by C M Muller
Fishing line? I wondered. Maybe a stray bit caught in his hair when he was hanging out with Fisher, before he started annoying me. The filament remained taut in the strong breeze, but I still couldn’t quite get a grip on it. Besides, this kid was creeping me out and my arm was bleeding severely. I started walking away again.
“Quit flopping around, fishy!” he yelled. He appeared in front of me again, latched onto my arm, and I shouted in pain. “Don’t you want to get this back to The Fisher?” he asked.
“There ain’t nobody around here, you little creep,” I said.
“The Fisher is,” he said. “He’s close.”
“I’m tellin’ ya—”
“The Fisher’s here. He’s close,” the boy repeated. He dragged me again, and if my arm hadn’t still been in a great deal of pain, I’d have resisted harder or yanked it away again. But I didn’t want a repeat of the injury I’d just sustained, and I wasn’t about to lower myself to the level of hitting some kid that I didn’t even know. I knew myself to be a pretty rotten person, but even I wasn’t quite prepared to do that.
“The Fisher’s here. He’s close,” the boy said yet again as we started down toward the water. The silver filament stuck out before him again and I finally managed to grasp it. It didn’t move though, and it remained taut on a path between the boy and some point in the water. He didn’t seem to notice it, and we were soon moving too fast for me to think about it.
“Yeah, yeah, the damned Fisher is close. I get it.”
His hooked fingers dug into my flesh and we once again resumed our rapid pace to the water’s edge. I instinctively kicked off my own shoes as they started to get wet, but I was moving too fast to look back and make sure they landed on dry sand. He pulled and pulled until we were both in the water, and it was soon up to his waist. The boy appeared not to care, and I seemed to have lost the ability to resist. My entire arm was on fire, as he’d worked his claw-fingers deeper and deeper into my flesh. Christ, this kid’s powerful, I thought.
“Hey, hey, hey!” I said. “This is far enough.”
The water was up to the boy’s waist and up to my knees, but he wasn’t stopping or slowing down.
“This is ridiculous!”
“The Fisher’s here. He’s close.”
The silver line coming out of the boy’s head flickered in the light. The other end of it disappeared into the water. He moved deeper and deeper into the waves, despite my resistance. It seemed the closer we got to our destination, the more powerful he became.
I was beyond panicked, but I couldn’t stop our forward momentum as I was pulled forward with him, old nasty shoe in one hand and my arm in the other.
The kid’s head disappeared under the water and he soon brought me with him. He turned back and yelled something at me. It was impossible to hear clearly under the water, but he was close enough that I thought I made out one word: “Here!”
I started flailing wildly, completely out of my element and terrified. My body didn’t know how to operate under the water and I was beginning to run short of breath.
I started to see spots before my eyes and I knew that I was not going to be able to wrench myself free. A huge hand came into my spotty vision, gripping the silver filament that protruded from the boy. He yanked the silver line forward, and we both came with it, the boy now having gone limp like an inanimate, empty human-sack.
The last thing I saw before the spots overwhelmed my consciousness was a huge bucket underwater, into which I was deposited alongside the rest of what I assumed was The Fisher’s catch so far for the day.
The Death of Socrates
Michael Wehunt
Cara sat on the edge of the bed, listening to her husband murmur under the floor. Her hand moved to the lamp but left the room dark for a moment. She felt the vibration of his words through the old oak floorboards, through her bare feet, through the hum of the space heater glowing red against her legs.
Something in his voice rooted her there. It flowed almost like water through pipes, unbroken as a litany. His side of the bed had not been slept in, the covers smooth under the goose pillow. Cara scrubbed her hands up and down her face. She’d been dreaming of the Causeway they’d walked last fall in the hushed red and orange of upstate Vermont, and now she waited for all the months between to bleed back into the darkness of the room. It was only Ethan, she told herself. He was probably just confused again.
Twice last week he’d done this, but in those cases it had been before bed, moments after he would have heard the creak of the mattress as she settled onto it. Both times he’d mumbled a sentence or two and then climbed back down to the first floor. Tonight he hadn’t come to bed at all.
She glanced at the glowing hands of the clock. Half past three. Her husband’s voice went on in its stream.
“Ethan, stop it,” she said, more harshly than she’d meant. “It’s not funny.”
Her feet found her slippers in the same instant her hand found the twist on the lamp. She stomped on the floor a single time but his murmur continued. A knot of guilt, even shame, hardened in her stomach. Ethan was sick, what was she thinking?
She swore under her breath, grabbed her robe off the closet door and went into the hallway. “Ethan,” she called from the staircase, “come to bed, honey.” The first floor was stifled with dark. Not even the familiar wedge of porch light angled through the panes high in the front door. A blanket of quiet. Whatever he was doing, she couldn’t hear it from the stairs.
The palm of her sliding hand squeaked against the railing and startled her. The steps sighed under her feet. She passed through the gulf of the living room, the grace of muscle memory guiding her around the end table beside the sofa. Ahead of her loomed the dim shape of the office doorway, like black paper laid against black felt. The soft half-whisper of his voice was even fainter down here, and not as close as she’d hoped.
