Jack of Hearts
11-01-2010, 01:52 AM
“-just the way you left it,” she said to me in the lowlight and from over her shoulder. I thumbed through the newspaper and I saw the caption of a picture that made me cringe.’ “That’s ridiculous,” I sighed in frustration. Mom turned off the sink and faced me while drying the last plate, “Don’t throw it out, I like to save them.”
I laid it down, vulnerable to wandering eyes. Where it fell I could appreciate that the kitchen table hadn’t changed, it remained small and intimate and flimsy like my quieter thoughts. Salt shaker, pepper mill, colorful napkins. My mother at work, I suppose… a pastel yellow tablecloth contrasted strangely with the violet hue of the room, of the window where the cool morning sun washed through. At nine in the morning she stood in front of me like she was ready for a day in a park, in a denim jacket and white patterned skirt in the design of sunflowers. She loved a sunflower, she was a sunflower. I favored her I was always told, with our fine features, auburn hair and almond eyes betraying a relation by blood.
“It’s ridiculous to say I’ve come back to mourn him,” I declared as I ran a hand over my head, “because he died before I even left, and I was there, and I found him. For Christ’s sake.”
His body stiff and rigid in his brown leather recliner, in his tucked away corner of the living room, in his suit, in his tie, in his socks. The image stayed with me- it was as though something in him just got up and left, and left that old body of his behind like unwanted furniture.
“Well, you know newspapers. And you know your father,” a clutch-phrase she used throughout my entire life. “At any rate you’re already a better man than he was. He would be proud.”
“We both know he wouldn’t be anything.”
Whatever the case, I still suspected that the old man remained ahead of me in a very important and mysterious way. Maybe it was only half a step, but it was very pivotal half step of which I could only fathom at the edges. “Why’d you marry that guy, anyways?” I said with the sort of dryness that would forever remain lost to Mom and, while taking a seat across from me, she answered with sincerity, “Well I loved him.” She leaned her elbows onto the table, “Still do, I guess. But hun, look at what they’re saying about you now… Right here on the back page, ‘establishing a remarkable reputation in light of his recently published seminal critique of modern analytic philosophy and meta-ethics...”
She scrunched her forehead, “I don’t understand though… was he Native American or something?” I shook my head and had to smile at my easy and non-threatened understanding of my mother, a calm in the storm of this world’s misunderstandings and unknowables. “No, ma, seminal- it’s a fifty cent word for important.” And of course, she brought her palm to her face and giggled, “I guess that’s why I teach second grade, huh?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, you were the best teacher I ever had.”
“Speaking of which,” she said while folding her hands over each other, a gesture that reminded me of an elegance I could not perceive through sporadic phone calls and thousands of miles between us, “Ms. Kimble wants to see you. In fact, she was supposed to be over here last night for the dinner... Maybe you ought to go next door and check on her sometime today? Well, if you’re not too jet lagged anyways. I kept thinking she was going to show up last night, later and later, but...” she shrugged and paused a moment. “Blossoming flowers need their space.”
“She’s in her late thirties, ma.”
“And I’m older than that, so watch it Charlie,” she said with a playful spark in her eyes. “Plus she hasn’t seen you since before you left for university, and you were always going on about how she inspired you, while forgetting to thank your poor mother.”
I rolled my eyes and conceded the reaction she wanted. “I only said that a handful of times, in high school. At every keynote I give now, every damn dinner I attend… I thank my lovely mother.” Mom giggled and stood up, “Language. Well, you were her favorite student, and she’s still always smiling when she talks about you. I thought it was wonderful that you had that inspirational relationship, even if it was only in high school.”
As her silhouette moved across the kitchen through the varying shades of violet morning and shadow, I entertained the idea that my mother was the form of goodness itself, and damned unknowable because of it. And then, in the back of my consciousness, how I had to understand my mother… how I understood my mother was through my father. He and the interactions he had with her made her graspable, made her of the earth. And I liked that, I thought. I liked that as the best gift my father ever gave me, as an elusive step that gracefully evaded the umbra of my mind.
