to Linda D. Benliza
6:20 a.m.
Martha closes her eyes as she threads the cap through her fingers. This is not just any cotton baby cap, she thinks, something holy or evil lives in it. She can’t decide which. Undoubtedly a family of the dead orbits around it with their hands outstretched, sliding their fingers over it just as she does now. Undoubtedly her touch is just another layer. Over fifty years of oil coat that tiny white cotton cap. Over fifty years ago some woman, her grandmother or her aunt or her mother before she got too sick. Some woman’s hands with her blood had cast on that cotton and fit it over not one, but two baby boys’ silk smooth heads. And the combination of those sweet boys and this hat had rendered her silent. How? That’s exactly what she’s thinking on: What can’t be spoken? What holds my spirit taut by strings tethered deep in the earth?
Are they cursed? It’s a possibility. Her mother had talked of it. Before she died, she’d told Martha of it constantly. But she’d been fevered then. She’d been sick. Foggy-headed. She’d never told Abigail about it, certainly. She was afraid that she’d say it was genetic. That the only way she could get rid of it would be to give up something she loved. Or worse, that there was no way to give it up.
That it was fate.
Of course, the first culprit that comes to mind is the Devil. Somewhere down the line, the devil had dipped its finger into Bellamy blood. It’d tainted every person they came into contact with. Martha had touched the baby caps and look what had happened.
But was it the Devil’s hand that had stopped her in the middle of the morning, with the coffee cup half-way to her mouth? Yelled her name, “MARTHA!” and set the image of that cap before her? Surely this was more the character of the Lord than anything. She’d run like it was. Had set her cup down and gone looking for it like a mad woman. Tearing through the house. Taking clothes by the neck and throwing them over her shoulder. Stripping the sheets from her bed. Ripping open boxes and pouring out their contents. The floor disappeared under tufts of silver and red tinsel, bits of old wrapping paper and high school yearbooks and a shopping list for milk and Band-Aids from some fifteen years ago. Milk and Band-Aids, she’d suddenly thought, what had happened that day? The weight of all that trivial nostalgia sitting in her gut, cementing her limbs. She’d had to turn away to keep from getting sucked in. Such was the power of things.
Eventually she ran out of places and dropped herself to the floor, her back against the wall of the living room couch. Arms and legs flopped out, body coated in sweat, chest heaving up and down. Knowing that she would think of this all day now. Unable to concentrate. Perhaps, she’d thought, it had disappeared. Her muscles tensed with worry that the existence of this precious object had evaporated without any sense of ceremony, without any significance. Even if she’d willfully forgotten it out of anger and burned it, then that would’ve been better than, as she’d feared, absent-mindedly tossing it out or giving it away to a secondhand store in a bag of otherwise useless children’s clothing.
That it was connected to an impenetrable silence settling at the core of being was more unnerving. Something was trying to undo her. Perhaps the Devil is too easy a term for something like this, she’d thought, there are things in this world working against us all the time that have ordinary names and a faces. Hidden from our sight but there nonetheless. Present in the strange forms that they molded life into. Perhaps it’s a curse but the Devil had nothing to do with it?
Her hand had risen automatically, checking her watch. It was always so. She’d gradually built up a paranoia that something was going to make her late. And then she’d be fired. Then, she’d lose the house. She had to get ahead of it. That bad luck. She’d started leaving earlier and earlier for work. Sometimes waiting outside. Until they gave her a key. Now she let herself in two hours before they opened. She’d felt only recently that she must seem an eccentric old woman. It would’ve been humiliating if she ever let herself pause to think on it, but she kept her mind at bay in those earlier hours by reorganizing the records in a dental office. There was a bookcase where she’d color coded them according to her own particular system that she’d written on notebook paper and taped to the side of the computer. Invoices, patient records. Her holy sepulcher. Organizing it every day like she was keeping the altar tidy or polishing off the pews. It used to be a way to kill time. Now she wasn’t so sure she’d be able to stop herself from doing it if she wanted to. Her hands automatically began the moment she sat down at her desk.
A sudden shiver traveled up her spine. She remembered!