“Ethan,” she said, and waited, hugging the robe shut. “Quit it, Ethan. Get out here. Now.”
He kept on speaking, and she again thought of a litany, a looping prayer. She reached around the doorframe and fumbled for the switch. The light snapped on and the room was empty. Ethan’s laptop was closed, his usual mess of papers and notebooks covering the desk around it. A stepladder lay overturned on the floor.
Cara looked up at the ceiling panel they’d only discovered in June, when they decided to have an office for Ethan here rather than a junk closet. It led to a short crawlspace between floors, a pocket that stretched from the center of the house to the eastern wall. The sliding panel was partly open, uncertain.
She stood below it a full five minutes, until she heard a drumming burst of thumps and choking wails. Then nothing. It was the tumor, she had to remember that. He could be having a seizure up there. She wanted to pick the ladder up, to shout his name, anything to help him. Instead she crept back upstairs. The quiet was much louder than the murmur had been. Not even her sobs could fill it. She turned on the TV’s white noise and dry swallowed an Ambien.
She opened her eyes to find Ethan in bed, snoring in his cartoon way, flutelike. He lay on his side, hands loose fists under his chin, face slack and peaceful as a toddler’s. Light came strong through the sheer cream curtains and his old scar curled like a hook from his graying sideburn.
She stared at the ceiling and tried to find some comfort in its rough whorls of plaster. As if written there were the words he’d been saying in that dead, chanting voice. Or why he would crawl up between the floors in the first place.
At seven she got up to shower. He was still asleep when she left for work. She made it through another day with her fifth-graders while her Zen face slowly broke apart. It was hard not to congratulate herself for leaving the Ambien at home. She braved the traffic, got dinner started, turned the space heaters back on to save money.
Ethan was distant, airy. “It’s better than yesterday,” he said, but still he used his headache to bat her questions about last night aside. She watched him sneak his fingertip
s up against his temples, prodding the hollows there. A clock in every room measured out his time.
Cara sat in the dark again. She held the remote and the blank TV threw back the pale green arms of the alarm clock. Under the floor, Ethan’s voice was a little louder tonight. A prayer, surely.
It had been twenty-four endless days since they’d learned his tumor was a level three. The sharp, pretty face of Dr. Furst calmly shoveling out grave words. Brain cancer. Chemo. Inoperable. Odds slim enough for Cara to make an appointment with her psychiatrist for her old friend Valium, but just hopeful enough to talk herself into canceling it from her car in front of his office.
She slid off the bed and knelt on the floor, as though intending her own prayer. With her ear pressed to the floorboards, she could nearly pick out a word or two. The top of her head grew unbearably hot from the heater and she climbed back to her feet.
She had to sit him down and talk. She needed to know what he thought he was doing up in the ceiling, under the floor. If he was hurting, and what she could do. She wanted to hear her voice say she was there for him, regardless of the fact that she already felt herself losing touch.
They’d just started trying to have a baby after the school year ended. The timing was right, the stars had finally aligned for them, until Ethan’s headaches started. The unfairness of it was like her own tumor.
And below her feet, the rhythm of his voice. Something close to music.
“I feel great, love. I even feel like I could work.” The look on his face when he said it broke her heart, but she surprised herself by believing him. He was almost younger, somehow. More vital.
She turned away. It was Saturday morning and she stood at the stove frying eggs and bacon in the same skillet, the way he liked. He sipped his decaf and leafed through a magazine. For a few seconds she could imagine it was still June. A new start and a home they hadn’t quite settled into yet. It had been a wonderful summer but it felt years gone now.
Her mouth opened and closed, the words she wanted to say clumping together inside. She laid the bacon out on paper towels to drain while she peppered the eggs. Then everything was on plates and she couldn’t put off sitting with him anymore.
He ate with a vigor she hadn’t seen in months, hardly pausing long enough to compliment the food before he stuffed more in. She watched him, traced the lines of him with her eyes. In the morning light his skin looked fresh, the hooking scar dim.
“Ethan,” she said, snagging on his name and then pushing herself on. “I need to know what you’re doing at night.”
He swallowed and stared at his fork. A string of yolk slowly dripped to the plate. “Sorry if I worried you,” he said. “I’m just doing some thinking.”
“Out loud?”
“Well, meditating, then.” He finally looked up at her. “It’s nothing, some words to help clear my head.”
“What words?”
“Stuff from one of my books. Socrates talking about what happens to the soul and body after—you know.”
“Okay, most people would choose Jesus over Socrates, so that’s good. But why do you need to creep me out under the floor to do it? It’s not exactly normal and—” She stopped and bit her lip hard. She wasn’t being fair.
“It calms me,” he said, watching his plate again. “It might not sound like it when I’m in there, but it’s fine. Just let me have this.” His words reminded her of when the shoe had been on the other foot, sitting at this very table in another house discussing the pills he’d found in her underwear drawer.
She stared at him, feeling the angry tightness around her mouth but unable to stop it. “You promise you’re feeling okay? The sounds you make scare me.”
“Yes.” He reached across and picked up her hand. “You’ll see.”
