The Sadness of Spirits

by Aimee Pogson

  Aching in the Grass

  He found her aching in the grass. He was only a mailman and had never encountered aching in the grass before, but there it was, undeniable and sad. He stood beside her, leaned toward her pretty, mournful face, and asked, “Is everything all right?”

  She focused her eyes on him, blue eyes, squinted versions of the sky. Around her head, blades of grass and dandelions stirred. “I’m all right,” she said. “Just thinking.”

  She wasn’t just thinking; she was aching, too. He could feel it rising up from her in waves, a heavy presence. And she had picked an odd spot to ache. Right out in the middle of her front yard where everyone could see. There was no shame to this woman, but maybe shame wasn’t necessary when there was ache.

  He continued to stand there. The mail weighed heavy against his shoulder, but when confronted with aching in the grass, he felt he should stay and try to assist. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

  “No. I’ll be all right.”

  “Are you sure? I can help you up.”

  “I don’t want to get up. Do I have any mail?”

  He sifted through his bag. “You have a catalog,” he said. “And a Valpak.”

  She sighed and her eyes moved away from him, following the line of a nearby tree, up and up, across the branches where a bird was flapping its wings, ready to take flight.

  “Do you want me to leave your mail here for you?” he asked.

  “If it’s more convenient.”

  He gingerly placed the catalog and the Valpak beside her and stepped away. Words formed in his mind, meaningful words that might make her ache subside, but even as they formed they flitted away. Words were just words, and besides, he didn’t know how to go about stitching them together, turning them into something hopeful and true.

  That night the mailman’s dreams were haunted with ache. Images of forests and his father’s eyes and cold water were woven together with threads of black. His memories were turned over, given back to him in darker form, and he awoke breathing fast, thankful to see that his wife was still sleeping beside him, undisturbed. When he listened hard, he could hear the soft snores of his son down the hall.

  He knew he should get out of bed, go for a walk, and shake these images away, but he couldn’t move. His arms and legs were heavy, and his chest felt constricted. The darkness closed in, and the dreams felt as real to him as experience: footsteps down a dark path, dew seeping into his tennis shoes, a girl’s hand clutched in his. “If you listen carefully,” he had said, “you can hear their voices.” And she had nodded eagerly, willing to follow him anywhere.

  He pulled himself from the bed, one slow movement at a time, and groped his way down the stairs and out the front door. The grass felt wet against his bare feet, and the streetlights shone down on him. He hovered there for a moment, ache throbbing in his chest, his abdomen, his unsteady legs. His heart beat slowly, resisting its own existence. Overhead the sky was the indigo of early morning, and the stars were the same stars that connected his past to his future. He closed his eyes, feeling wave after wave of sadness washing over him, and then he lay down, overtaken with exhaustion, yet one more victim of ache.

  His wife found him there the following morning. “Honey,” she said, standing over him in her too-small yoga pants and T-shirt. “Sweetie. What are you doing down there?”

  He opened his eyes and glanced at her before fixing his attention on some obscure point overhead. “I’m just thinking. I’m perfectly all right.”

  “You don’t look perfectly all right. Why don’t you get up before the neighbors begin to wonder.”

  “Let them wonder. I wonder about them all the time.”

  “You’re going to get a sunburn,” she continued. “It’s too hot to just sit outside like this. It’s supposed to be in the nineties today.”

  “Heat doesn’t matter. Our ancestors came from Africa.” Besides, he was too busy to worry about sunburn. His childhood dog was standing at the edge of their yard, wagging her tail. He could still remember the exact feel of her fur against his fingers, the slight curl of her body as she leaped into the air after a Frisbee. At night she would sneak into his bedroom, a forbidden place, and her breathing would be slow and steady. It would lull him to sleep.

  His wife rocked on her feet, heel to toe, heel to toe. “All right,” she said as if making up her mind. “I’m going to call the post office, tell them you aren’t coming in today.”