The yellow trunk. In the hidden compartment behind the dresser where Anthony used to hide their money. He’d never liked banks, although he’d never been good enough with money to know the difference between hiding cash in the house or in a bank. “Looks like a block of mustard,” he’d said just to rile her up when she first bought it from an antique store in Loris, the next town over. He was standing there in a slant, defying gravity with legs curving like a treble clef. He’d been out of work at the time. Everyone had. Three factories had closed simultaneously. Like some sort of social experiment. Only she, somehow, had snuck through. And so, she worked all the time. Angry at Anthony even though it was neither his nor any other man on their street’s fault. The women on the street suffered, too. Not her, exactly. Not physically. Anthony wasn’t violent. It was never that. But he’d get depressed. And she’d have to cook, raise the kids, and work. He, meanwhile, resting dull eyed on the couch. She did everything. So, when she found time to buy that trunk, it was only rushing in between jobs that she managed to do it. Driving home, running inside with the trunk, throwing open the door to put it in her bedroom before she went out again. She’d been so hurried then and could only regard his comment with spite, irritation.
But she remembers it now like a love song. The past has that effect on her. But objects especially. Caught in the plastic fiber of that trunk like a scent. Unable to remove itself.
After he’d died, she’d decided to put the yellow trunk in that space. And then forget about it. Forget about that secret part of the house. Now, here it is. Dresser pulled diagonally against the bed, as if blocking an empty corner of the room from an intruder. The compartment door wide open. All the secrets are out, she thinks. She smiles sadly. It feels like she dug up a corpse. Her stomach feels loose, like it’s floating inside her body. Like she’s letting something precious seep out into the world and won’t get it back. Maybe because the inside of the compartment still smells of the time just after Anthony died. Maybe.
That night.
When Damon and Norman were asleep and she’d removed the money and put the yellow trunk in its place. What might the smell of that night have been? Did she notice?
No, she’d been thinking about going to the bank the next day. And now, she’s thinking about that white cap. But she longs for that time right now. For some reason. Even though it was so painful, even though she remembers dreaming of how things would be better in the future – she longs for it like she longs for Anthony and her boys.
6:27 a.m.
Martha notices a coat of slick dust on the floor to clean. The light on the humidifier, blinking, behind the vacuum laying across the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. She’d been too tired to get carried away with it last night, which was strange. Usually, she’d let herself go. The world, the way it was, seemed to encourage that sort of living. Rushing to fill every single second so that she wouldn’t realize the day was over until the streetlights came on. Placing herself ahead of herself and waiting until she arrived. Sepia azures holding the past in an elongated state so that you could look out the window at a strange juxtaposition of the sun at this time but the feel and smell of another. Never actually living in what she feels like she’s in now, momentarily. That is, the present.
6:28 a.m.
Allen Street was laid down over a small hill. Half of the houses went up the hill. The other half went down. Seven blocks in all, with two intersections. James Street, located closer to the woods on what people would say was the downward half of the hill, went out into the country on both sides. Either corn or tobacco fields. Mavis Street, the upward half, went to Green Sea’s downtown, which wasn’t much to speak of. Turn left on Mavis and it was railroad tracks, a gas station, police station, a Baptist church, a city hall, a pizza place and a bank. In that order. Turn right and it was old dilapidated housing. “Penny projects” people in town called them now. Martha remembered when they were called “nigger shacks.”
Further out was a restaurant named “Tar-baby’s” that somehow was still allowed to exist. Owned by the brother of the man who owned the gas station. As far as she remembered it’d been there. She’d recalled Anthony saying that they’d built in on the site of the old segregated black high school, although she’d thought then, as now, that that sounded like the punchline to a joke that Anthony had forgotten. Even people from her neighborhood ate there. She never did. And she told her children never to eat there. Although their neighbors would tell her that the food was good. No one, as far as Martha remembers, ever recalls trying to change the name. She’s never said anything about it either. Those were the strings again, pulling taut at the throat. The dim interior of being that she’d feel in moments of boredom.
