The Secrets We Hide
A dissertation presented to
the faculty of
the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University
In partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Jolynn Baldwin
August 2014
© 2014 Jolynn Baldwin. All Rights Reserved.
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This dissertation titled
The Secrets We Hide
by
JOLYNN BALDWIN
has been approved for
the Department of English
and the College of Arts and Sciences by
Joan Connor
Professor of English
Robert Frank
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
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ABSTRACT
BALDWIN, JOLYNN, Ph.D., August 2014, English
The Secrets We Hide
Director of Dissertation: Joan Connor
The Secrets We Hide is a collection of short stories that are populated by
characters like Anna, who grows a man from a finger she finds in her garden; Laundry,
who dies in an unfortunate dryer incident; and Charlie, who adopts the role of the Grim
Reaper. Included is a critical introduction that seeks to explore, through the study of
stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Aimee Bender, and others, one of the major themes
in the collection: isolation, and how separation can engender positive consequences.
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DEDICATION
To my family.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With thanks to Joan Connor, Dinty W. Moore, Dr. Paul Jones, Annie J. Howell,
and the faculty and staff of the Ohio University English Department for their support and
encouragement.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract................................................................................................................................3 Dedication............................................................................................................................4 Acknowledgments ...............................................................................................................5 Introduction..........................................................................................................................7 The Harvest........................................................................................................................36 Invisible Strings .................................................................................................................50 The Shadow Carnival ........................................................................................................53 End Credits ........................................................................................................................61 On Location With The Grim Reaper .................................................................................65 Wearing Blazers Backwards..............................................................................................82 Through the Eyes of Ones Who Love ...............................................................................84 How Many Roads ..............................................................................................................87 Supply and Demand...........................................................................................................97 All In................................................................................................................................105 Spare ................................................................................................................................112 The Secrets We Hide .......................................................................................................114 Before Moving In with Your Doppelganger ...................................................................127 The Clock Keeper ............................................................................................................131 7
SHOUTING ISLANDS:
RECOGNIZING POTENTIAL IN THE POSITIVE INFLUENCE OF ISOLATION
We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.
― Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed
Introduction
The poet John Donne once wrote, in an effort to highlight the interconnectedness
of humanity, that no man is an island. It’s both comforting and encouraging to imagine
that humankind is connected to the point that one person’s death “diminishes” another’s
life. And while that may be true, it’s also true that every person goes through the
experience of feeling like an island; feeling isolated is an intrinsic part of human
existence. It makes sense, then, that isolation is not only represented in literature, but that
it’s represented with a frequency comparative to the regularity with which it occurs in
life. In his essay “On Isolation,” Mark Conliffe writes, “[i]solation so fully relates to the
human condition that its portrayal—however brief—would seem to be a requisite element
of any work of literature” (127).
We see isolation represented in many forms in literature: self-induced, alienation,
marginalization, separation, mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical, and each category
of isolation affects characters in different ways. With few exceptions (namely those
narratives told from a collective first/third point of view), all stories are inherently
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isolation narratives. Because of the constraints inherent in writing, readers experience the
point of view of one character (at-a-time, for those narratives told with an omniscient
perspective), which automatically sets up a binary of us (the protagonist and reader,
unified by perspective) and them (the other inhabitants of the story).
But not every story in which a character experiences isolation can be considered
an isolation narrative—nearly every story would be included on such a list. Some
parameters are needed, then, to ascertain what an isolation narrative is. Conliffe has
established three criteria that can be used to determine whether a story is an isolation
narrative, or if it’s simply a story with an isolated character:
First, reference is made to a separating or locking in, be it physical or abstract,
social or mental, intentional or unintentional, that isolates the individual from the
whole. A temporal association that distinguishes the time of belonging from that
of isolation may further clarify the isolation. Second, an active participant in the
depicted world, either the central character or a secondary one, will acknowledge
the isolation. Third, a form of particular interaction, if not dialogue, between the
isolated character and the new circumstances in which he finds himself will be
central to the story's goings-on. (125-6)
In other words: to be an isolation narrative, a character must have had some connection to
a larger community at some point in his life, whether within the confines of the story or
not; someone must recognize this lost connection; and the main character’s isolation must
be a major element in the story. The only modifications I would make to this system of
assessment would be: instead of the protagonist having once had a connection to a wider
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group, as the first point dictates, there is an acknowledgement that a world beyond the
protagonist’s exists; and second, in the event that the narrator and the protagonist are not
one in the same, the narrator’s acknowledgement of the protagonist’s isolation can also
fulfill the requirement suggested in the third criterion.
Even with these limiting factors, a significant amount of literature can still be
considered isolation narratives. Due to the pervasiveness of isolation in literature, a
comprehensive study, though enlightening, would be impossible to conduct. Conliffe
points out that critics have chipped away at studying isolation, though: it’s been
examined as “a topic that defines American, Jamaican, Canadian, and South African
literatures”; it’s also been adopted as a “fundamental topic in gay fiction,” and “women’s
prose about older women” (127-8). In spite of all of the work that’s been done to
catalogue isolation in literature, there are still areas of exploration that are
underrepresented.
The word “isolate” is distinguished from words like “solitude” and “loneliness”
(the potential results of being isolated) in that it is a verb. A character can choose to
isolate themselves, or can be isolated by someone else. It requires action for which there
are consequences. One area in which there seems to be a dearth of criticism is on the
potential for isolation to yield positive consequences. That isolation’s transformative
nature can cause pain and suffering is well documented and universally acknowledged;
its capacity to yield positive outcomes, like liberation and comfort, is not. It’s important
to remember that the word “isolate” is neutral. Despite the negative associations people
automatically make with the word “isolate,” it does not have any inherent negative
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connotations—it avoids such dichotomous binaries as “negative” and “positive.” The
consequences of isolation exist on a spectrum, but most critics neglect to acknowledge
the potential benefits isolation can have. To ignore the positive aspects of isolation is to
disregard part of its influence. In his memoir, Moab Is My Washpot, Stephen Fry writes:
It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in,
physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been
my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language,
literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade
me. (42-3)
It’s not a particularly new idea, or a fresh concept, this idea that individuals are
formed by their experiences; that seemingly negative experiences can have positive
outcomes; or that, what some would view as negative experiences are seen as positive to
others. And yet this concept is underrepresented in literary criticism.
That explorations into the immense potential isolation holds is unfortunate, as this
perspective opens up narratives to even further interpretation, provides new insight, and a
more comprehensive, fresh layer of understanding into characters and stories. In the
following story analyses, I intend to illustrate how isolation can provide characters with
safety, security, and comfort; that isolation can be a form of resistance or protest; and that
characters can use it as a tool to improve their lives, to make themselves happier or more
content, and to achieve what it is they most desire.
Before I begin, a brief note about the format of this essay and the stories I’ve
selected for analysis: as this essay is functioning as an introduction to my collection of
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short stories, The Secrets We Hide, in addition to exploring a variety of well-known and
highly-regarded classic and contemporary narratives, I’ll also spend some time analyzing
some of the stories from my collection, and putting them into conversation with one
another. As many of the stories in the collection were heavily influenced by my
appreciation for gothic and magical realist literature, the stories I’ve chosen to examine
are limited to those genres. The merit of studying the positive consequences of isolation
is not limited by genre, however, and can provide valuable insights into isolation
narratives regardless of genre.
Isolation Narrative Analysis: “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the
story of a young woman suffering from what was then diagnosed as a “nervous
condition,” though modern-day doctors would likely recognize her illness as post-partum
depression. Her husband John, a highly regarded physician, rents a house in the country
for the summer so that she may rest and regain her strength. She is fixated from the start
by the yellow wallpaper in the room John has chosen as their bedroom. As the story
progresses, it’s clear that the woman is losing her mind, and it’s through her shifting
opinion of the wallpaper that we recognize her loss of sanity. Additionally, she uses the
changes she imagines the wallpaper to be experiencing to craft a narrative that closely
parallels her own experiences, so it’s through the wallpaper that she’s able to express
herself and regain some measure of control—if not over her own life, then of the mirrorlife she believes she can see illustrated in the wallpaper. Readers don’t know the
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woman’s name throughout most of the narrative, and by the time a possible name, Jane,
is introduced in the penultimate paragraph, readers can’t be sure it’s hers, particularly
because, at this point, she has descended so far into madness that she loses her identity
completely.
From the first line of the story, readers are aware that the narrator feels like the
house her husband has rented is haunted; she adds credence to this idea by explaining that
it has been empty for a long time. Because she doesn’t tell us about the ongoing legal
disputes between the heirs of the estate until much later in the story—which would
provide a rational reason for the house sitting empty—readers are inclined to experience
the “strange”-ness that the narrator describes. Another possible explanation for the
house’s convenient availability is that it’s actually an institution, and John has lied to
Jane in order to assure her acquiescence. In either case, the house, therefore, seems more
sinister than it might otherwise, especially given the narrator’s initial description of the
house:
The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite
three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read
about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little
houses for the gardeners and people.
There is a DELICIOUS garden! I never saw such a garden—large and
shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with
seats under them. (30)
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Here, too, we get the first mention of how isolated the house is from the rest of the world.
Though the narrator doesn’t seem to mind the seclusion of the setting, especially during
this first part of the story, she does wish her cousins could visit.
The only aspect of the house that Jane doesn’t like is the room John has chosen as
their bedroom. In addition to the room’s wallpaper—the specifics of which make it seem
truly horrific—Jane explains that there are bars on the windows, and rings in the walls—
details that are otherwise explainable and harmless, but, given the tone of the story, might
invite readers to picture dungeons and prison cells in old gothic castles. The floor of the
room “is scratched and gouged and splintered,” from the walls “the plaster itself is dug
out here and there,” and the “great heavy bed which is all we found in the room, looks as
if it had been through the wars” (35). Later in the story we learn that the bed is nailed
down. We also learn that, at night when the moon shines in the windows, the bars on the
windows are replicated on the wallpaper—whether this is true, or in the mind of the
narrator, is unclear.
Jane is isolated physically from nearly everyone, including her baby. The only
people she’s permitted to see are her husband, who is “away all day, and even some
nights when his cases are serious,” and her sister-in-law, Jennie, who leaves Jane alone in
her room for longer and longer periods of time as the story progresses (32).
Jane is also mentally removed from everyone, including John and Jennie. On the
first page, Jane mentions that she can’t tell “a living soul” that she believes her husband’s
position as a physician might be the thing that’s preventing her from getting better (29).
Neither John nor her own brother, also a respected physician, claim to believe that Jane is
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really ill, so Jane, though she has ideas about what might make her feel better, stops
talking about her condition with anyone. Later, she admits to crying all of the time,
except “when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone. And I am alone a good
deal just now” (37). That she can’t express her thoughts and emotions in any way with
anyone without feeling judged or as if she’s a burden serves to disconnect her from the
world even more profoundly and absolutely than her physical separation.
Surprisingly, it is possible to also see the consequences of Jane’s isolation in a
positive light. John’s behavior throughout the narrative is controlling and injurious: he
refuses to change the wallpaper because he sees it as an opportunity for Jane to prove
herself stronger than her vivid imagination, believing “that nothing was worse for a
nervous patient than to give way to such fancies” (33). John then worries that “after the
wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows,
and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on” (33). He also refuses her continued
requests to use another of the plentiful rooms as their bedroom. He continually assures
her that she’s getting better, despite evidence to the contrary. Late in the story, when
readers are beginning to understand how dangerous the razor’s edge of sanity on which
Jane is walking is, John says: “you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I
am a doctor, dear, and I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better…”
(40). She attempts to disagree with him, and he gets angry. By refusing to listen to Jane’s
thoughts, and by assuring her that she’s improving, John attempts to convince Jane that
she’s wrong, that she doesn’t know her own mind, and that he knows better because he’s
a doctor; and in doing so he takes away the last of her agency.
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In addition to the control and manipulation Jane endures from her husband, she is
also acutely aware of social mores and rules; there are several occasions throughout the
narrative when Jane determines actions to be unladylike or something not to be done in
public. This is particularly true when she first sees the creeping lady, and she’s surprised
because such creeping isn’t done in public.
She refuses to cry in front of anyone, she won’t tell anyone her thoughts (even
when she is of sound mind), and she allows John to dictate her life, though his decisions
actively lead towards her madness. So, while insanity certainly isn’t an ideal consequence
to the isolation Jane experienced, it did, in a way, free her from the constraints and
limitations imposed upon her by her husband and the wider world.
From the beginning of the story, we know that the thing Jane would most dearly
love is to change the wallpaper in her bedroom. It’s a desire that seems innocuous
enough, until we realize that the wallpaper is symbolic of the control others have over
Jane’s life, and that what she most desires is her freedom from oppression. Jane thinks
she sees a woman in the wallpaper, trapped behind bars she imagines the wallpaper has.
The woman creeps around—which mirrors Jane’s own subservience to John—and the
speed with which the woman creeps increases the longer Jane obsesses about the
wallpaper, and the further she descends into insanity, which symbolizes the increasing
difficulty John has in maintaining his control over his wife. As readers grow increasingly
ill at ease with the images Jane sees in the wallpaper, Jane becomes less constrained and
more expressive. At the climax of the story, Jane determines to tear down the wallpaper,
thus setting the woman she’s imagined within free. Using the changes she visualizes the
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wallpaper experiencing, Jane crafts the narrative of her own independence. In the end, it’s
possible to see “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a story of self-determination and freedom.
“A Rose for Emily”
In the section above in which I outline the parameters of an isolation narrative, I
briefly touch on my belief that all stories, with few exceptions, might be considered
isolation narratives. I mention that I suspect the only exceptions to that theory are stories
told from the perspective of a collective first or third person narrator. “A Rose for
Emily,” written by William Faulkner, is an exception to that exception. Written by
William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily” is a story about Miss Emily Grierson, told from
the collective perspective of the generations of residents of the town in which she lives
and dies—residents who are so unified they narrate with one voice. “A Rose for Emily”
is an isolation narrative as it’s about the consequences Emily faces because she isolates
herself from—and is isolated by—those who live in her town. As the narrator is a
composite collection of perspectives from townspeople over several decades, he or she
has the advantage of knowing the breadth of Emily’s life, but only from an outsider’s
perspective.
The story follows an unusual chronology, eschewing the traditional linear
narrative. It starts shortly after Emily’s funeral, then jumps back and forth unpredictably
over several decades, pausing occasionally to describe the significant moments that occur
between Emily and the townspeople over the story’s forty-year time span. The timeline
suggests a mirroring of the way those who gather for a funeral might share memories of
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the deceased as a way of remembering him or her. The only stories the townspeople have
to share, however, aren’t those that illustrate Emily’s character or personality, but stories
that highlight their own interactions with her.
Just as in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” we know very quickly how isolated Emily
was during her life. In the first paragraph we learn that she has been secluded in her
house for at least the last ten years, which is on what had once been the town’s “most
select street” (1). There are several instances throughout the narrative where Emily’s
isolation is interrupted by bouts of companionship. During the earliest periods the story
details, we know that Emily lived with her father—a controlling man who never allowed
her to marry, and who encouraged her extreme segregation from the rest of the town.
After her father’s death, Emily becomes involved with a man, Homer Barron, who is
hired to pave the town’s streets. Because the townspeople believe she is too good for him,
“a Northerner, a day labourer,” they ask Emily’s estranged cousins to come and speak to
her. Soon after the cousins arrive, Homer departs (5). The cousins, the townspeople
determine, are haughty, arrogant, and elitist; the narrator asserts that they are “even more
Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been” (7). Shortly after the cousins leave, someone
reports having seen Homer Barron enter Emily’s house late one night, but as he is never
seen again, the townspeople assume he has abandoned her. Over the next few years, the
only people who see Emily are her servant, Tobe, and a few young girls who take chinapainting lessons from her. After they discontinue their lessons, Emily spends many years
alone in the house, Tobe her only companion. It’s only after her death when the
townspeople, in a fit of curiosity, enter her home and break down a locked door, that they
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learn the true conclusion of Emily’s relationship with Homer: they find his corpse on a
bed, where it’s clear that Emily, too, has been sleeping for many years.
What is so interesting in this story, is not only that Emily segregates herself from
the townspeople, but that the townspeople, in turn, isolate Emily. Though they have had
little interaction with her by which to judge her, they see her as this untouchable figure,
someone conceited and disdainful. Their opinions changes when her father dies:
…[It] got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people
were glad. At least they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she
had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old
despair of a penny more or less. (4)
But they never seem to let her feel that “thrill.” Given the opportunity to see her
humiliated and destitute, they provide her with the means to support herself, thereby
protecting her isolation. A few years later, when they could shame her because of a smell
emanating from her house, despite pettily thinking of the smell as “another link between
the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons,” they choose to manage the
issue without involving her in order to save her from the embarrassment (3).
The townspeople derive their collective identity from their association with and
obligation to Emily, but their sense of obligation is contingent on her seeming pitiable.
Emily’s health is of little concern; the narrator describes Emily as looking “bloated, like a
body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue” (2). As her home is an
extension of herself—and, more often than not, the only evidence of Emily that the town
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sees—they make no effort to repair her house (the narrator goes so far as to say that it’s
an “eyesore”), because it’s imperative that it, too, appears to be dilapidated (2).
But while the townspeople are dependent on Emily to shape their identities, she is
somehow not quite a member of the community; in addition to this being figuratively
true, with her refusal to pay taxes, it’s literally true, as well. Then again, she never really
was a member of the community—she was always held apart from everyone else, first by
her father, and then by the townspeople. It’s telling when the narrator states that, when
thinking about Emily and her father, the townspeople “had long thought of them as a
tableau,” as it highlights the constructed nature of the Griersons’s public persona: the
townspeople create an image of who the Griersons are, and then expect them to maintain
these static roles (4). The townspeople assume they know who Emily is, they ascribe
certain qualities to her character, and expect her to live up to the persona they’ve created
for her. They want to pity her, which allows them to feel some ownership of her, but they
also want her to behave with the “noblesse oblige” they believe is requisite in a woman
of her social standing (5).
The Griersons exist as something separate from but associated to the community.
When Emily’s father dies, they adopt a devout sense of obligation towards her that is
virtually religious. In fact, a great deal of the language the narrator uses to describe Emily
is religious in nature. The night the men spread lime in her cellar, one of them sees Emily
in an upstairs window: “…a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat
in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol” (4) She’s
referred to as an idol again later on, during the long years when no one sees her outside
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the house, and no visitors are allowed in: “Now and then we would see her in one of the
downstairs windows…like the carven torso of an idol in a niche…” (8). When the
townspeople see her after the long illness she experienced following her father’s death,
the narrator says Emily bore a “vague resemblance to those angels in colored church
windows—sort of tragic and serene” (5). Again she is likened to a religious figure. In
addition to these comparisons, for a while, the girls in town “were sent to her with the
same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a
twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate” (7). Though the townspeople “believed
that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were,” they still
treated Emily as if she was someone to venerate—almost deify—despite how sorry they
felt for her, and how unwarranted her high opinion of herself was (4).
