Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  I didn't love my baby when I held his green-glass face and smiled at him through rheumy half-blind eyes. I still saw the wing, the tiny shriveled thing, no longer a part of him in truth. He had left his birthright behind a long time ago, become something else, a native to this foreign shore. He bathed me in salt-water, lapped the dirt from my cracking talons. I would never see the sky now, but I have seen other horizons. He would bury me in the sand, raise me a pyre built from driftwood, lit by his flame.

  I didn't love my baby. Or maybe I did. Or maybe it was something else, some hidden place between words, incommunicable and unknowable.

  Will Swardstrom

  http://www.willswardstrom.wordpress.com

  Uncle Allen(Novelette)

  by Will Swardstrom

  Originally published by Windrift Books

  The air was crisp and clear, a little off kilter for a late August day in the bottoms of rural Southern Illinois. The soybeans were almost waist-high and the corn still clung to all the green it could, but the advancement of fall was evident by the drying of the plants. A few fields still held the vestiges of farm life from the early part of the twentieth century—crumbling silos, dilapidated barns, and hog houses virtually undone by the ravages of time and nature.

  The slight chill made Rachel wish she’d brought more than just a few long-sleeved shirts to Grandma Naomi’s house. Actually, the twenty-seven-year-old wished she wasn’t heading to her grandmother’s homestead at all—the past few years hadn’t been kind to Grandma Naomi. A fractured collarbone, a urinary tract infection, dementia, and all sorts of issues in between…lately it seemed as though if it wasn’t one thing, it was another.

  Rachel absentmindedly turned on the radio. Not a lot of choices on her dial. There were perhaps ten to twelve stations that were at least mildly free of static, but nine of them played country, and the rest were hit or miss depending on the weather. Luckily, Rachel always made sure her phone was stocked with some decent music for trips like this—her own personal jukebox.

  Just as she synced her car’s sound system to her phone, her phone chirped. She fumbled with the volume on the dash for a moment before answering.

  “Hello?”

  “Rachel?”

  Rachel recognized the voice immediately. “Hello, Uncle Allen. Yes, this is Rachel. I’m on my way, if that’s what you’re checking.” Her tone contained a touch of sarcasm.

  “Of course I wasn’t checking,” Uncle Allen responded. “I was just calling to see how my favorite niece was doing.”

  “Allen?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m your only niece,” Rachel said, a grin creeping onto her face.

  “That doesn’t make it less true,” Allen chided. “But since you brought it up, what time do you expect to be here tonight? I’ll see about having dinner on the table when you do.”

  Rachel glanced down at the clock on her now-silent radio and mentally plotted out the remainder of her trip. “Oh, I’d say about seven o’clock? Maybe later if I get caught in a traffic jam.”

  Uncle Allen guffawed. If there was anything more unlikely in Southern Illinois than a traffic jam, it was a skyscraper, or perhaps Godzilla. “Okay. Sounds good. I’ll tell your grandma. She’s really looking forward to seeing you.”

  Rachel felt a pit in her stomach. “She’ll see me, but will she remember me? Will she even know I’m there?”

  Allen went quiet, and Rachel realized she should have been more sensitive. She knew that Uncle Allen felt personally responsible for his mother’s health—after all, he was the one who lived close by, and he was in charge of her care. Yet most days Allen was needed in the field, so he’d had to rely on a cobbled-together series of nurses, family members, and friends to come by and watch over her while he worked.

  This week, it was Rachel’s turn to help. And in addition to keeping an eye on her grandmother, Rachel had also promised to purge the clutter in Grandma Naomi’s attic. It seemed that Grandma had never forgotten Rachel’s long-ago promise to clear out the mess—even though there was no guarantee that Grandma would even remember Rachel’s name when she pulled in the driveway.

  Rachel was almost sure her call had dropped when Allen finally spoke again. “You know she loves you. She can’t help it, and whether or not she remembers, it’ll be good for you to be here.”

