Page 39 - North Star Literary & Art Magazine

The Murmur
Hannah Gebo
What an awful thing it was. That spring when she was at that house. The one she was looking at now, all silent and empty, across the road.
It might have been almost ten years ago since then. It didn’t look anything like it did then, not one bit.
Now, the place was abandoned. It was cracked right up the middle, ready to shatter any day. It didn’t shine anymore; it just reflected the orange glow from the streetlights which kept her awake all hours of the night.
It didn’t matter anyway. There was hardly enough space in her mind for sleep anymore. She had just resigned to buying some blackout curtains and a pair of earplugs to see if she could drift off, but it did no good. Ever since that spring, the noise never stopped. The constant beating of the neighborhood around her; rhythmical echoes of dogs barking, cars driving, and kids out playing in the street, way after dark.
She was attuned to all of it now. So much, that she couldn’t turn it off, and now she was seeing if turning things on would remedy that fact.
There were just a few hours until dawn, and she could try to sleep now that every appliance in her house was running.
Instead, she ignored her bed, minding her bad knee so she could mosey off to the window, pulling the curtains open just enough so that it didn’t look like she was snooping to the neigh- bors—just enough to look at that house. It was time to go over it again, eyes straining, and arthritis-worn feet curling in the prints that were starting to form in the shag carpet. Her thoughts were already muddled, but then the sound of a house fly buzzing distracted her.
It was just banging its head into the glass of the window, again and again, desperately trying to get back outdoors. It was going to die soon. Never to fly around anyone’s head, or to raise maggots at the dump across town, or even just to land on some pile of dog shit in her lawn. Then the fly would fall onto the sill, lying on its back, unable to roll itself over and take off once more. And that was that. There’s hardly anything to be said about that.
But things have gotten harder since then. It doesn’t feel like almost ten years ago, her knee was just a tender ache; nothing that a decent knee board couldn’t fix. Just a little cush- ion to help her lean over and drop overpriced peony bushes into shallow holes, filling in the spaces with bagged soil, then covering them with mulch.
She liked to get out. She liked the spring air which held only a faint, residual chill. It was a pleasant day out. The kind that would bring all of her neighbors out onto their front steps to stick their nose into whatever she was busy with. Asking her all the usual questions like “how have you been?” or “nice weather we’re having,” and all that other jabber.
Nice weather indeed—and it would be a whole lot better if people would stop trying to badger her over something as pointless as her husband’s passing. The whole neighborhood acting like she was helpless. Asking if they could get her anything, take her to the store, call someone, carry her bag, or help her across the street, on and on and on, one thing after
NORTH STAR 37