Emily is able to literally get away with murder because of her isolation, and
because the townspeople actively protect her isolation, they are complicit in that crime.
They are responsible for Homer’s death in other ways, as well: they are responsible for
the cousins coming to town, because Emily is not meeting their expectations as a woman
of high standing; and though the druggist is suspicious of her intentions with the arsenic,
he still sells it to her. They believe that, somehow, they are fulfilling what they see as
their duty to her, but it is in the most apathetic and feeble ways imaginable. Would her
suicide have been a tragic yet acceptable end in the eyes of the townspeople? And yet, the
feeling readers are led to experience at the end of the story isn’t anger that Emily was
able to avoid the consequences of her crime, but pity or sympathy because of what her
isolation led her to do. Because readers only know about Emily what the townspeople
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themselves believe, it’s possible this sympathy is misplaced. It’s possible Emily lived
happily for forty years, entirely content with only Tobe and Homer Barron’s corpse as
company.
“The Rememberer”
Aimee Bender’s short-short story, “The Rememberer,” is about a woman, Annie,
whose lover, Ben, is experiencing reverse evolution. At the start of the story Ben has
already devolved from human to ape. Just as in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” when Jane
admits on the first page of the story that she has no one to whom she’d tell her suspicions
about her husband’s profession being the cause of her prolonged illness, the second
sentence of “The Rememberer” (“I tell no one.”), automatically establishes Annie’s
isolation. She has no one with whom she can talk about the traumatic experience of
watching her lover turn into an ape, then a sea turtle, and finally a salamander. At the end
of the story, Annie releases Ben, as a salamander, into the sea, and she is left alone to
remember him, and their life together.
As the “Rememberer,” then, it is appropriate, that Annie reveals the details of her
relationship with Ben before he began to devolve through flashbacks. They were
melancholic and contemplative; when he was still human, Ben was often “sad about the
world” (4). Annie says:
It was a large reason why I loved him. We'd sit together and be sad and think
about being sad and sometimes discuss sadness.
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On his last human day, he said, "Annie, don't you see? We're all getting
too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up
and dies when there's too much thought and not enough heart." (4).
Ben lives his life feeling a deep sense of sensucht: a nostalgia for a time that never
existed; but something about this day—and his sadness about, and disappointment in, the
world—initiates a rapid loss of his humanity and his self.
As Ben willingly relinquishes his connection to the world, Annie loses her own,
too, as her bond with the world is entirely dependant on her relationship with Ben. We
see her experience this struggle to connect even before Ben begins to devolve. When they
sit outside at night and watch the stars, Ben is comforted by them and by the way they
provide enough space for dreaming. Annie, on the other hand, is overwhelmed by their
vastness and by her own insignificance. She tries to wish on a star that’s never been
wished on before—she wants to make a mark, to prove her existence, and to connect
herself individually and specifically to the world—but she gives up. Instead of wishing
on stars, she wishes on the kisses she places on the back of Ben’s neck, because she
knows “no woman had ever been so thorough, had ever kissed his every inch of skin” (5).
Annie experiences her growing isolation in stages. When Ben first devolves into
an ape, she admits: “I didn’t miss human Ben right away; I wanted to meet the ape too, to
take care of my lover like a son, a pet; I wanted to know him every possible way but I
didn’t realize he wasn’t coming back” (6). But less than two months later, after she
accepts that Ben might never return to his human form, Annie says:
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Now I come home from work and look for his regular-size shape walking and
worrying and realize, over and over, that he's gone. I pace the halls. I chew whole
packs of gum in mere minutes. I review my memories and make sure they're still
intact because if he's not here, then it is my job to remember. I think of the way he
wrapped his arms around my back and held me so tight it made me nervous and
the way his breath felt in my ear: right. (6)
At the end of the story Annie lays in bed, measuring her skull with her hands to
see if it’s grown, which is obviously an echo back to the beginning of the narrative when
Ben says that people think too much and feel too little. It’s in this moment that readers
feel the weight of Annie’s loss, and the responsibility she now bears. This story captures
the profundity of isolation when it is borne out of loss, and the burden of being the one
left behind to remember.
That Annie cultivates the isolation first she and Ben, and then she alone,
experiences in this story is important. When Ben first begins devolving, she tells his
friends, coworkers and family members that he’s sick, and not to call. Everyone who
hears that Ben is ill behaves counter to how we might expect them to (and counter to how
Annie herself expects them to), by doing as she asks and no longer calling. That Annie
chooses to use the excuse that Ben is sick suggests one possible interpretation of this
story. The way she describes his reverse evolution is very much how someone might
describe the loss of a loved one, particularly to those illnesses, like Alzheimer’s, that rob
the affected of his or her memories, ability to function, and sense of self. When Ben is an
ape, he’s still able to communicate with Annie, and he can still express his familiarity
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with her, but the more devolved he becomes, the less like himself he is. Annie keeps
asking him, with every evolutionary reversal, if he remembers her. When he indicates his
distaste for honey—something he used to love, and the last connection she seemed to
have with him—she no longer recognizes any part of his old self, and realizes that she
can’t bear to lose him entirely, so she takes him to the beach and releases him into the
ocean. The isolation that she experiences is poignant and moving, but there is a certain
amount of solace to be found in the fact that she was able to let him go on her own terms.
“Vanishing Act”
At its simplest, “Vanishing Act,” by Kelly Link, is about two little girls and their
families. It’s set in 1970, and begins just after Jenny Rose moves in with her mother’s
sister, the Reverend Molly Harmond (R.M.), Mr. Harmond, and their two children, James
and Hildegard (Hildy). Jenny Rose and Hildy are both ten years old and serve as dual
narrators for the story. Jenny Rose’s perspective is experienced through her daydreams,
though that isn’t made immediately clear to the reader. The opening section of the story,
which is told from Jenny Rose’s perspective—distinguished from Hildy’s by its use of
italics—is a surrealistic dreamscape that doesn’t seem connected to either of the two
main characters. The next time this perspective is inserted into the narrative, it’s obvious
that these sections are Jenny Rose’s daydreams.
Hildy is responsible for the lion’s share of the narrative. She moves from scene to
scene interacting with her family members, Jenny Rose, and her best friend Myron, who
spends a great deal of time at the Harmonds’ house. Hildy spies on Jenny Rose
25
throughout the story, sometimes with Myron, but increasingly by herself. She can’t
explain why she watches her cousin so intently, but knows that it’s incredibly
important—that, without her constant attention, Jenny Rose might literally disappear.
Jenny Rose is living with Hildy and her family because her own parents are
working as missionaries in Indonesia. Jenny Rose spent most of her life with them, but
when the country experienced political instability it became dangerous, causing Jenny
Rose and her parents to go into hiding, then spend a week in a prison cell with seven
other missionaries. When they were freed from the prison, they moved to Singapore for
five years. After deciding to return to Indonesia, Jenny Rose’s parents send her to live
with the Harmonds. All of this is important because Jenny Rose’s greatest wish is to be
reunited with her parents, despite the danger that might put her in, so she spends all of her
time in bed with her eyes closed, picturing herself in a little boat with her parents,
convinced of her own ability to disappear from the Harmonds’ home and end up in her
parents’.
In a letter from Jenny Rose’s parents, they describe where they’re living now, the
boats in which they travel, and the color of the water beneath them. It’s at this point that
readers being to understand that Jenny Rose’s daydream at the beginning of the story is
rooted in reality: she is imagining being with her parents on that boat on that green water.
When we recognize that, we begin to understand that statements such as: ”What was
important, what she yearned for, was the trinity, the triangle completed and without
lack,” don’t indicate Jenny Rose’s devoutness, but her desire to be with her parents again
(122). Her obsession with having three oranges in the blue bowl on her nightstand isn’t
26
an indication of a possessive or selfish nature, but need to have a physical object that she
can see and meditate on that symbolizes her family reunited.
The first clue we get that Jenny Rose is far from ordinary (and just maybe capable
of disappearing herself), is when Hildy and Myron, while spying on her from the gazebo,
watch as she flips the lights on and off without moving from her prone position on her
bed. Myron is scared and is hesitant to come back to the Harmonds’ house, but Hildy,
while nervous about her cousin’s apparent abilities, isn’t surprised. She seems to have an
almost preternatural connection to Jenny Rose that allows her to see her cousin long after
the rest of her family loses this ability. Hildy also understands what Jenny Rose wants,
and how she plans to go about getting it. During a conversation with Myron, Hildy tells
him:
She wants to go home. She’s going to disappear herself. She’s been practicing
with the light switch, moving it up and down. She’s going to disappear herself
back to Indonesia and her parents.”
“You’re kidding,” he says, but Hildy is sure. She knows this as plainly as
if Jenny Rose had told her. (136)
Hildy interprets the letters Jenny Rose receives from her parents, along with Jenny Rose’s
behavior, and arrives at a conclusion that’s surprising but correct. When Hildy presents
Jenny Rose with the letter she and Myron have altered, Hildy realizes that it doesn’t
matter whether the handwriting is similar to the rest of the handwriting in the letter. She
understands that Jenny Rose is ready to go.
27
With the benefit of two narrators, the story is capable of showing how isolation
works when it is introduced at different points in a narrative, and when it’s chosen as
opposed to when it’s enforced. Isolation is a choice for Jenny Rose, and it’s a choice that
is made before the story even begins. She is determined to teach herself how to
disappear—or, perhaps more accurately—apparate, and she dedicates all of her time and
energy into learning how to do so. She’s so quiet and so utterly removed from life in the
house that, even prior to her literal disappearance, there are increasingly long periods of
time when her aunt forgets she’s there. Readers are encouraged to believe Jenny Rose
successfully reunites with her parents, so, while her story initially seems sad, her isolation
actually provides her with the opportunity to achieve the end goal she most desires.
For Hildy, isolation is a consequence of what happens over the course of the
story. She doesn’t choose to isolate herself, but as the story progresses, she is left alone or
abandoned by Myron and the other members of her family. First, Jenny Rose disappears,
followed by James:
A few months later, James goes to Canada. He is dodging the draft. He tells no
one he is going, and Hildy finds the brief, impersonal note. He is failing his senior
classes, he is afraid, he loves them but they can’t help him. Please take care of his
fish. (142)
Soon after her brother’s departure, Hildy’s father leaves to be with the woman
with whom he’s been having an affair: Myron’s mother. By this time, though, Hildy is
expecting her father’s abandonment. She has grown to believe “that life is a series of
sudden disappearances, leavetakings without the proper good-byes” (143). Left with just
28
her mother by the end of the story—a mother who is focused on her work at the church to
the exclusion of everything else—Hildy is virtually alone, and, at ten, is already jaded
and cynical about the world. The small amount of hope that Hildy finds comes from
imagining
the better place in which one arrives. This is the R.M.’s heaven, the Canada that
James has escaped to; it is in the arms of Mercy Orzibal with her bright. Glossy
mouth…It is in the green lake in the photograph Jenny Rose has sent Hildy from
the island of Flores. (144)
It’s a bittersweet ending, but one full of possibility.
Isolation in The Secrets We Hide—“The Harvest”
Most of the stories in The Secrets We Hide are about isolated characters, but “The
Harvest” is one of the few in the collection that features a main character, Anna, who is
looking to change the loneliness that is often associated with isolation. Everything about
Anna’s life is designed to limit the interactions she has with other people. She works
from home cultivating heirloom vegetable seeds, which she sells online, and the only
time readers see Anna leave the house is when she goes to the library or grocery
shopping. Her last known companion, her grandmother, died two years ago, and the story
indicates that she hasn’t sought out any relationships since then. The occasion for the
story occurs when she decides she wants to change this aspect of her life: “As much as
Anna treasures her seeds, though, she thinks she’s supposed to want more. Maybe a
husband” (1). Because a husband seems like the most logical relationship she should
29
want, she tries to meet men while doing the few things she needs to leave the house in
order to accomplish. After failing to make a meaningful connection, Anna retreats to the
place that has always brought her comfort and security—her garden—where she,
improbably, finds a finger. Even more improbable is the fact that, after planting the
finger, a man, Ben, begins to bloom. Their relationship seems natural, but while Anna
seems satisfied with their life together, Ben is unfulfilled and dreams of freedom and
adventure. Though Ben ends up prematurely harvests himself, causing his own death,
Anna is cautiously hopeful at the end of the story. She removes his finger and considers
trying to grown him again in the spring.
Readers are given several reasons to suspect Anna has isolated herself because
she’s been disappointed in people in the past. While never getting a dollhouse as a child
doesn’t suggest anything more than parents who are pragmatic, when we see Anna first
examining the finger readers begin to understand that her relationship with her father, at
least, wasn’t close or affectionate: “She wraps her hand around the finger and rubs the
pad of her thumb across the smooth nail. She remembers doing this to her father’s nail
once. She remembers how he pushed her hand away” (4). Anna’s scepticism towards
people other than her parents is unmistakable later in the narrative, when Ben says he
wants to go exploring and her response is “’You don’t want to do that…You won’t be
happy with what you find’” (9). And later still, after she says she would trade positions
with Ben if she could:
Why would you want to be stuck here?” he asks. “I can’t go anywhere. Or do
anything.”
30
“Exactly,” she says. “And no one expects you to. How comforting that
must be.” (11).
Through its use of gardening-associated descriptions like “hair the color of wellfertilized dirt,” and a voice that’s “gravelly,” even the vocabulary in “The Harvest”
indicates how limited Anna’s world is. Anna’s garden is her comfort—it’s what she turns
to when she’s needs safety and refuge from the world. When she’s rudely disregarded by
the men she approaches at the beginning of the story, she returns to her garden to console
her. The metaphor of roses as soldiers standing guard suggests that Anna’s home and her
garden protect her. By nurturing it so tenderly, and by vanquishing the “invading army of
dandelion and crabgrass,” Anna protects it, too. It’s in this place of comfort that she finds
a finger. That she willingly plants the finger in the garden, not knowing what will happen,
is significant. That Ben grows in Anna’s garden might be why she is capable of accepting
and connecting with him.
Even before Ben becomes a fully realized human, his finger evokes one type of
male figure: Anna’s father. As the story progresses, Ben figuratively fills the role of
several other types of male figures: she was looking for a husband, so he automatically
assumes the role of potential lover and friend, but she also cares for him like she might a
child. The shifting nature of their relationship mirrors Anna’s own confusion about what
she’s looking for in a companion. In the end, this confusion doesn’t need to be resolved.
That she considers growing him again is hopeful—it assures readers that she hasn’t given
up on finding companionship, especially if that void is filled on her own terms.
31
“The Secrets We Hide”
“The Secrets We Hide” is about a woman who audits secrets in a town where
secrets are tangible things that carry physical weight relative to their significance.
Seventy years before the story takes place, the townspeople learn that there is a limit to
the number of secrets their town can hold. The outcome of this revelation is the formation
of a group called the Council on Secrets, and the hiring of someone who keeps an
account of the secrets, a Secret Auditor. Readers witness the narrator of the story, the
great granddaughter of the original Secret Auditor, as she travels from person to person,
weighing their secrets and registering them onto a balance sheet on her computer. When
adding a new secret onto the account initiates a warning that the town is reaching the
limit of secrets they can safely hold, the narrator speaks to the head of the Council on
Secrets, Brad, whom she used to date. The Council on Secrets doesn’t act quickly
enough, however, and the story concludes when the limit of secrets is reached, and
people lose control of their ability to hide their secrets any longer. In the final scene, the
narrator rushes home in order to prevent her own secrets from being revealed.
Despite all of the time spent cataloguing the townspeople’s secrets, the story, in
the end, is about is about the narrator’s own, and the way keeping secrets disconnects us
from others. Told from a first person point of view, the reality of the narrator’s
isolation—her loneliness, the loss of her identity, and her failure to maintain a long-term
relationship—is revealed slowly throughout the story. While first person narratives can
limit what readers know about the world in which the character lives, in “The Secrets We
Hide,” the point of view is what allows readers the poignant moment at the end of the
32
story when the narrator goes home and surveys the evidence of her own secrets: “But
here, now, in my house, I am safe. I am alone, and my secrets will stay mine” (82).
Readers get the first suggestion that the narrator is isolated towards the beginning
of the story when the narrator reveals that “[p]eople always need time alone after I’ve
been to see them” (71). She never overtly threatens to reveal their secrets, but the
townspeople experience the fear of that happening all the same. They become vulnerable
and all too human in a way that makes them uncomfortable and unlikely to form a
friendship with the woman who knows what their secrets look like. Later, the narrator
confirms this when she says, “I don’t hate my job. Not really. I do get lonely, though. No
one really wants to be friends with someone who’s seen what everyone else is trying to
hide” (72). This is also the first time she admits to being lonely as well as isolated. She
feels her loneliness even more profoundly because she is surrounded by people. The
narrator is isolated by fear: the residents of her town fear the judgment and humiliation
they would be subjected to were she to divulge their secrets in any way. She is not only
isolated by their fear of exposure, but by her own: she, too, fears the revelation of her
own secrets. The narrator takes comfort in her secrets—they are the only connection she
has left to the rest of the community—proof that she is, at least in some small way, the
same as the rest of the people in town. Additionally, protecting them gives her an excuse
to never attempt another relationship they, in turn, protect her from potentially getting
hurt.
That we never learn the narrator’s name highlights her isolation; it signifies the
loss of her identity, a fact that she acknowledges while sitting in the Council of Secrets
33
meeting: “No one calls me by my name anymore. Now I’m just ‘the Secret Auditor.’
Sometimes just ‘the Auditor.’ Once or twice even ‘Secret Lady’” (76). Brad doesn’t call
her by her name, nor does anyone else in town; readers might begin to wonder how long
it’s been since the narrator last heard someone call her by name. When her dad was still
alive? That protecting her secrets is a priority is understandable, then, as they are
evidence of her existence.
Conclusion
Isolation is a major theme in The Secrets We Hide, and many of the stories in the
collection contain echoes of the stories analyzed above. “Supply and Demand” is written
in a form that I call a literary triptych. The stories are linked not through setting or
character, but through their use of shared themes, in this case lust and death. All three
narrators are isolated by their individual proclivities, but, as with Emily in “A Rose for
Emily,” it’s this isolation that allows them to lead lives not dictated by societal
conventions. Similarly, the narrator in “The Clock Keeper,” whose role as a harvester of
souls necessitates that she remains separated from the rest of the town, finds security and
safety in her isolation. The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is analogous to the
narrator in “Spare.” Jane’s isolation gives her the opportunity to create a narrative from
the wallpaper that frees her. The narrator in “Spare” takes advantage of her husband’s
emotional abandonment by making what was meant to be a nursery into a spare bedroom,
and filling it with things in a way she can’t fill it with a family.
34
Ultimately, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the pervasiveness of isolation
running throughout the collection, I see the stories in The Secrets We Hide as stories of
hope, stories of empowerment. Even the dark stories—especially the dark stories—offer
readers the opportunity to determine that the story is one of agency and of selfdetermination; that a story like “Wearing Blazers Backwards” or “On Location with the
Grim Reaper” is not about the narrator’s inability to assimilate into a larger group, but of
his or her reaching a greater personal understanding, and of learning to define his or her
life not according to those around them, but according to his or her own interests and
desires.