  He didn’t answer. He was scratching the dog’s ears. He was burying his face in the soft fur of her back, the very best refuge.

  The neighborhood came to life. Joggers ran past, their feet pounding against the sidewalk. Dogs barked and strained at their leashes, eager to investigate the man lying prostrate in his yard. Sleepy neighbors started their cars and scrutinized the mailman, to-go coffee mugs in hand.

  The mailman didn’t notice. He kept his eyes closed. He floated in a golden space. There were his mother’s hands, lined with thin wrinkles, composed of fragile birds’ bones, tying his shoelaces before taking his hand and leading him out to the driveway to wait for the bus. The bus was bright yellow and had the strangest clean-but-dirty smell he had ever experienced.

  His own hands were scratched from reaching into blackberry bushes. He clutched a Dixie cup tightly in his fist. When he put a berry in his mouth, it burst both sweet and sour. “You have to wait until they’re ripe,” his mother scolded, but she was smiling. She was always smiling until she wasn’t, until he found her crying on the couch, her hands drawn over her head.

  Rain fell against the car window. It spread in rivulets, and he traced them with his finger, imagining a race. The drops veered apart and then merged together. They became lost in a sea of drops identical to themselves, and he began again with two new drops. Tom Petty played on the radio, and his parents’ voices rose and fell.

  In the distance, his wife spoke to his son, telling him to eat his breakfast before he could play outside.

  Mother. Wife. Son. Parents. The sun burned against his eyelids, and he knew that this day, like other days, would drift into the past, would be tinged gray by memory, the very shade of ache. Even the happy memories. Especially the happy memories.

  Small fingers massaged his skin. Cool cream. The sharp tang of sunscreen. “Mom said you’d get burned,” his son explained as he coated first the mailman’s face, then his exposed neck and arms. “She said you’re sick today.” The boy stood up and hovered over him. “What’s wrong with you?”

  The mailman opened his eyes. The sky and wispy clouds were startlingly crisp. “I’m just thinking.”

  His son sat down beside him, tore up a fistful of grass. “I’ll think with you.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “I like to think.”

  “Why don’t you go inside? Dad’s busy right now.”

  The boy sighed but sensed the seriousness of his father’s tone. Once the mailman heard his son’s footsteps fade into the distance, he closed his eyes again. There was the heavy heat of the school gym, the squeak of sneakers, the thud of a basketball. Other boys were sleek machines, already sinewy muscle and coordination, but his own feet wouldn’t cooperate. He couldn’t dribble and run. He couldn’t catch. He couldn’t even follow what was happening. A passed ball struck him hard, knocking the wind out of him, and his glasses slid off his face, hit the floor with a clatter.

  That burning. That intense desire to hurt himself. There had to be a better word for self-destructive rage.

  “Can we go to the park later?”

  His son was back, and the mailman opened his eyes. “We’ll see.”

  “I like the bigger one. The one with all the slides.”

  “I know you do.”

  “I can think with you.”

  “That’s okay. I can think by myself.”

  “Mom said to bring you this.” He set a glass of water down in the grass. It was filled precariously to the top, and some of it splashed over the edge with his so
n’s movements.

  “Thank you,” the mailman said. “I appreciate it.”

  His son stood beside him for a second and then hurried back to the house. The mailman focused his attention on the surrounding trees, the sky overhead. He knew he should probably get up, do some chores, but standing up would involve too much effort. His aching body simply wouldn’t hold him.

  Darkness blanketed him. His son had returned, this time with a sun hat. “Mom said sunscreen might not be enough,” he explained and put the hat right over his father’s face. The mailman exhaled, and his breath was returned to him as a hot fog. “Thank you,” he said, and his voice came out muffled.

  He couldn’t hear if his son stayed or went, but it didn’t matter. He was following the forest path, and his hand was intertwined with the girl’s and his dog’s ghost trotted behind him and perhaps there were other ghosts, ghosts he wasn’t ready to think about. “Sometimes you can hear the voices,” he told the girl, and mostly he was lying although he wished it were true. “They speak to you when you drift off to sleep at night and tell you about your life’s path.”