That afternoon, I stepped over the threshold of the household doorway and into a very quiet small town. The front steps down to the sidewalk… When I was a child I asked the old man why we had to live there, why we couldn’t go back to the penthouse in the city and he said it’s laughable that we should think it makes a difference where we live without questioning the ideas of how we breathe smog or subsist on the minima. It’s an illusion of mind that we should believe to know anything about the existence of any kind of ‘difference’ at all and the limit of what an enlightened man would declare about life starts and ends in the resignation that it’s a funny mother****er, aesthetically speaking. One of only a handful of occasions I remember actually interacting with him, though I can’t imagine why. I walked the sidewalk to the house next door and I heard wind chimes singing, but from where I couldn’t be sure and the tones refused order. The sun was dull and Midwestern and filled everywhere with a mellow brightness all at once. There was no track housing here, every house was foreign to the next, every house was aged but kept and the lawns were permitted only a healthy degree of overgrowth. Ms. Kimble’s house seemed benign enough, and I approached without hesitation.
It was the last place I pressed my lips against Amy’s, probably because she hit me afterwards and not with an effeminate slap but a righteous fist. It stung and the sting was deep, but her so called justified fury dissipated with great rapidity- Amy shaped herself into the posture of grace in the moments after I spit a little blood over the rail and on to the snow. “What the heck, Charlie?”
I rubbed my jaw and watched her adjust her beanie back over the tops of her ears, blond and blond tumbling every which way around her cheekbones. I knew those cheekbones well, we used to having staring contests in the middle of class. “I just figured… well, I just thought it would be ok. I mean, we already…”
Her blue eyes held sympathy for me and she said patiently, “…I still don’t understand why you would try to do that. Where did that come from? At what point in the conversation did you think that would be appropriate?”
I had to try. I had the bruise to prove it. No matter what my ensuing rationalities would protest, well… Out of reach, I guess, barely real, real at all my mind goes sketch thinking about it so I try not to and stomach knots and stupid girl, the old man would’ve handled her properly.
I’m having women trouble, pops. Adjusts his smoking jacket foolish boy they have an advantage and its unsporting to hate them for it. It’s just a silly little game with silly little rules and should you choose to partake out of boredom or insanity or fire in your loins there is ego to be won and lost and spilled upon the earth in the form of blood which is the game you’re really playing. I ask how I can win. Winning and losing belong to a fool’s distinction; ownership is something cute to chase.
I don’t like to think about it, but when I lay awake at night at the mercy of the malice in my mind, I get to the crux of it. Stray snowflakes, hand brushes strand of shiny hair out of her face, “Don’t call me again, Charlie. Don’t come over here again.” That’s Ms. Kimble’s porch to me anyway, uncovered and exposed.
I tapped my knuckles into the Maplewood door and nothing answered, not even noise. My hand went for the brass handle with an alarming degree of familiarity and entitlement. Rather than turning it, I immediately let go. It might have appeared that it burnt me, but more the opposite- it felt like nothing, nothing at all. With cautious fingertips, I pressed the edge ever so slightly. It sighed itself backwards without noise or friction. An open door, not all the way, just enough for me to enter into at an angle.
It took my eyes a moment to acclimate. Daylight tumbled through the house in a myriad of different shades, but there was something else that was strange to my vision… everything seemed to be more resolved, every line and detail more refined as though my sight had achieved a degree of alacrity unknown to me before. After a moment I was able to make sense of the living room, starting with a brown leather sofa, a coffee table, a small television, a fireplace- pictures on the mantle. A picture on the mantle. There was silence and sound. First there was silence, which was so heavy that it sat like warm cotton in my ears, and then through it sound, a light melody emanating softly from somewhere unseen. I refrained from calling out and quietly pressed the door closed.
A picture on the mantle. I walked across the room and picked it up. Filling the space between the thin silver frame was a very gray image of a beach in northern France. Ms. Kimble, with her soft brown hair and blue eyes, looked much the same as I remembered her; Amy looked about eleven. Ms. Kimble was behind her, holding her in an embrace and smiling at the camera. After the flash, Ms. Kimble puts the camera back in her sweater pocket and they keep walking the beach, gray sands under a gray heaven. Amy is wearing her hood to keep her ears warm. They walk the edges between beach and dark green grass, perpetually smiling and laughing and talking to each other. Occasionally they pass other walkers, local men who know the place, and Ms. Kimble’s gaze lingers on them just half a second longer than half a second while Amy chatters away brightly, without reserve. “Mom, what’s the ocean for, anyways? I mean, why’s it there?”
