she was dying for time off from the exhausting, boring days of playing with Clara, watching to make sure she didn’t do anything dangerous, seeing that her small brain was constantly stimulated while her own couldn’t concentrate on a book.  It had not been her idea to have a child.  It had been Eric’s.

How far did Clara think this would go?  Is this a joke?  Is she running away from home?  “I am assuming she put her own bedroom up for rent?  Which she still occupies while she finishes high school.  Did you make an appointment over the phone?”

Jared looks blankly at her, as if waiting for an apology.  “Email.”

“It’s strange she would give you this time.”

“I’m early.  I walked all the way from Northwestern.  I didn’t know how long it would take.”

“I appreciate that,” Kaye says.  “But there is no room for rent.”

Jared begins to turn around.  “Thanks anyway,” he says as he walks down the path.

Kaye watches him leave.  At least he was polite, she thinks.  She runs to Clara’s room.  It’s easy to guess Clara’s computer password.  It’s the name of her beloved Scottish grandmother, who passed away ten years ago from lung cancer.  She came to visit every summer and would sit in the screened-in porch puffing on her duty-free Marlboros.  Janet.  The same password Eric uses.  Such a smart twosome, Eric and Clara, who were so sure that Kaye had nothing to look for on their computers.

She calls Eric at work.  “Our daughter put up her room for rent on Craigslist.  A young guy came by to see it.”

There is a moment where Eric doesn’t speak, then she hears the force of his laugh.  “That is hilarious.”

“It’s not hilarious.  Is she planning to run away?  Is it a joke to piss me off?  Because I am pissed off.”

“Don’t be so serious.  She’s a clever girl.  This is better than anything I would have thought of at her age.”

“She can’t get away with leading someone on that she is renting a room.  He came to the house.”

“It was a joke.  No one got hurt.”

Eric says that he really can’t talk, he has a meeting.  She calls into the phone, “You deal with her!” and hangs up.
Kaye is waiting in the kitchen when Clara arrives home an hour later.  After a lot of thought, she has a plan.  She has been waiting there, drinking coffee, and her stomach is feeling sour from the third cup of black just as she hears Clara’s key in the door.  “Come here!” she says in her loudest voice.

“Hold on.  I have to go to the bathroom.”  Clara sounds calm to Kaye, as if she isn’t expecting her mother to know about the Craigslist ad, as if this problem doesn’t exist.

Kaye stands at the sink and washes the coffee pot, listening for Clara’s footsteps.  She puts the pot and the mug in the drain board just as Clara steps into the doorway.  “Tell me about Jared.  And Craigslist.”

“Why?  What do I know about that?”  Then she throws her hand against her mouth.  “Shit.  I forgot.”

“He was early.  You were still at school.  What the hell were you planning?”

“That was last week!”

“Well, it was a good idea.”  Kay feels a smirk risking in her cheek muscles and manages to hold it back.  Another attempt to be funny.

“I went on your computer and looked at the listing.”

“You were on my computer?”

“It wasn’t difficult.”

“That’s private.”

“You are still in my house.”  The muscles in her face relax.  “He has put down a deposit.  You can move into the basement.  He’s a very nice boy.”

But Clara’s reaction isn’t what Kaye expects.

“God you are such a bloody bitch!” Clara screams, where Kaye had expected her to laugh, or admit that her joke has been turned around.   “I can’t believe you would go on my computer.  I can’t believe you would let someone else have my room!”

“I can’t believe you tried to rent out a room in my house,” Kaye says.   “Were you drunk when you set this up?  Were you trying to pull my leg?”

“I’m not like you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t drink.  I don’t get drunk.”

“I’m not a drunk.”

“Believe what you want.”  Clara looks at the ceiling, then her mother.

“Don’t talk to me that way.”  

“Why?  What do you ever do for me, your daughter?  You hang around the house hiding all the time.  It’s not like you pay any attention to me.  You are so fucking self-absorbed.”

“I am not having this conversation with you if you talk to me like that.”

Clara turns and begins to walk away.  “One more year and I am out of here,” she calls back.

“You can leave NOW!”  Kaye says, but immediately regrets it.

And Kaye leans against the counter.  She doesn’t know what to do or say.  It isn’t the first time.  The next thing she hears is the front door slamming shut, and Kaye is left not knowing how the whole room rental thing will be resolved.

 

*

 

Kaye doesn’t think it is unusual that Clara has walked out, at first.  Clara walks out all of the time, and in such a way that Kaye finds it difficult to track her down.   She tries to use the cell phone for that.  If she only knew, she thinks to herself about all the effort she has put into her daughter.  Eric believes that Clara should have the freedom to leave the house to be with her friends after school, and to calm down after the frequent arguments she has with her mother.  Clara communicates with him.  Some days she doesn’t know where Clara is eating, or where she is getting her homework done.  Eric, who grew up in a different place and in a different way, tells Kaye, “She is home sleeping in her own bed at night.”

“How the hell do you raise kids in Scotland?” she has asked him.

“We don’t chain them to their bedrooms or their mothers at that age, if that’s what you are wondering.”