  “Sure,” she said laughing. “So now you’re psychic? You’re communicating with the other side?”

  “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could?”

  They had been drinking earlier at a party with all his friends, and he still felt a slight buzz as he walked through the tall grass feeling the dew seep into his tennis shoes. His friends were fun to spend time with, and the mailman’s memory veered to their bonfires, their adolescent jokes, but he couldn’t remember those details clearly—or at least not in the way he remembered the path.

  Cross the bridge. Turn right where the trail forks. Stay out of the pricker bushes. Watch to make sure your pole doesn’t get caught in the trees.

  He was constantly catching his pole in the trees, losing his line in the bushes across the stream, and his father always shook his head, told him to cut it off and start again. “Don’t cast so far,” he said. “Pay attention to what you’re doing.”

  The sunlight came down in soft slants during those afternoons. He kept an eye out for the glinting bodies of trout rushing through the tiny rapids.

  In the dead of night, the path was shadowed, a haunted version of itself. The girl’s hand tightened around his, but he led her forward. Up the hill. Onto yet another bridge that overlooked the deepest part of the stream. He didn’t know how deep, but he didn’t care as he leaned over the edge and peered down into the ripples. “It’s creepy here,” the girl said, but he ignored her. He wanted to fling himself into that water. He wanted to lose himself forever.

  His father’s funeral was still a bodily memory. His eyes sore from tears. His numb legs carrying him across the floor as he moved from guest to casket and back again. His throbbing head sending shocks of pain all over. Slate-gray clouds moving over an open grave that was unreal, unreal. But here by the stream his father’s presence seemed returned to him, even if it was only through his imagination: voice, smile, the arc of his arm casting a line, his father refracted a hundred different ways.

  He could still feel it now, an ache that swam the rivers within him, easily recalled, as natural as breathing.

  There was movement beside him. The mailman removed the sun hat and opened his eyes. His son was lying faceup in the grass, his hand on his forehead to shield his eyes. “What are you doing?” the mailman asked.

  “Resting with you,” his son replied. “Until you feel better. It’s too late to go to the park.”

  The sun was sinking toward the horizon, and the mailman wondered what had become of the day. He turned toward his son, studying the way his hair fell in dark wisps across his forehead and his eyes solemnly followed the clouds overhead. People talked about childhood innocence, but the mailman knew there were serious thoughts taking place behind those eyes, workings of great gravity that would be mulled over again and again.

  He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, so small beneath his palm. “When you’re older,” he said, “this day will hurt you, and you need to let it.”

  The boy nodded, eyes wide, and the mailman returned his attention to the sky, watching as the sun faded away and the first stars appeared. They would never grow old, those stars. He could watch them forever.

  The following day he returned to his postal route. He thought he might talk with the woman aching in the grass, but the yard was empty and her car was gone. That was just as well. He imagined ache spreading all over the neighborhood like a disease, people suffering silently in their homes or more publicly in their yards, and then he dug through his mailbag, removing two bills and yet another catalog. The envelopes were brilliant white, and the paper was crisp against his hands. He shut the mailbox with a satisfying thump and moved on to the next house and then the next, thankful for how some days could feel illuminated, thankful for how the responsibilities of the moment could only lead him forward.

  These Clouds, These Trees, These Fish of the Sea

  I am told there is peace in loaves of bread, and so I kneel as I measure—flour, baking soda, sugar—and I stand to pour batter into aluminum pans. I wait, hands pressed together, praying, praying that my bread will somehow rise. I count down minutes, seconds as my teacher, Hilary, passes by and squeezes my shoulder. “I’m sure it will be wonderful,” she says.

  Wonderful, I think, and the word falls hollow. Fear spreads through my stomach like a fish.

  Deep in my nasal cavities I smell sulfur. There is a devil within me, and I am its vehicle.