  Rachel nodded, even though Allen couldn’t see her. “I guess you’re right. I better get off the phone and focus on the road then. I’ll see you in a couple hours. Love you, Uncle Allen.”

  “Love you, Rach.”

  ***

  The trip took a bit longer than she’d estimated, but at last Rachel pulled onto the road leading to what had been her favorite place to visit as a little girl. It had been several years since Rachel’s last visit here; after college, she had moved up to Indianapolis, a land full of metal and noise. Now, just turning onto the gravel road gave her goose bumps, reminding her of all the memories she’d shared with her cousins at the farm.

  Her sports car kicking up dust behind her, Rachel maneuvered down the gravel road and then up the long driveway belonging to Grandma Naomi. Surrounded on three sides by a thick grove of trees, her grandmother’s house was typical of early twentieth-century farmhouses in the Midwest: four bedrooms on the top floor, a large living room and dining room attached to the kitchen on the main floor, and a basement that followed the same basic floor plan of the house. The only difference in the basement’s layout was that it lacked the additional bathroom that Naomi and Grandpa Henry had added to the main floor back in the late 1950’s, when they were first lucky enough to get running water. Rachel’s mom still talked about using the outhouse in the winter when she was a child.

  From the outside, the house looked almost like a big cardboard box with the flaps slightly open to form the roof. A hailstorm had devastated the area the year before, and the aging shingles showed the evidence of it. Uncle Allen had promised to take on the repairs, but farming took him away from the task nearly every chance he had. Still, the roof was in decent shape, and everyone knew Allen would fix it immediately if it ever leaked anywhere in the house. Uncle Allen was busy, but he took care of his family. In fact, he was the kind of guy who was everyone’s favorite, whether he was your favorite uncle, brother, friend, or farmer. He just had a certain magnetic personality that kept people entertained.

  As Rachel parked, she saw her grandmother out in front of the house, watering her small flower garden. Rachel wouldn’t say Grandma was a hoarder, but the years she spent living in the Great Depression had taught her never to be wasteful. That was particularly true with clothes: if there was any use to be gotten out of an old item, she would squirrel it away for a rainy day. Her clothing, therefore, was a mix of styles gathered from across decades. Today her top bore a definite resemblance to the homemaker blouses Rachel had seen in a few reruns of Leave it to Beaver, while her slacks were 1970’s polyester through and through.

  “Hello, Rachel!” Grandma Naomi called out as Rachel stepped out of the car. “We’ve been waiting for you to get here.”

  Whew. At least she remembers my name.

  “We?” Rachel asked, hoisting her suitcase out of the back seat.

  “Oh, yes. Me and your Uncle Allen, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “We had more visitors, too, but they left just a minute or two before you got here,” Grandma Naomi said. “Funny-looking. Kinda glad they didn’t decide to stay.”

  That stopped Rachel. She knew she’d been all alone on the gravel road coming into the farm. And while the road continued on past the driveway, it was rarely used, and Rachel hadn’t seen any dust kicked up. Well, she had been distracted listening to the music on her phone. Perhaps she’d simply missed them.

  “Really? What were they here for?”

  “Hmm…now that you ask me, I can’t quite remember. I’m sure they were here for your Uncle Allen, though. They always are,” Naomi said, putting her watering can down next to a row of marigol
ds. She bent down—an amazing feat considering her advanced age—to pluck off a few dead flower heads.

  Rachel was still concerned about these visitors to the farm. “Who were they, Grandma? You say they’ve been here before?”

  “Oh, yes,” her grandmother replied. “Those men have been coming here for a long time. I wish they would just go away, but they won’t leave me and Henry alone. They just feel…off. Like they’re here, but not here at the same time. Strange clothing. And their accents…I’m not even sure they’re from this country. Could be spies. You know: the Soviets.”

  And there it was. Her grandma was combining fact, fiction, and history. She may have recognized and greeted her granddaughter by the correct name, but she was also somewhere in her own past, and apparently reliving some political thriller at the same time.

