by Shane Staley
For a moment, the world dripped blood.
Ellen barreled naked through a crimson corridor, drawn forward by a force like gravity. The wind whipped her with such violence it shaved off flecks of skin. Raw patches spread along the contours of her body like embers burning paper. She howled in pain, but the fury of the wind was louder, drowning her cries in its sonic boom.
The corridor soon ended in a chamber. At the far end, a gate of fissured stone swung open, revealing a void as black and sweeping as annihilation. She threw her arms over her face, screamed uselessly into the hurricane winds. It was the last thing she could do before the emptiness received her.
The gate shut.
On the page, the black eye dissolved.
And the paper fell to the floor in front of the empty pile of Ellen’s clothes, blending into the mountain of its undelivered kin.
Pink Denim
Brady Golden
Thirty-two hours. That’s how long her dad had lain on his hall carpet, prevented from rising or even rolling over by his weak, twice-replaced hip. Thirty-two hours until a neighbor had spotted him through the window and phoned for an ambulance. Any longer and he could have died. His doctor had little to say about the collapse itself—“It’s just something that happens when we get older”—but felt that the subsequent immobility was a real problem.
All her life, Connie had thought of Jack as an old man, and as a result had missed it when true old age had caught up with him. Seeing him now, propped up in a hospital bed, dressed in a toothpaste-colored gown, it was hard to ignore. A coil of plastic tubes and wires ran up from his arm to an IV bag and a bank of digital monitors. His skin hung loose. His gums were dark, as though he’d been drinking red wine, and the whites of his eyes were yellow and gummy. He was running out of time, and that meant she was too. It wouldn’t be long before the relationship that the two of them had never shared would become one that they never could. She had come to the hospital with a stack of brochures from assisted-living communities and home-care providers, but she left them sealed inside her purse and instead told her dad that she wanted him to move in with her.
“That would never work. Your apartment’s too small.” His voice was breathy and raw.
“I’ve got a spare bedroom.”
“I don’t want to live in the city. Anyway, you’re on the fourth floor. I’d be trapped up there.”
That he remembered this detail surprised her. He had only seen her place once, the week she’d moved in seven years ago, and hadn’t expressed any interest or curiosity in her living situation since.
“There’s an elevator,” she said. “You’ll be fine.”
A week later, she and a pair of movers navigated his belongings into a room that used to house an exercise bike and an Ikea desk, neither of which had ever seen much use. Both were gone now, replaced by Jack’s bedroom set. It was the same furniture that her parents had owned when she was little. She felt as though she were looking at a pair of photographic negatives placed one atop the other, the first from her childhood, the second from her adult life, the images interwoven and incomplete. The whole time, he sat on the living room sofa with his cane between his legs and his hands clasped on the crook, his eyes trained on the floor.
She wanted to make him a special welcome meal, but could not remember what foods he liked. He refused to suggest anything, so she ended up ordering Chinese. They ate on the sofa with trays in their laps and the TV on.
As a child, Connie had been reminded on an almost nightly basis how hard he worked, as though she couldn’t see it in the way he carried himself, hear it in the raggedness of his voice. At the grocery store that he managed, he put in twelve-hour days and six-day weeks. Each morning he left while Connie slept, and each night he came home after she and her mother had already eaten dinner. During those few hours when they were all under one roof, Connie was to stay out of his way. “Don’t bother Dad, he’s had a long day.” While he ate his warmed-up leftovers at the kitchen table, she and her homework were banished to the living room, and when he settled into his spot in front of the TV, it was time for her to go to bed.
Some nights, when she couldn’t sleep, she snuck out of her bedroom, padded down the living room in her pajamas, and from the hallway, spied on him while he watched the local news. As anchors described approaching weather systems and city politics, he sagged into the sofa. His eyelids drooped. His jaw went slack. If her mom had caught her skulking in the hall, she would have been punished, so she was careful to stand just out of the light where she could not be seen. Sometimes she wondered if he would have noticed her if she’d strode out into the center of the room, if she’d started singing and clapping and knocking pictures off the walls. As the light from the TV screen danced on his face, his eyes went soft and dull, until Connie wasn’t sure she was looking at her father at all, or just his husk.
After he moved in, he settled into a pattern of avoiding her. Each morning, she awoke to find a used coffee cup and a bowl containing cold dregs of oatmeal waiting for her in the kitchen sink. Through his closed door, she could hear soft, indecipherable sounds of movement. On the first day, she called out a good-bye before she left for work. He didn’t answer, and she never did it again. He was still in there each evening when she got home, the only sign he’d ventured out at all more scattered detritus for her to pick up—dirty socks on the living room floor, dirty dishes on the coffee table. On their second night together, she insisted that they eat dinner at the kitchen table. Conversation was so forced, so stilted, that they silently agreed to return to the sofa and the TV the next night.
On the Friday after he moved in, a letter arrived for him. She found it in her mail box beside the building’s front door, mixed in among the usual bills and credit card offers—a wrinkled envelope spotted with fingerprints. The address, written in large, rounded letters, was hers, but the name above it was her dad’s. She checked both sides for a return address and found none. The bluish translucent smear of a postmark was illegible over the stamp. Something about it was familiar, but she couldn’t say what.