Sometimes it’s not easy to interpret the consequences of isolation as positive.
Sometimes the outcome in an isolation narrative is positive only in that the character is
better off for having been isolated. It’s difficult to see how Annie, who is alone and bereft
of Ben at the end of “The Rememberer,” is better off for having been alone. It’s a
challenge to believe that Jane’s isolation in “The Yellow Wallpaper” results in her
empowerment and freedom from oppression, when she is insane at the end of the
narrative. But if we recognize the potential isolation has, the possibility for change it
offers, then we can see how isolation often brings about the most important moments of
growth, development, happiness, and introspection throughout any given text. If we view
isolation in terms of the positive impact it makes in a character’s life, rather than the
negative effects, new interpretations of a text are possible, through which we come to
understand that isolation can be about freedom as much as it is about control; that, while
35
alienation can be a consequence of isolation, so can acceptance; and that, alone, a
character can experience hope as much as despair.
Works Cited
Bender, Aimee. “The Rememberer.” The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. NY: Anchor,
1998. Print.
Conliffe, Mark. “On Isolation.” Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary
Thought, 2006 Winter; 47 (2): 115-30.
Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” Web. 2 May, 2014.
http://flightline.highline.edu/tkim/Files/Lit100_SS2.pdf
Fry, Stephen. Moab is My Washpot. London: Random House, 1997. Print.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Thomas L. Erskine and Connie L.
Richards, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1993. Print.
Link, Kelly. “Vanishing Act.” Stranger Things Happen. Easthamptom, MA: Small Beer
P, 2001. Print.
36
THE HARVEST
Anna sells historical vegetable seeds—a business she and her grandmother started
nearly a decade ago. The move from selling in a catalogue to selling on the Internet has
made her the go-to girl for seeds with history. Her tomato seeds have an ancestry of over
seven hundred years. Her pumpkin seeds can be traced back to when the settlers came
over on the Mayflower. Her asparagus seeds are descendents from the very stalks served
on Marie Antoinette’s table before she was beheaded—that’s the story, anyway.
As much as Anna treasures her seeds, though, she thinks she’s supposed to want
more. Maybe a husband. So, at the library Anna approaches a man who looks to be about
the right age, maybe 35?, with soft blue eyes, crinkles just beginning to form in their
corners. He is running his hands over the spines of books about root vegetables. He pulls
one out and slides his fingertip down the index page. She greets him softly. He turns and
shushes her.
“Sorry,” she says with a whisper. “It’s just that you seem interested in parsnips.”
She points to the book in his hand. “Did you know that they saved a family of gypsies
from starvation during the winter of 1582?”
“Did you know it’s rude to talk in a library?” the man says. He turns and walks
away, but leaves the book behind.
Anna picks it up and flips through it, but it doesn’t have any history behind the
vegetables it’s advising about, so she leaves it behind, too.
37
At the grocery store, over the imported cheeses, Anna catches the gaze of a kind
looking man with hair the color of well-fertilized dirt. She tucks a strand of blond hair
behind her ear, then offers the man a smile, but doesn’t receive one in return. The man
grabs the closest block of havarti and scampers off. Probably to pick up crackers.
At the gas station she tries to catch the eyes of the man waiting in the car behind
hers. Anna thinks it would be funny to reminisce with her someday partner about the day
they’d met while pumping gas. When her deep brown eyes finally catch his, she can tell
he is in no mood to be friendly. So she gets in her car and drives home.
What she really needs is a nice afternoon weeding, she thinks as she puts the new
bear of honey in the cabinet and the apples in a bowl on the kitchen table.
Anna lives in the house she inherited from her grandmother three years ago when
her grandmother passed away. The house is covered in pale yellow clapboards, with trim
and shutters in crisp white. Two years ago she laid the flagstone walkway herself that
leads up to the bright red front door. And for her thirty-fourth birthday last year, she
installed the white swing on the porch. The roses—lined up like soldiers in fatigues of
vivid green and faces of “Crimson Queen” and “Black Magic”—stand constant guard
from their posts in front of the bay window. The house has always reminded her of the
fancy dollhouses she walked by in the toy store when she was young—the dollhouses she
begged her mother and father for every Christmas and birthday she can remember—and
of the shoes and a book she always received instead.
In her backyard, aside from the wall of oaks and ivy surrounding it, and the high
wooden fence she installed to keep the animals in the neighboring woods from eating her
38
plants, every square foot of the acre of land has been tilled and planted with row after
arrow-straight row of ancient-blooded seeds. She can tell by looking at the barely there
sprouts of cornstalks, Pilgrim cornstalks—Squanto cornstalks—that it will be a good year
for corn, provided the weather remains favorable.
Anna begins working in the corner of the garden farthest from the kitchen door on
a row of Sophia beans that can be traced back to early eighteen hundreds Germany. She
likes to imagine a young farmer naming them after the girl he was courting. The only gift
he could afford. And that he and the woman married and lived in the German countryside
in a little house full of their fair-headed children.
As she works, her hands quickly and deftly flying past viable plants to the
invading army of dandelion and crabgrass, she imagines stories in which the ancestors of
her vegetables played a vital role. After the beans, she moves on to the rutabagas that
were the favorite food of a Bohemian princess, then the cabbages, which once saved a
Roman emperor from mushroom poisoning.
The afternoon light is beginning to fade, and Anna is gathering up the last few
piles of pulled weeds when she feels something brush by her shoulder. She looks down
by her garden-covered shoes and sees a finger.
Anna leans down and picks it up. She looks from the finger to the mauve-washed
sky, but all she sees is the promise of stars.
She turns in a slow circle, training her eyes on the trees surrounding her, listening
carefully for the sounds of footsteps crunching leaves or bodies breaking branches. She
hears and sees nothing.
39
Anna places the finger in her apron pocket. She thinks it might be an index finger,
but without the matching set it is hard to tell. She feels the outline of the finger through
her pocket to make sure it is there, then finishes her work.
A little while later Anna takes the finger from her pocket and lays it on the
kitchen counter in order to take a good look at it. Aside from missing the rest of its body,
it looks healthy. Male, she decides, noting its size, the deep wrinkles over the knuckles,
and the faint hairs on its widest part. It’s also rather long and slender. It must belong to a
musician—a piano player. Or guitarist. She wraps her hand around the finger and rubs the
pad of her thumb across the smooth nail. She remembers doing this to her father’s nail
once. She remembers how he pushed her hand away.
She won’t call the police. She doesn’t think people report missing fingers. She
folds the finger into a tissue, and places it carefully next to her mother’s pearl necklace in
a nearly empty jewelry box. She sets the box on the nightstand, then slides into bed.
*
In the middle of the night, Anna wakes up so intensely from a dream she nearly
falls out of bed. She doesn’t remember what the dream is about—she never does—but
she can’t go back to sleep. She checks the jewelry box to make sure the finger is still
there. As she unwraps the tissue, the finger falls into her open palm. It feels heavy and the
edge where the skin ends feels dry against her hand. For a few minutes she just sits
holding the finger, her feet hanging over the edge of her bed, brushing the hardwood
40
floor. She wonders what her grandmother would do with the finger. She knows what her
grandmother would say.
Naked as from the earth we came, she hears her grandmother’s voice say in her
head. And crept to life at first. We to the earth return again, and mingle with our dust.
The words, spoken shortly before her grandmother died, make Anna feel lonely.
The moon shining through the gauzy white curtains lights up her bedroom with a cold
blue glow. Anna gets out of bed and puts on her slippers.
Down in the garden, in the rich smelling dirt at the end of a row of bell peppers,
Anna digs a hole two feet deep and a few inches wide. She takes the finger out of the
pocket of her robe and drops it into the hole. She sprinkles a little plant food on it, then
covers it with dirt.
*
The freshly turned dirt doesn’t show any signs of change for several days. Then,
one early morning as the sun begins to burn off the low-lying fog, Anna walks by the
empty spot in the row and sees the barest hint of pink flesh showing in the center of the
dirt patch. She kneels down, brushes some of the dirt away from its base, and sees that
the finger is now firmly rooted in the soil. Its base has grown and the stub of a second
finger is just appearing.
A few days later two more fingertips are surfacing from the dirt.
41
As the cool mornings of spring turn into the baking heat of summer afternoons, a
hand, a wrist, an elbow unearth themselves in predictable succession.
The beginning of July, Anna weaves her way through the rows of corn. “Knee
high by the fourth of July,” she says. It’s a rhyme her grandmother said every year—an
age-old measurement intended to judge the plant’s growth. When she gets to the end of
the row she looks over at the arm reaching out of the dirt and towards the sun. She
wonders if the saying extends to fingers, as well.
She wonders a lot about the arm that she’s growing. She wonders when it will
stop—if it will stop. She wonders if she’ll end up growing a person, and who that person
will be. If that person will like her. She wonders about the arm so much, she’s taken to
spending most of her time sitting in a lawn chair at the end of the pepper row, watching
the arm grow ever so slowly.
One evening in the middle of July, Anna notices that a pale nose tip has surfaced
at some point during the day. When she kneels down to clean some dirt away from it,
Anna’s knees sink into the soft earth. She reveals two nostrils. Then the flat planes of two
pale, dirty cheeks. Finally she uncovers two eyelids. She gently touches her fingers to
each one and the deep blue eyes open, blinking fast in the bright, late afternoon sunlight.
Anna falls back, pushes herself away from the fresh male face, and watches as the
arm she’s seen grow over the last several weeks bends and stretches for the first time.
The hand reaches down, digs its fingers into the dirt, and, with a great shove, exhumes a
shoulder, a neck, and a fully formed head topped with long, dark hair.
“Hello,” he says. His voice is deep and gravelly.
42
Anna says nothing for a long time. Just sits looking at the arm, the shoulder, the
head, her expression a complicated mix of curiosity and fear.
Regaining some measure of her composure she asks, “Who are you?” She pulls
the lawn chair closer and slides her thin frame into it.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Who am I?”
“You don’t have a name?” she asks.
He looks confused. “I don’t know. Do I?”
She looks at him more carefully, then says “Ben. Your name is Ben.”
“Okay. But I feel like a Hank,” he says. “I feel ripe.”
“I’ve never grown a human before,” she says. She wonders if anyone has. She
bends down and buries her fingers into the dirt. Past his pale, flat cheek; his long, strong
neck; his bony shoulder; are nothing but fleshy roots. “You’re obviously not ripe,” she
says. She leans back in the chair and crosses her legs. “You don’t have a chest…or
legs…or anything but an arm and a head.”
“Well, I still feel ripe,” he says.
*
Over the next few weeks, Ben and Anna fall into easy conversation. As Ben
continues to grow, and Anna continues to garden, she tells him about her vegetables’
ancestry. Tells him stories about kings and thieves, sea captains and orphans. He asks her
questions about the sky and birds and everything he can see from his spot in the garden.
43
“But how can you just…kill them?” he asks about the bugs eating through her
tomato plants.
“Because if I don’t, the tomatoes will die,” she says. “I tend the plants so they
grow; I water and feed them, and I keep pests from eating them. That’s how gardening
works.”
Ben seems dissatisfied with her answer, but doesn’t argue.
That evening, Ben and Anna watch the fireflies wink in the enveloping darkness.
“Can I try some of that?” Ben asks gesturing to her teacup.
She hands him the mug and watches as he takes a long, slow swallow.
“Tastes like dirt,” he says. “I like it.”
They sit quietly as the stars overhead pop into view.
“Do I remind you of your grandmother?” Ben asks.
Anna turns to look at him, but he’s still looking at the sky. She wonders why he
would ask her this, but she doesn’t question him. Instead she says, “No.”
“What word would you use to describe her?” he asks. It’s a game they’ve been
playing. Beets: earthy. The house: charming. Airplanes: overwhelming. People are new,
though. They usually stick to inanimate objects.
Anna thinks for a moment before responding. “Grounded,” she says.
“And your father?”
Anna takes so long to think, Ben lowers his gaze from the sky to look at her. She
sighs softly. “Detached,” she says finally.
Ben nods, then looks back up. “And how about yourself?”
44
“Oh, I don’t know,” she says. She doesn’t want to play their game anymore.
“What word do you want it to be?” he asks.
She doesn’t say anything for a long, long time. She’s not sure she’ll respond at all.
Except she does, right before she goes inside for the night. “Content,” she says.
*
One morning during the first week of August, Anna comes out of the house and
sees Ben looking pale and sweaty. She feels her heart speed up and her hands start to
shake. “What’s wrong?” she asks. She puts one hand on his recently emerged second
shoulder, then touches the back of her other hand against his forehead. “You have a
fever.”
Ben’s eyes seem glassy and unfocused. “I think I have food poisoning,” he says,
his voice weak.
Anna drops to her knees and starts to pull the nutrient enriched soil away from his
skin. She fills up the space with more dirt, but doesn’t mix any plant food into it. She also
plunges the staff of a large outdoor umbrella over him to give him some shade. “What
can I get you?” she asks. “What will make you feel better?”
“I have no idea,” he says.
Anna disappears into the house, and when she comes back she has a steaming
mug of tea and a plate in her hands. “Grandma always gave me tea and toast when I was
sick,” she says, holding out the mug and plate to Ben.
45
Though Ben is feeling significantly better by sunset, Anna sits with him late into
the night. It’s cooler than it’s been the last several nights, and Anna has wrapped an old
quilt around Ben’s shoulders. The flood lamp by the back door gives them just enough
light to see each other.
“I don’t have a story. Not the way your other plants do,” Ben says. His eyes, as
usual, don’t stray far from the sky.
She looks over at him and wonders what it would be like to have no history. “Of
course you do,” she says. “You’re descended from the people who first told the story of
the stars. You have the blood of great explorers coursing through you. Your ancestors are
some of the most heroic men and women the world has known,” she says. She doesn’t
know if it’s true, but it seems right.
“I think I would like to explore,” Ben says.
“You don’t want to do that,” Anna says. “You won’t be happy with what you
find.”
*
Soon Ben’s chest rises from the dirt. In the evenings before she goes to bed, Anna
continues to cover him with the old, worn quilt. When Ben’s waist appears from beneath
the dark soil, Anna goes to the store and buys him a long-sleeved shirt, a hat, and a pair
of gloves.
46
“I’ll have to buy you pants soon enough,” she says one night when she puts his
new clothes on him, wrapping the quilt around his waist.
Soon enough comes the third week of August when her modesty demands he
wear pants. She comes into the garden as soon as she returns home from shopping,
holding the new pants—track pants with the snaps on the side—out in front of her like an
offering.
Over the last few days Ben has been sulking. He keeps telling Anna that he’s
ready to be harvested, but Anna keeps telling him that, as his knees are not yet grown,
much less his legs and feet, he’s obviously not ripe, yet.
She’s hoping the pants will give him hope about his progress.
*
The next month passes and Ben grows quickly. His knees appear in late August,
his shins the second week of September, and by the first week of October every one of
his ten toes has grown. Anna washes him down with warm water and cuts his fingernails
and toenails. She has to get up on a ladder to give him a rough haircut, and though she
shaves the stubble on his face carefully, he still ends up with a few nicks in his now
deeply tanned skin.
“I’m ripe,” he tells her several times every day. “I’m ripe!”
“Why do you want to be harvested so badly?” she asks. “I would give anything to
be in your position.”
47
“Why would you want to be stuck here?” he asks. “I can’t go anywhere. Or do
anything.”
“Exactly,” she says. “And no one expects you to. How comforting that must be.”
She doesn’t look up at him from where she’s weeding around his feet.
Ben groans. “But I want to roam. Explore. I want to see the grocery store you
mentioned.”
He is tall enough now to see over the fence and into the forest surrounding her
house. Anna has no neighbors, so she is still the only other person he’s seen, but in the
mornings, when Anna comes out to bring him his breakfast, Ben tells her about the deer
and birds and raccoons he’s seen during the night.
“What will you do when you’re done growing?” she asks him.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be done growing,” he says. “There’s still too much to learn,
and I want to learn it all.”
Anna leans back and looks up into his face.
“But don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll come home.”
*
One morning, when the dew on the ground is heavy and nearly cold enough to
freeze, Anna looks out her kitchen window and sees Ben lying flat on the ground, the
earth beneath him stained a garish shade of red.
48
She rushes out the back door and falls to her knees beside him. He is moaning
softly. In his right hand he is holding the sharp knife Anna keeps in her gardening basket,
and the soles of his feet, attached to roots the day before, are now free, though horribly
mangled and bloody.
Anna uses her weight to turn Ben over.
“I thought I was ready,” he says. His bright blue eyes look intense, vivid.
“I know you did,” she says. She runs her hand across his forehead. The intimacy
in her touch is new. She sets his head down gently and runs to get the quilt and the
wheelbarrow. She examines his feet, sees how shredded his roots are, and determines that
she cannot repair the damage he’s caused.
She sits next to him, holding his hand. The hand that first appeared through the
dirt. She rubs the nail on his index finger as she had done that first day almost seven
months ago.
“You’re about to get your wish,” she says. “You’re about to go exploring.”
“It doesn’t feel like I thought it would,” Ben says, his breath coming in short
gasps.
“It never does,” she says. Anna shifts so she can lay his head in her lap. She
begins to comb her fingers through his dark hair.
“I think you should just re-plant me,” he says. But she continues to run her fingers
through his hair.
“”Just re-plant me—” he says. His body goes limp and his chest falls for the last
time.
49
“That’s not how it works,” Anna whispers to herself. He’s heavier than she
imagined him to be, but, though she struggles, she manages to get him into the
wheelbarrow and covered with the quilt. She rolls the wheelbarrow over to the compost
pile and dumps the body. “That’s never how it works.”
She grabs the shovel leaning against the wooden crate and starts to cover the body
with dirt and rotting vegetables; she stops when it’s mostly covered, but before she walks
away she takes the sharp edge of the shovel and sheers off the index finger on the body’s
right hand. She pulls the fingers from the dirt and puts it in her apron pocket. She pats her
pocket to reassure herself that it’s in there.
Winter will soon arrive, and she’ll turn over the dirt in her garden in preparation
for spring. But during the dark, cold evenings of February she’ll start to plant seeds in
little paper cups. She’ll set them in her deep kitchen window where they’ll catch the
winter sun, and she’ll watch, day after day, as tiny green sprouts emerge from the dirt.
Maybe she’ll plant the finger again. Maybe she can start over.
50
INVISIBLE STRINGS
"Some people swore that the house was haunted," the TV said.
Brad and Cecelia were sitting in their living room, watching the news. A man was
being interviewed about a recent house demolition.
"People are so ignorant," Brad said, smirking.
Cecelia knew what that smirk meant.
It meant: I have a five-year plan.
It meant: I make six figures a year.
It meant: I’m more clever than that (read: you).
The silver-framed picture of them on their honeymoon, kissing under a Hong
Kong sunset, catches Cecelia’s attention.
"I thought that house was haunted," she said, frowning.
That frown meant: I hope your five-year plan doesn’t include me.
