Advance praise for States of Motion
“Stories can feel too careful, built rigidly around a single moment when the other shoe drops. Not these: Laura Hulthen Thomas fearlessly drops whole closets full of shoes, one after another, in these generous, spacious stories. She makes room on the page for all the complexities of real life.”
—Caitlin Horrocks, author of This Is Not Your City
“You will engage with these characters from the edge of your seat, as Laura Hulthen Thomas reveals their constant state of motion between memories of the past and present complex circumstances. Their futures remain uncertain. Yours may, too, after you read their stories.”
—Lolita Hernandez, author of Making Callaloo in Detroit (Wayne State University Press, 2014)
“The stories in States of Motion are a revelation: harrowing, tender, full of moments of everyday unease and menace. Laura Hulthen Thomas is a master at rendering characters undone by what life has thrown at them and by what they’re capable of doing in response. As with the very best fiction, the results are both surprising yet inevitable, and we are amazed, again and again in these stories, at what can be contained in the human heart, and at what can spill out. A debut collection not to be missed.”
—CJ Hribal, author of The Company Car and The Clouds in Memphis
“States of Motion shimmers with a quiet lyricism that transforms the stuff of ordinary life into pure magic. Laura Hulthen Thomas’s stories remind us that we are flawed and fragile and loving and dignified, and that every human moment contains the possibility of heart-wrenching beauty. What a lovely book this is.”
—David Haynes, author of A Star in the Face of the Sky
Made in Michigan Writers Series
General Editors
Michael Delp, Interlochen Center for the Arts
M. L. Liebler, Wayne State University
Advisory Editors
Melba Joyce Boyd
Wayne State University
Stuart Dybek
Western Michigan University
Kathleen Glynn
Jerry Herron
Wayne State University
Laura Kasischke
University of Michigan
Thomas Lynch
Frank Rashid
Marygrove College
Doug Stanton
Keith Taylor
University of Michigan
A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu
© 2017 by Laura Thomas. Published by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.
ISBN 978-0-8143-4314-2 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-8143-4315-9 (e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959424
Publication of this book was made possible by a generous gift from The Meijer Foundation. Additional support provided by Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs and National Endowment for the Arts.
Wayne State University Press
Leonard N. Simons Building
4809 Woodward Avenue
Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309
Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu
For Ron
Contents
Acknowledgments
The Warding Charm
Reasonable Fear
State of Motion
Adult Crowding
An Uneven Recovery
Sole Suspect
The Lavinia Nude
Lab Will Care
Acknowledgments
Bringing a book to life possesses a life all its own. I owe this life to Annie Martin and all of the dedicated staff at Wayne State University Press. My deepest gratitude also goes out to Kevin McIlvoy, Susan Neville, Megan Staffel, and C. J. Hribal for their guidance on early drafts of these stories. I am indebted to Lolita Hernandez for her forever wise and generous counsel and support. Dr. Geoff Murphy provided crucial background for Emily’s story, and any errors in science and the details of a laboratory scientist’s critical work are my own. My mother, Carol Church, is my first and best storyteller and lifelong inspiration. And all my love and thanks to the very best stories of all, my kids, Meg, Nathan, Bennett; and my husband, Ron, who have been with me every day, through every word.
I’m so very grateful to the editors of these journals for publishing the following stories: “An Uneven Recovery” in Novella-T; “The Lavinia Nude” in the Cimarron Review; “State of Motion” in WomenArts Quarterly; “Sole Suspect” in Midwestern Gothic; “The Warding Charm” in Art Saves Lives International Magazine. A monologue version of “Adult Crowding” was performed at the Mix Studio Theater in Ypsilanti, Michigan as part of Suspicions: An Investigation of Monologues. An excerpt of “Adult Crowding” appeared in Synesthesia Literary Journal.
An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.
Newton’s First Law of Motion (Law of Inertia)
O powerful love! that, in some
respects, makes a beast a man, in some other, a man
a beast.
Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Warding Charm
The day he came back, Emily was in the driveway, squatting in a gravel pen she’d built to capture ants. A black line streamed over her bare feet on its way to the nest in the corral’s center. Sometimes she would squeeze a few in the calloused patches between her toes. Abundant ants, restless to reach home. Their single-mindedness made them easy to trap.
He saw her, of course. She was in plain sight and made no move to hide. Under his arm he carried a floppy-eared gray rabbit like a football. His special-for-her gaze rested on her as it always had, although they hadn’t seen each other since. Emily was twelve, a late bloomer, her mother called her. Straight hips, hard shallow breast-buds. The training bra snagged her nipples. Her mother had scolded her to wear it that day, grow up, dress appropriately, but Emily refused. The chafing stung, and anyway what she wore couldn’t ward off his evil doings.
He walked past her up the drive, strode up the cement steps to the concrete porch. What was he doing here? He’d promised not to come back if she didn’t tell. Well, she hadn’t, she’d kept her word. He scratched the rabbit between the eyes. She hated that he was still handsome. The pale skin like blank paper. The deep-black hair curled at his neck. The mustache trimmed in a neat patch over his red lip like an inkblot. Shouldn’t he be ugly after the ugly thing he did? They did. Maybe that was why he still appeared to the world as handsome. Maybe it wasn’t to be thought of as ugly if she was now a part of him.