When she offered him the envelope, he let it hang in the air between them for several seconds before he took it.
“Who’s it from?” she said.
“No one,” he said.
“Come on. Who’s your pen pal?”
“No one.”
That night, a sound muffled through her bedroom wall woke her—harsh and high-pitched, a sound like a rodent caught in a predator’s jaws. Her dad was screaming. She jumped from her bed and ran out into the hall. She pushed open his door and swatted at the wall until her hand landed on a light switch. The overhead clicked on. Jack blinked up at her from the floor where he lay in a twisted cocoon of blankets and sheets, with one foot still propped up on the bed.
“There’s someone at the window. Someone looking in.”
She crossed the room and pressed her face and hands to the glass. Familiar rooftops, parked cars, and the wide street came into focus. When she stepped away, the look on his face transformed from one of terror to one of indignation.
“It’s this goddamned neighborhood. It’s all drug dealers and drug addicts and killers.”
“There’s no one out there, Dad.”
“How can you live like this? One of these days you’re going to get raped.”
“We’re on the fourth floor.”
He muttered something about a fire escape. She couldn’t tell if he was talking to her or the universe as a whole. With his bedding wrapped around him, he looked like he was being wrung out of an enormous rag.
“Not at this window,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I had a bad dream.”
She stepped toward him, but he flinched away.
“Let me help you.”
“I’m fine. It was a bad dream. Go back to bed.”
Later, in her own room, she stared up at the ceiling and listened to a new sound seeping through their shared wall, a low moan, broken by sp
uttering and coughing. She had never heard him cry before. Even at her mother’s funeral, he had kept it together. She had watched him from the beginning of the graveside service to its end. When they lowered the casket, his face broke into a twisted grimace. This is it, she thought, but he fought it back. At the time, that blip had been the most emotion she’d ever seen from him. This was something else entirely. He brayed away. Minutes went by. Eventually, either the sound tapered off or she fell asleep.
The next day was Saturday. She caught him while he was eating breakfast and suggested a visit to the old house. Without looking at her, he said, “Why would I want to go there?” Based on his tone, she guessed that an answer didn’t interest him, but she offered one anyway.
“We need to get through the rest of your things. Figure out what you want, what we need to put in storage, what to get rid of.”
“I don’t care what you do with it.”
“What about Mom’s photos? What about all her furniture?”
He sipped his coffee, smacked his lips, and said nothing.
“What about the house?” She heard the pitch of her voice escalating, heard a slight tremble. “Do you want to sell it? Hang on to it? Rent it out? What do you want to do?”
“You can rent it, you can sell it, you can leave it alone.” He tilted his chin to the ceiling and dragged his fingernails up and down his Adam’s apple. “You can do it now, or you can do it once I’m gone.”
“Dad—”
“Is this really how you want to spend your weekend? Do you really have nothing better to do?”
What could she tell him? That she didn’t? That the only person in her life right now was the old man screaming at imaginary Peeping Toms in her guest room? She had never been able to hang on to friends for more than a few years, and boyfriends even less. No matter how much effort and enthusiasm she put in, people around her always seemed to get bored. That boredom inevitably blossomed into irritation, and then into contempt. She didn’t know what she was doing wrong, didn’t know how to be anyone other than herself. Christ knew she had tried.
Of course, she said none of this. He shuffled out of the kitchen, the soles of his socks never coming up off the floor, the back of his robe swaying behind him as he moved.
She drove to her parents’ house, a single-story with a flat gravel roof and a narrow rectangular yard. She parked across the street and shut off the engine, but didn’t get out. The engine made clicking sounds as it cooled. Through a gap in the curtains, she could make out a stripe of the red-brown wood paneling of the living room wall.
She tried to contextualize Jack’s refusal to return in terms of grief over her mother’s death, but it didn’t fit. They’d turned off her life support five years ago, and though he’d managed to become even more remote and isolated as a widower than he’d been as a husband, Connie had no reason to believe that he minded it. She had never known how to categorize the bond that connected her parents. If it was love, it was a kind of love she had never seen anywhere else, and definitely not one she would ever seek to emulate. Her mom had always been devoted to him, and he loyal to her, but even as a child Connie had been able to sense the joylessness of it, the sense of obligation. Menial. That was the word for it. She never saw them embrace or cuddle, and when they kissed, their kisses were pinched-lipped and brief. The coolness between them hadn’t just manifested itself as a lack of affection, either. Bickering hadn’t been uncommon, but she wasn’t sure she could remember ever seeing a true balls-out fight.
She looked at the garage door, dingy, in need of a wash, and realized that, yes, she could.
She had been eight years old. Her parents’ voices woke her in the middle of the night. She followed the shouting to the kitchen, where her mom and dad stood in opposing corners like boxers, painted in the stove’s built-in light. Her mother held something in a clenched fist, something sagging, shapeless, and pink. It dangled down to the floor.
“It must be Connie’s,” her father said.
“It’s not.”
