Shadows & Tall Trees, Volume 8

by Michael Kelly

  “We can buy you a whole new bedroom suite, paint the walls a different color. Whatever you want. At least let the cleaners in here, open the windows and air things out, dust and polish and pick up all these clothes and towels and sheets, run the vacuum over these rugs. How long has it been, Dad? How long?”

  But you won’t let anyone else inside. This difficult life is still yours to handle. You wonder if you should change the sheets. You suspect things may be getting out of hand. You’re so tired of everyone’s advice you have to stop yourself from screaming.

  You haven’t told them how the bed creaks at night, how the mattress shifts, and the covers pull away. How every mysterious draft comes with a whisper attached. How someone on that other side has grown cold and needs your warmth.

  Once a day a man in a white suit delivers a hot meal to your door. You have no idea how much this costs them. You’re a grown man, and you’re ashamed to say you’ve never learned how to cook. You keep busy with nothing. Your hair is usually disappointing. You try to ignore these inexplicable swings in light and shadow, these unfamiliar odors, these unexpected swells of emotion. You don’t need to see everything, nor do you want to.

  “I know you don’t believe, but wouldn’t it be wonderful to see her again? We miss her too, and that’s what we hope for, that some day we’ll all be together again.”

  Both the walls and your skin resemble old newspaper. But in every lustrous surface: a piece of silhouette, a hint of eye, the suggestion of a moving form. Some of these reflections are not yours. Walking through this house has become an exercise in disintegration. You grow weary of the flies and stink.

  “For a long time, I wanted nothing to do with you. I regret all the time we missed. Why do we go through that with our parents when there is so little time left?”

  A long-lost cat glides in as if it might finally stay. You caress it, knowing its life to be short and brutal. You try to look out the window for the time of day, but those panes are full of confusion.

  Thick tassels of dust hang from doorways and the corners of ceilings. You never learned how to manage such visible neglect. You swing at them with a broom but have no idea if it does any good. You intend to take more showers. Cleanliness will keep you healthy and hopeful. You believe these perceptions may not be your own.

  “Dad? Please pick up. Are you okay? I’ll try to drive down next weekend. We’ll go to the movies. You loved taking me to movies. Remember how you said they were almost as good as dreams? I’ll always remember that. I hope you’re doing okay.”

  The phone rings many times a day, but it is always someone pretending to be someone they are not. Sometimes you can barely hear them. They act as if they know you when they don’t know you at all. Sometimes when you answer no one is there but everyone is listening.

  You are now old enough to understand there is a line which can be crossed, a balance which can be upended. You should not be here, and yet there seems to be no good solution for it. Everything you have done up until now has been improvised.

  “Are you sure you want to give all this stuff away? How are you going to remember the life you two had together?”

  *

  “Dad? Please pick up the phone. I’ve been trying to reach you for two days. I’m going to have to drive down and check on you. We had a deal, remember? I may have to call the police for a welfare check, and I know that may embarrass you, but I don’t have a choice. I’m hanging up now. Someone will be there soon.”

  You haven’t been outside in ages and you have no desire to go, but something compels you to open the door. You search your closets for some magical suit you can wear but travelling unprotected seems your only choice.

  You are surprised how dark the world has become. You had no idea the hour was so late. But at least all the tiny cracks are obscured. You start to go back inside, afraid to walk the city at night. Still you are driven to take another step, and then more.

  The neighborhood has changed but you can’t quite pin down the details. Your sense of balance is compromised and you’re not sure how to land your feet. Someone calls to you with a name which although familiar isn’t quite your own. You pick up the pace even though you have no specific destination in mind. Each time someone speaks to you it comes from a further distance away.

  “When you first taught me how to drive, I thought I’d want to drive all the time, remember? I asked you to send me on errands. I took my friends anywhere they wanted to go. Now I dread it. People drive like they’re at war.”

  Cars are densely parked on both sides of the narrow street, people jammed into their shadowed interiors. You wonder what they are waiting for. You stopped driving years ago. You could no longer trust yourself not to kill someone.

  Something moves among the trees along the parkway. A dark figure stands in the shadows between two buildings, whispering advice you can’t quite hear. You would step closer and challenge them if you were sufficiently brave. Everyone here has a great deal to answer for.

  “You forgot to eat dinner again? Dad, how can you just forget to eat?”

  On the next corner a once favorite restaurant is shuttered. You press your face against the window. The space appears to be completely empty, occupied by successive layers of dark. The black silhouette reflected isn’t yours, but you may have seen him somewhere before. You cannot remember the last time you looked at a photograph of yourself. The family pictures were stored in cardboard boxes at the back of a closet. You don’t know what happened to them all. They might have been burned or donated to thrift stores. You worry that someone else might be passing them off as their own. In any case these images no longer resemble you. Your history isn’t yours any more.

  “Have you made any friends? We worry that you’re so isolated. All these old men sitting around the rec center—maybe some of them can be your friends.”

