by A. J. Gnuse
Marshall’s window. While Eddie’s brother worked out, he would have had it open for the cross breeze, with his bedroom light left on. This wasn’t the first time his family had dealt with the swarming termites, but it was the first time in this house. Before, in the old home on the Northshore, Eddie had once left his own window cracked, and woke at night to the tickle and itch of a half-dozen of them on his arms and legs. He figured they’d been drawn to the heat of his body. Fortunately, tonight Eddie’s own light had been off in his room. Unless it had been turned on. Not by Marshall, but another way, when the family had been away from home.
But had his light been on when he walked from the car across the driveway? Eddie shook his head and pushed the thought from his mind. He rearranged the pillows on the sofa and took a seat. His light had been off. That was all there was to it.
His room was safe from the insects, and upstairs, his father wouldn’t be mad at him. Recently, after the side door in the library had been left open overnight, his father had canceled Eddie’s piano lessons, saying Eddie could request them again when he showed more maturity. Of course, Eddie wouldn’t ask for them back—he never had enjoyed them. He’d only put up with them for his parents. They’d seemed pleased by the hobby. Maybe his father knew that he didn’t care for them, and had used the open door as an excuse to end them. Eddie wasn’t sure. It was hard to know. It was hard sometimes to understand why anyone did things.
His mom entered as a dark shape into the living room. She reached around him as he sat on the sofa to close the curtains, the fabric of her shirt brushing against his hair. He watched as the outline of her head turned into profile, looking down among the furniture for the remote. She found it on the old ottoman and turned the television off. The high-pitched whir of the machine—too high for the others to notice, even when the television was on mute—went silent. Eddie closed his eyes. Opened them. For a little while, he couldn’t tell the difference. His mom left the room and he waited for his eyes to adjust.
A house is porous, he decided. Surprisingly so. Cracks beneath ill-cut doors and along the bottoms of the old storm windows, and holes in the foundation. Rainwater dripping through the ceiling, or bugs skittering across the linoleum: there’s not much separating inside from the outside. Eddie lay down on his back on the sofa and squinted until he could make out the turning fan blades above him. His parents still thumped through the house, catching any lights still on. The clock in the foyer chimed for the quarter-hour.
A wall doesn’t create two separate places, it’s just a thing in the middle of the same place. How many bugs were in the house already? There’d been a spider in the ceiling corner of his bathroom above the tub for months—it had to have been living off something. Maybe those somethings were simply good enough at hiding that no one knew.
What else is in the house?
He didn’t want to think those words.
Who was it that had been here?
Don’t bother. It’s over, and gone. Half-made by imagination, or more, or all—done and gone away.
“I don’t even think about it,” he said aloud to the empty room.
Nightwalk
LATER THAT NIGHT, AFTER THE SWARM ENDED, EDDIE FELT THE ITCH of filament legs on his body. But when he turned on the lamp, nothing crawled over his skin. The door to the bathroom was shut, and a towel stuffed along the bottom crack still blocked any of the termites that had entered through Marshall’s window from entering his own room. Eddie climbed out of bed and stepped in the hallway. It was all in his head. Like his mom told him: when a nightmare scares, a walk shakes the fear away.
In the hallway, Eddie rested his forearms and chin on the thick frame of the storm window. He inhaled, and dust tickled his nose. Outside, the moon was big and bright, like a bulb of a flashlight between the trees. The moon never really had looked like a face to him. There were holes for eyes, but where was the mouth? The whole thing seemed covered in eyes.
“Who is that?” his brother hissed through the guest room’s doorway. “Is that you, Eddie?”
“It’s me.”
Eddie heard the bedsheets shift. He looked through the doorway and saw in the gloom his brother sit up and rub his face.
“What did I tell you about walking around at night? The fuck are you doing out there?”
“I was . . .” He didn’t want to admit the nightmare. Marshall would laugh. Eddie said, “Just looking.”
“What? What’s that mean—looking?” Marshall said. He shook his head. “Actually, I don’t care. Quit skulking and go to bed.”