All the houses built on Allen Street are bunched up together and face away from the sun. In the morning it looks like shame or pride. It made sense. The two were inseparable. Many of the men on that street did disappearing acts when they were young. They’d go to work, go driving in their car and, somehow, they’d be caught. And then they’d disappear for several years. Once they’d return they were different. They had the façade of pride over a deep shame. Only a few managed to leave. Most of them into the military. Army, Navy. Something safe. Then, they never returned. They remembered the fear that set down in evening, in the night over the street. Like something horrible was about to come up the road. Fear. If they didn’t know it, then they’d be caught another way.
Damon.
She’d thought that about fear when she was a girl. She’d wondered how this group of houses managed to keep bundled up together. When she’d asked her mother once where her father was, she said that he’d “gone off.” A lot of the other girls on Allen Street used the phrase, too. She’d wondered. Why have all these people with all the same trouble been put together?
In the summer, she thinks, there’s no need for memory in the usual sense. Just look outside, Martha. Time slows down and all three bleed together like puddles on the asphalt. Past and future. Present absorbed wordlessly so no one ever knows what it says completely. No memory in the summer.
She shakes her head. Feels it taking her again.
She comes back to the cap because she wants to be here with it. Doesn’t want to slide away as she’s given to do. But a voice inside her whispers, Go ahead! Let it come, let it come, let it come… Her fingers slide over the cotton. This is something material that won’t let her go. Something against the warm soup of air that has swallowed her life. Against what has tricked her into bending into its liquid and sleeping. That will hold her and keep her in this kitchen, thumbing a white baby cap. The words flow through her and she sets her mind to wander knowing that she’s safe. She’s grounded.
6:29 a.m.
Whether because it’s cursed or blessed, the cap speaks.
The cotton presages some sort of burp in the stubborn seamstress that hems the moments together. Because right now she can see her youngest, Norman. Running, tottling on top of unsteady legs. Chubby and round. Lips always pursed. Right out there on the front lawn. That tiny white cap atop his head. Like it had squeezed him out, but refused to let loose the crown of his head. She remembers laughing. Sitting in the sun. Or, no. Sitting inside and looking out the window while Anthony was still alive. He’d been working that day. Or, no. Maybe it’d been Saturday and he’d been home, cooking on the grill.
Abigail would’ve called the cap “touched.” She’d been an old, old woman who lived in a ramshackle house down near the woods that she’d said her daddy owned. She’d had scraggly hair and sold tonics to her neighbors. She’d told Martha when she was just a little girl that dead people haunt the head board, dip their noses into the cooking pot. People had said she was a witch. But she was always sweet to Martha. She’d said, “If you hear something pecking at the window when the moon’s red, you say your prayers three times. Close each one with ‘The Lord bless and shield me.’ Can’t touch you then. It’d burn their fingers off if they tried.” She was loony like that. Cooking bees in her kitchen, catching salamanders and bleeding them. For God knows what. Perhaps she thought she was a witch doctor or something of that sort. She had mental problems, of course, and no one really had care for people like that in those days. They’d be let to wander off a cliff. “Easier for them,” her mother might’ve said. Or even now. People say that now.
Abigail had touched her deep with some of the things that she’d said. The things she tried to un-believe but failed. “There are ghosts. There are spirits, who even in death can’t escape Allen Street, who still wander it back and forth aimlessly.” When she’d asked her why, Abigail had said that heaven wouldn’t let them in because their bodies hadn’t been kept well enough. Martha doesn’t believe that now, but she can’t help but feel in her gut that Anthony at the very least haunts the road, is tethered to those black tire marks just down the street. One house over. She’s not bothered by them anymore. The rain’s been taking care of them for a while. She can pass them now without shuddering, although she used to feel as if they were electric. “Stepping over them would kill her.” That was Abigail again. She’d been dead over half of her lifetime and still she haunts her mind.
Someone had knocked on her door at one in the morning. She’d sat up with a jolt. One side of the bed was empty and cool.
Anthony had been drunk, no doubt. But he’d been standing on the grass. Not the street. Talking to someone on the other side. Those headlights must’ve blinded him and what might he have thought before the impact? “They should turn their goddamn brights off.” He’d be the one to have that as his final thought.
More than once, she’d come across the dilemma of explaining to herself how someone can be punished when they’d done nothing wrong. He’d been drunk on his own lawn, after all. His own lawn.
6:31 a.m.
