When the children come, they dry me out. They suck milk from me like nectar from a honeysuckle until I am wrinkled all over, my plumpness consumed, my watery sweetness devoured. I hang laundry above my children’s heads as they search for lucky clover in the grass. I hold their cheeks in my calloused hands when they stumble and cry salty tears.

  Michael, my oldest, picks bouquets of weeds for me when he is young. I put on gloves and set them in vases all over the house until they wilt and the water is yellow and brown. I do not throw them out until he brings me more, and one day, he is too old to think of it, and the weeds stay where they are, wafting their smell of decay through the house.

  When he comes with me to visit my brother, still seated by my mother’s window, he kneels down and holds Henry’s hands and asks why Henry won’t look at him.

  My mother says, “He lost something over there. Something inside him evaporated right into those jungle leaves.”

  2001

  The towers fall in New York City, one after another. We watch on the edge of our couch as bodies jump from windows into the flames. We cry and wring our hands.

  Michael is eighteen. He sits silently through meals and won’t look me in the eye.

  He enlists.

  I hold back hot tears I thought were long dry when he finally tells me, as if I hadn’t seen the crisp white envelopes in the mailbox day after day, hadn’t noticed his hands shaking over breakfast. I cup his cheeks in my hands and beg him not to, please, and he pulls my hands away and says, “I’m eighteen. I have to go. Someone has to do something, don’t you see?”

  They send him to the desert.

  2003

  It is not 1965, no, not in many ways. I don’t wait by the mailbox as my mother did. I try not to think of it, try to busy my hands. I weed our garden without gloves until Dean comes home and makes me stop, or until my fingers and palms are gone up to the wrists, and I must sit by the window with my hands wrapped in an old windbreaker and wait for blood and blisters to return. But I can’t stop. It’s cathartic—ripping the thistles out by the roots and dirt sprinkling on my toes as the weeds’ thin fingers release the earth for good. I leave them in a mound on the concrete patio to shrivel in the baking heat.

  Every knock on the door clenches my throat tight with panic until one finally comes that tells me the truth.

  I knew it as soon as he left.

  The sand has swallowed him whole.

  I can’t help but wonder, what leaves were there to soften his fall and lessen the heat of war? And I wonder if swallowed whole is better than emptied out.

  The day they tell me, I slip off my sandals and walk barefoot through the grass, past our fence, through the field of wildflowers and weeds, to the edge of the forest, until the coolness of undergrowth tingles around my ankles.

  When I force myself home, I am chilled deep to my inner organs, and I am hungry for ice. My feet and calves are all water, numb. I throw the windbreaker away. I don’t let Dean touch me for a week.

  2019

  The other children have scattered in the wind. They grow with their roots in rocky mountain clay, rich southern earth, volcanic island sand. My hair is gray and white, and the wind flings it about like corn silk. I sit by the window with my face in the sunlight during the day, but on summer nights, I drive with Dean to the home improvement store, and while he is searching for the right lightbulb, I wrap the thick leaves of houseplants around my arms until Dean pulls me away and throws a sweater around my vanishing skin, and I cry and say, “Let me, Dean. Let me disappear.” Parents near me speak in whispers to their children. Dean buckles me in the car and drives home in silence.

  He still smells of fire and ash, even retired for years. He sweats in his sleep and when the war is close to the surface, he yells in the dark and twists his neck tight. I wrap my cool arms around him. I bathe his forehead with ice. I gather handfuls of grass from outside and cover his hands and face in it, let him breathe in the green. It cools him, just a bit, but not enough. I wish I was the water, that I was the cold, and I whisper to him, Shhh, shhh. There is peace in the green.

  I think of my Michael, I think of them all, shot through with hot metal and fear. I hope that vines and undergrowth cradled them as they fell. I hope the leaves have cooled them and dissolved the sharp edges.