Eric does not make things easier.

Kaye does what she always does in the late afternoon of a weekday before Eric comes home at seven.  She will clear up things with Clara later.  She empties the dishwasher, washes lettuce and green beans for dinner, starts a load of laundry, and indulges in a finger of fifteen-year-old scotch .  An advantage of being married to a Scot is that there is always ten or fifteen-year-old scotch in the pantry.

Then the clouds come over the sky, shadowing the ground, and from the kitchen window she can see the tree swing manically and the huge branches of the seemingly immovable cottonwood tree sway.  The neighborhood siren at the nearby elementary school goes off.  Kaye sends a text message to Clara to let her know if she is inside, or to come home.  She calls her number and gets no answer.   Clara rarely responds to her parents on her phone.  The rain begins to pelt the windows, then sweeps over them in rushing, uneven waves that coincide with gusts of wind.  What little she feels she has of maternal instinct, she rallies, feeling a pang inside, something like fear.  She takes her rain jacket and keys and runs toward the car parked in front of the house.

By the time she has crossed the parkway and reaches her car she is drenched.  Would Clara seek cover?  Was she at someone’s house?  Would she go to a friend and shelter inside her house?  Clara has been known to walk for hours when she is angry, something Eric calls her “cool off time.”  Kaye sends another text before starting the engine. 

“Clara, where are you?”  Still no answer.

With the neighborhood siren still sounding, Kaye goes after her daughter.  The wind rocks the car and the rain pushes against the windshield in bursts.  She drives slowly along the street, clutching the steering wheel, trying to see ahead of her through the watery glass.  A lump of her failures as a mother sticks at the bottom of her throat.  Up a street, down another, no one is outside.  A squirrel runs in front of the car.  She doesn’t brake and doesn’t hit it.

She finds Clara soaked and hovering on the grass near a young tree, not far from the house.  Kaye pulls the car up to the curb, reaches to open the passenger side door.  “Get in!”

But Clara shakes her head.  “Why?”

“It’s dangerous.  The sirens are going off,” Kaye screams to her daughter, realizing that she will have to get out of the car and for Clara to get in.  Was her answer an invitation to help her?  She pushes her door open, and through the shower she walks over the grass and takes Clara by the shoulders.  The girl resists.  “Just leave me alone, you fucking cunt!”

Kaye remains standing in the rain and wind.  Her feet and hands are wet and cold, her hood blows off her head and the pinpoint drips of rain pummel her cheeks and forehead.  She recalls the time when she could not get Clara to latch on as a new baby when she was trying to nurse.  Through the pain of being rejected and her tears, she argued with the lactation nurse to allow her to use formula rather than breastfeed.  But the lactation nurse was adamant, and Kaye pinched and pumped milk until the stubborn Clara drank from her mother’s breast and Kaye developed a painful infection.  Before that there had been long contractions and childbirth.  Yet Kaye had not known what pain was then.

With all the things Clara has called her, she has never used the word cunt, hard-sounding, shot out in the hope of injuring her.  Words don’t matter in this moment in the middle of a microburst.  “Just get in the car and I’ll worry about what you think of me later,” Kaye says.

“No!  I am staying here.”

“You don’t have to move out.  I didn’t really let Jared have your room,” Kaye says, but she feels Clara didn’t believe she had rented her room anyway.   “You’ll get hurt.  Come!”

Clara makes a low effort to wriggle out of her mother’s grasp, but without enough energy to be successful.  Soaked and tired, Kaye leads her into the car.  She pushes the door shut and goes to the driver’s side.  She cannot hear the sound of the engine, only the pounding of rain on the car and the blood in her head.  She presses the gas pedal to move toward home.   She parks and Clara runs through the unlocked front door ahead of her mother.  Kaye stands in the doorway listening to Clara slam her bedroom door shut. Then, she can no longer hold her tears inside.  They come out harshly, along with seventeen years of failed motherhood.

 

*

 

Kaye is on her bed, dozing, when Eric comes home.  She has been drinking, but not a lot.  “What am I supposed to say to you?” she says as Eric opens the door.  He mutters something she doesn’t understand.  “What am I supposed to do?”  Eric closes the door and she falls back asleep.

 

*

 

Kaye takes a small carry-on suitcase from the hall closet and opens it on her bed.  In it, puts two pairs of jeans, two blouses, a wool sweater from college, an old winter jacket, socks, shoes, underwear.  She fills a quart-sized Ziploc bag with small toiletries and goes to the strong box in her husband’s closet to take out cash and her passport.  She puts the packed suitcase in the back of her closet. 

Some day.  She will call for a taxi, which will probably arrive early, before she is ready to go.  She will tell the driver to take her to O’Hare and give him directions for the most efficient route from her home.  Then it will no longer be a home to her.  She will purchase a ticket to somewhere far away, because you can get a direct flight to Tokyo, Madrid, and Toronto, all places she feels she will like.    She has the itch to leave because she is uncomfortable in her skin, and like a snake, she wants to get out of it.   But for now, the suitcase is her security for the future.