Nothing was ever the same again after that.
*
A few miles to the north, a little boy, holding his New-Mommy's hand, walked
past a man as he spoke into a TV camera.
"Some people swore that the house was haunted," he said as they passed.
51
The little boy fumbled with the postcard he had hastily shoved into his pocket that
morning as he’d done every morning for as long as he could remember, the image on the
front an artist’s gaudy rendering of a Hong Kong sunset.
On the back, in tenderly crafted characters: "Someday you will understand. I love
you, Mom."
The little boy pulled the postcard out carefully. He kept glancing down at it,
catching a flash of red, the hard line of a building, the splash of a boat.
New-Mommy looked down after the little boy stumbled again and saw the scrap
in the boy’s grip. "May I see that?" she asked.
His hand, holding the piece of heavy paper, extended cautiously. He placed his
treasure in her opened palm. She unfolded the postcard, which was doubled over again
and again until it was a neat little square. The edges were thin and weak, threatening to
break.
New-Mommy ran her fingers over the writing, rendered in stark black ink.
She handed the postcard back to him. The little boy refolded it and put it back into
his pocket.
Nothing was ever the same again after that.
*
"Some people swore that the house was haunted," Gary said, speaking loudly into
the microphone the reporter had thrust into his face moments ago.
52
He didn’t know if people thought that. Really, he just wanted to make people
think. They can’t just go around blowing houses up. Even if they think it’s for the best.
Even if they really only tear it down. Even if they own it.
Gary had grown up looking at that house.
"Right across the street," is what he’d told the reporter when she'd asked him
where he was from.
He’d been standing on the sidewalk in front of the now vacant lot, imagining how
the shutters used to hang. The way the crooked porch used to lean to the left. The precise
shade of sun-bleached red of the front door.
As a child he’d dreamt of owning the house.
“Then we can be neighbors,” he told his dad.
Later, Gary included his girlfriend in the dream.
“We can raise our kids there, and build them a sandbox. I'll mow the lawn on
Saturdays,” he’d told her when they sat on his front steps looking at the house across the
street.
Then they started fighting about whether to paint the front door Hong Kong
Sunset or Ladybug.
Nothing was ever the same again after that.
53
THE SHADOW CARNIVAL
I. Marlow Beckett
Marlow Beckett was born with an oversensitive sense of smell. His nose, those
who knew him said, could smell smells from three miles away if the wind was blowing
right. When he was eight-years-old, after just leaving school for the afternoon, Marlow
invited his best friend, Dave, to his house, saying his mom was baking cookies. When
asked how he knew this, Marlow replied “Can’t you smell them?”
After graduating from high school, Marlow traveled to France where he would
study to become a perfumer, or, as the French refer to them, a Nez. He excelled in his
studies and became a rising star in the world of Parisian fragrance. Marlow lacked the
necessary passion for perfume, however. Blaming the intense migraines he got from
smelling the strong essence oils used to make toilet water, Marlow bowed out of the
glamorous trade of perfumery.
He returned home that summer and quickly got a job at a local greenhouse. He
enjoyed being around plant odors in their natural state. He liked getting his hands dirty,
liked the subtle smell of the dirt, liked planting seeds and seeing them grow beyond what
he had thought possible.
Soon after starting his job at the plant nursery, Marlow read an article in
Gardening Today about a number of rare flowers that only bloomed once every few
years. Intrigued, Marlow began cultivating these unique blooms in his own carefully
constructed greenhouse behind his mother’s house. The Golden Padauk, a flower native
54
to Myanmar, was Marlow’s first foray into the exotic. Its spicy scent could be smelled a
few days before it actually bloomed. On the night it bloomed Marlow invited a few of his
fellow gardening enthusiasts over to witness it. After that first garden party, Marlow’s
flower celebrations grew in popularity. Flower fans would arrive from counties away to
see his striking blooms.
His last event took place toward the end of October. For the last several years he
had been nurturing a rare and fascinating titan arum, more commonly known as the
Corpse Flower. The giant blossom—this one measured a staggering seven and a half feet
in height—smells like rotting human flesh. Partygoers have said that the smell emanating
from the greenhouse was so foul they chose to view the bloom through the greenhouse’s
glass walls. It is believed that once Marlow approached the greenhouse on that
inauspicious night his susceptible sniffer was so overcome with the fetid odor that he
simply dropped dead from overexposure.
The flower, taken into custody by local herbologists, was examined, but as is its
nature, the bloom died before it could be proven whether or not its smell was harmful to a
normal human’s sense of smell.
The blossoms from Marlow’s collection were adopted by some of those gardeners
in attendance that fateful evening. As some of these flowers are quite rare, making them
valuable, an investigation on whether or not one of these dedicated gardeners actually
planned Marlow’s death is pending.
55
II. Laundry Matt
Some pretty strange people live in my town. Lisa, this woman who works at the
post office downtown, is a Fruitarian. Don’t ask me exactly how it works, but apparently
she only eats fruit. She doesn’t even drink coffee. And she doesn’t lick stamps. She held
a small celebration the day they introduced the already sticky kind. There was punch.
Donald, well, he owns a bike and rides around town wearing giant headphones.
One day I asked him what he was listening to.
“God,” he answered.
I walked away then, hoping he wasn’t following me.
Then there’s Neville who is certainly up there on the list of weirdest guys of all
time. Neville has a phobia.
“It’s called Venustraphobia,” he told me one day as we sat in the diner drinking
coffee. “It’s a fear of beautiful woman. I can’t even look at a beautiful woman, it’s so
bad,” he said, looking straight at me. I didn’t know what to make of it, but I saved my
self-confidence by telling myself that he was just a lying jerk looking for attention. Then
I went home to see if it was a real phobia. Much to my dismay, it was. “He still doesn’t
have it,” I said out loud to myself, though I was beginning to believe it less and less.
By far the weirdest guy I knew was my next-door neighbor. A guy named
Laundry Matt. I guess his parents didn’t want him, or maybe they did and thought they
were being creative by naming him after the place he was born. You see, his mama was
56
folding some clean sheets one day when she realized that she hadn’t just been getting fat
these last few months. A few minutes later, Laundry popped out.
Having weird parents must have damaged him some, I guess. Hell, I had
relatively normal parents and I’m pretty screwed up, so it makes sense that he’s so weird,
you know? Anyway, Laundry wasn’t just weird on account of how he came into this
world, but he also had a weird relationship with the actual Laundromat in town. He loved
it, and not in an I-Love-Pepperoni-Pizza kind of way. Now, it’s not like he wanted to
marry it or anything; it wasn’t that kind of relationship. No, it was more like he wanted to
take care of it. Protect it. Kind of like a big brother. I told you he was weird.
It all started when he was about eight years old, or so I’ve been told. I was a few
years younger than him. He ran away from home and the whole town went looking for
him. Well, right about dinnertime they decided to call it a night so that they could get
home in time for dinner and Wheel of Fortune. Laundry’s mama had to wash some
clothes, so, thinking that the search was over for the night, she set her husband Hector
down in front of the television with his meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and left for the
Laundromat. Well, much to her surprise, who did she find inside one of the dryers but
Laundry himself, legs hanging out, fast asleep in dryer ten.
He started running away a lot after that, but he’d always end up at the
Laundromat, so eventually everyone stopped saying he’d run away and just started saying
that it was his brain that had run away. Soon he started living there. The owners, Fiona
and George Dewar didn’t mind. He knew his way around a washer and dryer, so he fixed
them for free when they needed it, and in return they let him sleep on a cot in the
57
backroom, though, more often than not when they got there in the morning to open the
place they found him fast asleep in one of the dryers.
Shame about Laundry, really. Early one morning Neville came into the
Laundromat with the comforter off his bed. He always came in early so he wouldn’t run
into any beautiful women. But just as he was about to put it into the dryer, Lucie-Mae
Greenbottom walked in. Lucie-Mae, you see, is the county’s reigning beauty queen.
Great legs, bad timing for both Neville, who shoved that comforter in the dryer as fast as
he could, turned it on and ran from the building, and for Laundry, who had chosen that
particular dryer for last night’s bed. He was knocked out by the dryer’s second rotation,
and dead by the time Neville had the gumption to come back.
They cremated Laundry, his parents and the Dewars did, and now his ashes sit on
the shelf behind the Laundromat’s front desk, keeping an eye on the place.
Unfortunately for me, the incident put an end to all those rumors that Neville was
lying about his phobia.
58
III. Thaddeus Cahill
When Thaddeus Cahill was a boy he begged his mother and father for a brother or
sister. He didn’t care which, he told them, he just wanted someone to play with.
Thaddeus’ mother liked symmetry, though. So much so, that she agreed to go out with
Thaddeus’ father when she learned his name was Bob, and agreed to marry him when she
learned he weighed the same as her. A second child would never be the same size as
Thaddeus, so the symmetry she so required would have been ruined.
In the car Thaddeus sat in the backseat, in the middle, over the hump. “It’s so the
tires wear evenly,” she said every time she buckled the boy’s seatbelt.
At seven years old Thaddeus’ father sat him on his bed in the middle of his room.
In each hand young Thaddeus held a small stuffed tiger, one identical to the other down
to the reattached tails. He didn’t have many toys, but he had two of each of the ones he
did have.
“You must stop asking for a sibling,” Thaddeus’ father said as he sat down next to
the boy. “It’s ruining your mother’s nerves,” he said. “If she has another child our little
family will be uneven. She would have to be put in an institution,” he said. “Do you want
your mother to be put into an institution?” he asked.
Thaddeus wasn’t quite sure what an institution was, but by the sounds of it he did
not want his mother to be put in one.
59
So that he wouldn’t hate her, Thaddeus grew to appreciate his mother’s respect
for symmetry, and, because it was all he’d ever known, he adopted her beliefs when he
left for college.
Thaddeus got a single room in the dormitory and removed all of the furniture that
didn’t adhere to his lifestyle—namely two mismatched wooden chairs and a single
wardrobe that was covered in scratched out declarations like “Bill + Wendy” and
“Douglas was here.” Though it was a tight squeeze, he managed to outfit his room with
two bookshelves, two desks, two nightstands, and a double bed—one that could fit two
pillows across the top so that the extra flap on the pillowcases could be situated opposing
one another as mirror images of themselves.
To no one’s surprise, while at school Thaddeus proved to be a whiz in his
accounting classes. His professors believed him to be a sort of accounting savant, so it
was to him the school accountant came for help in finding where several thousand dollars
had disappeared. Apparently, the theater department had, for the last year or so, been
skimming money out of petty cash in order to produce their latest production of Death of
a Salesman. Everyone wondered why Willy Loman looked so uncharacteristically
successful; no one would have guessed it was because he was wearing Armani.
Thaddeus’ success in locating the misappropriated funds was just the first of many
monetary mysteries solved during his triumphant career as an accountant.
At the age of thirty-four Thaddeus met a lovely woman named Jennifer. She was
a little thick around the middle, but so was Thaddeus, so he thought she was simply
perfect because they matched. Jennifer was also an accountant and worked in the same
60
office building as Thaddeus. Thaddeus drove them both to work, and Jennifer drove them
both home. On their one-year anniversary Jennifer told Thaddeus that she was pregnant.
With twins, no less. After a life dedicated to symmetry, Thaddeus saw the arrival of twins
as the greatest of achievements. A matching set.
Near the end of Jennifer’s pregnancy, Thaddeus decided to take a walk to clear
his head. His sons, because he was sure they would both be boys, needed the perfect
names. But when Thaddeus reached the end of his road, his pedometer said that he had
walked just over half a mile. Were he to have turned back then he would have had to
walk a little over a mile. So Thaddeus continued to walk until he had walked exactly one
mile. Stopping at one mile, however, meant that Thaddeus would have to stop halfway
down a large hill. Thaddeus decided to continue walking until he had walked two miles.
No matter what, he decided, he would stop at two miles.
It was unfortunate, then, that exactly two miles away from Thaddeus’ house was
one of the busiest intersections in town. And had he been there a minute before or after
his actual arrival, he might have been able to take that last measure of two miles without
much difficulty. As it happened, as Thaddeus took his last perfectly paced step he failed
to notice the distracted driver of a minivan as she drove straight into him. And though the
emergency responders drove the eight point two miles to the hospital as fast as they
could, Thaddeus did not survive his injuries.
Upon hearing of her husband’s death, Jennifer went into labor and gave birth to
two lovely boys, Randy and Sandy, who were exactly the same in height and weight.
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END CREDITS
Their story started as so many great love stories do. They sat across from one
another in class exchanging those catch-each-other-looking glances. The kind so
perfectly choreographed in the movies.
They introduced themselves. James. Kara.
They talked. Oh really? Yes, really.
They laughed. I can’t believe he did that! He did!
They fell in love. I love you. Me too.
They married. I do. I do.
They bought a house. Sign here.
Their movie should have been complete. They shared the final, perfect kiss and
the credits should have rolled. But their lives continued after the audience left, and theirs
wasn’t meant to be a romance with a happy ending.
*
Early in the spring, when the nights are still cold enough to paint the ground with
a shining frost, the moon barely rises before it disappears into the lightening of the sky.
It’s a strange image, Kara thinks: the moon chased out of view by the coming of the sun.
On those mornings, she sits on the porch in the chair that he made, sipping her tea. She
watches the sun in its determined hunt, and she can’t help but think that the sun is a bully.
62
It pursues the moon, tracking it around the globe day after day in a never-ending battle of
light and dark. It uses its obvious power and strength to force the moon’s retreat, and
while the moon has never been strong enough to win, it never gives up. If she were to
believe in a god, she would pray for that kind of will. But she doesn’t, and sometimes she
thinks that’s why he left her.
But she knows that’s not why he left her. She knows that the woman he chose
over her doesn’t believe in god, either. They had met once, at party, she and this other
woman. They liked the idea of god, they had agreed during an alcohol-induced “meaning
of life” conversation. The other woman had a blonde haircut that made her look like an
elf. He never said that he didn’t like her long red hair, but she wonders if this is why he
left her.
*
She rises from the wooden chair, sanded and formed by his well-worn hands.
Hands that she had felt run up and down the length of her body more times than she could
count. Hands that felt almost as familiar on her body as her own. Hands that she’d like
more than anything now, to forget.
She takes the mug inside, setting it in the sink with a clunk, and she wishes that
this memory and the feeling of his hands could be left behind, like the shadow of a ghost
in the chair.
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She hates goodbyes. It’s a silly thing to think. No one likes goodbyes. That last
moment, when he had pressed his soft, moistened lips to her forehead, she hadn’t said
anything. There was nothing left to say. And yet, she wanted to fight with him, wanted to
leave a vicious red welt on his face where her hand landed, wanted to scream and be
screamed at, but he left before she had the chance, and before he could remember he was
supposed to care. So, now she is left wondering if he ever truly loved her in the first
place, or if she was just some sort of distraction. If she was his next logical step.
She walks through the house, and the rooms that had once vibrated with the sound
of their life together are now filled with wind. And though the windows had been opened
to let every last whisper of his presence escape, his scent still remains in everything,
tucked away in corners, sealed into folds, hidden in untouched pockets of the house.
Her mother calls and tells her that she is being overemotional, oversensitive, and
overdramatic. Her mother tells her of the other fish in the sea, that she needs to get back
on the horse, and not to cry over spilled milk. It’s been almost a year, her mother says. It
is about time she moves on and finds someone new. Maybe her mother is right. Maybe
her mother is delusional. In any case, she stops talking to her mother.
She lies on the couch, looking out at the sky. It is blue, the same blue as his eyes,
the same blue as the tropical waters in the pictures from their honeymoon, or of those
sterling silver and turquoise rings they bought by the side of the road near the Grand
Canyon where the red dust of the earth dyed everything it touched, including them.
She wishes, as she looks at the clouds sit in the sky, that she could believe that
some god, a prime mover, a higher power, cut them out of white construction paper,
64
placed them in the sea of sky and commanded they not move. The sky looks fake, like the
backdrop for a children’s play. Perfectly designed. Perfectly painted. Perfectly executed.
Perfect.
She wonders what she did wrong. What she could have done differently. What
she should have said. Someday she will realize that she is asking the wrong questions.
But for now, these are her days. Once filled with love and comedy, they are no longer
movie material. They, along with the rest of her current story line, are on the cutting
room floor of the studio that is producing her life.
65
ON LOCATION WITH THE GRIM REAPER
Charlie Rivers is a professional movie extra. Well, kind of. It’s not easy to be a
professional movie anything in a city that produces, on average, one movie a year. On the
side Charlie works overnights at a hotel. He parks cars and helps people with their
luggage and runs toothpaste and the like from room to room. But that’s not his real
career. Anyway, that’s what he tells people.
Up until two days ago the biggest acting gig Charlie ever had was as a man
reading a newspaper in the background of the movie Inspector Gadget starring the
affable Matthew Broderick. It wasn’t an Oscar worthy performance or anything, but
Charlie was very convincing, just the same. At least his mom thought so.
Two days ago, though, Charlie was hired to play the main character in a film
documentary about the origins of the Grim Reaper. He doesn’t have any speaking lines,
he just has to sort of loom and maybe stalk a little. But Charlie’s hoping to inspire the
writers to change the script.
This is how he got the part: he had been laying the morning papers in front of the
guests’ doors at the hotel—he does this around three in the morning—when the door he
was delivering to opened. Had Charlie been bent over, mid-delivery, he wouldn’t have
gotten out of the way fast enough, but as he had just been approaching the door he missed
being run over by a rotund man, whose face was the color of an over-ripe tomato, as the
man hastily ran from the room. Without looking back, the man got onto the elevator and
disappeared.
66
Another man appeared in the doorway wearing a set of silk pajamas with a
matching paisley patterned robe. He saw Charlie standing there with blue eyes
respectfully directed toward the floor, newspaper hanging limply from his hand.
“You would do well to not mention that, young man,” the robed man said, his
voice smooth and southern.
“I saw nothing worth mentioning, sir,” Charlie said.
“Thank you. Your discretion is appreciated. What is your name?”
“Charlie, sir.”
“Well, Charlie, how would you like to be in a movie?”
This was the way Charlie always imagined it would happen: some popular actor
or director would come to town to promote or film a movie and he would be noticed for
the star he knew he was destined to become. Terrance Howard once stayed at the hotel
and Charlie had done everything he could to impress the man: used different accents
every time he and Terrance Howard spoke, ran as fast as he could to deliver new filters
for Terrance Howard’s coffeepot; he’d even had the opportunity to fix Terrance
Howard’s TV. As he knelt behind the TV, Charlie pretended that he was dismantling a
bomb in Terrance Howard’s next movie—an action flick and a departure from the actor’s
most recent film work. But the actor failed to recognize Charlie’s potential and checked
out without so much as a tip.
With the opportunity the director was offering him, though, Charlie knew his time
had finally come. “I-I-I’d love to be in a movie.”
67
From there Charlie learned that the portly man he’d seen fleeing from the hotel
room was this man’s—the director’s—lover. A lover who had been using his wooing
abilities and charm to garner himself a role in the director’s next movie. Charlie met him
after he learned that that movie was going to be a low-budget documentary about the
origins of the Grim Reaper, and that he would have no lines.