Ms. Kimble squints her twinkling eyes in playful contemplation and after a moment by god she has it. She leans down to look at Amy more directly, “It’s a big bathtub for you and for me!” She taps her index finger against Amy’s nose and they both start laughing. They flip off their shoes and run down the dunes, intent on getting ankle deep, where the coldness in the waves gives no thought to chilling their feet.
I put the picture back and began to drift my eyes back across the living room but stopped when they fell on the threshold to the kitchen. I went there. A conversation with Ms. Kimble I remembered having some evening a long time ago... I leaned against the tile countertop in the dim light and watched her cook across the way, my entire self tense and aware of the space between us- she faced the other direction and my eyes had free reign to wander over the body that virtually all of her male students lusted after. It seemed so perfect, so unreal to us that any teacher could look so damn good and teach so many damned subjects- everything from Freshman Health to World History to English, so clearly we determined her to be better than us and our school and our other teachers and ourselves, so in disbelief were we when we thought about her choosing to be here among her lessers.
“Charlie, thanks for coming over and helping to set up. I’m so glad we all get to have dinner tonight. And we’re going to talk about your paper, which was incredible. It’s going to be lovely.” She looked over her shoulder and smiled.
“Yeah…” I swallowed nervously. Mom had me help her move in, and I had been over a few times for odds and ends, but the once empty house next door was still strange to me. This new teacher was still strange to me. And so young…mom, who had taught nearly every grade between first and tenth, eventually took her under her wing and showed her the ins and outs of education in our county. They became quite close.
“You know, you’re incredibly bright,” she started. Thanks. “I mean it, Charlie. I think your insightfulness draws people to you.”
Only the grown-ups, a freshly Freshman me thought. I decided to let a quiet moment push her words away and change the subject.
“Ms. Kimble…” I managed my nerves long enough to slowly say, “… Did you read my story for English?”
“Mmmhmmm,” she drew out while stirring a sauce. “It was very nice, Charlie, but you went over the word limit. It was still very well done though.”
It wasn’t the same tone of voice she used to describe my essays. It was a tentative voice, a kid-glove voice. I never wrote her another story, I never had to. She didn’t like them anyways, I can’t think of anyone that ever did. First year of college it wasn’t uncommon to see various liner notes that read something like, “Indulgent. Get to the point. Do not follow. Is this necessary? See me.”
Or, as one professor put it years later, “It’s not that you’re bad at writing fiction, Charles, it’s just that you’re saving some of the genius for the rest of us. You can’t expect to be immediately good at everything.”
“Almost ready. Charlie, would you mind setting the table?” Ms. Kimble bent down to reach into a drawer full of utensils. I quickly tracked the curves of her sweater and the form of her jeans and I swear to god she saw me. She stopped bending, returned from the drawer with nothing and tended to the stove without a word.
The redness flushed from my memory and back into my cheeks. All four years of high school. More classes than I can easily remember. She was the first to sing “Genius,” and like any one hit wonder, everyone else knew the words and wanted to join in.
The kitchen was quiet now. No salt shakers, no pepper mills, no colorful napkins. Just clean countertops, that stove of course, and an open window from whence daytime and a breeze rolled in, both of which caressed the thin curtains with timidity. And then that melody- it was still playing somewhere. I followed it toward the hall, where clean tile met handsome carpeting beneath various pictures of Ms. Kimble, Amy, extended family and even one of me and mom. I paid them little more than a passing glance. Though at first I hesitated, the music compelled me up the stairs. I slid my hand along the polished banister and felt the slow stream of smoothness. When I reached the top, I stopped and looked down the empty hallway. Light shown through the other end and came to rest on the whitened walls. My eyes shifted sideways. The first door on the right was Ms. Kimble’s bedroom.
