Tribulations

by Richard Thomas

  “To the nickel.”

  “Tomorrow night then,” Jamie said. “Christmas Eve.”

  “Yep.”

  “What the hell are you doing, John,” Jamie asked.

  “The only thing I can.”

  When John got home Laura rushed out to the car.

  “The fireplace,” she said, “It’s caved in.”

  John looked up to the tall brickwork that was now leaning to one side, the winds whipping up a tornado of snow around him. A few broken bricks lay on the ground, a trickle of smoke leaking out of the chimney.

  “Everyone okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah, some smoke and ashes, I swept it up and the fire was out at the time. But no fire for Christmas now, the kids will be disappointed.”

  “It’ll be okay,” John said. “We’ll survive.”

  ****

  It was a Christmas tradition that John and Laura would stay up late, drinking wine and talking, giving thanks for the year behind them. Laura would glance at the presents and John would wince. Every time she left the room, he poured his wine into hers, preparing for the night ahead.

  At one o’clock he tucked her into bed and went out to the truck. It was cold outside, getting colder, the layers he wore giving him little protection. There was a slow snowfall gracing the crops, his headlights pushing out into the night. John was numb. Where was the storm, the epic snowfall, the crushing ice storm, the arctic temperature littering the countryside with the dead?

  He pulled up to the trailer and Jamie stepped outside. On the river was a single barge filled with coal. A crane was extended out over it, teeth gleaming in the moonlight.

  “Ready?” Jamie asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Jamie manned the crane, back and forth, filling it up with coal and turning it to the side, a shower of black falling on the truck bed, the darkness filling with the impact of the coal. Over and over again Jamie filled the crane with coal and turned it to the truck bed, and released it. In no time the bed was overflowing.

  “That’s all she’ll hold, John,” Jamie said.

  “Thanks, Jamie. You might want to take some home yourself.”

  “Why?”

  “Storm coming.”

  ****

  At the house, he backed the truck up to the chute, glancing up at the sky, clear and dark, with stars dotting the canvas. He opened the heavy metal doors that lead into the basement and started shoveling the coal down into the chute—the coal sliding down and spilling onto the floor. Fat snowflakes started to fall, a spit of drizzle that quickly turned to ice, slicing at his face. He kept shoveling. The bed of the truck was an eternity stretching into the night—one slick blackness pushing out into another. He kept on. The snow fell harder, John struggling to see much of anything, guessing where the mouth of the chute was, flinging the coal into the gaping hole, feeding the hungry beast.

  When he was done he didn’t move the truck. He could hardly lift his arms. And his secret wouldn’t last much longer, anyway. In the kitchen he sat under the glow of the dim bulb that was over the sink, sipping at a pint of bourbon that he had pulled out of the glove box, numb and yet sweating, nauseous and yet calm. It was done. Whatever would come, it was done.

  He fell into a fitful slumber, his wife asleep beside him, the silence of the building snowfall, deafening.

  ****

  The morning brought screams of joy, and soon after that, screams of panic and fear. The children climbed in bed, excited to open their presents, bouncing on the heavy comforter as Laura beamed at the children. John sat up, dark circles and puffy flesh under his red, squinting eyes.

  “John, you look terrible, you okay?”

  “We’ll see,” he said. He leaned over and kissed her. “Just know that I love you,” he said.

  Laura turned to the kids. “Should we go downstairs?”

  “Mommy, look at all the snow. Everything is white,” Missy said.

  Laura got up and walked to the window.

  “My God. John, come here.”

  John stood up and walked over to the window, the yard filled with snow, a good four feet up the trunk of an old oak tree. The snow showed no sign of stopping. The limbs were covered in ice, hanging low. John walked to the other window that faced into the back yard, and saw that only the cab of his truck was visible above the snow.

  The kids turned and ran down the stairs. Laura turned to John and opened her mouth, and then closed it. When they got to the bottom of the stairs the kids were already at the presents, starting to rip them open. Coal dust and fingerprints were on the stockings, a small bulge at the bottom of each. They stopped at the bottom of the steps and watched the kids as their smiles turned to looks of dismay.