“He didn’t look that part, in any case,” the director said. “Maybe it’s a good thing
he’s gone.”
Charlie, knowing very little about love and even less about the depth of the
director’s feelings for the man who left, stayed silent.
“Anyway,” the director continued, “you’d better get back to what you were doing,
and I should try and get some sleep.”
After they agreed on a meeting place for the first day of shooting—a park on the
city’s east end—Charlie left the room, closing the door behind him.
*
Today, Charlie woke up early so he could go through his warm up exercises
before going to the set. He liked saying things like that to himself—things that sounded
movie-like.
“I have to get to the set today by ten,” he told his mom during breakfast.
She was very excited for him. “I’ll have your white dress shirt ironed,” she said.
“You’ll want to look professional.”
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After eating his shredded wheat, Charlie sat on the floor in front of the full-length
mirror on the back of his bedroom door.
He started by stretching out his mouth, opening it wide and then quickly shifting
to pursed lips. He did this for five full minutes. His acting book said a minute or two
would be sufficient, but Charlie wanted to be extra prepared.
Next he sat up straight and imagined that attached to his spine and coming out of
the top of his head was a long string that was holding him perfectly aligned. He rolled his
head back and forward and then from side to side.
After his neck and face were loose, Charlie looked in the mirror and began his
vocal exercises.
“Green glass goblins, give them mead,” he said over and over, with careful
enunciation and projection.
“Amidst the mists and fiercest frosts/ with barest wrists and stoutest boasts/ He
thrusts his fists against the post/ and still insists he sees the ghosts.” Charlie had learned
this exercise one summer doing community theater in a small town nearby. He hadn’t had
any lines, then, either, but felt it was important to be ready to receive them if the chance
came.
When he felt he was fully primed, Charlie gathered his things and left.
*
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He wasn’t entirely sure what the budget for the documentary was, but when the
director said that it was a low-budget film Charlie expected there to be just a few other
people working on it. This was not the case, he realized as he approached the set.
Down a steep path, surrounded by ancient trees that blocked out the late morning
sun, a swarm of people milled. At least twenty people rushed around setting lights up,
testing audio equipment, planning camera shots, talking and arguing and laughing.
The director, dressed in carefully ironed jeans and an artfully distressed t-shirt,
was talking to the costumer when he saw Charlie on the shore of the activity.
Charlie tried to test the waters of the commotion. He walked timidly past two
cameramen who were arguing about the direction of the lenses. As he stepped aside to let
a man with an armload of cables pass him, he felt a firm hand on his shoulder.
“Can I help you?” the man asked. He was at least a foot and a half taller than
Charlie, and easily a hundred pounds heavier.
“Um, yeah, I’m here to play the Grim Reaper,” Charlie said.
“Sure you are, buddy. Get behind the line with the other spectators.”
“But, the director said I should come see him.”
“Behind the line,” the man said.
Before Charlie could go anywhere, the director saw him and motioned for him to
come over.
Charlie looked over his shoulder at the security guard as he joined the director and
had to suppress the urge to stick out his tongue.
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“Charlie, my boy, come here,” the director said, “This is Jake, our costumer. He’s
been making some alterations to the costume and he needs you to try it on.” The director
then turned to Jake and said, “after you’re done with him send him over to hair and
makeup. He needs his hair darker and his skin lighter. No, more yellow. No, gray. Make
his skin gray…or grayish-yellow.” And with that the director hurried off to direct
something elsewhere on the set.
A little while later, after he’d been clothed, his hair dyed, and his skin painted a
shade of gray somewhere between death and dying, Charlie stood in front of the camera.
*
Something needed to be done. He had completely blown his first day of shooting.
They were never going to give him any lines if he messed up as badly as he had today.
When he was supposed to stand he had swayed. When he was supposed to walk he had
sauntered. At one point, when Charlie was supposed to be stalking a victim, the director
stopped the shoot to ask him if he understood what the term stalk meant. He was ruining
his chance to be an actor. Something needed to be done.
So this is what he decided: in order to act like the Grim Reaper, Charlie needed to
find out more about him. His history, background, motivation. He needed to get into the
Grim Reaper’s head.
So Charlie did what any red-blooded American would do when looking for
reliable information from experts in their field. He searched the Internet.
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The Grim Reaper’s true origins are unknown, but it is widely believed that he is
fashioned after the Greek god Kronos, the god of the harvest.
“I am a Greek god,” Charlie said out loud.
Kronos dispatched his father’s genitals with a scythe and threw them into the
ocean, giving birth to the goddess Aphrodite.
“Well…that’s different.” Charlie thought.
Many religions, however, have personified death, giving it a body and the ability
to choose its next victim.
“The ability to choose victims? I can choose who lives and who dies?” Charlie
had always thought that the Grim Reaper took his cues from someone higher up. Like
God or someone of equal importance. But, he supposed, if the Grim Reaper isn’t
necessarily from one religion or another, it made sense that who dies is his decision to
make.
“It’s my decision to make,” Charlie thought. The idea was both terrifying and
exciting.
He got up from his small wooden desk and sat in front of the mirror. Looking at
his reflection he barely recognized himself. His hair was still black and would be for the
next thirty shampoos, or so. His skin, though he had washed it after he’d left the set, still
looked ashen, his cheeks hollowed, and the bags under his eyes puffy and shadowy.
“You are no longer Charlie Rivers,” he said to the man in the mirror, “You are the
Grim Reaper.”
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*
Charlie spent the night at a diner where his mother worked, looking at every
person who entered or left and deciding whether they should live or die.
From his booth in the corner of the restaurant he saw one woman. Her bright
orange hair was piled on top of her head, and she was wearing a brightly colored blouse
with Macaws printed on it. She reminded him of his mother, so he decided she could live.
Another woman sitting a few tables away from him was yelling into her cell
phone for the first twenty minutes she was there. She probably deserved to die, Charlie
decided.
It wasn’t until the man entered, though, that Charlie was sure that someone should
die. The man, wearing a dark blue puffy coat with a sports team’s logo emblazoned
across the back, entered, his arm hanging limply across the shoulders of a small blonde
woman.
They sat in the booth closest to Charlie. The man sat with his back to Charlie,
while the woman sat across the table. Both Charlie and the woman glanced over the
man’s shoulder at the same time, and their eyes snagged on the other’s glance. She had a
pretty face, except for the fading bruise along her jaw line, and the bandaged cut just
above her right eyebrow. She held her gaze on Charlie’s for just a moment before she
lowered her eyes.
The waitress came to the couple’s table to take their order.
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“I’ll take a cheeseburger and a chocolate shake,” the man said. “And make sure
my fries are hot.”
“And for you, miss?” the waitress asked the woman.
“Oh, she doesn’t need anything,” the man replied for the woman. He held his
hand up to the side of his mouth as though he was going to whisper something, but he
spoke for the whole diner to hear. “She’s getting fat,” he said, and burst out laughing, an
obnoxious laugh that made Charlie cringe.
The woman’s face blanched and her head lowered to rest on her chest.
This woman, too, reminded him of his mother, though it had nothing to do with
her hair or clothes.
Charlie glared at the back of the man’s head and wished for something sharp and
dangerous. He understood, then, the Grim Reaper’s choice of a scythe.
The look on his face must have given the nature of his thoughts away because he
caught the woman looking at him from under her eyelashes, and her head lifted slightly,
and though the smile she returned was slight—almost imperceptible—Charlie knew she
had thought of doing similar things to the man before.
By the time he left the diner Charlie had decided the fate of nearly twenty people.
*
Charlie stood between the trees, the heat from the wool cloak no longer bothering
him, the thickness of the makeup pancaked onto his face no longer a distraction, and the
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weight of the scythe in his hand a welcome responsibility. He stood staring at the man
crying at his feet with little sympathy and no remorse for what he was about to do. It was
his destiny.
“And cut!” the director yelled.
The man that was kneeling at Charlie’s feet rose and brushed the dirt from his
knees. “That was good,” he said. “That felt good, authentic,” he said.
Charlie nodded and lowered the hood of his cloak. He looked over at the director,
who caught his gaze and motioned for Charlie to join him.
“You’ve really shown up today, Charlie. You’re doing a fabulous job. I’m quite
pleased,” the director told him. “We might even be able to wrap up shooting early,” he
said.
“Thank you, sir. I’ve been really trying to get into character,” Charlie said.
“Which is something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about,” he continued. “You have
me running to catch my next victim in the next scene. I don’t think that the Grim Reaper
runs.”
The director looked at Charlie for a moment before her responded. “You may be
right, Charlie. Let’s shoot it my way first, though. Keep up the good work.”
Charlie was glad that the director was happy with the work he was doing, but
frustrated that it meant a shorter shooting schedule.
Charlie walked back to the props tent and handed the weapon back to Kevin, the
props guy. Charlie had expected that the scythe would be plastic, harmless in case it
accidentally hit someone. So he was surprised to pick up a real one on the first day of
75
shooting. The director had insisted on the real thing. He explained that plastic doesn’t
shine like the metal on a real scythe, and that the heaviness of the tool would translate
onto the screen and would give a real air of authenticity to the character.
“Not the weapon I would choose, if you ask me,” Kevin said. “It’s really not
practical. The Grim Reaper doesn’t have to fear any consequences, though. He can’t get
caught. Someone like me, I’d use a knife. Same outcome, but it’s more easily concealed.”
Charlie ran his hand along the handle as Kevin slid it from his hands.
“A knife would be practical.”
*
Charlie knew the acting job wouldn’t last forever, so the next night he had to go
in for his shift at the hotel. He delivered newspapers and bills, cars and shampoo, but
Charlie was no longer content to work at the hotel. His big break had come, he thought,
and he was still working at a hotel. That wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
He had finished most of his work by a little after three and was sitting in the lobby
watching TV when the front doors slid open. Charlie recognized the man from the diner
as he entered, this time with his arm around a curvy brunette’s waist.
“I want a room,” he said to the person at the front desk.
Charlie went around the corner and stood behind the wall that separated the TV
area from the rest of the lobby. Through a small glass panel he saw the man receive keys.
“You’ll be on the sixth floor, sir,” the front desk agent said.
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Charlie followed the couple as they walked to the elevators. As they got on, he
pushed the door into the stairwell and ran up the six flights of stairs that they were gliding
past.
He reached the floor as they put the key into their door.
“But what if your old lady finds out,” the girl was saying.
“She won’t. Even if she does she wouldn’t do anything,” the man said as the door
closed behind them.
Charlie ducked into the room that housed the requisite ice and vending machines.
His hands were shaking as he grabbed his multi-tool out of its holster on his belt. His
breath felt uneven and fast. This was his moment. He just needed to decide if he was
going to take it. His big break had already passed him by. Or maybe he was never
supposed to be an actor. Maybe his true destiny lay in playing a different kind of role.
He remembered the night his father left. He was seven and it had been raining
hard, so he was under the couch building Legos with his dog, who didn’t like the fierce
thunder, either. His mother was in the kitchen. She was cooking despite the fact that
they’d already eaten dinner hours ago. She was chopping onions with a long, sharp blade
when Charlie’s dad, who had been slamming and breaking things in the basement, came
bursting through the basement door and into the kitchen. His parents began arguing.
Charlie remembered the hatred in his father’s voice. The fighting stopped with the smack
of his father’s hand across Charlie’s mother’s face. She would have the bruise for more
than a month. Charlie’s father would forever have the scar on his neck where Charlie’s
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mother had pressed the tip of the knife as she told him to leave and never come back or
the tip of a knife would be the least of his problems.
Charlie crawled out from under the couch as the front door slammed, his Ninja
Turtles pajamas covered in dryer lint and dust bunnies. His dog stayed behind, but stuck
his nose out to make sure Charlie was okay.
“Is he gone gone?” Charlie asked his mother who was sitting at the kitchen table,
shaking, the knife still in her hands. He had seen his father leave “forever” before.
“I think this time he is, Little Bit,” she answered after a minute. “Come with me,”
she said as she laid the knife on the table and grabbed Charlie’s hand. They raced out the
backdoor and into the yard and the rain. Charlie’s mom stood as the rain poured down
over her, soaking her in a matter of moments. She looked over at Charlie whose hand she
still held tightly in her own.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of, Charlie,” she said over the sound of thunder. She
grabbed his other hand and the two of them twirled in the rain and stomped in puddles for
nearly an hour.
The next day brought a cold for both of them, but it did not bring Charlie’s father.
Nor did any day after.
A few miles away and several years later, Charlie gripped the multi-tool tightly in
his hand, its blade extended beyond its other features. His other hand removed his set of
master keys from his pocket.
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He stood in front of the door that the couple had gone in for a moment, regulating
his breath. Then he quietly put the key in and opened the door. He heard the sounds of the
couple’s activities and then heard them stop as he turned off the light.
“What the fuck,” the man yelled. Charlie heard him get up from the bed and feel
his way over to the light switch where Charlie was waiting for him. He grabbed the man
from behind before the light could be turned back on. He pressed the knife to the man’s
throat and spoke in a whisper into the man’s ear.
“I’m the Grim Reaper, and your time is up,” he said. He hadn’t really put any
thought into what he was going to say, but that seemed good enough.
The brunette ran out of the room, clutching her high heels to her chest. Her
makeup had smeared making her look like a less attractive Picasso painting. She tugged
at the hem of her short skirt as she got on the elevator, and the look on her face read as
sheer confusion.
Charlie and the man struggled for a few moments before the guy, several inches
shorter than Charlie, gave up. The knife pressed against his neck but Charlie kept it from
breaking through the skin. Barely. Beaten, the man started weeping and pleading as
Charlie hoped he would.
“Why should I give you a second chance?” he asked the man.
Had the man lied and claimed to be a good guy at heart, someone who deserved to
live because he was kind and giving and polite, Charlie might have slit the man’s throat,
but the man was, maybe for the first time in his life, completely and totally honest.
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“I’m a real asshole,” he said. “I mean, I’ve done some pretty nasty shit. But please
don’t kill me. Please,” he said.
“You’re going to do one good thing,” Charlie whispered into his ear. “You’re
going to leave that little blonde girl alone. Never touch her again, or I will find out.”
“Okay, okay, whatever, anything,” the man said, tears streaming down his face, a
trickle of blood running down his neck.
“I will find out if you do,” Charlie warned. “I’m the Grim Reaper.”
He pressed the knife into the man’s neck, leaving a small gash—enough to scar
him, but not to kill him—then shoved the man down and bounded out the door and into
the housekeeping closet across the hall. Through the peephole Charlie could see the man
standing in his boxers in the doorway of his room, rubbing his neck. The man looked up
and down the hall before going back into his room and closing the door.
The man left a few minutes later, fully clothed and looking up and down the hall
and then over his shoulder, convinced, apparently, that the Grim Reaper would show up
again at any minute.
“Let him think that,” Charlie thought as he watched the man get on the elevator.
Charlie went down to the lobby a few minutes later.
“D’you see that couple that came in here about a half hour ago?” the guy at the
front desk asked him.
“Yeah, why?” Charlie said.
“They just left. Separately. Guess things didn’t go as they’d hoped,” the guy said,
laughing to himself.
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*
The next day was the last on the set for Charlie. He went through makeup and
costuming as though he was heading to his own death: his feet were heavy and slow, and
his muscles ached with the desire to never stop coming to set.
The day went smoothly, each shot going as planned.
Towards the end of the day the director even asked Charlie to say a line.
“Your time is up,” he said in a low voice that he made as dark as he could. He
was grateful for the previous night’s unexpected rehearsal.
By late afternoon, the sun, hidden from them all day by the surrounding trees,
began disappearing from the rest of the city, too. Charlie removed his cloak for the last
time, washed the makeup from his face, and headed to the props tent when the director
called him over to where he was watching the cameramen pack up their equipment.
“Charlie, I’m really happy with the work you’ve done. You can expect a call from
me the next time I’m in town,” the director said. He looked at the scythe in Charlie’s
hand and, motioning to it, said “I was thinking you might like to take something from the
set here as a remembrance.”
“Can I have it?” Charlie asked, glancing at the gleaming metal of the scythe’s
head, then running his hands over the smooth wood of the handle.
“Splendid idea. It’s yours.”
Charlie shook the director’s hand and, scythe in hand, started walking home.
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*
Charlie Rivers is the Grim Reaper. Well, kind of. It would be easy to kill people
in his city, but it’s not so easy to give them second chances. So, on the side Charlie works
overnights at a hotel. He parks cars and helps people with their luggage and runs
toothpaste and the like from room to room. That’s not his real career. But it’s the one he
tells people about.
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WEARING BLAZERS BACKWARDS
During the worst of a fierce summer thunderstorm, the girls in cabin three at West
Valley Summer Camp huddled together in the lower halves of bunk beds. They squealed
every time thunder smacked, and drew closer to one another, dizzy with excitement,
shaking with nerves.
Emma ran out of the cabin and into the downpour. She grabbed a metal bat,
abandoned when the storm chased all the baseball players indoors, and held it high as she
danced in the rain.
“Emma, you’re crazy!” the other girls screamed.
The day before, she had discovered a boy named Carey catching frogs by the
pond. She spent an hour helping him, but when she leaned in to press a kiss to his cheek,
he’d fallen backwards into the rushes, a look of horror on his face. So she’d kissed the
frog they’d found, instead.
“You’re insane,” Carey said.
Her mother and father drove out from the city to visit her on parents’ day. When
they arrived, she was crouched over an anthill sprinkling sugar crystals from a packet
she’d stolen from the mess hall.
She heard her counselor, who was walking with her parents, ask them, “Has
Emma had any developmental delays?”
83
The next day, she nearly stepped on a dead bird on the walk back from the horse
corral. She picked it up with a plastic grocery bag she found caught in the weeds. In the
arts and crafts building she used popsicle sticks and glue to build it a coffin.
“She’s such a psycho,” she heard a boy say as he walked by her table.
A girl Emma didn’t know sat down in the seat across from her. “My mom would
say you just like wearing your blazers backwards,” the other girl said. “Here,” she
continued, a piece of black felt in her outstretched hand. “Use this for the lining.”
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THROUGH THE EYES OF ONES WHO LOVE
Evan wondered, as he looked at Tara’s body in the coffin, if dead girls wore bras.
Kate wondered, looking into the same coffin, if you weigh less when you’re dead
than when you’re alive.
They both wondered if the coffin was comfortable, and realized that it didn’t
matter.
“Do you think her boobs are real?” Kate asked. She had her finger out and poised
to poke one of the mounds.
Evan reached out and lightly smacked Kate’s hand before she could touch the girl.
“How would I know?” he said. He would never admit to wondering the same thing.
“It’s just that they’re so…perky. I figured you’d lose some of that, you know?”
Kate said.
“Maybe they’re in rigor mortis.”
“That’s gross.”
“You’re the one who’s talking about your dead cousin’s boobs.” He paused for a
moment before he said, “Maybe they, you know, gave her fake ones.”
“They were generous, then,” Kate said.
“Why are you being so mean?” Evan asked.