It took awhile but I eventually drew near that door. I turned my ear toward it and listened- there was nothing. The music was coming from further down the hall. I stood up straight and twisted the handle. A gentle push. When I looked inside I saw Allison naked with all fours spread atop the bed and me taking her from behind. My hands were trying to touch every part of her body at once though they clearly favored her breasts as a focal point. Her moans resonated in the throes of passion but the act for me was borne of consumption and that’s what I’d always remembered. In the darkness, as she slept against me softly and I felt the gentle breath in her chest rising and falling… I was sated. I had crafted a human being out of an angel.
It didn’t seem long after that I boarded a plane and flew east and stopped mentioning her at media outlets. I closed the bedroom door gently, but then, having not bothered to enter, it was never entirely open. The hallway now felt much cooler by comparison. Intrigued again, I continued further down with the melody guiding me to Amy’s door, which was only slightly ajar but all the invitation I needed.
Inside it was like a mausoleum and as though nothing had been touched since she left for school. Saving a bed, a bit of furniture and few posters or photographs, it was mostly empty and in order. On the dresser were various pictures, an old diary- locked- and a music box, a standard pink affair with Mother Goose, bonnet and all, spinning with her chicks in the middle. With gradual steps I approached the dresser and closed the thing midway through the melody, leaving the empty spaces in want of resolution, and then I sat down on the edge of the bed where the shadow of the blinds fell upon my back. It was there, as I lay there underneath those blankets, I remembered watching her stand and up pull her pink lace panties up around her shapely legs. “Amy, where are you going?”
She laughed and gave my hand a pat, “Charlie, I love being with you but I’ve got things I want to do today.”
I wanted more, though. “Come back here,” I lured, “and I’ll send you on your way in style.”
Amy smirked, “Well, with a line like that, all you need is a tacky moustache… but seriously, Charlie, I’ve got to get going here… We’ll do this later.”
But when later did come, it was never enough. Her phantasm returned to the fringes of my thoughts and I ran my hand over the space next to me on the bed. I couldn’t imagine leaving there, all I imagined was waiting there for her to return, and this prompted me to wonder what was laid to rest between those walls in the first place and whether or not one might reach up to grasp the hem of a seraphim’s garment, and irk it with enough force that the ethereal might be flung toward the realm of the earth and I might be flung into the heavens.
I laid it down, vulnerable to wandering eyes. Where it fell I could appreciate that the kitchen table hadn’t changed, it remained small and intimate and flimsy like my quieter thoughts. Salt shaker, pepper mill, colorful napkins. My mother at work, I suppose… a pastel yellow tablecloth contrasted strangely with the violet hue of the room, of the window where the cool morning sun washed through. At nine in the morning she stood in front of me like she was ready for a day in a park, in a denim jacket and white patterned skirt in the design of sunflowers. She loved a sunflower, she was a sunflower. I favored her I was always told, with our fine features, auburn hair and almond eyes betraying a relation by blood.
“It’s ridiculous to say I’ve come back to mourn him,” I declared as I ran a hand over my head, “because he died before I even left, and I was there, and I found him. For Christ’s sake.”
His body stiff and rigid in his brown leather recliner, in his tucked away corner of the living room, in his suit, in his tie, in his socks. The image stayed with me- it was as though something in him just got up and left, and left that old body of his behind like unwanted furniture.
“Well, you know newspapers. And you know your father,” a clutch-phrase she used throughout my entire life. “At any rate you’re already a better man than he was. He would be proud.”
“We both know he wouldn’t be anything.”
Whatever the case, I still suspected that the old man remained ahead of me in a very important and mysterious way. Maybe it was only half a step, but it was very pivotal half step of which I could only fathom at the edges. “Why’d you marry that guy, anyways?” I said with the sort of dryness that would forever remain lost to Mom and, while taking a seat across from me, she answered with sincerity, “Well I loved him.” She leaned her elbows onto the table, “Still do, I guess. But hun, look at what they’re saying about you now… Right here on the back page, ‘establishing a remarkable reputation in light of his recently published seminal critique of modern analytic philosophy and meta-ethics...”