  “John, what’s going on,” Laura asked.

  The kids looked up, the boxes empty. Missy went to her stocking and dumped the lump of coal into her hand. John didn’t remember putting those lumps of coal in the stockings. Some of last night was a blur. Outside the wind picked up. The loose bricks shifted in the fireplace, a dull thud scattering across the roof, and a blur of red fell past the window.

  Missy began to cry.

  “John, what did you do?” Laura’s face was flush, and she walked to Missy, pulling the girl to her side. Jed kept ripping open boxes, his face filling with rage—any box, big or small—his name, Missy’s name, he kept ripping them open.

  Empty, all of them.

  John sat on the couch and clicked on the television set, all of their voices filling the room, the paper tearing, Missy crying, Laura saying his name over and over again.

  “…for the tri-county area. Temperatures are plummeting down into the negatives, currently at minus 20 and falling, wind chill of thirty below zero. We are expecting anywhere from six to ten feet of snow. That’s right, I said ten feet.”

  “Shut up!” John yelled, turning to them, tears in his eyes. He turned back to the television set.

  “Winds upward of fifty miles an hour. We have power outages across the state. So far over fifty thousand residents are without electricity. ComEd trucks are crippled as the snow is falling faster than the plows can clear them. Already we have reports of municipal vehicles skidding off the icy roads.”

  John looked up into the corner of the room where a large spider web was spreading. A ladybug was caught in the strands, no longer moving. The weatherman kept talking, but John could no longer hear him. The map, the charts, the arrows and numbers spread across the television screen, warnings and talk of death on the roads.

  “…anywhere from six to ten days before…”

  Outside there is a cracking sound, a heavy, deep ripping and the kids run to the window and look out. Icicles and branches fall to the ground, shattering like glass, half of the tree tearing off, one mighty branch falling to the ground, shaking the foundation, sending snow flying up into the air.

  “John?” Laura says.

  “…do not go outside for anything…”

  “John?”

  “…blankets, huddle together…”

  Somewhere down the road a transformer blows sending sparks into the sky, the bang startling the kids who start to cry, burrowing deeper into Laura’s side.

  “…police and a state of emergency…”

  The television set goes black and the Christmas tree lights wink off. Winds beat against the side of the house as a shadow passes over the windows. Outside the snow falls in an impermeable blanket, the roads and trees no longer visible.

  The room is suddenly cold.

  John gets up and goes to the kitchen, taking a glass out from the cabinet and turns on the water. There is a dull screeching sound as the whole house shakes, and nothing comes out of the tap.

  “Pipes are frozen,” John says to himself.

  On the windowsill is a line of candles, and three flashlights sitting in a row. He grabs one of the flashlights and opens the basement door, staring down into the darkness. John walks down the stairs to where the coal spills across the concrete, grabbing a shovel t
hat he has leaned against the wall. He pulls open one furnace door, then the other, and setting the flashlight on the ground so that it shoots up at the ceiling, he shovels in the coal. In no time the furnace is full. He walks around the basement, the band of light reflecting off the ductwork, turning screws and opening vents. Behind him on the stairs Laura stands with the children in front of her, each of them holding a lit candle, a dull yellow illuminating their emotionless faces. John lights a match and tosses it into the furnace, a dull whoomp filling up the room.

  Turning back to his family at the top of the steps, John smiles, and wipes the grime off of his face.

  Love Letters

  It started with the paper, tearing it apart into little pieces, pressing it into tiny balls and popping the crumpled words into her mouth. Cassidy would chew and chew his love letters while staring out the window, the sun setting across the city—her apartment falling into darkness. She imagined that she could hear him speaking, his deep voice filling up the empty spaces that she created with her desperation and remorse. He compared her to a summer day, to a moonlit lake, to a drug addiction—one he needed to quit. She didn’t believe he would disappear—Cassidy felt their love was eternal. Twirling her long, red hair in slender, pale fingers, she stared out at the city, wondering where he was.