This was her cue to be the loving wife. The support system, the best friend. She managed to find a weak smile and a squeeze of his fingers before getting up and raking her plate off into the trash.
The mornings that followed softened her. A couple of them began with Ethan’s hand pulling her out of sleep and on top of his warm body. Years melted away with him inside her. Other days she still had to rush to work after simply watching the smooth peace of his face as he slept.
But in the evenings his headaches returned, regular enough to set clocks by. A quarter to nine and he’d start rubbing his temples and the rich, chatty dinner they’d shared would turn sour in her stomach as she sat helpless against his pain.
And in the nights, somewhere in their smallest hours, she would wake to his voice beneath her. She started sleeping with the bedroom TV tuned to one of the audio-only music channels, but Ethan woke her up anyway. His voice grew louder as the nights stacked up past a week.
She took him to the hospital and graded book reports while Ethan was prodded and stuck into machines. Dr. Furst stood before the spectral CAT scan chart and told her they shouldn’t get their hopes up, it was important to remain realistic. Cara nearly had to wrench from her that Ethan’s tumor appeared to have shrunk dramatically.
“It’s still there,” the doctor said, placing a fingertip beneath a black smudge in the X-ray. “But it’s over eighty percent smaller. I admit it’s remarkable. We’ve run some more tests and I want to get his tumor markers again. So until we learn from those let’s keep chemo on the board.”
“He’s been telling me how good he feels,” she said, staring at the smudge. She could have believed it was a piece of dust on the camera lens, if not for the blackened golf ball shape that had been in the precise spot just last month.
“No headaches?” Dr. Furst had taken her glasses off and was pinching the bridge of her nose as if she had her own migraine.
“No, he still gets one every night, before…before bed. But from morning until dinner he’s a different person. The Ethan I met, almost.” She tried to bring up the crawlspace, the murmuring beneath her floor, but she couldn’t bear to upset the flutter of hope lodged in her chest. Her eyes welled up instead.
“Just try to stay grounded, Mrs. Petrakos. I wish I could tell you more today, but we’ll talk again after the weekend and figure this out.”
Cara stepped back into the waiting room and kissed her husband, cradled his head in her hands as though she could truly love that speck out of his brain. The belief that it could get even smaller settled down into her stomach. It nestled against the renewed hope for a baby. It felt like light.
She held onto that light, tried to stay in every moment with Ethan. He gained a few of his pounds back. They went for bundled-up walks that grew shorter as the days did. They shopped for red meat and leafy greens. They watched too much TV until the inevitable headache came.
But too often she felt as if her favorite music were playing in another room, and her mind wandered from his conversation, or more frequently whatever was on Netflix, to pick out its melodies. Even if his tumor really was shrinking, it could just come back. She knew that. And so it was easier to bury herself in the rhythms of other times.
In the pall of the cancer and the early St. Louis winter, their trip to Vermont last October was never far from her mind. It was like one side of that record, full of more buoyant songs.
They’d found the Causeway in a small town north of Burlington, after getting lost during a foliage drive. They parked and walked a wide, beaten dirt trail through the woods and eventually came out upon a long needle threading the vastness of Lake Champlain.
A tumble of old railroad marble littered the sides of the Causeway like some shattered god’s tomb. They went out to its break, where during warmer months a ferry carted cyclists and the occasional tourist to the trail’s continuation to Grand Isle. The service was done for the year, and she and Ethan stood alone in the center of this great and still world.
Cara remembered the comfort of his fingers laced in hers, a clean wind on her face. Looking across the water as though she could see past everything into the forests of Canada to the north. Ethan had said something about tranquility, or p
eace, as she pulled her Valium and her Xanax from her shoulder bag. He looked wounded, thinking she’d already tossed it all, but she did so now, spilling the pills from both bottles into the lake.
Her knees weakened and he sank down beside her, pulled her to him and whispered the right things into her hair. “We should make a family,” he said in the end. The warmth of the words spread down her neck and she nodded against him, unable to speak.
That day had been the real start of them, three years into their marriage. It was the first time she’d seen a true horizon in front of them, without a decade of chemical haze obscuring it. And she flipped the record over to side two, mid-June, when he climbed on top of her and told her it was time to start trying. But the tumor had already bloomed against his brain, waiting for them to know it.
And now it was September, its music discordant, and Ethan’s evening headaches left her crying in frustration. Why couldn’t they have one full day, she asked the next night, giving him his pain pills and a hot wet towel to drape over his forehead.
He told her they would, many of them. His head tipped back onto the recliner, and she couldn’t read his face beneath the towel.
She dozed off on the couch and woke to find him leaning over and peering into her face. “Many of them,” he whispered. His eyes were wide and gray and shot through with strands of blood. The irises weren’t round but seemed a shape she might have learned in school once, of several circles overlaid. As if many eyes studied her.
He left the room when she asked what he was doing and wouldn’t answer no matter how much she pleaded with him through the closed office door. She took her last Ambien but lay awake for hours in their bed, pulling patterns out of the textured ceiling. Sleep felt impossible with every moment the one when his voice might come from below.