Ten years in the Navy when Damon, out of nowhere, showed up. It’d been a surprise. And he apologized for frightening her and she laughed, batted him on the shoulder and held him tightly. And remembered. He stepped aside and there, standing behind him, smiling and nodding had been his wife, a short Asian girl with a dusky complexion. He’d said that they’d met in the Philippines. Her father sold motorbikes in town. “I bought a lot of motorbikes, Mama” he said, grinning big. She’d coated herself in makeup and perfume. Martha hugged her and noticed that her skin smelled like mothballs and rice. Although it could’ve been her imagination.
For the first time in a long time, Martha came home to the smell of someone else’s cooking. Damon’s little wife with her hair tied up in a ball. The house never not smelling of food. Her mouth so wide. Big teeth. One gold filling in front. She’d been proud of it at first until a few people had dropped by and made fun of her about it. Thin lips, too. But Martha could tell that she was one of these people always on the verge of laughter. Damon would tell a joke and she’d open wide. Her mouth consuming her whole face. Such a beautiful, beautiful creature. Always acting as if she had to earn her keep. As if being married to her first born wasn’t enough. Always apologizing. But maybe I’m more fearsome than I know, Martha thinks. Maybe I had a look to me that others had grown used to, but it was just her first time seeing it.
Martha had had questions for her, of course, but nothing angry or mean. Just curiosity. What did her parents think of her being all the way in America? What had her father thought of Damon? Did she miss her hometown? She answered all of them, but Martha never felt that she’d really told her anything. English was a polite language for her and she, Martha had felt, could only give her polite answers. Answers that she thought Martha had wanted to hear. She’d said that she was happy to be where she was. In America. But Martha saw something frantic behind her eyes. It was the way she watched them as they ate her dinner or as she spoke to them with her oily accent. The fear that one day she’d have to go back. And she wouldn’t judge her because of it. She’d let it be.
Why? Because during that time they were all staying in that house together. So crowded. Lord, how crowded it was. And they complained. And there were always messes. But see. Something glorious lived among them. She can’t help but imagine it the way it truly was. An extension of souls into the heart of God. The Lord’s hand works through the house. That house that Anthony had paid for many years ago. His legacy that became the anchor for them all.
Martha had been aware of it. She’d been working two jobs then. She’d just started the secretary position at the dental office and she’d moved to an afternoon and evening shift at the IGA in town. Picking up part time night shift work at a group home in Conway. Everything was so busy, but was so energized. Here was a family! The whole neighborhood seemed to come to them, too. They wanted to eat there, talk there, sit on their porch and just look out. For too long they’d been like a graveyard. Everyone’s memories being far too good to forget anything. But at that moment, they were actually remembering not the accident but Anthony. The parts of him that still existed in the house. Damon took on his posture, his place. As if he knew he should as the first born son: tell jokes and speak with his father’s affect. One day Martha saw him leaning like Anthony and her breath stopped. The men who remembered Anthony came by. Some of them just recently returned to the neighborhood after ten, fifteen years in a small stone room. No longer entirely happy, but still laughing nervously when they saw Damon. “Damon came home,” they’d said and slapped his hand, his back. Something was being rebuilt. “Got a woman, cooking…my, my, brother. This house is alive again. So good to see it.”
“Thank you,” he’d said, seeing what was different about them. All he said. A quiet way. A quiet couple.
When it came to Norman, Damon could be trying. He always had been. They were opposites. It was Norman’s preference to slip in and out without them ever seeing him. That was her genes, she’d supposed. Quiet like her and maybe that’s why she’d felt so protective of him. He was like her soul, raw and unclothed. Damon wanted to toughen him up, loved to needle him on anything. What was he doing in school, how were his grades, did he have a girlfriend, where he was going, what time would he be back? Norman had never said anything back to him. That wasn’t his way, to get angry at his older brother. Rather, he’d brood in his room and Damon would laugh to himself after Norman had closed his door. Then, he’d get quiet, pensive. Like flowers wilting for the night. That was when Martha saw it most clearly. It was an act. He was trying to bring his father back. He was trying to fill the house up again.
It’d held together so long that she’d thought. Well maybe we can. If we’re careful. The worst of it has passed and perhaps we’ve paid enough.
