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Jun 30, 2020 02:25
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| # ¿ Jan 17, 2025 01:22 |
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Duty 1176 Words She drifted through the door on chill autumn air and reached for the pullchain to turn on the light in the entryway. Her hand passed through it. She turned her gaze to the cheaply-made black lacquered table tucked into the side nook. Stuck to her decorative wooden bowl was a post-it that read, in her hand: They’re stealing. Hide the valuables. She reached again for the pullchain. She felt the substance of what it was, watched it swing back and forth, and could not grip it. The lingering heat of a hundred and more lives passed through her. One more brightly than the rest. Jack’s. She glided down the unlit hall and into the kitchen at the back of the house. The gas range hissed, and the sink pulsed sonar into the drain. She wanted to turn it off, reached, could not. She descended into the unfinished basement. She passed over pitted and uneven stone. Before her, the washer and dryer stood open. She looked into the washer and reeled. Clothes, heaped to the top, and covered in a dull green mold. She looked down onto another landscape there whose hills and valleys described a degradation and reclamation. She whirled to the dryer and found it empty. Then she saw the boxes. They were heaped to the ceiling in a teetering mass each labeled neatly in her own hand. “China, gramma,” “Jewelry, auntie,” “Letters, Jack,” and on. She screamed then. No sound came. But the force of it radiated from her. The dryer swung shut and boomed a discordant clang. The cardboard tower shivered, each box seeking balance and the topmost, full of china from a life now lost, tipped to one side, before tumbling to the floor. The bright sound of shattering dishware ran knives through her. An ordered world coming undone before her lifeless eyes, as if death weren’t enough. She hung there, only just now realizing she needn’t walk on stone to affirm her existence. The space thrummed through her insides. What had happened? Who had she become in her final days? Feet from above. Sandals slapping against the grey linoleum in the kitchen, and his voice, “Yeah, look, I have to go. I think there’s a mouse problem. It’s a shitshow here.” She rose to a far corner and curled herself around a beam, though she didn’t know if it served any mortal purpose. Why was he here? She hung in silence. Jack came down the stairs, looking fatter than she remembered. Looking messy. Looking not at all like the boy she’d raised. Too-large cargo shorts that drooped, a stained white V neck and his left sandal trailing a broken strap. He snatched the broom out of the corner without looking, and in a few brisk and efficient sweeps he’d piled up the shattered dishes. The grey light filtering from atop the stairs cast them in a shade of bone, where once their countenance had been bright and clean. He clucked his tongue and sighed. His expression was flat and mechanical. He looked round, walked corner to corner, glared at the washing machine and flung the top shut. How like him, to avert his eyes from the unsightly. How like him, to gesture at reparation with hapless busywork. How like her. She trailed behind him up the stairs and into the kitchen. He did not notice her. He drew down from the cabinet some flavorless fiber concoction, emptied it into a bright pink plastic bowl, doused it in milk, no sugar, and lumbered to the den, the one she hadn’t used in years. Bowl on lap, he spooned, hand to mouth in autonomic repetition. No joy lived in his eyes. The TV ran on mute, some crime show, grizzly footage intercut with talking heads. He finished, left the bowl on the coffee table and stepped through the doorway, where she waited. They were, for a moment, one being. A spear of psychic pain pierced her. A memory, he, getting ready for school. Her wielding the scourge. He, whining about the injustices of institutional learning in the wheedling tones of a six year old. Her, gritting her teeth with her head turned, smiling when she faced him. “Nobody likes it, not even me,” she said, ruffling his curly blond hair. He nodded silent assent and they got into her truck to go. He’d grown into something she didn’t recognize. Obedient, mechanical, catatonic. She watched him for months after. He tended the house without entering forbidden rooms, her office, her bedroom, the back deck where they’d read together amid the mantra of crickets and locusts. She’d made an exquisite being. She’d miscalculated somewhere. The movement was wrong. Where once her baby stood she saw only a simulacrum. She needed to atone. He slept in his eternal bedroom, bannered with rock posters, He lay in the twin bed she’d never discarded, a single beeswax candle of her making casting yellow light over one of his comics and she, staring down at him from the ceiling, felt the familiar rage. She knew that one. She’d read it. She dove for the book, passed through it once and again. She writhed at the touch of overlapping memories, of two faces young and grown, of what she’d birthed and what she’d wrought. The pages slipped out from under his fingers to reveal for him a truth. The book came to rest on a page depicting an astronaut, face obscured by the glare from the light of an alien sun. Above his head a word bubble, “We’ve got to get off this rock.” Jack gaped at the thing, and flung it against the wall. She retreated. He slept fitfully. A good start. Another evening. Trundling to the kitchen, he made coffee. He sat to drink, and she lifted the mug, spun it and flung it against the wall. His eyes betrayed his terror, but his body did not. He opened the cabinet for another mug. His fingers groped within. She slammed the door on them. The crunch of bone echoed somewhere within her. Her vision dimmed and went monochrome. She wanted to stop, but didn’t. He yelped and snatched ice from the freezer, pressing it to his throbbing and mashed hand. She dove for the range. Up and up through the pilot she rose. She manifested before him, a mother’s wrath run rampant. She’d expelled him twice before. What was once more? The flames shot up from the top of the stove with such force it flung the cooktop and burners off. She rose and cast the darkness of the kitchen into sickly, pale blue light. He staggered away, speechless. She caressed each surface of her life, its joists and its woodwork, its spackling and its floral wallpaper. She caressed it until it shrunk away, blackened. The anguished, twisting face of her son yawned before her. Pupils widened and black, the pulsing pink of his throat exposed. Alive, blessedly alive. He ran as the huddled mass of their home cracked and sank into the womb of the earth. In contrition, she prayed.
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Jul 6, 2020 02:00
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In for a penny, in for a sound. Whatcha got?
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Jul 7, 2020 15:27
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