Jaguar

by Bill Ransom

  Maryellen returned to her house the day it was sold. Olive and her horrible son were moving to Oregon.

  “I’m not going,” Maryellen said.

  “Fine,” Olive said. “You don’t have to.”

  Olive had taken up smoking. She tapped her long filter-tip on the table-top, end-over-end, tap tap tap tap then lit it and tilted her head back but did not inhale.

  “There is some money,” Olive announced, her matchbook on the tabletop tap tap end-over-end, “for your college. If you want to stay here, I can put it into an account for you.”

  She rolled the ash of her cigarette delicately into a saucer.

  Maryellen didn’t have anything to say. She watched her stepmother’s hands, nervous and thin, their blue veins stark against her pale skin. Maryellen’s hands curled in her lap. Behind her hands, inside her warm abdomen, she imagined she felt a quickening.

  “You have a week to find a place,” Olive said. “We have to be out by the first of the year.” She finished her pink wine and dragged on her cigarette.

  tap tap tap tap

  Olive poured herself another glass and gulped down half.

  “Someone will have to be responsible for you,” she said. “I’ll get a lawyer to do it if you don’t know anyone.”

  tap tap tap

  She gulped the other half, set down the glass and finished her speech.

  “Your share is twenty-five hundred dollars. Chris and I don’t have any money to spare; this move is eating me up. I’ll put it in the bank Monday. You’ll probably need a job.”

  Olive finished her cigarette and stubbed it out in the saucer. She brushed all the little pieces of ash off her black sleeves and off the tabletop. Maryellen looked past her, out the window towards the river and Afriqua Lee.

  “If people think you’re crazy nobody’ll rent you a place or give you a job. Snap out of it.”

  Then she was finally alone. She found what she’d known all along—that breath came easier, and even temporary secrets were safer when she lived alone.

  All the shadows of evening began their slow melt through pink to gray. Out the window a crow or raven lifted off, his wings bowed and slow. Maryellen glimpsed his quick eye looking back, bright in the last of the sun.

  “Nevermore!” she hollered after him, “Nevermore!”

  Christ, she thought, I bet they hear that all the time.

  The End

  Acknowledgments

  James M. Mathias, MD; psychiatry

  Robert B. Olsen, MD; psychiatry

  Robert Colfelt, MD; neurology

  Karen Hart, physiology

  The McCarron family, the O’Keefe family and Johanna Nitzke.

  Portions of this story appeared in slightly different forms in the following publications: The Kansas City Star, Portland Review, Willow Springs Magazine and Iron Country.

  Thanks again, Frank.

  Bibliography

  Silver Departures by Richard Kehl

  Landscapes of the Night, Christopher Evans

  The Country Between Us, Carolyn Forché

  Life During Wartime, Lucius Shepard

  Gathering the Tribes, Carolyn Forché

  The Origin and Treatment of Schizophrenic Disorders, Theodore Lidz

  The Drawing of the Three, Stephen King

  Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card

  We the Divided Self, John Watkins

  Here Among the Sacrificed, Finn Wilcox/Steve Johnson

  On Nature, Daniel Halpernen

  The Destruction of the Jaguar, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno

  Dreams and Schizophrenia, Benjamin B. Wolman

  Chaos, James Gleik

  Collected Works, C. G. Jung

  Soul Catcher, Frank Herbert

  Crow, Ted Hughes

  Ravens, Crows, Magpies and Jays, Tony Angell

  “Letter to a Sister Who Lives in a Distant Country,” Daisy Zamora

  “Prayer for the Soul of my Country,” Otto-Rene Castillo

  Maxims, Marcel Proust

  The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Gaston Bachelard

  Sigmund Freud, Pindar, Herman Melville