She scrunched her forehead, “I don’t understand though… was he Native American or something?” I shook my head and had to smile at my easy and non-threatened understanding of my mother, a calm in the storm of this world’s misunderstandings and unknowables. “No, ma, seminal- it’s a fifty cent word for important.” And of course, she brought her palm to her face and giggled, “I guess that’s why I teach second grade, huh?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, you were the best teacher I ever had.”
“Speaking of which,” she said while folding her hands over each other, a gesture that reminded me of an elegance I could not perceive through sporadic phone calls and thousands of miles between us, “Ms. Kimble wants to see you. In fact, she was supposed to be over here last night for the dinner... Maybe you ought to go next door and check on her sometime today? Well, if you’re not too jet lagged anyways. I kept thinking she was going to show up last night, later and later, but...” she shrugged and paused a moment. “Blossoming flowers need their space.”
“She’s in her late thirties, ma.”
“And I’m older than that, so watch it Charlie,” she said with a playful spark in her eyes. “Plus she hasn’t seen you since before you left for university, and you were always going on about how she inspired you, while forgetting to thank your poor mother.”
I rolled my eyes and conceded the reaction she wanted. “I only said that a handful of times, in high school. At every keynote I give now, every damn dinner I attend… I thank my lovely mother.” Mom giggled and stood up, “Language. Well, you were her favorite student, and she’s still always smiling when she talks about you. I thought it was wonderful that you had that inspirational relationship, even if it was only in high school.”
As her silhouette moved across the kitchen through the varying shades of violet morning and shadow, I entertained the idea that my mother was the form of goodness itself, and damned unknowable because of it. And then, in the back of my consciousness, how I had to understand my mother… how I understood my mother was through my father. He and the interactions he had with her made her graspable, made her of the earth. And I liked that, I thought. I liked that as the best gift my father ever gave me, as an elusive step that gracefully evaded the umbra of my mind.
That afternoon, I stepped over the threshold of the household doorway and into a very quiet small town. The front steps down to the sidewalk… When I was a child I asked the old man why we had to live there, why we couldn’t go back to the penthouse in the city and he said it’s laughable that we should think it makes a difference where we live without questioning the ideas of how we breathe smog or subsist on the minima. It’s an illusion of mind that we should believe to know anything about the existence of any kind of ‘difference’ at all and the limit of what an enlightened man would declare about life starts and ends in the resignation that it’s a funny mother****er, aesthetically speaking. One of only a handful of occasions I remember actually interacting with him, though I can’t imagine why. I walked the sidewalk to the house next door and I heard wind chimes singing, but from where I couldn’t be sure and the tones refused order. The sun was dull and Midwestern and filled everywhere with a mellow brightness all at once. There was no track housing here, every house was foreign to the next, every house was aged but kept and the lawns were permitted only a healthy degree of overgrowth. Ms. Kimble’s house seemed benign enough, and I approached without hesitation.
It was the last place I pressed my lips against Amy’s, probably because she hit me afterwards and not with an effeminate slap but a righteous fist. It stung and the sting was deep, but her so called justified fury dissipated with great rapidity- Amy shaped herself into the posture of grace in the moments after I spit a little blood over the rail and on to the snow. “What the heck, Charlie?”
I rubbed my jaw and watched her adjust her beanie back over the tops of her ears, blond and blond tumbling every which way around her cheekbones. I knew those cheekbones well, we used to having staring contests in the middle of class. “I just figured… well, I just thought it would be ok. I mean, we already…”
Her blue eyes held sympathy for me and she said patiently, “…I still don’t understand why you would try to do that. Where did that come from? At what point in the conversation did you think that would be appropriate?”
I had to try. I had the bruise to prove it. No matter what my ensuing rationalities would protest, well… Out of reach, I guess, barely real, real at all my mind goes sketch thinking about it so I try not to and stomach knots and stupid girl, the old man would’ve handled her properly.
I’m having women trouble, pops. Adjusts his smoking jacket foolish boy they have an advantage and its unsporting to hate them for it. It’s just a silly little game with silly little rules and should you choose to partake out of boredom or insanity or fire in your loins there is ego to be won and lost and spilled upon the earth in the form of blood which is the game you’re really playing. I ask how I can win. Winning and losing belong to a fool’s distinction; ownership is something cute to chase.