“It’s a stage of grief. Haven’t you heard?”
As Kate looked down at her cousin she was almost glad for the fact that they had
been close in age but not in contact. You always hear about kids who die at eighteen, but
85
you’re never supposed to know them, and now that she knew one she was glad it hadn’t
been very well.
“Do you think she was a virgin?” Evan asked.
“I don’t know. I barely knew her,” Kate said.
“Her face looks pretty good, at least,” he said.
“Well, at least she can be glad for that. Maybe Tara can get lucky in the afterlife,”
she said, her jaw clenched, teeth grinding into each other. “Why did you even come?”
Kate asked.
“It’s not easy to see someone you know in a coffin,” Evan said by way of
explanation.
In their seats toward the back of the room, he studied the people as they made
their way to the casket, while Kate cleaned the dirt out from under her fingernails.
“Why does everyone bow their heads as they walk back to their seats?” Evan
asked.
“Because no one wants to see anyone else crying,” Kate said, not looking up from
her hands.
Tara’s mother sat at the front of the room in the same place she would have sat if
she’d been the mother of the bride, not the mother of the dead. She held a crumpled tissue
in each hand, but she didn’t cry. No one knew that she had convinced herself that her
daughter wasn’t dead, just away.
From right behind Kate and Evan came the opening notes to a familiar hymn.
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Evan leaned over to Kate. “They play this song at every funeral. I think it’s
mandatory.”
“How many funerals have you been to?” she asked, but before he could answer
the preacher stepped to the front of the room and settled behind a podium to the left of the
casket.
He spoke with a careful voice, low and respectful. Kate imagined him at home,
standing in front of a mirror, speaking as though to an audience of mourners, using
hackneyed phrases. “Gone far too soon; God needed her in heaven; A bright star
extinguished,” practiced over and over for just such an occasion.
Kate wondered, if Tara could see this, what she was thinking. Was she laughing?
Crying? Or was she angry that her life, in the grand scheme of things, meant nothing?
Kate wondered if it even mattered.
Evan reached for Kate’s hand where it sat in her lap and gave it a gentle squeeze.
She realized then that it may not matter to her cousin, but it absolutely mattered to
everyone left behind.
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HOW MANY ROADS
Kelly feels the warm blood trickle up her cheek and she reaches down to touch it.
It’s sticky and grainy from the glass, dirt, and rocks embedded in her skin. There’s a large
gash near her ear; she can feel another by her hairline. Her head is throbbing and hot, and
her neck, exhausted with the weight of her head, feels like it is straining to keep her head
from falling away. The seatbelt across her chest and thighs is carving itself into her,
cutting off circulation. That doesn’t matter, though—her legs are already numb and her
chest hurts less than the rest of her body.
The CD never skipped. Did the CD ever skip?
Bob Dylan’s voice, rough and crusty, rattles out of the speakers around her.
The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind…
Her left arm hangs limp beside her head, dangling, her hand resting slack and
motionless on the ceiling. There is a searing pain coming from her left shoulder that’s so
intense she’s considering ways of hacking her arm off. She remembers reading about a
guy who cut his arm off with a pocketknife, but he’d walked away from his arm. At the
moment she doesn’t have that option. She’s already tried to unfasten her seatbelt, timidly,
for fear of falling and hurting herself further. She also has no idea how the car is resting.
If her worst nightmare has come true, the car is sitting on the edge of a cliff, teetertottering and on the brink of plummeting to an explosive end. Those were words she
doesn’t want to think about right now. Plummeting. Explosive. She isn’t aware of any
cliffs in the area, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.
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If only I could reach my cell phone.
She can see it a few feet away from her, on the ceiling just behind the front
passenger seat. She gingerly stretches her right arm as far as it will extend, but the phone
is just out of reach. Waiting. Taunting. Mocking her.
The screen lights up brightly for a few seconds, a message indicating she’s
received a text. Kelly wriggles and squirms as much as the safety belt lashed across her
body will allow, but as she gropes for the phone again, a tremor of pain rolls through her
shoulder. She feels lightheaded, bright spots like stars expand behind her eyelids. She can
sense the blackness coming; like a shadow at the corners of her eyes, it creeps in on a
wave.
*
“Talked to Georgia today,” Kelly tells Jack when he gets home from work. She’s
stirring cheese into a béchamel sauce, nearly ready to slide a big pan of macaroni and
cheese into the oven.
“Oh? What’d she have to say for herself?” Jack asks as he drops the mail on the
counter. He shrugs out of his suit coat and drapes it over the back of a kitchen chair.
She doesn’t turn away from the stove. Tries to concentrate on the pot in front of
her. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches Jack leaning into the refrigerator, rooting
around for something to drink. “Our mother contacted her,” she says. It’s hot for
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September, and the back of his white dress shirt sticks to the sweat of his back. “She’s
moved back to town.”
“You’re kidding,” he says, turning to look at her.
She shakes her head. “She wants to see me.”
She’s startled when Jack snorts loudly.
“Fat chance of that happening,” he says.
“I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.” She looks up and sees Jack watching her,
his eyes narrowed with apparent suspicion. “Tell the kids dinner’s almost ready?” she
says.
*
It’s the cold that wakes her. Dylan is still singing. Her husband made the mixed
CD for her and included all of her favorite songs. She’s listened to it so often, she knows
the order by heart, starts singing the next song in her head before the song that’s playing
is fully over.
How does it feel, to be on your own, with no direction home…
Kelly is shivering now, and with each movement she feels her shoulder shift and
bloom into a renewed surge of pain. She grinds her teeth, willing her shaking to stop. It
had been snowing lightly all day, and while the weather hadn’t gotten much worse, it had
certainly grown colder and windier since she’d left her mothers’ for home.
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Where her windshield once had been, there is now an evergreen bough. The
shards of glass that litter the crushed limb sparkle like precious gemstones in the faint,
green, half-light that seeps in around the needles.
My headlights must still be on. Maybe someone will see them.
It’s strange the way memory works. As the heady evergreen scent fills the car,
and as another shadow washes over Kelly’s eyes, she is reminded, the way she always is
by the scent of pine trees, of the last Christmas she spent with her mother, nearly thirty
years before. It was like a Christmas from one of those lifestyle magazines they have in
the waiting room at the dentist. She and her older sister, Georgia, had knelt on dining
rooms chairs, watching their mother cut shapes like stockings and wreaths into cookie
dough. They’d snuck their fingers into the frosting bowl when it came time to decorate.
They’d giggled as they ran around and around the tree, wrapping the lower boughs
heavily in the brightly colored chain they’d made from construction paper. They’d sat,
breathless from excitement, and watched the abominable snowman chase after a
claymation Rudolph.
Then their mother left, taking with her the big, robin’s egg blue, leather suitcase
with the built-in luggage tag, and the brand new stand mixer she’d gotten as gifts earlier
that day. Kelly doesn’t remember hearing the fighting, but Georgia says it was constant.
Georgia says that she wasn’t surprised when their mother left them, standing huddled
next to their dad, with silent tears marking tracks down their flushed cheeks. Kelly does
remember that the tree was still standing in their living room, its rainbow colored lights
illuminating a pile of needles that had been gathering beneath it, its scent still permeating
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the downstairs; a big, black garbage bag of balled up wrapping paper still sitting next to
it. She and Georgia had gone to bed early that night without much protesting, and the
next day the tree and any trace of Christmas had disappeared.
Kelly’s cell phone is ringing. An irritating, tinny ring that pierces her ears and
had, on occasion, garnered her evil glares from the customers at the little greasy-spoon
where she’s worked the lunch shift every weekday for the past five years. Now Kelly
glares at the phone, lit up and vibrating. The ringer is a discordant soprano to Jim Croce’s
tenor, his voice lulling where Dylan’s had rattled. Then the ringing stops and Kelly is left
with Jim.
If I could save time in a bottle…
Kelly’s phone is beeping, alerting her that she has a voicemail. She wonders if
Jack called, or if it was her mother, and if either of them had called to apologize. Not that
Jack had anything to apologize for. He’d been right after all. Whatever Kelly had
expected from the visit had clearly been too much.
Kelly guesses, judging by what song is playing on the CD, that she’s been
hanging upside down, strapped into her car, for maybe half an hour. She hasn’t heard
anything in that time but her own thoughts and the music. She knows the weather is
keeping people home, but she’d hoped at least one person would drive by.
She tries to reach the steering wheel to see if she can beep her horn, but she’s too
tightly secured to the seat, and her legs refuse to move. Kelly reaches across her body and
gently pushes at the window there. It’s a shattered maze of webbed cracks and gives
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easily. A rush of bitter cold air bursts in, consuming any warmth that was left. The wind
howls through the car, bringing with it a drift of snow.
“Help!” she screams. The sound bounces around the inside of her car and comes
back to her, stunning her with how obscene the noise sounds against the silence of the
snow.
Jack had proposed to her on a night like this. If he had read a textbook on
proposing he couldn’t have made it more perfect: candles, champagne, a crackling fire,
soft music. Sometimes she wishes he wasn’t so perfect all the time. Sometimes he makes
her feel more flawed just by being around him.
She’d heard once that thinking about warm things would make you forget how
cold you are, but the cold is working its way solidly into her bones and no amount of
daydreaming about fires is making her feel any warmer. She can’t stop shaking and her
teeth are chattering so much that it sounds like someone tap dancing.
Kelly closes her eyes, trying to hear the slightest noise that would signal help
coming, but she hears nothing, and soon she drifts off into a restless sleep.
*
“I don’t think you should go,” Jack says. He’s watching her as she gets ready to
leave.
She sighs as she scrapes a brush through her hair. She looks at him in the mirror.
They’ve had this discussion several times over the last few weeks. “I think it might be a
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good idea,” she says. This has been her argument since she first brought up the idea of
visiting her mother. She can’t really come up with a better reason, which, for Jack, master
of logic and good sense, isn’t reason enough.
Jack leans heavily on their bed, then folds his arms across his chest. “She was
drunk when you talked to her on the phone.”
“You don’t know that.” Kelly has no idea why she’s being defensive. Her mother
had sounded drunk. But after weeks of waiting for her mother to call and ask to see her,
Kelly wasn’t about to say no.
Jack sighs as he rises from the bed. He walks over to the bathroom door and leans
against the jamb. “Nothing she says will make it okay,” he says.
“I still have to go,” she says. She has a sad smile on her face. “I still have to give
her a chance.”
“I’d rather you not go,” Jack says.
“And I’d rather have your support. I guess neither of us gets what we want.”
*
A blinding pain wakes her up a short time later, just as Carole King is starting one
of her songs.
So far away. Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore…
Kelly has shifted in her sleep, unconsciously searching for more comfort, and
bumped her shoulder. She feels it grind and twist unnaturally. The sound that comes out
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of her mouth doesn’t sound human to her own ears. It’s been over an hour, she knows,
and she’s starting to wish she believed in god.
After her mother left, Kelly’s dad started taking her and Georgia to church. Kelly
remembers that their pastor had a lazy eye. At five years old she hadn’t understood what
that meant. She thought he had the ability to look two places at once, so she was always
especially good when her family sat near the front. When she was seven, Georgia told her
that his eye was like that because it was bored. After that, Kelly tried to do things to keep
him entertained. Her dad then informed her that waving at the pastor and making faces at
him were not appropriate activities during the sermon.
She stopped going to church when she was sixteen. She’d grown out of God.
Jack still goes to church.
She’s stopped shaking, her teeth have stopped chattering, and all she can think
about is going to sleep. Kelly closes her eyes and listens to Don McLean as she drifts off.
So bye, bye, Miss American Pie…
*
Her mother is living in an old motel that’s been converted into efficiency
apartments. It’s behind a Mexican restaurant and the air smells like hot oil and spices.
Kelly knocks on the door marked 4½ and hears a small, rusty voice shout, “Come
in.”
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Kelly pushes the door open and sees her mother sitting on the edge of a bed. She’s
stamping out the cigarette she’d been holding into an ashtray on the nightstand. Her eyes
are dull and bloodshot, and her graying blond hair hangs limp against her puffy cheeks.
“Well, you’ve grown,” her mother says. She doesn’t move from where she’s
sitting.
“It’s been thirty years,” Kelly says.
“Oh, you’re not going to start in on me right away, are you?” the woman asks.
Kelly shakes her head. She lowers herself into a chair next to the door.
Her mother stands up and stumbles over to the mini-refrigerator beneath a sink in
the corner of the room. She pulls out two cans of beer, then turns and offers one to Kelly.
Kelly takes it but doesn’t drink any.
“Don’t say I never gave you anything,” her mother says, a crooked smile
spreading across her weathered face. She drops back onto the bed.
Kelly places her can on the table next to her, then stands up. “This was a bad
idea,” she says.
*
She wakes up when the CD stops. The lights that had once reflected off of the tree
limbs, giving a comforting greenish light to the inside of the car, are now out, and she
can’t see anything. The beeping of her cell phone has also stopped. The battery drained.
She’s no longer cold. Her arm, leg, face, her whole body has grown numb. But as she
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blacks out again, she thinks she might hear sirens in the distance, though it could have
just been the wind howling.
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SUPPLY AND DEMAND
I. Kim
This isn’t the first time I’ve watched you. I have a hard time imagining that it will
be the last.
I’m sitting in front of your house in my mother’s car. I’ve borrowed it for this
evening because her car is newer and it doesn’t have that dent in the front fender like
mine does—the one I got the second day I followed you home from work. There are still
days I can’t take my eyes off of you. I didn’t know then, like I do now, how to drive and
watch you at the same time.
This afternoon, as I prepared, I painted my nails a shade of polish called Mango
Slush. You wear orange a lot, so I think it must be your favorite color. I’m also wearing
your favorite blue sweater. You once said it brought out my eyes. I’ve taken my nametag
off, Kim with a heart over the “i,” but you’ll know who I am. I’m sure of it.
The radio quietly maneuvers around some classical piece of music thick with
strings, but I can barely hear it above the throbbing of my heartbeat in my ear. I’m not
nervous, though. My hands are steady, perched on the steering wheel. I wouldn’t say I’m
excited, either, though. I know that this night will be bittersweet.
I’m really quite surprised, and maybe a little disappointed, that you haven’t
noticed the signs I’ve been leaving for you. I expected more from you. Maybe I was
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expecting too much. I saw this crime show on TV once where a criminal was discovered
because of a cigarette butt he left on the ground. I don’t smoke, but I bought a pack of
cigarettes, burnt them all down to the filters, and scattered them outside your bedroom
window. You haven’t seen them, yet, though. I wonder what you’d think if you saw them
now.
I turn the radio off when I see your approach in the rearview mirror. I’ve beaten
you home from your evening jog, but just by a few minutes. I sigh, knowing this is our
last time together. It’s going to be a special night.
You would greet me if you knew I was here, I’m sure of it. You always give me a
warm smile at the bank every Friday. You come in at noon. I go on break at 11:45 so I’m
just coming back when you get here. This gives me the opportunity to freshen up for your
arrival. It also means that I get to be the one to deposit your paycheck. When you leave I
take it back out of my drawer to smell it. I have to be careful, though. My manager saw
me do this once, so I had to make up an excuse to explain what I was doing. I thought I
smelled something funny, I told him. It didn’t, though. It smelled like you.
You enter your house and I get out of the car to take my place just outside your
bathroom window. Through the blinds I can see you take off your shirt. Your back is
damp and beads of sweat trickle down the valley of your spine, soaking into the top of
your gym shorts. In one fluid, graceful move you are naked and beautiful. The glass
begins to cloud as you step into the shower. It will be easy now to enter your house. You
don’t lock your doors.
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Today you didn’t come into the bank; you drove through. There was a woman in
your car. Her hair was too shiny and her lips were too full. You were both laughing. I
could make you laugh like that. I know it. She was wearing a blouse the color of
begonias. It clashed with her skin tone and I wondered why you would want her.
In your living room I run my finger along the fireplace mantle, and it picks up a
wad of dust. That woman in the car clearly doesn’t take care of you. I would. I would
clean your house and cook your favorite meals and let you pick the movies we watched. I
bet she makes you watch romantic comedies all the time. I think you’d prefer dramas
more, but you’re nice, so you do what she wants.
I sit down on the floor outside your bathroom door, and I can hear you humming
some unknown song. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard. I lean my head
back against the wall and close my eyes, breathing in the scent of your shower and
listening to you serenade me. This is your last gift to me.
All too soon the song, and the shower, are over. I hear the crack of the shower
curtain as you whip it open. I hear you grab a towel off the rod and vigorously rub it over
your hair, your chest, your legs.
I rise from my seat and silently make my way to your bedroom. I settle myself
onto the edge of your bed. From my purse I pull the kitchen knife I brought from home—
the one I spent an hour sharpening today.
I hear your footsteps padding softly down the hallway. You stop abruptly in the
doorway. For the first time you see me. You really see me. Or maybe you just see the
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knife in my hand. Either way, I have your attention, and you’re finally going to know
how much I love you.
II. Megan
The first cut was an accident. Megan bumped her father’s razor in the shower, and
as it fell with a clatter to the floor it nicked her right thigh, just above the knee. It was a
shallow cut, and as the blood trickled out in a slow but steady stream, she felt her chest
expand, as if taking its first deep breath in a very long time.
She touched the flow of slick red liquid and brought it to her lips. She painted her
lips with her blood, and her tongue darted out to taste it. It was flavored red metal. It
tasted like power and strength. She wondered if licking a red Corvette would taste the
same.
Megan picked up the silver razor from the bed of the shower and gave herself an
identical cut on the other thigh, letting the blood flow down both of her legs. Blood
mixing with water, the floor turned a happy shade of pink.
When she got out of the shower Megan grabbed one of her mother’s pure white
towels and began to pat herself dry, soaking up the blood as it flowed down the front of
her legs. Her mother would later purse her lips, silently accusing her of ruining her
perfection. Special towels for special times of the month, she would chastise, her voice
the same temperature as an icicle and just as sharp.
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Megan cut tiny slices in her skin whenever she was in the shower. She liked to
carve in rows. Little crops of blood would sprout on her thighs, her arms, her hips. Four
rows of four, then six rows of six, she would cut twice each shower, adding to the little
grid of gouges.
Megan would dip her fingers into the fresh flows and draw pictures on the shower
walls. Cars, bridges, cats, flowers, all produced in that vicious shade of red. There was no
thought to what she drew, only that her blood was creating something outside of the
limits of her skin. The shower walls were her canvas. Her blood was her medium. Megan
felt a sense of loss as she washed down the walls before she turned off the steaming
water. She mourned for her paintings of blood as she watched her artwork flow down the
drain.
When she got out of the shower she would put band-aids on the cuts before she
slipped on her panties, then her jeans. At school Megan would feel the bandages rub
against the stiff denim—a silent, constant reminder. She wondered what she would do in
the summer when it grew too hot for sleeves.
Megan started to think about suicide. There wasn’t a single moment of decision.
No great, evil deed was committed against her to make her start considering it. Her thighs
and arms were beginning to look like graph paper. She was running out of usable space.