And Damon wasn’t like some of the other boys. He’d had money, after all. No scheming. He’d gotten training in the Navy and gotten paid for it. He’d seen the world and he suddenly knew how small home was. He would make himself, certainly. The mood had been different around him. Even when he spoke to her, she wanted to straighten her back. She got excited. That’s good, she’d thought, how your child grows up and teaches you. As if they’d known all along and just now decided to share their secret. Damon would find work no problem. They would save money. Norman was making high marks in school and he was obviously college-bound.
She’d let herself go off on wild tangents then. Imagine a lawyer coming from him. A doctor. She could see it walking down the street already.
But the thing is.
The thing is.
The thing.
Damon had died. Actually died. That was the truth of the matter. He’d let himself get stuck into things. Forgotten what it was like. Like stepping on fly paper. When you’re gone for so long, you forget it’s there.
He hadn’t found work in three months and he’d started hanging with some of his old high school friends. They’d go hangout in town somewhere. Eat at a diner twenty minutes over in Conway. Sometimes he’d just go walking with a friend around Green Sea, just to listen to them talk. Lots of things were going on, lots of things were pushing people. Damon didn’t know. He’d been gone too long.
He’d gone for a walk with one of them on that day.
Just on the edge of their neighborhood. On Mavis going toward town, just before the railroad tracks that intersected the road, there used to be a shop. A tiny white building, hastily constructed, that had always had a new owner. (Kind of the unofficial official split of the two parts of town, black and white.) But Aaron. That boy was so confused. Always had been. He’d never caused anyone harm, but his body did things that must’ve confounded his head. His mother had been a basket case over him. The whole neighborhood knew he was special, but she had argued that he was normal. But something was off about him. He should’ve been inside. Not out by himself. Or with others. Damon might’ve known. But anyone outside Allen Street? Never. Martha is convinced, even to this day, that he’d pulled out from the wrong pocket. Money was in the one. And a knife in the other. Probably didn’t even know or remember that he’d had a knife. Damon must’ve been as surprised as he was. Maybe he was hurt. Aaron, he must’ve thought, how could you? Don’t you know that I had everything figured out until now?
How we do each other in. How we do.
An Indian fellow worked there. He’d hated being in this neighborhood anyway. The kids made fun of his English, his accent, the strange music that twisted and whined through his store. Sounding like gibberish to all the rest of them except him. He was the only who understood the message it had to convey. Now she thinks of how lonely it must’ve been, being the only person that he could explain the world to. He was an outsider, too. Before all the mess that transpired, he’d not belonged to anyone. The only place he could be was right at those railroad tracks. All his facts, his life and friends and family, were utterly incomprehensible in that town. He could never explain himself. Ever. No one would listen. Why would they? He was a dark machine opening the cash register.
She’d softened over the seventeen years since. She still hated him. But she no longer wanted to kill him. Not today. Less and less did she want to find him and kill him.
He’d long disappeared anyway. She thinks he left town five years after Damon died. The store is a shack now, although the memory of it is still there. An orphaned imagination of that day still playing on a loop in her head. She can’t shake it. That man waiting in the darkness of his store. Waiting day after day for one of their boys to threaten him. And then. Finally. His time. When he could pull a trigger. Do his part to set things back the way they should be. Prove himself to someone.
Damon had his hands up, a woman who worked with her at the supermarket had said. That man had shot them both. But she’d not seen it herself. She’d only heard.
One boy on the street had told her that Aaron had run outside holding his arm, making it as far as the street. Then to the hospital. Of course, he’d not been there as well. The hospital was on the opposite side of town. A ten minute drive. But he’d only heard. And Aaron. Aaron was all just hearsay to her anyway. She may have even seen him walking around here recently. Still holding his arm. Like a tic. But she wasn’t interested. He wasn’t her boy.
Damon had actually died. People had seen it. Chest pushing up. Only two times before you know what happens. It still boggles her mind that that’d actually happened. She can’t wrap her head around it. He should just walk right through the door. Her whole life is full of spots like that. Things that seem they’ll right themselves in the next minute. Someone will come in and announce that they’ve looked over her life and corrected the mistakes. Unnecessary omissions, gaffes. That’s when the dull whine starts up. Or maybe when she just notices it.