  The bread is dry and overcooked. Even though Hilary smiles as she tastes it, I know she is secretly convulsing. When I get home I throw the bread away and pour a tall glass of wine.

  “How was class tonight?” my husband, Miles, asks as he flips through the TV channels. There’s nothing on TV. There’s nothing to talk about besides cooking, the garbage that needs to be taken out, the bills to be paid. He doesn’t make eye contact.

  “It was class,” I say. “I did nothing productive.”

  “Then why do you keep going?”

  “I’m learning,” I say. “I’m making progress.”

  By morning my head is a slow swelling leading from my sinuses to my forehead and deep, deep within, throbbing, throbbing, and the morning sun is bright and I drink my coffee slowly, breathing in and out, in and out. Often breathing exercises are the only thing that will help with the pain. One breath in. One breath out. The day must go on.

  I dress in pure brown and tie my hair back in a ponytail. I wear red lipstick, sharp and distinctive. I don’t carry a gun, but I wish I did.

  The first perpetrator is a woman walking a dog.

  She wouldn’t normally be noteworthy, but she drops a plastic water bottle in the vegetation, allowing it to nestle among the endangered plants of Presque Isle State Park, Erie PA’s rare peninsula. I stare at the bottle, hardly believing my eyes, and then I begin to follow her. It takes only a minute or so to catch up to her, but in that time she also manages to drop a breakfast sandwich wrapper and a paper napkin. She is shedding trash like some sort of litter snake, and all I can think is that we have garbage cans for a reason and my head is killing me.

  “Hey,” I say when I get close enough. “Littering is prohibited on park grounds.”

  I am a small woman with a big voice. She jumps and clasps her chest, a damsel in distress, and I try to hold back my irritation, which is profound. “I found your water bottle,” I say. “And your wrapper.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “They must have slipped out of my hands.”

  Her eyes are defiant, daring me to call her a liar, and I sigh. It’s so easy not to litter, and yet I find trash everywhere, invading the natural beauty of this place. Why don’t people know how to leave a good thing alone?

  “I’m giving you a warning,” I say. “Don’t let me catch you again.”

  The woman glares at me, and I get the sense that her dog is doing the same. It’s a dachshund, shambling along on spindly legs, its pudgy stom
ach close to dragging on the ground. I hate dachshunds. I hate people who are too lazy to use a garbage can. My chest tightens, but instead of berating her, I force myself to imagine bread. Bread tucked under a towel. Bread slowly yielding to the dancing yeast within.

  Without another word, I turn on my heels and walk away. I hope her dog gets hit by a car.

  For my lunch hour I stroll along the beach, taking in the waves, the breakers that protect the peninsula from erosion, the endless lake beyond. So much of this place is carefully orchestrated to make sure it breaks down slowly, a deterioration people can process. Overhead the clouds are white and puffy, and I name their shapes—cow, mountain, tiger shark—as they pass by. I call Miles, but he doesn’t answer the phone, and I press a hand to my achy head. I continue to name the clouds: cactus, bear, Danny, Danny, Danny.

  Words are supposed to have power, and I once used them like a summons, but now I can’t put my heart into them. I have only these clouds, these trees, these fish of the sea.

  Often the best meals are created from opposites. This is what Hilary tells us as she reveals the secrets of fine cooking. Sweet and sour. Pork and pears. Applesauce and potatoes. “Your own experiences can also be a pairing,” she says. “In that way you can own them.”

  She invites us to think of the saddest experience we have ever had, and then she goes around the room asking us to share. I suppose this is the therapy part of the class, and I listen as people talk about kids turning to drugs, kids falling in with bad crowds, kids doing any number of things that are wrong and might affect their futures. Kids. Always kids, those little heartbreakers. I listen and I don’t know how to feel. All my life I have been able to pinpoint my emotions; I have prided myself on being self-aware, but now I am in a new place where everything is turned upside down. I sympathize with these ordinary tragedies, but I also feel tired. There is a hard lump in me that can’t be penetrated.