The only room left was the soft underbelly of her forearm. When she flipped her arms
over, she was welcomed by smooth, flawless skin.
Later, Megan’s mother would read articles that said it was for control. Selfmutilators cut because it is something in their life they have control over. With a glass of
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vodka in one hand, and a bottle of Vicodin on the end table next to her, her mother would
begin to understand.
III. Jenny
Your heart arrives in a plastic bag, stapled to the gurney next to your head so that
it doesn’t run away, I imagine. Having a heart so ready to separate from you must mean
something.
I think: had I known I was going to meet the man of my dreams at work today, I
would have put on some lipstick. Sometimes my lips are so pale I can look in the mirror
and forget that I have them. Plus, I read once that during sex lips turn bright red, so
women wear lipstick to make men think of having sex with them. I want you to think of
having sex with me.
We haven’t even been formally introduced, yet, but I know we are meant to be
together. I know this because I’ve written a list of requirements for my future mate, and,
so far, you’ve met all of them. You are quiet, sensible, well maintained, attentive, and
available.
Irene, another attendant, says your name is Josh. I love the name Josh because it’s
a synonym for teasing. I wonder if you tease people a lot and if they forgive you for it
because it’s in your nature. It’s a much better name than Jenny, my name, which means
nothing to anyone, not even myself.
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I want to reach up to your face and brush away the wave of blonde hair from your
eyes. It’s the color of the sun when it rises in the summer, and it’s wet because it’s just
been washed. I think it must shine like a sun, too, when it’s dry.
You stare at me openly with wide, unblinking eyes, eyes like puddles of the
richest mud, and I feel like we’ve shared a moment. I like brown eyes because they’re
sensible. People with blue eyes tend to be flighty and die younger. I could tell you that’s
only my opinion, but in my opinion it should be considered a fact, so I’ll let you think it
is.
Irene will be coming soon to take you away, so I know we don’t have much time.
I bend down and inhale. Air that belonged to you is now mine and we are further
linked. You have a faint chlorine scent to you that I don’t find wholly unappealing. This
is why I know we’re meant to be together. There’s little worse than being with someone
who smells badly. I think you must be a swimmer, and decide that you are. Your scent,
along with your broad, muscled shoulders, and trim waist, give you away.
You are quiet at first, except for the normal sounds. I like this. I appreciate
silence, too, so you know. You might appreciate this, given your apparent nature.
I am not like other girls.
I release your heart from its plastic bag and cup it in my hands. The organ, like a
sack of wet sand, shifts slightly and I imagine for a moment that it’s beating. Its weight
will be a pleasant memory.
My hands are shaking as I reach for you. Your skin is soft and moist. I imagine
that if I tried to put my finger through it, it would stretch and stretch, fitting my finger
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into a skin-thimble made just for me. But instead of poking you, my finger brushes along
the landscape of your body, memorizing instantly the contours of your hills and valleys.
And I know that after Irene takes you away from me the feeling of the dew from your
skin on my lips as I kiss my finger will remain. Long after you’re gone I will remember
this, remember these perfect moments between you and me, and I will know that we were
meant to be together.
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ALL IN
They met at an amateur poker tournament.
Sarah noticed after four hands, maybe five, that his left pinky finger would shake
ever so slightly if he had a good hand.
Ryan noticed that her right eyebrow would raise a fraction of an inch when she
was bluffing.
They both lost to a man in a ten-gallon hat who would smile when he got a bad
hand and frown when it was good. But all of the other players were skeptical enough to
think he was playing them more than he was playing cards.
They walked away from the table losers. They were just the right amount of
cynical not to realize that they were actually winners, their victory held gently, timidly,
between their now shared handclasp.
They moved in together right away because they couldn’t think of a single reason
why they shouldn’t. They sat in their tiny apartment in one of the safer parts of the city,
sipping coffee or tea, depending on the time of day, at their miniature dining table, no
more than an end table, really, talking.
“Isn’t it strange how we brush with a brush, and mop with a mop, but we don’t
broom with a broom?” Ryan asked.
“Isn’t it funny how mnemonic is one of the hardest words to spell?” Sarah replied.
“Isn’t it strange that monosyllabic has five syllables?” Ryan said.
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“Isn’t it funny how we park on driveways and drive on parkways?” Sarah asked,
and they laughed because that’s what they did, as they drank hot liquid from their giant
shiny mugs.
On Saturday afternoons they walked to the market. Every week they bought more
than they intended, but preferred their complaining backs and hands to the silence of a
car.
When they got home they took turns rubbing each other’s backs, then feet. They
lay naked on their old, corduroy couch, shifting slightly every few seconds to make the
most of the fabric as it rubbed against their bodies. He marveled at the cream of her skin
against the dark chocolate color of the couch. Sarah rose, her backside imprinted with
tiny rows of indentations, to begin cooking dinner, and Ryan thought about the rows left
by the couch as farmlands of flesh.
She got burned once by the oil of frying zucchini, so whether she liked it or not,
she wore an apron while cooking.
Ryan liked it.
On Sundays they walked to the park. They sat on a bench by the pond, each with
their nose in a book. Every once in a while they looked up and smiled at each other.
Sarah looked out at the ducks on the pond as they chased one another, or as they bobbed
under the water for food, their little duck backsides mooning the world. She closed her
eyes and breathed deeply for a few moments before returning to her book. Ryan watched
her as she performed this weekly ritual. He wondered what she was thinking, but never
asked. He wondered if she was praying.
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They lived quietly, not silently, in their tiny apartment, making slight sounds or
sighs, interpreting each to mean different things.
“I’m hungry.”
“I’m tired.”
“I’m bored.”
And then she would cook, or he would turn on the television, or they would make
love.
She worked as a florist, constructing monolithic arrangements for church altars,
tenderly wrapping single buds for lovers, and creating elaborate bouquets for cheaters. At
the end of every day she brought home a small, simple bouquet for the table.
Ryan liked the flowers, but he wished that she would let him buy her some every
once in a while. Instead, he found her things on his walk home from the library where he
worked. Pebbles shaped like eggs, or un-twinned butterfly wings. Or he’d stop at the gas
station and buy her a candy necklace. Or he’d bring her an old postcard he’d found in a
book donated for the book sale.
Sarah had known she was pregnant for about a week before she watched the stick
turn pink. It was a cool, late spring morning, and she could smell the earthy promise of
rain in the air. The sun, looking like a perfectly round cut ruby, hung low in the sky. The
rage of a thunderstorm would bring darkness before night could.
She wore clothes that night as she fixed dinner. Outside, as she had predicted, rain
crashed like waves on the windows. The wind had already stolen one of their plastic deck
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chairs. Noisily it had been flung over the railing where it fell with a clatter and a snap to
the concrete below.
As Sarah placed the dishes on the table she thought about the new life growing
inside her and became nauseated. She wondered if morning sickness was nothing more
than nerves. Nothing more than women waking up every morning to the realization that
they were one day closer to being responsible for another human being.
As they sat down to eat, Ryan knew something was different, but said nothing.
“Could you pass the squash,” she asked.
“You didn’t say please,” he said, a toothy grin on his smooth face.
“Fuck please,” she said.
And still he said nothing.
Sarah didn’t want kids. She never had. She didn’t want the hassle. She didn’t like
the idea of someone else depending on her. She wondered if this made her a faulty
woman—if there was something wrong with her. She didn’t want kids.
Ryan did. They’d talked about it before. Or, rather, he had talked about it before.
He had told her, in the hushed tones of their bedroom, that he wanted to be a father. His
own father had died when he was just a child. He wanted to be the father he had always
wished for.
She should have told him then that she was never going to be the mother he
wanted her to become. She was never going to be a mother at all. But she didn’t tell him.
Instead she continued to take her birth control and pray.
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Sarah didn’t like the word abortion. It was too harsh. She preferred the word
procedure. It was clinical, less personal. As she made the appointment the day after the
color pink changed her life, Sarah wondered if there would ever be a time when she
would tell Ryan about this particular procedure.
It hurt less than she expected. Just a tug and a prick and it was done. She was told
to expect cramping, a heavier than normal cycle, and mild to moderate depression. Sarah
had the taxi driver who drove her home stop a block shy of her apartment, just in case
Ryan had come home early. She walked that last block slowly, tenderly placing each foot
in front of the other. When she finally got back to the apartment, she lay down in bed and
fell asleep.
She heard Ryan come home, but didn’t get up.
She didn’t, however, hear the phone ring a little while later. Ryan picked up the
receiver and tucked it between his ear and his chin.
“This is Doctor Hanson’s office, may I speak to Ms. Douglas?”
“She’s lying down right now. Is there something I can do for you?”
“No, we were just calling to check and see how Ms. Douglas is feeling.”
Ryan stopped rifling through the mail in his hands. A look of confusion washed
over his face, starting with his eyebrows knitting themselves together, and ending with
his mouth forming a baffled purse.
“She’s fine,” he said, tentatively.
“That’s good. Just have her take it easy. With procedures such as these, there can
be more emotional pain than physical,” the woman on the other end explained.
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“Excuse me, but which procedure was this?” he asked. He could feel his heart
beating in his throat, could feel it pulsing hot and erratic from just under his Adam’s
apple. Her pause was tangible. If he were to reach through the phone he would have been
able to feel her stop. Collect her thoughts. Mentally run through protocol.
“Sir, if you don’t know, I’m not allowed to tell you.” She said this and hung up.
The click from the other side of the phone sounded painfully loud and abrupt.
Ryan wondered what kind of procedure wouldn’t allow the doctor’s office to talk
about it with him. He came up with the right answer almost immediately, but willed it to
be something else. He sat there, on their couch, for an hour, going through the names of
every medical procedure he’d ever heard of, but none of them made any sense.
Finally, on shaky legs and with little breath in his lungs, he rose from the couch
and walked to the bedroom, opening the door gently.
Sarah was lying on the bed, curled into a tight knot. The room had grown dark
with the arrival of dusk, the jewel toned sunset not even visible at the edges of the
curtains.
He sat on the edge of the bed at her feet, and gently placed a hand on her calf.
Sarah woke with a deep breath as she unfolded herself from the pretzel-like
position she had woven herself into. Ryan sat, squeezing her calf gently, looking at where
he knew the curtain would be.
“Hey,” Sarah greeted, her voice heavy from sleep.
“Hey.” Ryan’s voice, too, was heavy, and Sarah knew then that he knew. “The
doctor’s office called." His voice cracked.
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She had never meant for Ryan to find out. She was never going to tell him about
it. She should have been more careful. But now her only option was to tell the truth.
“I don’t want kids, but I do want you,” she tried to explain, tears of frustration and
fear marking thin tracks down her cheeks.
He got up from the bed and began to silently pack some clothes in the duffel bag
from under the bed. She could hear him sniffing as he grabbed a few things from the
closet.
“You should have said something,” he said in a whisper as he walked out the
door.
The little apartment grew silent, not quiet, as she realized how alone she was.
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SPARE
She keeps buying things off the Internet—things she doesn’t need.
Last week it was a porcelain hedgehog figurine that had a pleasant face. A week
before, it’d been a horseshoe that may have, at one time, according to the seller, been
worn by Secretariat. A few days ago she’d found a collection of used postcards for sale
on eBay. She doesn’t know why she bought them. The seller has already mailed them
with a “Thanks for shopping!” note included in the padded envelope.
Her husband doesn’t yet know about the things she buys. She doubts he’ll mind
very much. He doesn’t seem to care about much of anything, lately. He spends most of
his time at home in his “man cave” watching basketball. Before that, it had been football.
Then baseball. She’s not sure if there’s a sport he doesn’t watch.
She puts her purchases in the spare bedroom—a room with pale yellow walls and
crisp white molding. It has white eyelet curtains, and when the morning sun shines
through the windows, the room seems to shimmer.
Her husband doesn’t come in here anymore.
She props the postcards up on top of the white dresser and against the wall, the
words facing out.
She sets the hedgehog with the kind smile on the bookcase, where it can survey
the room.
She tacks the horseshoe above the doorway. She thinks she remembers hearing it
will bring luck.
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There was a bunny lamp in here a month ago, but she’s replaced it with one made
out of books.
Yesterday she found a woman selling positive pregnancy tests on Craigslist.
It will be nice to see a second line for once.
114
THE SECRETS WE HIDE
Mrs. Summers keeps her secrets in an old Dukes of Hazzard lunchbox in the back
of her closet, underneath her daughter Meg’s old teddy bear—the one Meg wouldn’t part
with between the ages of two and twelve. Her daughter left the stuffed animal behind
when she hit puberty. The same can’t be said of Mrs. Summers and her secrets.
I know this because I go to Mrs. Summers’s house once a year and wait while she
digs her secrets out of the closet, pushing aside her wedding dress, now yellowed after
hanging in the dry cleaning plastic for decades. She pulls the lunchbox out slowly,
brushes the fleshy pad of her thumb over Daisy Duke’s face, then hands the metal box to
me and sighs.
“Any changes I should know about?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
We take the lunchbox downstairs to the kitchen table. Before I open it, I pull my
computer out of its bag and open up the spreadsheet. I tie my hair back with an elastic
band, then slide the lunchbox towards me.
I’ve been auditing the town’s secrets for nearly two decades, and by now the
objects in this little metal box are nearly as familiar to me as they are to Mrs. Summers.
*
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Cassidy Rogers has a single secret sandwiched between her mattress and box
spring—the ‘N’ key off of a computer keyboard. And though it doesn’t weigh much—it
barely has any physical presence at all—it makes her sleep funny; sometimes she wakes
up with a backache; sometimes a cramp in her shoulder. But she doesn’t move it to the
garage, where her husband keeps his secrets in an old cardboard box, next to the half
empty containers of motor oil, or to the basement, though no one keeps secrets there.
“This is still the only one?” I ask her.
She nods her head once. Her husband, Matt, is still in the garage, carefully
packing his secrets away again. Slowly. Methodically. People always need time alone
after I’ve been to see them.
*
My job as the town’s Secret Auditor hasn’t always existed. Seventy years ago no
one realized there was a limit to the number of secrets the town could hold. People kept
every secret, even the really little ones. But once the factory opened, and the population
grew, the secrets started piling up fast.
Then, one day in the farm supply store, a man named Mr. Gregg started turning
purple in the face. My great-grandfather, there that day picking up some chicken wire,
caught Mr. Gregg as he collapsed.
“Breathe, man,” my great-grandfather yelled at Mr. Gregg, but the man just shook
his head emphatically until his mouth popped open with a great expulsion of breath.
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“I’m going to rob this place,” he yelled with a strength that belied his currently
weakened condition. The secret he’d curled his fist around deep in the pocket of his
dungarees, a cold, heavy carriage bolt, evaporated.
“I couldn’t keep it,” Mr. Gregg said, his eyes wide with surprise and fear. “I tried,
but I could feel the words in my mouth, crowding up behind my teeth.”
News of Mr. Gregg’s experience spread quickly, and soon people were hoarding
their secrets. Counting them frantically. Obsessing over them. Burying them deep in their
back gardens. Or they were taking them to Narrow Rail Bridge, tying rocks to them, and
tossing them into the rushing river below.
But the secrets still came out.
It didn’t take long to realize that there was a limit. That the town could only hold
so many secrets before they started finding their way into the open. So the mayor formed
the Council on Secrets, a group of people in charge of figuring out how to keep track of
everyone’s secrets, and how to measure them, determining how many secrets each person
could have, and what to do when that number was in danger of being reached.
They named my great-grandfather the first Secret Auditor. It’s sort of been the
family business ever since. When my great-grandfather died, my grandfather took over,
then my dad after him. When my dad died of a heart attack about twenty years ago, I took
over. I was only eighteen, but no one seemed to care. As long as secret auditing wasn’t up
to them.
Sometimes people look at me and shake their heads slowly. “I don’t envy you,”
they say. “That’s a lot of responsibility you must carry around. The things you know.”
117
“I only know numbers,” I usually say. Or I don’t say anything and just shrug and
smile.
I don’t hate my job. Not really. I do get lonely, though. No one really wants to be
friends with someone who’s seen what everyone else is trying to hide. And sometimes it
makes me uncomfortable—forcing people to confront their pasts every year—but lots of
people have worse jobs than mine. I don’t think I could ever be a nurse, for example. I
can’t stand the sight of blood. That’s one of my secrets. It’s such a little one, and I don’t
really have anyone to tell it to, so it sits, a heavy glass paperweight the garish color of
blood, on my desk at home.
*
Doug Ferndale buries his secrets in a rusty tackle box in his backyard. Every
spring he digs the box up, thumbs through the secrets inside, reacquaints himself with
them. Every year, I’m there with him, checking to make sure they’re still there, still kept,
still necessary.
“I didn’t mean to,” he says to me. He says it every year, and every year he can’t
seem to look me in the face.
“Doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” I say as I measure the weight of a
plastic green army man. The secrets are laid out on the table in front of me in a straight
line. There are four of them. There have been four of them for over ten years. I make sure
they’re still big enough to keep, then add the total to the tally on my computer.
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*
Some secrets are fresh and shiny as a newly minted penny, like the glittering ringshaped secret Kyle Matthews has added to his collection in the last year. Some, though,
are old and worn out. Mrs. Hernandez has a tattered piece of cloth—the frayed edge of an
old blanket, maybe—tucked into a disused teapot in her dusty china cabinet.
I don’t ask people what the objects mean, and most of the time they don’t offer to
tell me about them.
But some people want to tell me. Doesn’t change anything, though. I don’t matter.
People can tell me their secrets all day, as long as the one person from whom the secret is
most being kept doesn’t find out about it, the secret stays hidden.
*
One cold morning towards the end of October, Dennis Hudson shows me the
delicately webbed butterfly wing he has cupped in his hands. “It’s new,” he says. “But
it’s just a little thing.”
People forget that the weight of the manifestation of a secret doesn’t really matter.
A man named Frank Barrett once accidently killed his best friend in a drunken argument.
That little blue button was one of the heaviest secrets I’ve ever weighed.
119
Years of stress and worry have etched lines into Dennis’s face the way water
carves canyons. The line between his heavy eyebrows grows deeper as he watches me
weigh the butterfly wing. “It’s got a broken corner,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. He doesn’t offer anything more.
It’s not a particularly heavy secret, whatever this butterfly wing is supposed to
represent, but it’s new, and when I add the new number to my spreadsheet the total at the
bottom changes from black to red.
Dennis, looking over my shoulder, catches the shift. “That a problem?” he asks.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I say with a small smile. “You’re still well within
your allowance.”
He shuffles his feet and flexes his hands at his sides. “What’s it mean, then?” he
asks.
“Just means I have to talk to the Council.” I try and sound reassuring. I don’t
know if I succeed.
*
I sit with Brad Green, the head of the Council on Secrets, in a diner on Ridge
Road, tinny ‘80s music playing over the speakers in the corners.
“We’re getting close,” I tell him, twirling a coffee mug around on the worn green
Formica tabletop.
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“How close?” he asks around a mouthful of pancake, generously doused with
syrup.
A lifetime ago Brad and I had dated. Then I took over the Secret Audit from my
father and Brad couldn’t handle me seeing the evidence of things he’d rather keep
hidden.