  We pack up our dishes, our glasses, my vases of weeds. We move far away from the asphalt stench and metal street lights that stretch over the road like dead trees. We unpack our delicate things in a cabin in the woods, one with no wires running through the walls, no lightbulbs to buzz loudly in my ears. But late into the night, the logs cry to me, saying, The nails, the nails! Shot through us like bullets! Where are our branches, where is our green? We are always thirsty.

  I sit outside with my feet in a bucket of lake water and mud. I eat up the sun. I drink through my roots.

  Dean makes his coffee black and silty like soot. He walks around the lake. Each morning he runs his hot fingers through my hair to remind me to stay, until one morning, he does not come outside to me, and I pull my feet out of the muddy water bucket to find him. His coffee is still hot, and he sits upright at the table, but when I shake his shoulder and press his palm to my cheek, there is no heat left in him. My toes curl against the wood floor, gritty from the mud.

  I stumble outside and into the brush. I peel off all the fabric wrapped around me and lie in weeds that are taller than me. The daisies sweep their petals back and forth against the bottoms of my feet. The thistles sting and burrow behind my knees. The dandelion leaves caress my ears, and I rub branches of wild raspberries along my arms, along my legs, in swaths across my stomach.

  My skin fades from pink to white to glass, until only my eyes remain. The green curls up in wisps through my organs until even the bones and ligaments become water.

  I am colder and colder and I long for Dean’s hands in my hair with their smoky ash fire warmth, for my brother’s fading heat, for my mother’s hot palms, until I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t

  2024

  There is a lake here, through this forest of trees. I float on the surface of the ripples, arms outstretched, legs outstretched, face in the water, like a leaf. I do not need air anymore. If someone were to come upon me, to sit quietly at the water’s edge and lift their gaze to the middle of the lake, they would see only a shimmer where the light is not quite right. Nothing more—no wrinkled and sucked-dry skin, no white-and-gray corn silk hair.

  It takes weeks before I learn to dissolve the thin skin around my watery being. It is months before I can run through the veins of plants, until I am sucked up into the air, falling again as rain scattered across miles. It takes years to learn how to find my pieces in the lake or the stream or beneath the forest floor. I gather up the bits of myself from the land. I build my fingers and hair one droplet at a time until I rise from the forest floor with watery hands and cheeks. I lie in a field of Queen Anne’s Lace and let ladybugs drink as they skitter across my surface. Their feet are wet with me.

  One morning, I open my eyes, and the whole world is green, as if I am seeing through a leaf. My skin is not withered anymore but taut and swollen—a raisin soaked. My veins are visible again and flowing with emerald blood, plump, twisting. Alive.

  But I am cold, almost numb. The wind whips around me, and I shiver in it.

  There is peace here. The leaves were right. But there is no warmth, and my arms have no one to hold.

  Bullets rip through jungles the world over, but I whisper my desires to the clouds, and the rain takes me to a new war, one full of vigor like an infant, not yet wise, not yet tired. Smoke approaches through the trees where I wait, and when sons and daughters cry and stumble in the fray, I reach out my leafy arms to catch them as they fall. I soak up their blood as the cities crumble. I cool flushed cheeks and wipe away salty tears.

  And when the bloodshed pauses for breath, I race through the rivers and roots to find other mothers to join me, and I whisper to them through the leaves, saying, Shhh, shhh. Don’t throw out the weeds. But once your arms are empty, come with me, to peace, peace! Come comfort the raging heat. Disappear with me into green.

  Elizabeth Childs’ short fiction has appeared in Ponder Review, Marathon Literary Review, and The Showbear Family Circus. She was a finalist for the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards. Elizabeth Childs lives with her husband and small children in Colorado, where she is an Anselm Society member artist. Visit her at www.elizabeth-childs.com.

  Fragile Masks

  by Richard Gavin

  “Woolf.”

  The word caused Paige to flinch in the passenger seat. She scanned the leaf-carpeted banks of the road, looking for signs of movement.

  “It was Virginia Woolf who took her life that way, not Brontë,” Jon explained, “my mistake. Wait, did you think I saw an actual . . . ”

  “You gave me a start,” she said brusquely.