“Okay,” Eddie said.
“I’m serious, you scare me like that again, I’ll gut-punch you.”
“Okay.”
Marshall pulled the comforter over his head, and Eddie went back to his room and closed the bedroom door. Inside, he stood and listened. He wouldn’t be able to sleep until he looked. Eddie went into his routine, the one he had begun the evening of his birthday, when he packed up his Legos into plastic bins and stored them in the attic. When he counted the books on his shelves, so he could ensure they were all still there.
Eddie dropped to one knee to look beneath the bed. Peered behind the overstuffed armchair. Pushed the hanging clothes in the closet to either side.
Nothing. So, Eddie crawled into bed and turned off his lamp.
Some Troubles of the Girl Who Doesn’t Exist
ELISE SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE EATING A BOWL OF RAISIN BRAN. The Masons were out of milk, so she ate the cereal dry, picking raisins out first with her fingers and placing them on a napkin beside her bowl. What remained was the brown flakes, dry, on their own. A terrible breakfast.
One of the Masons, earlier that morning, had spilled orange juice on the table, and the small puddle sat beside her cloth place mat, yellow and sad, soaking slowly into the table’s wood grain. By afternoon, the liquid would likely turn the wood beneath it a brownish-gray—unfixable probably—puckered into small moisture scars.
Not Elise’s problem.
She might once have been bothered to slide her napkin four inches over, to clean the spill for the family. Solve a mess before it became one, without them ever knowing. Keep Mrs. Laura’s wrath from whatever dumb boy couldn’t notice the spill he’d caused. Now, she couldn’t be bothered. Girls who don’t exist can’t clean up the mess of people who do.
Why Elise Was Bothered, in No Particular Order
1. A MISERABLE NIGHT’S SLEEP.
Last night, with the termites swarming, Elise spent the final hours of her evening in the pitch-black of the attic, afraid even her small booklight might attract the bugs. She sat in the dark, hours before the cries of the starlings downstairs, when she normally called it a night. Eventually, when she could no longer take the boredom, and the waiting, and the unsettling thought that insects were somehow gathering in a dark cloud above her head, she flipped on the booklight to investigate. They weren’t billowing above her—thank god—but she did find nearly a dozen crawling on the floor below the attic dormer. Their clear, papery wings already shed along the windowsill, their pupilless, red eyes like little drops of blood under her light. Elise couldn’t decide what was worse: letting them live to skitter through the attic all night, squirming over her, or to smoosh them, and get bug guts on the soles of her feet. Ultimately, she hedged her bets and did a little of both, which had given her the worst of both worlds.
2. BREAKFAST FOOD.
She wasn’t going to let this go. Breakfast is—should be—the single greatest meal. Fried eggs, pancakes drowned in syrup, buttery biscuits, hot grits, grape jelly on toast, bacon with the edges burned the way her dad used to cook it. No child should ever be subjected to the Raisin Bran in front of her, particularly a bowl without milk. Elise was tempted to walk right over to Mrs. Laura’s tear-off grocery list hanging from the refrigerator and write, below her husband and the boys’ request for bananas and spaghetti, a two-line, all-caps demand for “GOOD CEREALS PLEASE.” Seriously. They didn’t have to be sugary stuff
. Just not Raisin Bran.
3. TODAY WAS A WEEKDAY.
This used to be a good thing; it guaranteed morning hours alone to herself in the house. But now the afternoon encroached on her like an ominous weather forecast. It drove her to interrupt her reading or television show in order to lean into the foyer and double-check the time. Had to make sure the goose call she just heard wasn’t actually the cardinal gone hideously hoarse. Weekday afternoons had become more restricted. Since the birthday of a certain boy, Elise had to spend them in—
The attic.
The laundry chute.
The walls.
