[Continued from
Part I]
Part IIShe tumbled and brought a wall of snow with her into the dark room. The first thing she did upon raising her head from the floor was to turn on her side and kick the door closed behind her, crushing the noise of the wind in mid-howl.
The silence that ensued bellowed in her ears, then whispered. She felt as if the echo of the wind was bleeding out of them. She could feel something like a tinny vibration beneath her that penetrated her skin, and soon her fingers were vibrating, too. It was heat: mumbling steady in the tiles of the floor that were wedge-shaped, dark green, and connected to one another by a seal of dirt that ran all between them in black, intersecting lines. She raised one hand and turned it in front of her face to discover a gray shadow of the webbed pattern printed onto the surface of her palm. She closed her fingers over it and worked them together until the pattern became a shadow-colored smear of dirt grains grinding on her skin like flour in a grist-mill.
The rest of the room came into focus more slowly, as if the dark were painted on a series of curtains that were being drawn in succession. One, shivering back silently, exposed a row of gray-green cabinets, with dingy brass knobs that picked up the light and blinked like a row of eyes. The next revealed the face of the window above them, blocked by snow into a pure, white-blue rectangle, which sent a glow in sequential layers over dishes stacked up in the sink, the choppy surface of grime that covered the counters, and the small, square table in the center of the room where dust had mummified a setting of tea arranged for two.
She raised herself to her knees and pushed her hands into her coat pockets to smother the humming of the heat in her fingers. In the next moment she was teetering on her feet that she couldn’t feel – the sensation was like walking in cement shoes – but they still brought her three steps to the table, where she inspected the two teacups that were filled with equal amounts of black mud. In between them, the overturned pitcher lay fixed in a gritty slick of cream that had turned to glue. She touched the handle with a fingertip, but it didn’t budge. She used the same finger to draw her name and a star in the dust aroud the inner lip of the table.
She launched an unsteady orbit around the room as she massaged the grits of dust that had stuck to her finger against her thumb. There was a small living room one step down from the kitchen that was awash with the light filtered through three more windows sealed by snow. The entire space was not much bigger than her old bedroom, but about the same size as their living quarters at the compound; there was even a hint of the same musty odor, mixed with something else – something like chicken broth. There was a small bookshelf encased by the dust that ran over and between all the curves of the spines of the books, a dusty couch with sewed-on patches, and no pictures on the wall, or anywhere.
She drew her fingertip on a meandering course through the dust on the top of the bookshelf, both the arms of the couch, and the walls. Wherever she drew her shaky letters, small plumes of dust rose on the tail of her finger and leapt astride the air – and when she moved through them, the thick clouds were cut into diluted sweeps of dust flecks that floated high above her head. By the time she stood in the middle of the room, at the end of her journey around its perimeter, the churned-up dust hung in a shadowy mantle near the ceiling, where light pierced it through and transformed the dark particles into shining flakes that began to fall. She crouched down close to the soiled shag carpet, with her hands held out and her face turned upward, and watched as it snowed inside the room.
This snowstorm was silent, and the snowflakes that settled upon her skin were warm and buzzed with her own touch.
She sat quietly until the dust had formed a layer as thick as the face of a glove over both of her palms and streaked her hair half-white. Then she let out a sigh that cast a fresh breeze of dust from off of her lips and nose.
There was no telephone in the room, but she doubted one would work even if it was there; the wires had all been twisted up and swallowed by the storm. There was no refridgerator, not that she thought any food she would find in one in this house would be edible. Obviously, whoever lived there had not done any living there recently, but had left the door unlocked, and the possessions behind to leave a wordless message to anyone who stumbled in seeking shelter from the outside world: if you stay here, the dust will take you too.
She stood up abruptly, causing the dust to leap off of her all at once, and when she paced across the room the shape that the dust had taken over her form remained and for a moment preserved the rough shape of her body like a mold, which stayed suspended for a millisecond before the churning air chewed it apart.
She walked the length of the room again, hopped over the single step to the kitchen, and gave a hearty kick to one of the softball-sized nuggets of snow that had accompanied her into the house, sending it skipping like a stone across the patchy lake of melted ice beside the front door. She felt a legion of little hot pinpricks erupt on her spine and set out on a march across her skin, searing her from the inside. She wrenched open the zipper on her coat as they began to bridge the cusp between her chest and neck, and flung her coat to the floor before they could infiltrate her heart.
She was panting so heavily that she hardly heard it the first time. What she heard she mistook for the crying of the storm. The second time, it sounded different, as if the meaning had been growing on the sound and only now reached her in a developed state. It was someone calling for help, and it came from the back door – the one directly opposite the door she had tumbled through, on the other side of the house.
She paused, then began to walk toward it. The calling from outside continued, weaving in and out of the squawl of the wind in an uneven punctuation. The short, high barking of her boots as she slinked without lifting them across the grotty tiles rose up to her ears and formed a steady layer over all the other noises, sealing them all together into an ugly chorus. It was like the ballad of her low and anxious heart – sung by the crudest voices of the world.
When she touched the knob, she felt her heart drop precipitously as if the floor of bone and tissue beneath it suddenly gave way. Now, when it pumped, it churned brutishly against the tangle of intestines that had caught it like a cradle where it had fallen. The force of her pulse bruised her belly and propelled contents of her gut on a violently quick course; she heard her stomach snarl and spit in protest. Nobody wanted a heart where a heart didn’t belong.
Likewise no one wanted a girl with muddy insides and a hole filled with sloshing juices where a heart should be, but that was what they got. Girls with long shiny hair and pearls on their wrists resented the one who took up space in their school and infected it like a diseased organ. Maybe the boys were not boys; maybe they were antibodies, sent to beat and bully her out of their body. In the end they hadn’t needed to try so hard. When the leaves painted the streets in marbled hues, when the prospect of another semester rose like a breaker in front of her, she excised herself.
Now she grappled with a frozen door one thousand miles away. The ice had penetrated the space around the frame and plugged it stubbornly, like caulk. She pulled and pushed, alternatively. She put all the force of her aching muscles into it and didn’t know why she did. She was frightened to think that she didn’t know who was out there, on the other side of that door – but mildly comforted by the knowledge that that person didn’t know her, either.
As the crying of the voice, the braying of the wind, and the tearing protest of her fraying nerves reached a crescendo, they fused together into a stream that was like energy, and an energy that was like a lightning bolt that struck her with all the fury of her past and present suffering, igniting her with a supernatural strength that wrenched the door open in a shower of shattered ice.
[to be continued]
[© 2011 M.B.K.]