“Then it’s one of her little friends’.”
“It’s not.”
She had never heard a sound so sharp, so broken. Not from an adult, at least. Not from a parent. In her surprise, she must have let out a sound of her own. At the same time, they both spun to look at her. He took a step forward, but her mom shouldered past, cutting him off, and crossed to Connie in three long steps. She seized Connie by the wrist and flung the flimsy pink thing aside. In the last instant before she was yanked out of the room, Connie saw it land in a mound at her father’s feet. A single octopus eye gazed up at her. No, not an eye. A circle, as big as a quarter, stamped with a five-pointed star. A brass button.
The memory drew back like the tide going out, leaving a buzzing sensation behind. The street outside the driver-side window was fuzzy and indistinct. Her hands hung off the steering wheel by the tips of her fingers. The prospect of opening the door, of stepping out onto the asphalt, of crossing the street to the house, made her limbs feel heavy, lifeless. Better to leave. Better to just drive home.
That night, when dinnertime arrived, she stayed in her bedroom. At one point, she heard her father approach her door. He didn’t knock. He didn’t say anything. For a minute, he lingered outside. Then he walked away.
The next week, a second letter showed up for him, as smudged and wrinkled as the first. This time, she realized why it looked familiar.
On the day of the move, while collecting a half dozen pairs of near-identical loafers from the floor of his closet, she’d discovered an old hatbox with bulging sides and a sagging bottom shoved all the way in the back. Its lid did not sit quite right, and when she pushed the box aside in her search for stray shoes, it slipped to the ground, exposing the box’s contents—torn-open envelopes, each with a single piece of paper folded inside, packing it past capacity. They were stacked in cramped rows, upright like cards in a card catalogue. There were hundreds of them. One a day for a full year wouldn’t use up so much paper. She would have thought about it more, even slid one out for closer inspection, but a pair of movers came in for the mattress and bed frame. She placed the lid back on the box—it still didn’t fit—and shoved the box back into the recesses of the closet. At the time, she had assumed its contents were mementos, nothing with any connection to his life now, such as it was.
Instead of bringing this new one to him, she slipped it into her pocket. That night, while he slept in the next room, she sat upright in bed with her comforter pulled to her waist and stripped an edge from the envelope with her fingernail.
The stationery that slid out was mottled and misshapen, as though the sender had crumpled it into a ball and unraveled it over and over again before sending it off. The smudged fingerprints that marked the envelope marked the letter as well. Connie noticed their smallness—the fingertips of a child. A single sentence ran across the center of the page, written in the same rolling-hills script as the address. She read it. She shut her eyes and waited for the trembling to stop. She read it a second time.
Please come back. I promise I won’t scream again.
She had seen that pink thing, that brass button emblazoned with an all-American star, one last time. It couldn’t have been more than a few days after the fight in the kitchen. She was in the attached garage. The car was gone, so it must have been daytime, but she was alone, and she could not figure out what she would have been doing in that strictly off-limits space without an adult. She spotted it sticking out from under the lid of the brown Rubbermaid garbage can. She approached it, coming close enough that she could smell the rotting vegetables inside the can. She smelled something else, too. Something salty and warm. She touched the sleeve, felt the fabric’s simultaneous coarseness and gentleness, that texture that only old denim can achieve. How many girls did she know who owned a jacket just like this?
As she held it with the tips of her fingers, had she felt a tug? Had she felt something inside the can try to yank it away from her?
S
leep didn’t come that night. She showered and dressed before the sun came up, and left a message on her boss’s voice mail that she was too sick to come in. As soon as she heard the first stirrings of movement in Jack’s room, she started knocking on his door. She didn’t stop until it opened. His striped pajamas were discolored from a thousand trips through the washing machine, and a couple sizes too big. He looked from her face to the letter she held at her side and back again. His mouth worked.
“You opened my mail?”
“What is this?”
“What gives you the goddamned right?” Balls of crust clung to the corners of his eyes.
“Who sent this? Do you know? Who’s it from?”
“It’s not your business.”
“Did Mom know?” she said. “If she was alive, could she tell me who sent it?”
“It wasn’t her business either.”
He tried to take it from her, but his grasp fell short and his fingers snatched at empty air. The sudden movement was too much for him. His balance gave out. He tipped forward. She wrapped her arms around his torso, feeling soft flesh and brittle bone through his pajamas. She managed to prevent a full-on collapse, but his weight was too much for her. Their legs folded beneath them, and they slumped as one to the floor.
“Give me the letter,” he whimpered.
She had to contort and twist to extricate herself from the tangle. She pushed herself to her feet and started down the hall. He called something after her but she didn’t hear it.
Fifteen minutes by freeway to the house she’d grown up in. She still had the key to the front door. It was the oldest one on her key ring.
She found the hatbox where she’d left it, on the closet floor beneath a couple of bare wire hangers. She squatted, slid it out, and flipped off the lid. At random, she pulled out an envelope. This house’s address was written across the front. The date on the postmark was from seven years ago. Her mother had still been alive then. Connie removed its contents, a familiar slip of paper with a familiar sentence written across it in familiar script.