  You are aware of other people walking these streets, conversing and conducting business, but they’re always so far away. No matter how far you walk you never appear any closer. You can’t account for the many discrepancies in time or distance. You can’t explain the general scarcity of pedestrians. You stopped paying attention to news reports a long time ago. Perhaps this is the consequence of choosing to be the last one to know.

  “Did you see it, Dad? They showed the whole thing on TV. All those poor people dead. The media could use better judgement—it only encourages the terrorists when they see their names everywhere. Do you think it really happened? We all saw it on TV, but today they can fake anything, did you know that? You never know what to believe. You can’t trust your own eyes anymore.”

  More than once you perceive a witness staring from some distant window. You are pretty sure they know something you do not. As you get closer you search for an opportunity to say hello, just so they know you’re aware, but every window is empty, and every door closed. Even if you wanted to start a conversation you could not. You may already know some of these people. But you’re not sure you can still tell strangers from friends.

  The city is consumed by the anticipation of its own decay. You want to let everyone know the first thing you lose is the meaning. Don’t make any rash assumptions. Withhold interpretation until you’ve seen enough. Most of what you believe about other people will prove to be incorrect. Everyone has the right to suffer in silence.

  While walking you have a dream in which you meet several people constructed entirely out of garbage. They follow you home and try to get in. They leave their nasty handprints all over your front door. You hide in the dark pretending you’re not there. You’re ashamed of your own reluctance to care.

  “Why can’t we invite them in for dinner, Dad? You always say we should do whatever we can to help. There’s so many of them now and they have nowhere else to go.”

  When you awaken, you’re still walking and there is no one left anywhere. Row upon row of architecture recedes into clouds of dust. All around your feet bits of life scurry by. You don’t know what they are, if they are even e
dible, but you snatch and swallow them while you still have the opportunity. This doesn’t satisfy you, but then you know nothing will. This is what it’s like, you think, to outlive your home.

  You burn. You burn.

  Tiny insects crawl out of your eyes and down your face like tears. Their overabundant legs mark permanent trails in your cheeks.

  You try to remember the last time you spoke to her. You don’t know if the failure is in your recollection or with your calendar. This is the life you’ve always had. Anything important either happens unexpectedly or is ill-prepared for.

  You remember other times when walking through the city was like reading a novel or watching a movie, finding yourself in another person’s head as you both negotiated an unfamiliar landscape. But not like this. Not for hours, not for days.

  Eventually you reach the suburbs of this place. Here all the doors have been left open. All the houses have been emptied; everyone’s things gathered into piles by the street. All of humanity is moving. The dead leave their houses for the living and the living are restless because they can be. Still, you see no one. Perhaps they’ve all gone out to dinner, you think, dinner and a show and the life to come with someone they used to love. You sift through their piles of everything, and yet nothing interests you.

  When you reach the bridge, you are terrified of its shuddering construction, so high there is nothing you can see below you but the obscuring fog. This may be the same bridge which brought you here so many years ago, but you really can’t remember. You gaze down through the layers of mist, where you imagine the drowning continents lie.

  “Have you met your new neighbors? Go out there and introduce yourself. At this point in life you need your friends.”

  Green Grows the Grief

  Steve Toase

  • • ∞ • •

  By the end his bones were like peeling paint on iron. Sophie had lifted him into bed when they’d eventually sent him home from the hospital. He weighed less than the blanket-wrapped urn she carried in her arms.

  Behind her, Simon followed; stepping only on the grass she’d already flattened. Since they were kids she’d always taken the lead. Always clearing the way for him.

  Sophie glanced behind. He was too hot in his suit but would never admit it.

  “It’s a sign of respect,” he’d said, looking her up and down in her day clothes which he thought weren’t even suitable for going to the shops in, never mind scattering their Dad’s ashes.

  At the back the cousins followed in a snaking trail, seeds and meadow petals snagging on their t-shirts. Their children had played together so long and so close for the past ten years it was hard to tell where one family began and the other ended.

  She rounded the corner of the small copse of trees. The greenhouses alone, the buildings they were once attached to long since gone. Somehow the fragile structures of metal and glass still stood when stone and alabaster had fallen. Something like grief caught in her throat and she swallowed it before she had a chance to pay it any attention.

  Her Dad had worked in the greenhouses as an apprentice gardener, and though his working life took him all over the county, he always returned when he could. Even when the estate fell into ruin. She wondered what he would think now. Whether he would weep at the chaos of trees and plants, pressing glass out of rotten window putty, or whether he’d rejoice in the vibrancy of life. She didn’t care. He wasn’t alive to ask. Another question that would go unanswered.

  She stopped. Simon stopped behind her, not wanting to face what they had to do shoulder to shoulder. The children had dispersed into the overgrown meadow like so many seeds.

  “Am I going to do this on my own?” Sophie asked without turning around. A breeze caught the sky, then caught the branches. They rattled against the remaining glass.

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” Simon said. She shook her head, partly in disappointment. Partly so her loose hair would hide her grief.