I don’t like to think about it, but when I lay awake at night at the mercy of the malice in my mind, I get to the crux of it. Stray snowflakes, hand brushes strand of shiny hair out of her face, “Don’t call me again, Charlie. Don’t come over here again.” That’s Ms. Kimble’s porch to me anyway, uncovered and exposed.
I tapped my knuckles into the Maplewood door and nothing answered, not even noise. My hand went for the brass handle with an alarming degree of familiarity and entitlement. Rather than turning it, I immediately let go. It might have appeared that it burnt me, but more the opposite- it felt like nothing, nothing at all. With cautious fingertips, I pressed the edge ever so slightly. It sighed itself backwards without noise or friction. An open door, not all the way, just enough for me to enter into at an angle.
It took my eyes a moment to acclimate. Daylight tumbled through the house in a myriad of different shades, but there was something else that was strange to my vision… everything seemed to be more resolved, every line and detail more refined as though my sight had achieved a degree of alacrity unknown to me before. After a moment I was able to make sense of the living room, starting with a brown leather sofa, a coffee table, a small television, a fireplace- pictures on the mantle. A picture on the mantle. There was silence and sound. First there was silence, which was so heavy that it sat like warm cotton in my ears, and then through it sound, a light melody emanating softly from somewhere unseen. I refrained from calling out and quietly pressed the door closed.
A picture on the mantle. I walked across the room and picked it up. Filling the space between the thin silver frame was a very gray image of a beach in northern France. Ms. Kimble, with her soft brown hair and blue eyes, looked much the same as I remembered her; Amy looked about eleven. Ms. Kimble was behind her, holding her in an embrace and smiling at the camera. After the flash, Ms. Kimble puts the camera back in her sweater pocket and they keep walking the beach, gray sands under a gray heaven. Amy is wearing her hood to keep her ears warm. They walk the edges between beach and dark green grass, perpetually smiling and laughing and talking to each other. Occasionally they pass other walkers, local men who know the place, and Ms. Kimble’s gaze lingers on them just half a second longer than half a second while Amy chatters away brightly, without reserve. “Mom, what’s the ocean for, anyways? I mean, why’s it there?”
Ms. Kimble squints her twinkling eyes in playful contemplation and after a moment by god she has it. She leans down to look at Amy more directly, “It’s a big bathtub for you and for me!” She taps her index finger against Amy’s nose and they both start laughing. They flip off their shoes and run down the dunes, intent on getting ankle deep, where the coldness in the waves gives no thought to chilling their feet.
I put the picture back and began to drift my eyes back across the living room but stopped when they fell on the threshold to the kitchen. I went there. A conversation with Ms. Kimble I remembered having some evening a long time ago... I leaned against the tile countertop in the dim light and watched her cook across the way, my entire self tense and aware of the space between us- she faced the other direction and my eyes had free reign to wander over the body that virtually all of her male students lusted after. It seemed so perfect, so unreal to us that any teacher could look so damn good and teach so many damned subjects- everything from Freshman Health to World History to English, so clearly we determined her to be better than us and our school and our other teachers and ourselves, so in disbelief were we when we thought about her choosing to be here among her lessers.
“Charlie, thanks for coming over and helping to set up. I’m so glad we all get to have dinner tonight. And we’re going to talk about your paper, which was incredible. It’s going to be lovely.” She looked over her shoulder and smiled.
“Yeah…” I swallowed nervously. Mom had me help her move in, and I had been over a few times for odds and ends, but the once empty house next door was still strange to me. This new teacher was still strange to me. And so young…mom, who had taught nearly every grade between first and tenth, eventually took her under her wing and showed her the ins and outs of education in our county. They became quite close.
“You know, you’re incredibly bright,” she started. Thanks. “I mean it, Charlie. I think your insightfulness draws people to you.”
Only the grown-ups, a freshly Freshman me thought. I decided to let a quiet moment push her words away and change the subject.
“Ms. Kimble…” I managed my nerves long enough to slowly say, “… Did you read my story for English?”