6:31 a.m.
The houses all bunch up on the hill and then lead straight down into the woods. And in the middle of those woods had been an abandoned moonshine still connected to a tiny hut beside a small pond that had grown into swamp over time. Norman and two boys from his school used to hang out there. She doesn’t remember their names.
With her free hand, she finishes her coffee, sets the cup down and rubs her head like she’s scrubbing a table. She feels her shoulders relax, respond to the scrubbing. And she closes her eyes.
She’d once asked Norman what they did out there.
“Just talk,” he’d said. “Get away from things.”
“But what do you do out there?” she’d asked. He shrugged. She examined his forehead, his eyes to see if he was lying. He rarely ever did anything except school so she’d rarely had the opportunity to catch him lying.
“Mama, we’re just bored. We don’t do anything. Throw rocks into the water. Talk. That’s it,” he said, exasperated. Looking away as if he was describing something before him. “Anyway…it’s interesting. That thing’s been there since the 1920s. It’s just nice to be around something that old and a lot of Green Sea used to be unsettled. Originally it was black folks, you know, living out in the woods, making a go of things. During prohibition they would…” He looked at her and it was like he’d just woken up. Forgotten she was there. Almost embarrassed to have admitted that there was nothing interesting enough to worry about except history. A gravelly clearing of his throat and he turned and went to his room. She’d believed him, although she still forbade him to go. Seventeen years old and they tossed rocks into a swamp. She almost laughed when she’d heard him say that. What boring criminals.
He’d said he wouldn’t go anymore. He’d been lying then. The only time she’d been sure of it. But she let it go.
That was a couple of weeks before you know what.
The law had been following them for a month. Who knows why? There didn’t necessarily need to be a reason. She’d heard that one those friends of his sold weed. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Norman was lumped with them. He’d just turned eighteen a few days before and that was enough to make him an adult. She went to city hall for the court case. It was moved to the county, so she went to the County Clerk’s Office in Conway. A big marble building with enormous columns outside, but only three steps to get in. Seemed a bit off to her. Like they’d changed their mind once they built the steps and decided that it would be grand. Not common. But it was. Everything around those parts was common. Everyone, too. They couldn’t escape it. No one knew how to build themselves out of it, so they just pretended like everything was better than it really was.
That was where he was sentenced. Ten to fifteen for possession. September Seventeenth.
She visited him once. He’d been in prison for two weeks by then. It was just a ten minute drive from the County Clerk’s. She’d come with news from friends at church, people in the neighborhood. And he told her not to come back. He was stone-faced. Serious. Not like when he was reading. His face had been drained of all life. Although she still tried. Coming week after week, but he’d refused to meet her. The last time she’d tried to see Norman he’d been in prison for four years. At that time, she’d stayed away a four months hoping he’d cool off. But he was all the more adamant. She’d gone back home and cried hard. Remembering his face after only two weeks when he’d told her not to come again. He’d had that shame that she’d seen on all the other boys’ faces. The ones who’d returned and found that they were better off where they’d been. How, she muttered painfully, how is possible for this to happen to Norman? He did everything right.
She wrote him letters. He didn’t answer them. His release date would be in a year and a half, but she’d heard nothing from him. Where would he go? She would accept him back in the house, of course, but would he come? She felt he wouldn’t. He would go off by himself. Where? The boys whose names she doesn’t remember – where are they? That swamp? She heard the county filled it up. It’d been festering with disease. They tore down the still, too. Norman would’ve been upset. He loved historical details like that. The age of their neighborhood. Photographs and letters of people whose names had otherwise disappeared standing in front of buildings that had done the same. There was a church on the opposite of Green Sea that she went to sometimes when she didn’t have to work. He’d looked up information about that, too. (She’d been surprised how old it actually was and it’d occurred to her to ask about what Anthony had said about Tar-baby’s. But she didn’t. It wouldn’t been right.) He was nine or ten when he did that, made a whole book on the computer. Binding and everything. She still has it somewhere. Yes, she’d heard how they’d drained the swamp and were going to cut down the trees, too. Build homes there. Just the other day at the office.