  Jon’s mouth hitched into a grin, which made him look more pained than amused. “Maybe you have some Halloween spirit after all.”

  Paige made a noise with her throat then stared out at the drabness that surrounded them. The road was all clay and ugly stones, and the trees that flanked it had lost their foliage. They passed a pumpkin-patch, a cornfield, both of which had been gleaned of their growth. Even the sunlight was filtered through strips of gray clouds that reduced it to a vague glimmer, the way the features of the dead grow indistinct beneath the shroud.

  “Any of this look familiar?” asked Jon.

  “The country all looks the same to me.”

  “Oh. Well, according to my phone we’re less than three miles from the bed-and-breakfast.”

  The final bend was riddled with potholes, forcing Jon to slow the car to a crawl. The phone app instructed him to turn left.

  “Hmm,” he muttered, “that doesn’t seem correct.”

  “Why not?”

  “Take a look down there, honey. That lane looks like a footpath. I doubt I could even get the car down there without getting the sides all scratched up by those trees. I’d hate to damage my new present.” He patted the dashboard gently, then touched Paige’s hair. “I know you said these places all look the same to you, but do you remember turning down a little lane like this when you were last here?”

  “Teddy and I didn’t stay at this particular place,” Paige explained, “but it was near here.”

  Jon rubbed the back of his neck. The rush of blood had made him feel hot. “Teddy . . . ” he mumbled, though not so softly as to go unheard.

  She reached to the steering wheel, placed her hand over his. “This can be our place.”

  They made the turn.

  He’d been correct about the narrowness of the lane but had underestimated its length, for by the time they came upon the white two-story house the main road was no longer visible. It was obvious that the photos they’d seen of the establishment online had been taken in fairer weather and during better times. The sloping lawn that had appeared so rich and manicured was now a sparse, brownish mat, interspersed with mud puddles and a broken stone birdbath. Jon did his best to mask his feelings of having been swindled.

  “I guess we just park over there.” He indicated an ovular patch of the yard that was inlaid with white gravel. They drove up alongside the beige jeep that was parked there, and Jon switched off the engine.

  He gave the car, which Paige had given him as a spontaneous gift over the summer, an inspection for scratches.

  “The paint is fine,” said Paige.

  Jon nodded, collected their bags. The only detail that distinguished the house as a business was a small placard beside the doorframe: GUESTS—PLEASE RING DOORBELL FOR SERVICE.

  “This doesn’t look very . . . ”

  “Very what?” Paige asked.

  Jon shrugged. “All I mean is, you can afford to holiday in places much nicer than this.”

  “I think it’s perfect.”

  Paige obeyed the sign and pressed the button. They stood in wait on the covered porch and Jon whispered to her that he hoped they would have enough privacy.

  The woman who drew back the inner door was genial, energetic, and, Jon felt, very well put together for someone her age. Her hair, obviously dyed, was the color of rusted tin. She extended her hand, introduced herself as Imogene, and then plucked both suitcases from Jon’s hands.

  “Oh, that’s not necessary,” he said.

  “Nonsense,” replied Imogene, “come, come.”

  The couple followed the wake of perfume that smelled of clean linen. Imogene led them to a handsome Edwardian desk and bade them to sit. Stationing herself behind the desk, she deftly collected file folders and confirmed the details of their stay.

  “Just one night it is then?”

  “Yes,” Paige said.

  “It’s refreshing to have guests here on a Tuesday, especially during the off-season. Both of my rooms are booked for tonight in fact. Are you here for the Halloween Ball over in Durham?”

  “There’s a Ball?” Jon asked.

  At this same instant Paige uttered, “No.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” said Imogene. “The other couple that’s here said they’re not going either. You really should reconsider. It’s a good deal of fun. I’m going there myself after supper tonight. You did know that here we offer both dinner and breakfast to all guests?”

  “Yes, that’s excellent, thank you,” said Paige.

  “Can I ask if that scent from the kitchen is tonight’s dinner?” Jon said.

  “It is—Irish stew and homemade bread.”

  “Good Celtic faire. That’s fitting.”