  She moved on to the ink. In an effort to embrace a historical sense of romance, she purchased an inkwell and a quill, inserting the sharp tip into the shimmering black liquid, running the tip across the page. It didn’t turn out well. When she hesitated, and that was often, she would place the tip of the quill on her tongue and tap it, tap it, trying to put in words her feelings for him, the man who spent many a night caressing her ivory skin while whispering in her ear. Soon enough her stomach rolled and flipped, tightening into knots of anguish, vomiting a great void into the toilet, her lips and teeth stained with death.

  She crafted her own perfume, a mortar and pestle sitting on her kitchen counter, grinding up bits of sandalwood, pounding out waxy pieces of ambergris, slicing her finger over the stone bowl, crying into it, squeezing out blood orange, adding a few drops of honey. She poured this lumpy mixture over one screen after another, the weave getting smaller, until the essence was but a spoonful in a bowl. She rubbed it in her fingers, behind her ears, her kneecaps, and ran it across the envelope seal, dropping her letter in the mail. To no avail—he didn’t notice.

  When his silence filled her mailbox, a slender rectangle of metal and failure, she took up her needle and thread, to immortalize his final words, the last letter he sent to her, signing off with the words that haunted her now, caused her to flinch—love always the lie that he kept telling. She took a deep breath and ran the needle under her skin, a muffled gasp, her heart quickening, his love still finding a way to her heart. She pulled the thread through, up and down, the script filling her left forearm, a reminder of the things men say, a warning to the next fool that would certainly share her bed, a love letter to herself.

  Vision Quest

  The frozen pack of peas that I hold to my forehead can’t block out the noise of broken glass and twisted metal. Last night was another failed opportunity, one of many in a long line of failed evenings spent racing battered cars around the city, aiming for brick walls and concrete dividers. I was trying to undo the mental anguish that had come home to rest on my shoulders with a crippling weight. The others don’t understand me, they want what I have, hoping that their slippery catch will yield fewer teeth than mine, that their visions aren’t hauntings—shadows of my past.

  The dark helps. The shades are drawn down behind thick curtains, the recliner leaned way back, the bag on my head, the television set muted, flashes of color sending icy spikes through my temples, so I close my eyes and take a breath. When the weight of my long dead cat settles into my lap, hot tears push out of my eyes, and I ask him to go away. But he won’t. This is where he always rested, where he came to sit and purr, the vibrations thrumming my legs, so I have no choice but to pet the long-haired beast, the swollen tumor in his throat distended, as his outline shimmers in the dimly lit living room. The house is empty now, too large for my newly solitary life, but it’s the only thing I have left of them, and I’m unwilling to let it all go.

  I can’t explain it, nobody can. The medical doctors just refer me to psychiatrists and those shrinks only prescribe pills that dull the edges, nodding their heads and using words like “closure” and “release.”

  I hear cars outside on the street, the world slipping by, and I wonder how I got here. Accident, what does that word mean—random, unintentional? Accidental. Accidents. We all have them. I’m having them all the time now.

  An innocent phone call led to a deafening silence to a morgue in a concrete bunker that I never knew existed. Every detail made my hands shake, my head throb, the officer with his hand on my shoulder, his fingers gripping into my dead muscle, the black bags pulled back one by one, each one worse than the previous devastating knowledge.

  My wife was first, asleep on the cold metal, the gash across her head the only obvious sign of the violence that started my undoing.

  “You okay?” the man asked. He kept asking it over and over.

  The twins were next, still in grade school when the minivan skidded off the icy road, barely in second grade.

  My son, a lump on the side of his head, a seam running up the front of his chest, his tiny ribcage, and I thought of birds, wanting to get out, trying to push against the bars, and I turned and vomited into a plastic trash can that the man standing next to me held out. A cop, the morgue guy, I can’t remember who he really was. I try not to think about it.