  Shifting the urn from one arm to the other she walked to the greenhouse. Roots and grass had long since knotted the door shut. She knelt down, ripping the plants free of rusting metal. When she looked at her hands, her palms were sliced and smeared with blood. The world taking another payment from her. The urn stood cushioned on a pad of meadow flowers. A metal vase of bone and ash. Nothing more. The door finally moved enough for her to enter. She picked up her burden and went inside. Simon did not follow.

  She thought the heat would hit her under the magnifying roof. Roll over her skin, snagging it and drawing sweat out of every pore. Enough glass was still above to turn the air humid. Bonsai ponds in the top of book-sized leaves. No, it wasn’t the heat that hit her first but the smell. The smell of damp soil. Of leaves browning to smears beneath her boots. Hidden flowers that shook free their scent as she brushed against knots of vegetation. The reek of rotting plants transformed to taste in her mouth. She swallowed and tried not to think of spores and seeds and decay, but instead the urn and her Dad and the pile of ash he now was.

  Pine trees rose through the canopy, their branches holding them in place. Vast untended tomato plants blazed with yellow, around their stalks fruit crawling with flies. Across the building, metal troughs full of soil and rotted stems. Each step she took unleashed another eruption of flavours. Plums and apples. Lilac. Under her feet she ground away blackberries, glancing behind at the trail of skins.

  *

  Without looking she took off the lid and reached inside, feeling the larger pebbles of bone fall through her fingers. Scooped them up again. When she took out her hand she stared at the grey streak filling the lines of her palm. Staining the calluses at the base of each finger. They would go with the next wash.

  There was no perfect place in the greenhouse to scatter his ashes. No matter where she spread the burnt and caramelised bone, her Dad would still be dead.

  She took out a fistful of powder and dropped it around some sugar snap peas, then some more into a container of ferns. After each handful she scattered she moved faster. It would never be easy, but it could be quick. The only thing to do was to make the process short. There were no words to say. No words to hear from him any more. Just dust and dirt and silence. Soon she’d forget the sound of his voice. She’d already lost what he sounded like before the choke of cells and the surgeon’s blade. Her only memory was the slashed croaking at the end.

  As she found paths around root-mats she came closer to the windows and ran her finger down the glass; through the warm smear of algae. Outside, the children ran through the grass, their location visible by the clouds of seeds rising to be carried away on the breeze. Simon stood staring in the opposite direction, as if he couldn’t bear to look at the greenhouse in case he caught sight of her.

  Another handful of ash. Sophie wondered if she held her Dad’s hand or his head. Over the past few months she’d cradled both as he struggled to speak, too weak to use a pen to write when his voice failed. The one time his eyes brightened was showing him pictures of the greenhouse. Seeing the joy on his face she knew what his last wishes were. How important they were to him. Dreams and choices the only thing distinguishing him from the malfunctioning meat he was trapped within.

  The tree was in the centre of the greenhouse. She had no memory of the curling path that took her there, as if recollection was rationed and she could not waste it on something as meaningless as paths.

  Bark rough and root splayed, the tree had shattered its home, a glitter of splinters upon the ground around her feet. Upending the urn she tipped the remaining burnt bone upon them. There was no breeze to carry them away. She wondered if, when high summer scorched through the dirty glass, the bone would char once more.

  Outside she did not speak to Simon, did not call to the children. She walked the path back across the field, knowing the place she arrived at would not be the one she left. That home did not exist.

  *

  It was July when Sophie returned to the greenhouse, and as she crossed the field the heat lifted blisters from he
r skin. By the time she stood beside the steel and glass she was ready for the relief of being out of the sky’s glare.

  There was no relief. No sanctuary from the heat. True, the sun no longer scraped one layer of skin from the other. Now the scent of rotting palm leaves and ferns filled every pore. The stench of lilac as it baked under glass. The sweetness of tomatoes rotting on the vine. It seeped into everything. It had been a mistake to come.

  She sat on the floor and crawled under a potting bench, not caring if decades old compost stained her skin. Beetles and aphids crawled over her legs. Caught in her hair. Beside her feet she found fresh falls of broad bean pods.

  The urge to feel the cool of the velvet inside was too much and she picked one up, running her nail down the seam as her Dad had shown her many years ago.

  The beans were shrunken and withered, velvet absent. Instead the inside of the pod blackened and scored. Rotten. She put it down and opened the next. This one had also succumbed to blight. The third she almost didn’t open. Didn’t want to see the bloated decay. Swallowing down bile in her throat she opened it anyway. The beans were perfect, plump and pale. She popped one into her mouth and chewed, feeling it turn to paste against her tongue. In that moment she was five again, sitting on the back-step, stealing as many beans as she put into the bowl. The memory was so strong she did not notice the grit until she opened her eyes, breaking the spell.

  It tasted of charcoal and dirt. She spat the mess into her hand and stared at the charred bone in the centre and carried on staring until the sun went down.

  *