The woods, it turned out, actually belonged to somebody.
6:41 a.m.
On the day she found out that Norman was going to prison everything in the house was ordered meticulously. Perhaps she’d been subconsciously thinking of the curse. In preparation, she supposed. To try to get ahead of it. But, of course, she didn’t know it would happen. She’d just gotten in the mood of cleaning that day. Organizing. It was the one world she controlled. The boys, at that age, began disappearing from the neighborhood anyway. Just snatched by haints in brass buttons. So, she thought, I don’t want it, although it may come. Lamb’s blood across my headboard. Still, it may come. You don’t how to protect yourself any other way? Keep your house in order.
The picture frames in the living room of her mother and the boys and Anthony had had no dust underneath them and they were all facing the doorway at the exact same angle. Freshly-ironed purple rayon cloth covered the coffee table. The chins of violet orchids leaned against the brim of a glass vase. All the floors were mopped. All the walls were scrubbed. The wood had actually smelled like wood after it all, like the thick musk of a pine tree. The house had really grown out of the world that day. And it got punished for doing so. Pride. She still believes that it’s her fault. She never tells anyone, but only because she can’t bring her feelings down into words.
She hasn’t changed much. The pictures face the same direction and they still look at the small dining room table. Although there are hydrangeas in bursts of blue and red sitting in tap water. In a glass vase unadorned with design. That is different. But her world no longer expands. It sits waiting for some immanent return. Everything is rife with energy but also exhausted by it.
When will the Lord come?
The street’s is empty and silent. Has He forgotten?
6:43 a.m.
On the kitchen wall, she still has a drawing that the Filipino woman gave to her as a gift. It’s a black ink drawing of a bald headed man with wide eyes. Mouth open. Like he’s surprised. It was supposed to be good fortune. She’d said it was called, “Mr. Lucky.” Martha had had it framed and placed on the wall. She’d asked Damon if it was a Filipino thing. He’d shrugged and said that they’d picked it up at a market in South Korea when he was on leave with her. So was it really good luck? Did it have no roots at all? For some reason, it had bothered her.
When Damon died, the Filipino wife disappeared, too. She had been told, as they all had, that he’d died quick. There was an investigation and no charges were filed. There were witnesses who testified that one of them had pulled a gun. The store owner now had friends. Somehow he’d discovered the secret of inclusion. No one, besides “the hearsay in the neighborhood,” talked about Damon’s hands being up. She’d wondered then, what wasn’t hearsay? When does something become the truth?
Damon’s wife got hit with it all at once. She shut down. Wandered the house lost for days. Spoke to no one.
Husband dead. Who’s fault? His own.
She didn’t come to the funeral. Stayed in Damon’s room in the house. Norman didn’t go either. She supposed that he went to the swamp, sat at the still. He must’ve been by himself because all his friends were at the church. A few people were angry, but no one did anything. His wife? She had no idea how she felt. Anger at Damon? At America? At the shopkeeper?
Or maybe just life in general. It’s good to have something to blame. Someone dying that way completely changes the insides of someone. It was hard not to take it personal. Like God had flicked her on the nose. Just out of spite. How could she not be embittered, stripped raw by that? Nothing can be seen as it was. She probably felt angry. Alone. Nameless. Faceless. Because he’d been her face for so long. She did that thing women will sometimes do. Trust in the face and shoulders and voice of her man. Wait for those to make her righteous. So, maybe she’d waited for that. Even after he died. Waited. And? Nothing. So, she’d just disappeared. A bunch of Filipinos lived near Myrtle Beach, Martha had heard, an immigrant community. They all worked on that strip of highway with all the fancy restaurants. Cooks and dishwashers.
So, maybe that’s where she went. Maybe they took her in. Maybe.
What was her name? How can she not remember these things? She’s sinking into a kind of funk. One where she thinks, thinks, thinks and nothing. It’s the blues. Maybe that’s it. Every two or three weeks it rises in her like a fever. Travels up her throat and washes over the back of her head. Pulls at her nostrils. Maybe that’s it. A silent blues. Squeezing her brain. Now she just sits there and feels it. But she used to fight it. Beat herself down and wait for someone to feel sorry for her and lift her up. The blues are different for a mother, she’d think, for me it’s the deep blues, the kettle whining low forever, insides turning into themselves, the body feeling like it just wants to fold up. It’s mostly in silence outside, a horror show on the inside. Her mother was the same way from what she remembers. But all those feelings are just words, too. Now they pass right through her. She’s just a membrane now. A filter. Although inside and outside are just words. They switch from day to day. She’s positive. There’s no difference between them.
