It's a first draft and needs to be cut by about 200 words if I'm to submit it to any micro-fiction sites.
The house across the way mirrored ours in nearly every respect, forgetting the minor details. It was undersized, like ours. Yellow, to our blue. Stood on the corner, across from us. We climbed on the couch and stood watch most nights, no one going in, and no one coming out.
On the other corner, other children did the same: watching us; we came on weekends--in the fall and winter--thanksgiving, twice. Nearly always for the Christmas tree lighting, never in January or February, when icicles grew from the eves, and fell shattering in the drive way. But we were back in the spring, easter break more often than not--remember the year it snowed?
We went to bed in the spring time, and awoke to a blanket of white, packed quickly and set out in separate cars, Mom and the kids, Dad with the dog and the antique furniture he'd picked up in Walton.
They had bought walkie talkies from Radio Shack, this before their expansion into the cellphone and digital camera and tablet computer market--this before, in fact, cell phones and digital cameras. Before tablet computers.
Dad, driving quickly, was soon out of range--"Michael, can you hear me, over." Nothing. Snow and ice. The Crunching road beneath our tires. "Michael, come in Michael, over." And nothing. Static.
Once, we nearly swerved off the road, wide eyed as the car was suddenly aimed at the guard rail, the granite, icy river below, and mother's sangfroid as she steered with the skid, gained control, pointing us back, slowly, inexorably towards the meeting place. I imagine her fear now, three children, and no control.
It took three hours to drive an hour and we spent the night in a hotel, watching through the window as snow piled against the wall, reached the window, stopping three inches up, an aura of frost above it, and spots of fogged breath, circles of wonder, like the universe itself, "ha - ha - ha," breathing out, and watching our big bang shrink back to a singularity above the snowed in window.
In the morning, snow hung from pine boughs, six inches high, falling now and then in dull thuds around us. The roads were cleared by then, on the highways anyway, and we made our way south, back to the city, a day late for our return to school, where the daffodils and crocuses were still germinating, and no one believed that we missed our first day back because we were snowed in.
**********
My brother and I had decided the yellow house across from ours was empty, finally, after years of faithful watching. Sometimes we would cross the street, walk the perimeter, with long jeans, ever mindful of ticks hiding in the overgrown grass. I never got closer than that until one day my girlfriend was visiting and we decided to poke around, discovered the back door unlocked and walked in, just like that. The house was empty, but abandoned--the floors sagged under the weight of forgotten ephemera--comic books, combs, the shattered glass carafe of a coffee maker, its black, L-shaped electronic frame nearby. Upstairs, overturned mattresses and emptied closets--sheets and sheets. Twenty minutes we spent, indulging our secret intrusion into a forgotten life. And then we too left.
Later, in Centralia Pennsylvania, we visited an entire town that had been abandoned--it was collapsing into itself, the town, a fire raged underneath, from coal that stretched for thousands of acres, sinkholes forming, swallowing townsfolk. And when the town was bought out, the moving vans weren't big enough for everything--hard choices were made and what didn't make the cut was thrown into a stretch of grassy road that used to lead somewhere.
*******
We lie awake at night sometimes, a generation borne of baby-boomers, talking and not talking, but always the same fear--our dubious inheritance, homes full of years of acquired souvenirs--books and videos, sculpture, painting, chairs, bolts and bolts and bolts of fabric, half re-finished chairs, basements overflowing. And when they're gone, us left to sift and sift, make the hard choices, the wheat from the chaff, and leave the rest behind.
No comments:
Post a Comment