  My daughter, I only had to look at her hand, the pink fingernails, with Hello Kitty appliqués looking up at me, forlorn.

  “Don’t pull it back. Please,” I asked. But he did anyway. And everything went dark.

  That was the first accident, the one that started it all. Left to my own devices I started to drink, whatever was in the house, everything, all of it, until the next thing I knew I came to flying down the highway at eighty miles an hour.

  That’s never a good thing.

  ****

  It took me awhile to start calling people. I just couldn’t muster the strength. It wasn’t real to me—I didn’t want to own it. But eventually I started calling family—mothers and grandmothers, brothers and sisters, all of it painful until it stopped being anything but a headache, a tension in my gut, snakes uncoiling inside me. They started showing up and I went through the motions, the crying and the hugging, and eventually they faded away, back to their cities and lives, afraid to catch what I had brewing inside me. I understood. I welcomed their departures. The insurance check came in and I quit my job, not that I had been going, and decided to drink myself to death. It seemed like the right thing to do.

  It was an easy choice, barreling down the highway, flashers in the rear view mirror, and little left that mattered. All I had to do was pull the wheel hard to the left, and the moment the thought entered my head, I did it. Maybe it was an accident, a twitch.

  The tires squealed, and the car flipped over, blackness wrapping around me, a smile pushing across my face, dots of white light—my head making contact with something. I wanted this, wished it to be over, the sickening momentary panic of my head being crushed, the sense that this was more pain and more serious than anything I’d ever experienced. That revelation flashed across my mind, and then everything winked out.

  A hospital, several tickets, uniforms in blue, uniforms in white. I couldn’t do this right either, the seatbelt saving my life, a life I had no interest in saving. A new word was bandied about the room, as I drifted in and out, pain radiating out of my misshapen skull, broken fingers, broken legs, broken ribs. The word of the day was “lucky” and it made me laugh until blood sprayed out of my mouth, a coughing fit, and then they pushed me back under with meds and hands on my cold flesh, and the pale outline of my daughter standing next to the bed, shaking her head slowly back and fo
rth, disappointed in my reckless behavior.

  ****

  Amy and Robb were friends, people I used to work with. Amy was a slightly overweight, loud-mouthed blonde who made me laugh. She was always placing her hand on my forearm, always touching me. I didn’t mind it so much now. Robb wore glasses and a black Kangol hat, skinny and pale, a moustache and goatee giving him the odd appearance of a foreign filmmaker, or perhaps an unemployed mime. They came to visit me in the hospital, and followed up with random drop-ins at the house, forgiving in their judgment, bringing chicken wings and beer, absorbing my pain, listening with tight lips and barely nodding heads as I told them about my shadow daughter, and the recent reappearance of my cat.

  “It’s stress,” Amy offered. “You’re just dealing with it all, processing. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  Robb nodded, sipping at his beer. “Yeah, stress. I’m sure that’s all it is.”

  I didn’t tell them about the day before when I walked past my daughter’s room and saw her and my son playing on the floor, a bucket of Lego pieces scattered across the carpet, a brick wall built up in an array of colors, repeatedly running a tiny Lego car into the solid structure they’d built, over and over again. They looked up at me, and moved their lips and I stumbled over my own feet, moving past them without looking back, unable to mouth the words “I love you” in return.

  In time I would tell Amy and Robb about that moment. I would tell them about my wife appearing in my bed, her arms wrapping around me, pressing her cold flesh up against my bare backside, her hand reaching around to rub my chest, nibbling at my neck, unable to stop her. I would tell them about all of this, about my dead wife turning me on, her hands wrapped around my cock, stroking me as her breasts pressed against my back, my eyes squeezed shut, pretending it was all a dream. When I washed the sheets later that day, I sobbed and bent over the washing machine, afraid to go back to bed.

  I told them all of this because I couldn’t keep it to myself.

  “I’ve had worse wet dreams,” Robb mused. “Don’t get me started. Clowns, old grade school teachers, a cousin I barely know, fairies farting sparks of glitter when they came.”