She’s silly. She just has to wait for this feeling to pass.
Aren’t there stories, she thinks, about how some poor black man’s always selling his soul to play the blues? Isn’t that interesting.
She lays the cap on the table. Maybe she won’t put it away. Maybe she’ll just forget it.
After all.
Who will complain that it’s there? Who will see that it’s out of place?
6:44 a.m.
It’s ninety-two degrees now. The air is literally sweating. What did Anthony say once? “If I had scissors, I could cut a ribbon through this day.” He’d always said that he should move everyone back up to New York. He had the address. Live with his sister in the Bronx. She’d done all but say that they had a room waiting for them.
Get out of Green Sea. Get out of South Carolina.
There’s nothing here.
Later, it was Damon. He’d only said it once. Not like Anthony, who’d made it a monthly ritual of tossing it right in her face. Damon had taken her for a walk. He was subtle. Some shooting had happened a few blocks over. He was talking about casually. She didn’t know the boy. That’s what she told Damon. He’d said, “There’s people that don’t know me or Norman either. Imagine that,” he said. She regarded him slyly. He didn’t say anything else. Just before they reached the house, he pointed to some birds lighting on a power line overhead. Grackles. They made horrible screeching sounds. He might’ve thought they were something else. Like sparrows or finches. Their scaly claws curled on the line above some white shoelaces dangling a pair of red sneakers above the street as if it this was the message their vicious caws were conveying. Damon’s face was ashen. The shoes were new.
But Martha couldn’t leave. The neighborhood. The smell. The touch of things. This was her home, she’d told him. She’d been born in the south. Bred to live here. How could she move? Even with her husband and her children, she would’ve been lost. Swallowed up. Even if this place crushed her, it was what she knew, wasn’t it? That’s what she’d said then. Still, she thinks it now. Her mind hasn’t changed. “I live in Green Sea, South Carolina,” she says to see how it sounds. It doesn’t sound like she thinks it will. She’d hoped that there would’ve been life, even a worn-down type of life in it. Nothing a little sleep couldn’t fix. A seed of strength, something deep within her, a little universe that remains unchanged, unafraid of the bigger world that she has to live and work in. But her voice is dull and empty. Hollow. I could’ve gone, she thinks. Long ago, they all could’ve gone.
Might’ve been different.
She can’t say for sure.
“This is a no where. I live in a no where in the middle of no where.” The thought is out there. No one hears it but herself. But at least. She still has the address on the refrigerator. She never threw it away. That was something Damon and Norman always noticed. That despite all she said about it being her home. She’d still kept one door open. And it was true that she’d not spoken to Anthony’s sister since Norman had gone to prison. But she holds the option open and she’s the only who can close it.
This is my door. I hold it open. I will close it.
6:49 a.m.
She pats her chest. Holding the entire history of the house here. Although that world gets smaller and smaller, it increases in power. It feels like an atom. If she were she to split it, to open it up, what would happen? Staying here, it surrounds her like a heavenly body. She draws from it for strength. The power of the hidden compartment, the front yard, the backyard, the dressers, the beds, the closet, the trunk. As much as she would like to leave, she can’t. She must stay. Who else will remember, will hold all these things to their finish? To their conclusion?
The chair creaks more than ever and. Only I know about it, she thinks and grimaces and shakes her head and. Grabs her purse and. Her keys and.
Shh. Her mind goes blank.
It’s time to go to work.
Brennan Burnside is a writer, photographer and teacher living near Philadelphia. He has been published in Lost Coast Review, Gold Dust, 3Elements Review and been a featured poet at the Glasgow Zine Fest. His chapbook, Room Studies, is currently on sale from Dink Press. He posts photos, literary quotes and other ephemera on his blog, burnsideonburnside.tumblr.com