  Just then Uncle Allen popped his head out of the side door of the garage, saving Rachel from an uncomfortable situation. “Supper is ready. Glad to see you, Rachel.”

  After allowing herself another sideways glance at her grandmother, Rachel grabbed the handle of her suitcase and headed toward the garage. As she passed by Uncle Allen, she made eye contact with him for a brief moment. And in that split second, she saw something…strange. Allen had always been so jovial and vibrant. Even in the face of his mother’s illnesses and maladies, he’d always kept up appearances. He’d always put on a brave face.

  But this time…his eyes told a different story.

  Uncle Allen was afraid.

  ***

  After a late meal and then getting Grandma Naomi settled into her chair to watch The Tonight Show (the “Johnny Carson show,” Naomi insisted), Rachel and Uncle Allen reconnected over a small makeshift brush fire near the driveway. The bright colors of Grandma Naomi’s flowers were subdued and dim under the curtain of darkness, and the night sky was like oil covering the landscape.

  A few stories from her uncle brought laughs from Rachel, but eventually the stories wore out and the laughter did as well. Rachel sat in silence for a few moments, gazing up at the stars, light years away.

  “I miss her,” she said.

  Silence followed from the other side of the fire. Finally, after a few moments, Uncle Allen replied.

  “Yeah. I know, kid. I miss her, too. Growing up, it seemed at times like she was the only one who really got me,” he said. “Like Mom and Dad loved me, but kept their distance a little. Your mom was the best sister I could’ve asked for. Your other aunts were just too old by the time I came around.”

  Rachel felt a slight chill in the air, but being with Uncle Allen was warming her soul. She nodded toward the starry expanse. “You think she’s looking down on us? That there’s someone out there that cares what happens down here?”

  Allen cocked his head and took in the Milky Way and the countless stars that shone down. “Up there? I don’t know. I do know I’ll never forget her. In that way, maybe your mother will keep on living, you know?”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  With nothing else to be said, Rachel stood, walked around the fire, sat down next to Uncle Allen, and put her head on his shoulder, both of them remembering her mother.

  ***

  The next morning, Rachel woke to light streaming in the windows of her mother’s childhood room. The house had been built long before mini-blinds had been invented, and the bedrooms had been vacated before window shades would become the norm in homes across the country. The sun illuminated the entire room, chasing away any darkness still lingering.

  Unable to sleep any longer, Rachel slid out of bed and dragged herself down the stairs, only to find Grandma Naomi already up and baking. The scent of sugar and cinnamon filled the small kitchen. Rachel pulled a chair out from the table and sat, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  “Good morning, Melissa!” Naomi said, turning around. Her face showed a brief moment of confusion. Rachel waited a moment before responding, to see if Grandma would realize her mistake. She didn’t.

  “Good morning, Grandma. I’m Rachel. Melissa is my mom, but she couldn’t be here today,” Rachel said, a small tear beginning a slow slide down her cheek. One of the worst parts in coming to her grandmother’s house was reliving the painful memories of Mom. It’d been three years, but Rachel wondered nearly every day what would have happened if her mom had only gotten that mammogram earlier. What if she had gotten to the doctor even just a few months earlier? Would she still be here?

  But her mother was gone, and now Rachel felt compelled to help take care of Grandma Naomi, to take her mom’s spot in the family rotation.

  “Of course you are. I said Rachel, didn’t I?” Naomi didn’t wait for an answer, probably because she already knew her mistake. “What do you say we get up in that attic after the rolls come out of the oven? I haven’t been up there in probably ten years.”

  Just then the timer went off, and Rachel hopped up, grabbed an oven mitt, and took the steaming sweet rolls from the oven. As she set them on the counter to cool, she glanced out the window above the kitchen sink to see if Uncle Allen’s truck was there. Gone. Rachel was alone with her grandmother. Well, no time like the present to clear out years of dust and memories from a hundred-year-old house.