  Imogene looked confused.

  Jon felt himself blushing. “Halloween . . . it was a Celtic holiday . . . way back, I mean.”

  “A fountain of information, this one,” she said, winking at Paige.

  They signed the registration forms and were shown to their room, which was slight but stylish.

  “The tub is really something,” Paige said as she emerged from the washroom, “I could practically swim in it.” She found Jon standing between the bed and the nightstand. He had a finger pressed to his mouth. Warbled voices, one deep and the other bright, were audible from the adjoining room.

  “Just as I’d feared,” grumbled Jon as he maneuvered out of the awkward space. “These walls are like tissue paper. We’ll not have any privacy at all. I can practically hear them breathing next door.”

  “Well there’s nothing we can do about it now.”

  “I suppose. Why don’t we go for a walk before dinner?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  The woman beyond the wall laughed shrilly.

  Jon sighed. “What would you like to do?”

  “I think I’m going to soak in that tub for a while.”

  He was hoping for some indication that Paige wanted company. When none came, he proceeded to unpack and then went to appreciate the view, such as it was, from the upper story window. The landscape that surrounded them looked as dull as the piled clouds. Their room was facing the lane. Even from this higher vantage, the main road remained obscured by bends in the lane and by the unkempt verge.

  “Pretty?”

  Paige’s voice startled him. He spun around and asked, “How was your bath?”

  “Lovely, but now I’m famished. I’ll get dressed and we can go downstairs.”

  Soon after, they were about to venture down when Paige decided to change shoes. While Jon was waiting in the hallway, the other couple emerged from their room. Jon experienced a pang of social anxiety. The three of them nodded and offered vague greetings.

  The other man then said, “Hello, Paige.”

  Jon snapped his head back to the doorway of his room.

  “Teddy.”

  “Did you say?” Jon uttered hoarsely.

  “I’d like you to meet Alicia, my fiancée. Alicia, this is Paige and . . . ?”

  Jon shook hands but did not think to introduce himself. The four of them casually forged a circle. Three of them conversed. Jon, however, scarcely spoke and heard even less of the discussion. His brain was oscillating between disbelief and rage.

  “Well,” Teddy said, checking his watch, “shall we go down?”

  He wrapped his arm around Alicia’s waist and the two of them descended the stairs. Paige was about to follow when Jon gripped her wrist.

  “I need to talk to you,” he rasped. “In here.” He opened the door to their room. Paige was reluctant to close it once she saw the expression on her lover’s face. “What do you take me for?”

  “I’m sorry?” she said.

  “Is this your idea of a sick joke, dragging me here to spend the night with your ex-husband? What, are you two comparing your new paramours?”

  “I didn’t know he would be here!”

  “Right.”

  “I didn’t. Last year we stayed near here, yes, but how could I have known that he would pick this exact place on the same night as we did?”

  “An amazing coincidence, no?”

  “That’s just what it is.” She pressed herself against him, kissed his neck. “I swear. I’m not thrilled with this either, but let’s not let it ruin our trip. Let’s just go have some dinner, be civil for an hour or so, and then I’m going to prove to you that I’m yours and only yours.”

  Paige’s whispered words and the gestures that followed caused Jon’s anatomy to reflexively awaken even though his take on the situation hadn’t changed. Paige took his hand and together they slipped down to the dining room.

  Four settings had been placed upon a large tortoise-shell table that sat beneath a hanging lamp with a golden dome. Teddy and Alicia were already seated, their hands clasped in a churlish show of their bond. Jon forewent his habit of pulling out Paige’s chair. One wall of the dining room was covered in gold-veined mirror panels. Jon moved in front of this and sat down heavily. He poured himself some ice water from the crystal pitcher. He could feel Teddy seeking eye contact, perhaps to start a conversation, perhaps to assess how deeply his presence was troubling him. Jon refused to look up from his glass, at least until the kitchen door swung open and he caught sight of Imogene wheeling in a serving cart. It took all his resolve to keep from laughing in the woman’s face.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6