“Mmmhmmm,” she drew out while stirring a sauce. “It was very nice, Charlie, but you went over the word limit. It was still very well done though.”
It wasn’t the same tone of voice she used to describe my essays. It was a tentative voice, a kid-glove voice. I never wrote her another story, I never had to. She didn’t like them anyways, I can’t think of anyone that ever did. First year of college it wasn’t uncommon to see various liner notes that read something like, “Indulgent. Get to the point. Do not follow. Is this necessary? See me.”
Or, as one professor put it years later, “It’s not that you’re bad at writing fiction, Charles, it’s just that you’re saving some of the genius for the rest of us. You can’t expect to be immediately good at everything.”
“Almost ready. Charlie, would you mind setting the table?” Ms. Kimble bent down to reach into a drawer full of utensils. I quickly tracked the curves of her sweater and the form of her jeans and I swear to god she saw me. She stopped bending, returned from the drawer with nothing and tended to the stove without a word.
The redness flushed from my memory and back into my cheeks. All four years of high school. More classes than I can easily remember. She was the first to sing “Genius,” and like any one hit wonder, everyone else knew the words and wanted to join in.
The kitchen was quiet now. No salt shakers, no pepper mills, no colorful napkins. Just clean countertops, that stove of course, and an open window from whence daytime and a breeze rolled in, both of which caressed the thin curtains with timidity. And then that melody- it was still playing somewhere. I followed it toward the hall, where clean tile met handsome carpeting beneath various pictures of Ms. Kimble, Amy, extended family and even one of me and mom. I paid them little more than a passing glance. Though at first I hesitated, the music compelled me up the stairs. I slid my hand along the polished banister and felt the slow stream of smoothness. When I reached the top, I stopped and looked down the empty hallway. Light shown through the other end and came to rest on the whitened walls. My eyes shifted sideways. The first door on the right was Ms. Kimble’s bedroom.
It took awhile but I eventually drew near that door. I turned my ear toward it and listened- there was nothing. The music was coming from further down the hall. I stood up straight and twisted the handle. A gentle push. When I looked inside I saw Allison naked with all fours spread atop the bed and me taking her from behind. My hands were trying to touch every part of her body at once though they clearly favored her breasts as a focal point. Her moans resonated in the throes of passion but the act for me was borne of consumption and that’s what I’d always remembered. In the darkness, as she slept against me softly and I felt the gentle breath in her chest rising and falling… I was sated. I had crafted a human being out of an angel.
It didn’t seem long after that I boarded a plane and flew east and stopped mentioning her at media outlets. I closed the bedroom door gently, but then, having not bothered to enter, it was never entirely open. The hallway now felt much cooler by comparison. Intrigued again, I continued further down with the melody guiding me to Amy’s door, which was only slightly ajar but all the invitation I needed.
Inside it was like a mausoleum and as though nothing had been touched since she left for school. Saving a bed, a bit of furniture and few posters or photographs, it was mostly empty and in order. On the dresser were various pictures, an old diary- locked- and a music box, a standard pink affair with Mother Goose, bonnet and all, spinning with her chicks in the middle. With gradual steps I approached the dresser and closed the thing midway through the melody, leaving the empty spaces in want of resolution, and then I sat down on the edge of the bed where the shadow of the blinds fell upon my back. It was there, as I lay there underneath those blankets, I remembered watching her stand and up pull her pink lace panties up around her shapely legs. “Amy, where are you going?”
She laughed and gave my hand a pat, “Charlie, I love being with you but I’ve got things I want to do today.”
I wanted more, though. “Come back here,” I lured, “and I’ll send you on your way in style.”
Amy smirked, “Well, with a line like that, all you need is a tacky moustache… but seriously, Charlie, I’ve got to get going here… We’ll do this later.”
But when later did come, it was never enough. Her phantasm returned to the fringes of my thoughts and I ran my hand over the space next to me on the bed. I couldn’t imagine leaving there, all I imagined was waiting there for her to return, and this prompted me to wonder what was laid to rest between those walls in the first place and whether or not one might reach up to grasp the hem of a seraphim’s garment, and irk it with enough force that the ethereal might be flung toward the realm of the earth and I might be flung into the heavens.