A single knock summoned her mother to the door. She opened the screen and parted her lips as if tasting every word he spoke. She always breathed through her mouth. Chronic sinusitis was what Emily had been told was the matter with her mother. Gunk made her breath stinky. Impossible to kiss her, hard even to stand near her when she spoke, yet he stood fast at the threshold. To hide her red, swollen eyes she was wearing her thick shades, the reflective Jackie O disks Emily would one day realize were fashionable back then. She cried all that morning, seized by one of those sudden jags that made Emily talk long and frantic. Her mother had finally kicked her outside. Now he was staring into her pitch-black lenses at his own reflection, commanding her attention.
Emily couldn’t hear them, but she was convinced he was telling her mother the whole story. Well good. She’d be released from her promise not to tell. Her parents would quit nagging her about her sulking. They’d quit squelching the talky bursts that followed her silence, those hour-long stories she’d weave, one thought ram
bling to another like mismatched beads Emily was determined to string into something pretty. If he always intended to tell, why hadn’t she gone ahead and done it first? What was the secrecy for? Why attach rules that only she was expected to obey, as if he were nothing to her but just another parent?
The strong line of his shoulders shifted as if he might hug her mother, comfort her over the bad news about her daughter. Emily wanted to run to the porch then, touch some part of him. Some clean part. Like his arm, the one curled around the rabbit. She waited, hopeful and grieving, for her mother to fetch the gun and shoot him dead. Grandpa’s Mauser rifle hung over their mantel, the one he’d taken from a German soldier’s corpse on the field of battle. That’s how her mother always described the trophy, taken from a corpse on the field of battle. Grandpa was a hero. He’d known how to fight a war and what to take from the battlefield after a triumph. Her mother was a hero’s daughter. She would know these things, too.
The sun whitewashed the gravel, frosted the cement porch with a glaring light. Through the sharp gleam the rabbit changed hands. The soft gray ears grazed her mother’s chapped knuckles, red rimmed knobs like her eyes under the shades, like her nose’s rosy bulb.
Emily turned her attention to the ants. She chose a jagged-edged gravel fragment studded with mica. The chunk was big enough to cover the line of ants marching over her foot’s flat table. Still, she was selective. She squished hard enough for the stone to cut her skin. Slow, thick blood trickled over the crushed ant. The line scattered, fell back into order, skirted the dead body like a stream’s current around a boulder. She’d remember this moment in high school biology, and again as a postdoc researcher, as her first glimpse of instinct’s unmerciful march.
The screen door clapped shut. Emily didn’t understand why her mother would take the rabbit except maybe she didn’t want to hurt it when she shot him dead. His shadow joined with hers. They were touching again down here at the gravel. Oil and sweat spoiled the clean air. Emily didn’t look up. With the sun behind, his face would be black. Nothing to see.
Emily shifted her bare feet in a sprinter’s starting crouch. When her mother fired the Mauser, she would have to scoot out of the way fast. Emily had to keep him in the driveway while her mother got the gun. She let the embroidered neckline of her peasant blouse fall open a bit. Bait for the catch, but she wished now she was wearing that bra.
His shoe knocked over one of her gravel walls, on accident or maybe on purpose. The ants scuttled to the break.
“Hello, sweetheart.” His voice special, as if they’d parted just the day before, although since the winter had disintegrated into this warm sticky spring.
Did he want to hear her voice? His was the same. A dip in his tone like the even swoosh of a swing. She shrugged.
“How are you?” He sounded hurt at her silence.
It was good that she could hurt him. When would her mother get out here? She mumbled, “Fine.” From the apple tree in the front yard a bird trilled two notes, hi-lo, probably a chickadee. She was memorizing bird calls that spring, something else to do when her mother sent her outside besides play with the ants. Were the blossoms out by then? Could she also hear bees buzzing at the pink-tipped blooms, their faint kazoos piped through the air like wax paper pressed to toothcombs? Beyond the apple tree and a row of lilac bushes the lawn sloped to the dirt road. His rusty old truck was parked on the shoulder’s grass. He hadn’t pulled into the drive, maybe afraid he’d hit her on accident even though she was right there in plain sight.
His shadow shifted. His arm melted into her head. “I brought you a bunny for a present. I remember you said your hamster died.”
Oreo died a long time ago. She was too old now to miss him anymore, too old to want another small creature. Rodents were for kids who didn’t know anything about what made a good pet. What Emily wanted now was a dog, the bigger the better. A cuddly gentle breed but with a huge barrel chest and fangs. Terrifying on the outside, loving on the inside.
Maybe he was remembering only that she’d told him about the hamster, and the telling made the death seem recent. He cleared his throat. “Bunnies are stronger. Not so susceptible to every little thing. They make good pets. I asked your mom if it was OK just now. Do you like bunnies?”