—often wedged up and uncomfortable, as quiet as she could manage. This was safest, the only way she could be sure that Eddie wouldn’t realize she actually hadn’t gone anywhere. That she had, in fact, stayed exactly where she was, and still heard, from her nook in the attic, the same squeak when he climbed into and out of his bed, the same opening and closing of his clunky dresser drawers; and that, from time to time, she still caught sight of him in that part of the yard where he paced, between the willow and oak, where he thought no one could see him. And now that she considered it, catching sight of him was no good because that meant:
She had been in a place to see him, so—
He had been in a place to see her.
Which meant she was still making mistakes, meant she should tone down, curl up smaller, be even quieter than she had been before. She had to realize no time was safe, or fully hers. Even the nighttime was being taken away, like last night, when she tried to sneak down to the first-floor bathroom to scrub her feet clean of the dead bugs, and she’d been startled by Marshall in the guest room rolling over and squinting out into the dark at her. Elise had flattened against the wall beside the doorframe, her heart so loud she could hear it, and listened as the older boy called out to her:
Eddie? Is that you?
Who is that?
Who’s there?
And she stood there for nearly half an hour, squeezed against the wall, until she was sure that Marshall had chalked it up to his imagination and had finally gone back to sleep. Finally.
4. SPRING WAS ENDING, AND EVERYTHING WOULD ONLY GET WORSE.
Eddie and Marshall out of school, at home more—maybe all day. Plus, two days ago, Marshall had come home from the car wash to say he’d quit his job because his manager treated him like a child. Mr. Nick’s voice rose up from the guest room, cracking with the disbelief she herself felt. Marshall home all summer, every day? Neither of the boys seemed to have friends they left home to spend much time with. They’d both be here, and Elise would need to limit herself even more, even more. And so, she would have to rearrange her schedule. Adapt, shrink.
Find other times for:
Breakfast.
Bathroom breaks.
Stretching.
Moving.
Breathing.
Basically anything considered life.
5. BUT THAT WASN’T EVEN ALL THAT WAS BOTHERING HER, BECAUSE . . .
Dear lord, dear Odin, dear patron gods of nonexistent girls and all that’s hidden and lost and stuffed-up-in-someone-else’s-crawl-space-somewhere—a crick throbbed along the length of Elise’s neck. A big, fat throbber down into her shoulder. Of course, when one sleeps in the crawl space beneath attic floorboards with a balled-up sweatshirt for a pillow, it’s something she would expect. But this morning?
“Necks that don’t exist shouldn’t hurt,” she muttered, giving the offending muscle a harsh, two-knuckle rub. “Get with the program, Buck-o.”
Life Is Boring
ELISE WASHED HER BOWL IN THE KITCHEN SINK, DRIED IT WITH A hand towel, and placed it back in the cupboard. She took one of Eddie’s gummy vitamins from the pantry and chewed it, looking out the window past Mrs. Laura’s garden and the backyard trees, across the open field, at Ms. Wanda’s blue house that rested, half-surrounded by woods. Elise watched a little boy, tiny with the distance, step out from the underbrush, and cross into the neighbor’s yard. He crawled up on the seat of a riding lawn mower parked beside the house and, standing on the seat, pressed his head against the dark window with hands cupped around his face. He pulled the window open and squirmed his way inside, legs flailing in the air as he kicked his way in.
Locked out. Elise sighed and shook her head. She understood that. She felt locked out, even being inside. The boy was some nephew of old Ms. Wanda, probably, visiting for the morning. A second- or third-grader at most.
Elise yawned and arched her back, trying to pull loose the tight muscles. Had she ever been this sore before? Had she always been, since she had come back home? Was this growing up? Growing pains? Elise made a mental note to check the pencil marks in the side of one of the library bookshelves her parents had used to measure her height—measurements she tracked now with something less than pride.
In the fall, if Elise were still going to school, she would be a fifth-grader. Maybe once she would have been excited to reach that age. Maybe. But now a fifth-grader seemed so old. Gangly, out of place. How could a girl that big move in the small crevices of a house? Where could she fit? How could a girl like that exist anywhere?