“You don’t have to tell me what the things mean,” I’d tried to reason with him. “I
just need to weigh them.”
“You’ll know. You’ll know!” he’d said as he shoved socks and underwear into a
duffle bag.
“You knew this was coming,” I said. It was the first time I’d been dumped
because of my job, but I wasn’t surprised it was happening. I’d known this was coming.
I’d heard this argument before, the day my mother left my dad and me behind. She’d had
a duffle bag, too.
“I thought I could do it. I thought I’d be different.” He dug through the bowl by
the front door, looking for his keys. Eight months later he was married to a woman
named Wendy who was dumb and would never imagine he had any secrets to hide.
But he does. Every year I weigh the evidence of them.
And now, sitting in the diner, Brad across the booth from me, I can’t remember
why I argued with him then—why I’d wanted him to stay.
“We’re in the red,” I tell him. “And more secrets are being added all the time. For
every one that’s revealed, three more are kept. The Council is going to have to do
something.”
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Brad slurps down a big gulp of coffee. “How long do we have?” he asks.
“Hard to say. You know the tally is a delayed account. I can’t get through the
population fast enough for it to be entirely accurate.” Years ago I’d asked Brad’s
predecessor, George Underhill, to hire a second auditor, but had been denied on account
of people not wanting a second person to have access to their secrets.
“Yeah, but if you had to guess,” Brad presses me for an answer.
“Maybe a month. Two at best.”
*
No one calls me by my name anymore. Now I’m just “the Secret Auditor.”
Sometimes just “the Auditor.” Once or twice even “Secret Lady.”
I live alone in a little house on the edge of town. It was my father’s before it was
mine, my grandparents’ before that. I sleep in the same room I’ve slept in since I was a
baby, though, in a fit of hope when I was still young, I’d switched out my twin bed for a
double. After Brad there was Carl. Then Nathan. Then Mike. But it always ended the
same way: no one likes when their secrets are threatened.
I tried to learn to sleep sprawled out, taking up as much of the mattress as my
slight frame could manage, but I felt exposed, vulnerable, and a little bit like I might float
away.
I sleep on the left side of the bed, closest to the door, curled into a ball.
122
This is one of my secrets: I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be touched. What the
warmth of another body next to mine feels like. I don’t know who I’m keeping this secret
from, but it sits like a snow globe on the nightstand on the right side of the bed.
*
Before each emergency council meeting over the years—those meetings called
when the limit of secrets was closing in—each of the council members sits at home,
rummaging through their stashes of secrets, looking for the most innocuous ones to tell.
They decided long ago that, with the limit of secrets so close to being reached, it would
be best if they shared some of lesser secrets with people inclined to forgive them, instead
of risking exposure in a more public setting.
“Here,” Anthony Callavaro says to his wife the morning before the council
meeting. He hands her a movie ticket. “When we were first dating I was going out with
another girl.”
Across town Brenda Fontaine is telling her wife, Janine, that she was the one who
ate the whole apple pie a few weeks ago—the one Janine had baked for dinner guests. “It
wasn’t the dog,” Brenda says as she lays a silver fork on the kitchen counter.
A few houses down on the same street, Dan Campbell tells his wife: “I had an
affair with the barista.” Dan’s got a chipped coffee mug in his hands. He’s not the
smartest man, but his father served on the Council before him, and he throws really
elaborate parties for the council a few times a year, so they don’t mind him much.
123
“I think you misinterpreted the point of this,” his wife says.
*
I sit in the back of the room next to Wayne Dylan, a reporter for the town
newspaper, and we watch as the seven men and women who make up the Council on
Secrets gather around a large conference table and take their seats. Each of them looks
leery in their own way: shifting eyes, straight-line mouths, raised eyebrows; all of the
telltale signs of trepidation are present and accounted for.
“I call this emergency meeting of the Council on Secrets to order,” Brad says with
conviction from his place at the head of the long oak table. He doesn’t have a gavel or
anything like that, but the one thing Brad’s always been good at is asserting authority,
whether it’s his own or not.
He calls me up to the front of the room and asks me to explain the numbers to the
other council members—to give them an idea of how close we are to the limit, and how
fast we might reach that limit.
Several minutes later, I conclude the presentation I’d prepared by saying: “To be
perfectly honest, it could happen any time now. We don’t have a truly accurate measure
of where we stand. People aren’t required to tell me when they have a new secret, and
I’m only one person. I can only see so many people each day.”
Wayne Dylan’s wife, Francine, who is also on the Council, looks confused. One
of her secrets is a flower with brown petals pressed flat between the pages of a book in
124
her office. I think it had once been yellow. “Can I ask a question?” she asks. “Weren’t
limits set up years ago? So each individual could only keep so many secrets?”
I nod before saying “Yes, allowances were set up. But the population has grown
since then, so those limits may no longer be workable. And a lot of people were near the
top of their allowance during last year’s audit. Even a handful of them adding secrets
since then could be the cause of a major crisis. Which is what we’re facing now.”
“Any recommendations?” Brenda asks me.
“Over the last several years I’ve mentioned many times that another auditor might
help us keep a more up-to-date account of the numbers,” I say, “but that doesn’t help us
now. We need to purge some secrets in order to bring our numbers down. And I have no
clue how to make people reveal what they’ve worked so hard to keep hidden.”
As I make my way back to my seat next to Wayne, Father Dominic raises his
hand as though he’s in school. “I can speak to the religious leaders,” he suggests. “We
can start designing our sermons and homilies around the power of forgiveness, and the
freedom that comes from telling the truth?”
“A good idea, Father,” Brad says. “But if we wait for people to speak of their own
accord, no secrets will ever be told.” Several people around the table hum in agreement.
Over the next several hours suggestions are made and, for the most part,
disparaged, the vehemence with which they are criticized increasing as the hours wear
on.
“Give it to me straight, Secret Lady,” Wayne leans over and whispers into my ear.
“Are we screwed?”
125
I give a pointed look at the table of people currently arguing at the other end of
the room. I’m about to answer him when a harsh voice is heard above all the others.
“I have a daughter that no one knows about.” As soon as the words come out of
his mouth, Anthony smacks his hand over his mouth. His eyes are wide.
For a moment, everything and everyone is still. The silence fills in around us,
making the air feel heavy and thick. People sit in their seats blinking stupidly at one
another.
Then, with a burst of movement, everyone stands to gather their things, but they
can’t stop the rush of secrets as they tumble from their mouths.
“I’ve never kissed a boy,” Brenda says as she shoves her laptop into her briefcase.
“I have kissed a boy,” Brad admits as he yanks his jacket off the back of his chair.
“I told my wife I had an affair with a barista,” Dan says. He hasn’t gotten up from
his chair—the lone point of calm in a room full of frantic shuffling. “But that’s a lie. I
just don’t have anything worth keeping secret.”
I’m out of my seat and through the door in the back of the room before anyone
else. I make it to my car, lips sucked into my mouth and clamped together with my teeth.
I taste blood, but I don’t stop biting.
When I get home, I collapse into my father’s armchair and take a deep breath. A
slow smile starts to spread across my face as I look around the living room.
A bright blue guitar covered in band stickers: evidence of the summer I was
supposed to be taking summer classes but followed a band around the country, instead.
126
The chipped porcelain figurine of a yellow canary: the daughter I gave up for
adoption at sixteen.
A half-used tube of lipstick in a color I didn’t wear anymore: the dog I accidently
hit with my car when I was twenty.
Everywhere I look, on every surface, I see my secrets lined up like a museum
exhibit.
All over town right now, secrets are being told, hidden traumas and transgressions
tumbling haphazardly out of mouths in nearly every house.
In a few days, everyone will emerge from their homes and the air will seem
clearer than it has in years. It’ll just be an illusion, but it’ll feel lighter and fresher just the
same. Relationships will either be ending or on their way to being rebuilt. Some people
will end up in jail, but others will finally have answers.
Then the audit will begin again, the tally so affected it will need to start at zero.
But here, now, in my house, I am safe. I am alone, and my secrets will stay mine.
127
BEFORE MOVING IN WITH YOUR DOPPELGANGER
A bit of friendly advice: If you’re ever given the opportunity to move in with your
doppelganger, don’t. But it’s not for the reason you think.
It’s not because, contrary to your (adult, responsible) belief that dirty dishes
shouldn’t sit in the sink for more than two days, she’ll let them crust over with heretofore
undiscovered strains of mold before attempting to wash them, then, deciding it’s a
pointless venture, throw them away—including the Wedgewood plate your grandmother
left you in her will because she used to serve you sugar cookies on it, but was then used
to “nuke some nachos,” and, because the enamel over the porcelain has thinned over
time, the cheese melded in such a permanent way it was beyond rescue.
And she didn’t think you’d want to keep it, not even for sentimental value, so she
tossed it carelessly into the special stretching garbage bags you bought but she uses, and
it smacked against a glass she’d thrown away because the lactic acid in milk eventually
eats away at the glass and ruins it, and both the plate and the glass break; and no garbage
bag can hold up to that kind of assault, so, predictably, the broken glass or the broken
plate (does it really matter at this point?) pokes a hole in the bag. But she doesn’t take
the bag out, oh no, she lets it sit on the kitchen floor where it leaks, and you’re the one
who, after a day of waiting to see if she’ll do anything about it, is forced to rush it out the
front door and down the porch steps and over to the trash cans all while attempting to
avoid whatever fetid juice is dripping from that goddamn hole.
128
It’s not because she makes you feel guilty when, occasionally, after spending days
on your feet as a waitress, you feel inclined to spend your day off in your pajamas on the
couch watching old Gilmore Girls reruns and eating grilled cheese instead of getting up
at 7am and going for a “quick ten-mile jog,” or constructing yourself into human origami
while doing yoga in the middle of the living room, or going fucking rock climbing with
that guy who asked you for your number at the bar last month but then never called you.
It’s not even because she consistently (and intentionally?) leaves the front door
open “Just a crack!” while she trots out for the mail wearing your slippers, or to greet the
pizza delivery guy, and your damn sneaky cat takes the opportunity every time to slip out
of that cracked door, so when you come home from work you have to spend two hours
outside cooing, “Here, Doug. Here Dougie, Dougie, Dougie,” like a damned idiot with an
open can of tuna, trying to entice your wayward pet into coming out from underneath the
porch, but usually only succeeding in attracting the next door neighbor’s cat, Gerard, who
slides along your legs with such intent and determination there’s a thick mat of Gerard’s
white and orange hair on your black work pants when you finally give up and go inside.
Doug always comes home. But only when she calls for him.
No, you’re best not moving in with your doppelganger, not for any of those
reasons, though those reasons may be good enough, but because one day you’ll get a
haircut. And then she’ll get a haircut. And she’ll choose a better cut or a better stylist, so
her haircut will look much better on her than yours will on you.
129
It’s because sometimes she does something, like buys some off brand laundry
detergent that you’d never consider, and for some reason it works better and your clothes
are cleaner and they smell fresher longer and she’s saved a lot of money, and you realize
she’s done something right. Which means you’ve done something wrong.
And then these little examples start adding up. She takes a different route off of
the highway and doesn’t have to sit in traffic for an hour, so she gets home and makes
dinner and is in front of the television watching stupid fucking Seinfeld reruns while
you’re sitting in your 10-year-old hatchback listening to Fiona Apple complain-sing and
wondering why your life has turned out so differently from how you imagined it would
when you were ten and filled with careless hope and wild dreams and a belief that yes, it
was hard to become a dancer, but if you just worked hard enough, it would happen,
because you’re a good person and good people get. What they. Deserve.
It’s because your boyfriend or your best friend or your mother can’t help looking
at the two of you, side-by-side, and comparing, and your mother will ask why you can’t
wear a shade of lipstick that makes your lips look less thin, or whether you might like to
try this new cream she got you for cellulite.
130
And then some warm night in April you’ll be sitting on the couch next to the guy
you’re dating and you’ll glance at him and he’ll be looking at her, across the room and
curled in the armchair like a cat, like she’s something special, and two months later
they’ll be moving into a townhouse together and you’ll be left alone, paying the rent for a
two bedroom apartment in the dodgy part of town, wondering what she has that you
don’t.
You shouldn’t move in with your doppelganger because she looks like you, but
she is not you. And just because you’re better at making sure the dishes are done in a
timely manner, and the garbage is out on the right day every week; just because you
know how to crochet elaborate patterns and the best she can ever achieve before giving
up with an impatient huff is a stupid chain; eventually you’ll realize there are some things
your doppelganger is better at.
That’s the nature of doppelgangers. You might be terrible with money, and she’s
the next Warren Buffet; or you’re nervous around new people, and she walks into a room
and greets people like she’s a goddamn politician, and soon enough you’ll start to wonder
if she isn’t the better version of you, and, let me tell you, that’s a dark and dangerous road
to travel. Because, then you start to wonder, really wonder: if there’s a better version of
you that exists, what’s the point of you?
131
THE CLOCK KEEPER
Not far outside of town, up a steep hill, and at the end of a long dirt driveway, sits
an old house covered in vines. The house hasn’t been painted in a very long time—so
long that no one who notices the house could say what color it was once meant to be.
Not that anyone ever notices the house.
There are lots of dusty windows in the house, and they look out into the pine trees
surrounding it, over the little garden in the back, and down the long drive that disappears
into the forest. The air there is heavy and damp, and smells like Christmas all year long.
Between the vines and the indefinable color of the wooden siding, there’s a sense,
maybe, that the earth is trying to reclaim the land on which the house sits, and if the
house comes too, like an afterthought, then so be it.
*
There’s a little old woman who lives in the house. She and the house have a lot in
common: she, too, seems to be melting back into the earth. The older she gets, the more
she shrinks, and she moves so slowly now, it’s as though she’s growing roots in the soles
of her feet. The earth is reclaiming her, too.
She wears her thick white hair, like vines, free and long down her back, around
her head in a cloud. She spends an hour every day brushing it like her mother used to.
132
Her eyes are set deep in her face—they look like two little pebbles, wrinkles rippling out
like water on a pond.
She’s much older than she used to be. That is to say, she’s much older than
anyone should be. Her last birthday, a day she celebrated by smoking a single cigarette
on the back porch, she turned two hundred and four. Her mother had lived to be two
hundred and thirteen. Her mother’s mother: two hundred and eighteen. This isn’t unusual
for her family, or for other people like her, just for the rest of the world. If anyone knew
about her, there would be questions to answer. But for anyone to know her, they’d have
to notice her, and one thing she and her descendants have always been very good at is
staying overlooked.
*
The most remarkable thing about this woman isn’t her house, or her age, or her
ability to remain unnoticed. The most remarkable thing about her is her collection of
clocks.
Inside the house, on every flat surface and on every square inch of wall space,
there are clocks. Clocks of every shape and size; clocks made from pewter and glass,
from porcelain, from gold, and from wood. There are elegant grandfather clocks and little
collapsible travel clocks, digital and analogue clocks, clocks with bright lights, and
clocks with funny faces, clocks with elaborately scrolled hands, and clocks whose gears
are exposed but made all the more beautiful for their vulnerability.
133
The clocks are all set for the same time, but that doesn’t mean they get from
minute to minute in the same way. Some clocks seem to slide into the next second, while
others seem to jump or trip along in time.
If she hadn’t grown up with the clocks—become accustomed to the sound they
make over the two centuries she’s lived—she’d have gone mad a long time ago. The
clicking, ticking, clacking, tapping the clocks make as the hands or digits shift,
acknowledging the passage of time, fills the house with a steady beat, a pulse, that her
own heart was born to match.
No two clocks are the same, just as no two people who live in her town are the
same. And were anyone to see these clocks all lined up in rows on bookshelves, in
clusters on the top of the piano, between the banister slats on the stairs, tucked away in
the medicine cabinet, they would understand the significance immediately. Underneath
each clock, or on the lip of the bookshelves, or hanging on a tag from some artistic finial
or ornament, are pieces of masking tape, on which, in thick dark ink, are written names.
A clock for each name. A name for each person who lives in town.
Every day the woman shuffles slowly from room to room, carefully dusting
between the clocks, gently running her fingers over those that have been with her the
longest.
There’s one clock she doesn’t check every day. It’s made of silver with a shining
white face and simple hands, the ends of each dotted with a glittering diamond. This
clock is carefully wrapped in tissue paper, and tucked in an old chest deep in the attic. It’s
old, though not as old as some, and it’s hers.
134
*
Not every day, but more often than not, she’ll come across a clock that has
stopped. She knows the moment a clock stops—feels a weakness in her own heartbeat—
but that doesn’t make finding the clock, now eerily still, any easier.
She writes the name by the clock in a little notepad she carries in her pocket along
with the time the clock stopped, then consults the large book on her desk. It’s not unlike a
handwritten phone book. She thumbs her way through, runs her fingers down the
margins, finds the name and writes the accompanying address in her little pocket
notepad. The address is never wrong.
*
In all her time keeping the clocks, she’s never grown used to her job. The clocks
are one thing: beautiful, steady, perfect. But the job that goes along with keeping watch
over them is anything but.
As she makes her way into town on every day that a clock has stopped, she tries
to remind herself that her job is beautiful in its own way. That, for a few hours in the life
of each person who lives in her town, she knows their greatest secret: when they will die.
The death isn’t the beautiful part—she’s never thought that. The souls she frees, though.
Those can be indescribably beautiful.
135
She always gets to the address at the right time—being on time is built into the
rhythm of her life—and she knows who she’s meant to meet the moment she sees them.
They’re bright, not like there’s a light shining on them, but maybe from within them.
She approaches the person whose name she wrote down on her notepad earlier
that day sometimes hours but sometimes only moments before they overexert themselves
mowing the lawn, or get into the car and drive too fast on roads too icy. More times than
she can count, the address is the hospital and she sees the person not long before they
take their last breath, before an illness finally wins.
She’s not responsible for their deaths, and for that she’s grateful. Their deaths,
like their lives, will happen naturally, and without any interference from her.
She just has to touch them—skin on skin—for a moment. Less than a moment,
really, it’s just the promise of touch sometimes that’s necessary. A soul knows when it’s
being freed. It doesn’t fight this liberation.
No two souls feel the same—though, since she’s been doing this, she has had the
opportunity to meet several souls more than once. The moment the soul leaves a body it
travels through her, and that’s the beautiful part of her job.
*
The woman won’t live forever. She can’t. If the concept of death loses its
significance, so would the concept of life. People die. They have to. Life would mean
nothing if it went on forever.
136
So, one day, the woman’s clock will stop, and she will feel that silence more
profoundly than she’s ever felt any of the silences she’s experienced in her long, long
life. In that moment she’ll be able to breathe more deeply than she has since she inherited
the job as clock keeper from her mother well over a hundred years before.
Not long after her clock stops a knock will sound at her door. She’ll open it and
greet a friend—maybe the keeper from the next town over, maybe her sister who she
hasn’t seen in far too long. She’ll walk into their open arms, and as she feels the pulse of
the clocks in the house behind her stop for the last time, she’ll experience a stillness she’s
never known, and she’ll whisper, “Finally.”
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