Page 55 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. Iv #8

his head. Elena must have taken it out after school, too late to thaw for dinner. He goes through the mail. Great, lots of letters against the proposed shopping center on the edge of town right next to the river. Right next to his favorite fishing spot. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said, the way he couldn’t all day on the job, where as
city attorney, he had to pretend he was neutral. Maybe, after all, he wouldn’t have to resign himself to smelling exhaust from an enormous parking lot while casting his fly. Something good anyway, though all day Gabe had felt bad about their argument after breakfast, just another
“
He reaches his arm around
her, for stability, his and hers. She doesn’t pull away. That gives him hope.”
to add to the long chain weighing down their marital life. Could she still be upset over it? How could it take fifteen years of marriage to figure out that you don’t rearrange someone else’s stuff? He’d been late to work because she’d moved his boots and jacket from the place by the door where he always kept them so he could get to work quickly. In the closet she said, where they’re supposed to be. So he had to rummage through the mass of coats to find his jacket, and sort through all the other boots to find his. Yes, he’d let off some steam, may have called her a name or two, but Elena just clammed up like she always did and walked out the door.
The light has left her, and everything around her has folded into the shadow of dusk, but she re- mains seated there on the edge, maybe to watch the sliver of a moon appear in the west. Perhaps she has decided to hibernate like the bear, the chipmunk, the frozen toad that lives out a winter like a long night in the hollow of some broken, life-giving log. Nearby, the beat of a wing, some nocturnal bird just waking up.
Gabe collapses into his favorite chair in the liv- ing room and opens the local paper. A retriever settles his muzzle in Gabe’s lap for him to run his hand between Randal’s ears. Poor dog needs more exercise than they can give him. Why hadn’t Elena taken him out? Maybe she had gone up the cliff trail. She never took Randal there, for fear he’d bound off the edge of the cliff.
The pain in her palm from holding the stone so tight, reduces the one at the base of her skull to a mere ache. All she did was put away his damned boots and jacket where they belonged, and he had to go into a tirade. For the first time he’d sworn at her, and she’d just stood there in the shock wave of his fury, trembling inside.
Randal moaned to indicate without being pushy that he’d really like to go out. Gabe could never resist. “Ok boy, let’s go for a little run.”
What was she supposed to do? Pick her way around his clutter all day? When he took off his boots, he just dropped them in the middle of the hall as if he were the only one living there. He’d throw his bulky down jacket over her chair in the hallway, the cane chair her own grandmother had given her, and one he knew not only was fragile but that she cherished. And his papers! Always strewn across the dining room table, though she would not dream of rearranging them. But he left no room for herself to work, to perhaps study her fossils from the time before bone. Lay them out as she used to when he might even have asked to examine one himself under her magnifying lens.
Two figures emerge from the side door, the man keeping a steady pace while the dog trots along side, then races ahead, only stopping to mark
a tree or bush, an erratic planet circling a dark sun. If one listens carefully, he might hear the breath of the man, the pound of his feet, the whisk of the dog’s belly grazing the snow as he plows trails through lawn after lawn.
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