She sighed and watched the shadows of clouds pass over Mrs. Laura’s garden in the backyard. The ground still moisture-dark from the cantaloupe and watermelon seeds she’d seen planted the evening before. Each of the leaves on the trees wiggling in the breeze, as if they each had their own mind.
Elise pressed her nose against the thick storm window, and—careful—bunched her shirt up at the bottom to wipe away the offending smear. Elise missed these things. The outdoors. The simple act of going outside.
But to come back to a home after time gone is to push open the door and find that the shadows have all shifted. To be accosted by the house’s smells, whether laundry or candles, food or mildew. To find things moved, mail brought in, someone else’s shoes left by the door. To come back, at any point, is to return, in a way, as a stranger. Each minute you’re away makes you a little more odd, and the house a little more odd to you.
Elise had been that stranger already—when she’d come home that December to find the Masons’ furniture squatting in the places where her parents’ things had once been. Pungent, orange-scented air fresheners plugged into the electrical sockets. New scratches on the wooden floor. Hair, shades darker than hers or her parents, collected around the shower drains.
Who would want to be that again?
Elise wouldn’t, as long as she stayed, and stayed inside.
She’d last here, for as long as was needed. Like one of her dad’s old sayings: Come hell or high water. Until the very end.
The sun pulled free from a cloud, turned the outside an electric, vibrant green, the kind that continued when she blinked—a flash of the speckled afterlife of lights—reds and yellows lingering across her eyelids’ insides. The colors of the last days of spring shifting in the wind, still there as Elise turned back to see a room that had gone gray around her.
Here, the girl stayed, where all that moved was dust, sinking through the air like a cloud of gray, dead midges, visible only in the illuminated shaft through the window.
Swamp Creatures
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LEVEE, RIVER WATER ROSE.
For months, as the snow melted up north, the small runs of water fed into streams, swelling half-iced creeks, sloughing downhill, weaving over rock and sand and padded mud, over the days and weeks down into the Mississippi. With it, the brown river ballooned, as it had every spring, until it pushed up against its border levees, swallowed the thin batture, and submerged the cypress trees to their slender bellies.
When the air cooled in the evening, green river frogs and southern toads, large as a man’s fist, emerged from the water’s edge and leaped in short bounds up the concrete side of the levee. They crested the levee, plunging into the grass. Then down across the road and into the Masons’ yard.
Eddie marched along his trail between the willow and the oak even after the sun set.
Twelve and a half steps to the roots of one tree, and twelve and a half back, made twenty-five. There and back four times made a hundred steps. He wore the knee-high rubber boots he had received this past Christmas, the ones he wore every afternoon in the backyard, even though his feet had already grown until his toes pinched, and it had become a chore to pull the boots on and off again. Everything changed in time.
Eddie adjusted his pace in order to step over a toad that had appeared in the mud of his trail. A skink wormed over the bark-stripped root where he had planned to step and pivot. Hard to keep focused on his own mind when the world beneath him teemed and wriggled on its stomach.
“Eddie!” His brother’s voice. “If you’re still out here, Mom says come inside!”
The back door slammed shut.
It was getting late. Eddie had been out here since he had come home from school, counting his steps and imagining himself as a knight. The back field had become overgrown with yellow thistle, and while he had paced that afternoon, the stalks had been spiked creatures, his enemies, peering at him above the tall grass, plotting as he prepared his castle’s defenses. Too old to think like that, he knew. He hadn’t even done any of his homework, even though there was less of it now, with the school year nearing its end. Eddie looked over at the house, gone gray in the dusk. His father was a shape passing through the office window. A lamp blinked on. He had to go inside now. Eddie realized he’d been avoiding it.
“Hurry the hell up!” His brother’s voice again. “She won’t let off me until you get your ass in!”
The grass rustled in the field behind him. Shadows leaping throughout the yard. When Eddie pulled open the screen door, he found a lizard caught in the netting. Its limbs twisted in the screen, and its yellow eyes lolled. Skin dried to a dark brown. He couldn’t tell if the animal were dead or looking at him.