Emily hated bunnies. When she was a kid, The Velveteen Rabbit had scared her to death. Instead of comforting the sick boy, burning up with scarlet fever, the parents took away his favorite stuffed toy and banished him to the seaside. Any normal kid would die outright from such cruelty, but the boy had gotten better, so maybe it was all right. But why burn all of his toys while he was gone? Why not just spray them with bleach like her mother used to?
“I guess I like them,” she said.
He approved of her reply. “Lots of girls do.”
Their shadows drew apart. The ants abandoned the opening he’d kicked, streamed back to the nest.
She glanced up at the porch. The door was still closed. Maybe her mother was having trouble loading Grandpa’s rifle. Keep him here, hold him fast. Still, her hand crept to her blouse and scrunched it closed. Willed the door to open, the same door she’d opened to him when she was home alone and wasn’t supposed to let anyone in but he was there to fix the furnace, her dad had called him to come right away, he said, so Emily wouldn’t freeze to death, and he had a toolbox and she’d flirted with him, she had. Plenty of times when he hung around drinking beer with her father, she’d wandered into the den or onto the deck, pulled her bare legs up to her chin for him to run his gaze over. Met his eyes boldly. She didn’t even blush. Once they’d held hands when her father was in the kitchen fetching more beer. Wasn’t she old enough to know exactly what she was doing? When she showed off her new bikini to her dad last summer, flashed a grin over her shoulder, her dad laughed and said, “My goodness but a girl is never too young to flirt.” He meant to tease her. But Emily took him seriously, trusted his judgment of girls like her.
“Do you want to know what’s special about this bunny? Other than it’s for a special girl?” His voice dropped to the special tone he always used with her. The deep secret music used to thrill her.
She mumbled, “I guess.”
He squatted down to her level. He wanted her to look at him. She searched instead for the ant stragglers. “It’s not a tame one from the store. It’s wild. I caught it.”
How he’d managed that would be another string of terrifying imaginings she’d spend years trying to quash.
He touched her chin, tilted her gaze to his. Friendly eyes, black as sunglasses, why wasn’t it hard to look at him? Maybe she was braver then she thought. “It’s not easy to catch a bunny and not hurt it so it can’t be a pet to anyone.”
“OK.”
“So you can feed it anything. Because it’s used to eating what it can find. You don’t need to go to a special store to get special food.” His long nail nicked her chin when he let her go. He’d cut her in her other places maybe on accident, maybe on purpose. “It was hard to do. To catch her.”
A repetition of a fact she was expected to remember. She was meant to be grateful. “Thank you.” She tried to sound ungrateful.
“I’ll come back sometime. Help you feed her.”
He knew the family had a gun, he’d asked her dad to tell him the whole story once. Why wasn’t he scared to show his face here? A bird’s lithe shadow, maybe a chickadee, flitted over the gravel. Emily selected the ant milling over his toe. The shoe’s leather crown wrinkled under his crouch like ripples of brown water. She rubbed the worn leather with the gravel as if she were polishing the shoe. When the ant was crushed, he wet a finger. Familiar, the sound his tongue made. He used his water to wash away the ant, then dabbed the blood on her foot.
“That’s cruel, sweetheart,” he said.
She dried her foot by wiping the gravel chunk along her cut. “I know.”
“Like tearing the wings off flies. I knew a kid who did that. He was bad news.”
Emily knew a kid who
had pulled the wings off a monarch butterfly, and a girl, too, but she didn’t tell him that.
“This is how you get rid of them.” He stood up, nudged the nest’s mound with his shoe. Fine grains cascaded into the hole like sand sliding through an hourglass’s throat. “See? Easier that way. But it won’t keep them away for long.”
She looked up at the black hollow of him, his silhouette cut out from the sunshine like a paper doll. He might have blown her a kiss good-bye, she couldn’t see. He walked down the drive, disappeared into the day’s glare. The motor sounded as rusty as the truck.
Emily went after her mother to tell her she’d missed her chance to shoot him dead. The house was still, as it often was because of her mother’s condition. The day’s glassy brightness made the familiar rooms caverns, or maybe her eyes refused to adjust to the gloom. On the dining room table, the bunny was dumped in the old hamster cage. It filled the space like a fat aunt in a parlor. The water dispenser was empty. The shavings smelled of mold. Emily went to the den. Above the mantel, huddled in the flagstones, the Mauser lay on its pegs. The grainy blond wood stock and barrel gleamed as if her mother had chosen to polish the gun instead of use it. Her mother knew how to shoot this gun. Once she’d pointed it at Emily’s dad during the loud fights they used to have before the sinusitis became chronic. The gun wasn’t loaded, on accident or on purpose. The trigger’s hollow click made her dad laugh, like her mother was playing a joke.
So by the looks of things her mother hadn’t disappeared inside the house to prepare to defend her daughter. Doubly bad news, because this time he’d left with a rule change. He planned to come back.
He must mean for them to be lovers.
And since, after what he’d told her, her mother hadn’t shot him dead, she must mean for this to happen.
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