septemberist

Thea could hide the pink bills in her purse as she brought them into the house from the mailbox. No one could see the DISCONNECT notices from a driving-by car, a peek out the kitchen window, or even walking the family dog down the street.

Six months had passed two times, and still the water kept pouring in over her. She could hear the whispers of her friends, Thank God there are no children to think of. Thank God, indeed, she echoed, not even closing her eyes anymore as she submerged.

Thea lived on the first floor of a two-story house. Upstairs were three bedrooms, two with doors open. In one was a jumble of boxes half-unpacked, books and photos and notebooks flowing in a stream of dust at sunset when the sun’s last rays flickered through the prism of warped glass and cracked shade. Another door exposed a bed unmade, covers caught wrinkled in the midst of a floe. An alluvium of clothes and shoes littered the edges of the still mattress pond.

The third door remained closed.

Thea would stand at the sink in the kitchen, eyes staring unseeing out the window, deafened by the rush of the tap water. Each day, she dirtied one bowl, one spoon, one plate, one fork, and one glass and washed them all each evening in the kitchen sink, rinsing each far longer than necessary. When the dishes were cleaned and rinsed, Thea placed them on the counter, spoon in bowl, fork on plate, glass next to plate.

When the sun had truly sunk and all color had drained from the sky, she turned out the light in the kitchen and moved to the sofa in the living room. Somewhere between the kitchen and the couch, two talismans appeared in Thea’s hands. In her right hand, she carried a man’s watch, heavy and silver and silent. In her left hand was something small. The main of it was clenched tightly in her fist, invisible, but if a car drove by on the street outside, its guide lights might illuminate something pale blue between her fingers. A ribbon, perhaps, tied to a small silver charm, perhaps.

Thank God there are no children to think of. Thank God, indeed. She no longer fought to breathe when she submerged.

Posted by erica at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At the first vibration, the girl lifts her chin from her arms and her arms from the windowsill. Her grandmother’s house, the kind of gray that white paint becomes after too many summers of wind and not enough rain, sits back from the crumbling sidewalk on a street too close to the train tracks. The rumble of the cars on the tracks, the startle of the horn, are all too loud and too often. For the girl, however, the summer weeks she spends here in this old house with this old woman of a grandmother are made tolerable only because of the train.

She sits on the edge of the bed, bare feet reaching for the vibration through the worn plank floor. Her fingertips just rest on the window glass, feeling there the motion too slight for the floor to relate. She curls her toes, flattens them.

From the front room, she can hear the whir of the mantle clock preparing to strike the hour or quarter hour. She doesn’t know, doesn’t need to know. Of what use was clock time? She strains to hear through the walls to her grandmother’s room. Would she wake?

There. Her feet begin to tickle from the slight movement of the floor. Slowly, she rises from the bed, wincing at the moan of the bedsprings and at the stretching of the new scabs on her chest and belly. She was too old to be climbing pecan trees, especially with no shirt on. And why she couldn’t climb down the same way she climbed up was some mystery, anyway. But that was how she had always climbed, how he had taught her.

The window glass rattles as she moves barefoot silent toward the doorway, down the hallway. Clock chimes conspire with the girl as she pushes past the squealing hinge of the screen door and onto the crumbling concrete porch. Out here, she can’t feel the earth vibrate, but she doesn’t need too. Already, a faint grumbling can be heard in the evening sounds of the small mill town.

The girl steps to the edge of the porch, her hand grasping the metal column, ignoring the ants that travel across her fingers. She hears his voice, Not yet, feels him pulling back on her t-shirt, holding her back.

If we go too soon, someone will just stop us, tell us to stand back.

So instead of running, she walks, down the steps and the grass-grown walk way to the sidewalk. She turns, looks back to the window of her grandmother’s room, to the screen door.

The air is no longer grumbling but beginning to shout. The leaves shudder as the girl walks, more quickly now, hands balled into fists at her side. She won’t run. A dove coos—no, it is an owl—no, a dog howling. It is the horn.

The girl begins to run, the slap of her feet against the pavement inaudible now. He is running beside her, urging her onward. He used to be faster, his longer legs pulling him ahead.

Longer and louder, the horn races the girl to the crossing. A shriek of pain tears through the arch of her foot as she runs over the dusty glass of a broken bottle, but it is overpowered by the horn, the thunder of wheels against rails. Faster, she sprints off the cracked pavement onto the gravel at the edge of the rails.

He has pulled ahead, as always. One, two, three steps ahead, his foot finding the chunk of pavement knocked by time and weather from the street to the gravel, wedged into the thirsty dirt by some forgotten rain storm. He stumbles, pitching forward. She pushes herself against the roar to him, reaching out to grab his shirt, to pull him back.

The girl’s fingers grasp only dust, close over only air as she her screams are lost in the wake of the train.

Posted by erica at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)