Page 39 - WTPO Vol. VII #5

a soft, clear voice (really nothing like her own at
all) that filled their sagging blue house in a way she found difficult to explain. Today, Helen thought her own voice sounded like a strong man shoveling wet sand. Tomorrow, it could be like the sharp crack of early morning frost. She loved to come up with such vibrant images.
She best remembered Saturday mornings in the wintertime, her small bedroom window coated with a thin layer of ice (on which she would scratch out designs with a fingernail), the heavy blankets pulled up to just below her nose, the sounds of her father still asleep in the room next to hers, those sounds
like a near-snore, like dry fall leaves being rubbed between large, gentle hands (another image she was secretly quite proud of), and her mother’s voice, sing- ing up through the narrow stairwell as she prepared
events that occurred after that fateful day without
song, placing herself in the background of nearly every exchange that followed between her mother and father, playing confidant to all her mother’s drug-induced confessions, chambermaid to all her needs. But in truth, Helen saw little of her mother’s brisk transformation from solid health, to skeletal condemnation. Francis
did all he could to protect her from the worst of it, and once the cancer quickly embraced Violet in its full and irrefutable grip, and the hospital itself had become only a place of inhospitable starkness and unearthly sounds, the end came swift and unseen by Helen.
So her beloved mother was gone, she thought (for perhaps the hundredth time that week), as Albert sniffed and pulled her through the cold evening air. Her beloved mother of the sweet morning song and brightly-colored warmth, gone. And all that was left was Helen and her father, sad man he could be, living in a house her mother had loved, a house that shifted now and then like a cat sleeping on a warm stove.
When Albert had finally pulled himself to a near- standstill and could not elicit one more drop of waste to share with the good earth, dog and mistress turned homeward once again.
Francis was fast asleep on the couch with an unlit cigarette moving gently up and down in the corner of his mouth. Helen gave Albert a bowl of fresh water, smiled at the cleanliness of the kitchen, closed the small window there (with some difficulty), covered her father with a quilt that was folded up in the fireplace, and went to bed herself. Albert cautiously followed her up the risky steps, and as was his ritual each night, sat at the foot of her bed, waiting until Helen had settled herself just right beneath the covers, before he leaped up between her snuggled feet, turned himself around half a dozen times or so, and there, as if his old bones had magically turned to ash, he col- lapsed into a small pile of groaning, farting fur.
The following morning was a bright, October Friday. There was a staff in-service at school (which meant no school for students, something Helen had not remembered until the morning itself, a fact she had to take a few minutes to convince Francis about once she had), and after a breakfast of coffee (which, like her father, she took with milk and plenty of sugar) and scrambled eggs, she sat by the small living room window and watched as Francis set off on his walk to work. She drank another cup of coffee and thought about what to do with her day. Albert nuzzled her leg with his wet nose, his breath reeked. “I should give
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falling from the “T
sky like a bird collapsed (murdered, thought Helen) in midflight.”
breakfast; that sound like so much additional warmth, drifting to Helen in a myriad of colors and remem- bered moments, a sound she could almost taste, a sound of rippling heat and undeniable strength and belonging.
She tried to stay with the fonder memories as Albert tugged her along, her long limbs now tingling with heat from the effort of her muscles, but darker im- ages quickly bled through, like they always did: thick shadows, blacker than ancient blood, attached to her mother’s heels, from where they rapidly spread up and outward, converging into a rising dark mist that would then descend to smother all of her mother’s brightness, every drop of her radiant color.
The sickness came falling from the sky like a bird collapsed (murdered, thought Helen) in midflight. One cold morning her mother was singing and the next, she wasn’t. There was a painful tightness that morning, deep at the base of her throat, Violet later told them both. Helen had spent the last six years reimagining
he sickness came
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