  “Yeah, Grandma. Sounds good. First though, let’s eat.”

  ***

  The attic was foreboding on many levels, and the neglect was tangible. Spider webs and dust covered everything. Boxes were stacked to the joists along the walls, and dated Christmas decorations were scattered haphazardly around.

  As Rachel began to inspect the boxes, she noticed many were damp. The leaky roof had affected Grandma’s attic after all. Books that had been boxed up, perhaps in the hopes of storing them on a bookshelf again at some point, were now ruined, their pages warped and wilted by the constant moisture coming in from above.

  “Grandma, these books are no good,” Rachel called out across the large attic space. She’d situated the elderly matriarch in a folding chair as soon as they’d come up to the attic.

  “What do you mean, dear? Those books were perfectly fine when I boxed them up last week.”

  Not again.

  Rachel grabbed a book and made her way back to her grandmother, maneuvering carefully around a stack of cardboard cutouts that appeared to be from Naomi’s days as a Sunday School teacher at the local Methodist Church.

  “Grandma, look at this book,” Rachel said, handing her a paperback copy of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.

  “Oh, yes, this was your grandfather’s favorite. All the suspense and the beings from another world. Too much for my taste,” Naomi said. “But it’s all wet. What did you do to it?”

  Rachel sighed. Perhaps she would have to take on this task without Grandma’s consent. It wasn’t like she was going to remember what Rachel did or didn’t do anyway. She took the book back.

  “The attic is too moist for books,” Rachel said. “They’re all this way, Grandma.”

  “Oh. Well, I don’t need to keep damaged books. You just take care of them, Rachel. I’ll stay here and look through these boxes.” In front of Naomi’s folding chair were a couple of small boxes.

  “What’s in there?”

  “Oh, just a few of the kids’ favorite toys. As they outgrew them, I’d put them away up here. I always meant to give them back to them, but they’ve all gone now. Gone or moved away,” Naomi said.

  “Not all of them, Grandma,” Rachel reminded her. “Uncle Allen still lives down the road. Remember? He comes by every day to check up on you.”

  Naomi’s eyes clouded for a nanosecond and then cleared. “Oh, yes. You’re right, honey.”

  Peering into the box on Naomi’s lap, Rachel saw many familiar shapes: a toy gun, a teddy bear, a baby doll. Each had special meaning for her mother, her uncle, or one of her aunts. She wondered which items belonged to her own mother when she was growing up in this very house—what special toy her mom had loved and cherished until it was a forgotten object, a mere memory of carefree days.

&nb
sp; Then something caught her eye. Reaching down, Rachel plucked a key from the box. It didn’t appear old—in fact, it still shined as if it were brand-new. Impossible—Grandma Naomi herself had said she hadn’t been in the attic in years. But Grandma isn’t exactly a reliable witness. Rachel had to admit that although Grandma Naomi believed herself to be truthful, her mind could jump not only between decades but between fact and fiction.

  “What’s this?”

  “That’s Allen’s toy key. I remember he held on to that key until he turned seven years old. Each and every day, you’d walk into a room and find him holding and playing with that thing. Never really knew where it came from—one day he was just holding it. I suppose today I might’ve gotten turned into the Department of Child and Family Services for letting him play with keys,” Naomi said, with a smirk on her face.

  “Maybe,” Rachel said, twirling the key before her eyes. The small key wasn’t aluminum or silver or any metal she recognized; it had an iridescent sheen to it, appearing slightly different from every angle. She’d never seen anything like it.

  Grandma Naomi made a motion to put the box down, so Rachel volunteered to find a place for it, and to organize its contents and find homes for the various toys. She absentmindedly stuck the key in her pocket as she moved the box over to the other side of the attic.

  “You girls up here?” Uncle Allen called up from the base of the stairs.

  “Come on up,” Naomi answered.

  “Nah. I don’t need to see any of that old stuff. Don’t want to get stuck doing your job anyway. Just wanted to swing by and check on you two.”