Fantods1
07-29-2014, 06:06 PM
The 9:15 arrival at Sayers Station ground to a stop. The space between the tracks and the thick woods across from the platform was rocky, only patches of dry earth peaked through. Dandelions and thick green weedroot struggled in scattered clumps.
The two left the train’s cabin. The heat swarmed them and Lily’s white camisole stuck sweetly to her chest. The rusted, mangled steps down to the platform rattled underfoot and left sharp impressions in Thomas’ knees. They lacked cartilage: a high school track injury. Lily wore face paint to his states meet; she rubbed the red and black onto his flushed face after his race. He only came in third.
There is an altar in the valley, Thomas said.
He put his bag down on a mossy wooden bench. He leaned down to tie his shoe. She waited; slowly taking in the curtain of trunks whose leaves cut swaths of green across the sky.
Thomas had suggested a train ride to the country to get out of Brattle Falls, if only for a day. Lily’s mother had had them stay in a motel, rather than in her house, for their visit.
There’s an altar where they all gathered. Or used to gather. That’s what I hear at least, he said.
His shoe-tie complete, they walked into the yews interspersed with cherry red mulberry-gutted earth. The sun, peering through the canopy, made light-Rorschach’s on the tree needle ground.
The rock formation in the clearing was the deepest pool of pen ink. It seemed like it had bubbled over, out of the grass. They came from the woods into the meadow where one lonely dogwood was in bloom across from the rocks. Lily pointed to the mallows on the far side of the clearing: they had flowered, some dropping fragile, bleached purple petals.
I see a hawk, she said.
There are no hawks where we are going, he said after pondering the cloud cover. It was cirrus and the wind pushed it quickly.
They sat on the rock in the center, it was irregular, with large and angular shelves and lichen growing, and it hurt them to sit down.
I would be a hawk, she posited, I would be meant to be a hawk; up there in the sky.
Silence grew from the ground. Everything was hot and ecstatic. The silence was warm and he loved her.
On the Fourth of July of their senior year, Thomas drove his father’s Pontiac from Will Suther’s house to Lily’s. She rode in the back seat, looking at fireworks shatter over the harbor. Freshmen at Will’s party sat at the bottom of the hill and smoked gas station cigars. The braver ones took long hauls into their lungs. They all threw up.
The streets were packed as moms and dads led theirs by hand towards the gazebo on the green where a big band in red cummerbunds played; grandfathers walked slowly, talking baseball and of the Falls’ shipyard where they worked as pages and timecard operators during their youths. The Pontiac was dull silver; it had a gummed-up stick shift that Thomas never learnt to drive too well. Whenever he slowed to let pedestrians pass, the Pontiac would stall out.
Lily had fallen asleep. The water tossed its salt and night scent into the air. Everything was hot and ecstatic. Wind ran through the car; Thomas drove on and they had loved each other.
Lily glanced up: a cloud passed under the sun, casting a thick shadow over the meadow. Thomas’ eyes quickly followed hers. After the sky, he looked at her face. His hand slid over hers. Lily looked down to her feet, down into the earth.
Train rides go by now, she said, most things go by and I don’t even know they do.
---------
It was night back at their motel. They had returned from their excursion as the sun was going down.
Things were still and calm as Thomas sat on a chair by the motel’s pool, the sides of which were a cracking red and had moss growing and brown and grey water purling from the fractures. The moon wavered in the pool’s reflection like a gigantic dime flipping into a wishing well. He thought the moon was a gigantic dime flipping into a wishing well and he drank, pulling at a ginger ale and vodka from the minibar, and as he drank he thought about it more.
The room’s shades were drawn behind him; they were a gauzy white on which television light limned, dancing a shadowy dance onto the deep folds. The moon and the shadow dance opposed each other: the moon had a set and noted trajectory, it would float –had floated- over the houses and roads and people to another face of the earth, he thought.
Rising from his chair, Thomas took off the complimentary motel bathrobe. The moonlight is sweet like white wine, he thought as his toes grasped the cracking red edge of the pool.
He leapt into the water. It is cool and wet, he thought. The water was cool and wet: the hairs on Thomas’ arms stood up and he shivered but felt relieved and unwound. The vodka circulated through him and his mind went blank, swept clean and not yet retaining marks, encompassed by thin fog: unreachable.
As he started swimming laps, slowly turning onto his back and then back to his chest, Lily, inside their room, turned the television’s sound off and listened to the water hit the pool’s porous concrete edges.
Within the room, the bed was lumpy and the sheets coarse. Lily’s feet felt hot and strange. She had had a thought that her feet felt hot and strange while the sound was on and now, with the sound off, she felt the same: unchanged. It always stayed with, like facts didn’t affect her. Everything is facts, she thought, everything is facts: I am a fact and the fan spinning is a fact. The facts were spinning and twirling and uncomfortable to her. They melted and slipped through her fingers.
Lily crawled from beneath the sheets and peered through the curtains at Thomas blowing water from his chapped lips. His lips bled all the time. He carried medicated chapsticks and left their plastic wrappers in Lily’s car and on every table in their apartment.
I would be a hawk, she thought. I would be a hawk. I would be a hawk.
She repeated it over and over looking at Thomas in the pool, at the skinny trees swaying in the wind, at the way his bathrobe had shrugged onto the damp concrete.
She repeated it over and over leaving the motel room and sliding her bare feet towards the pool.
Thomas didn’t notice her. His ears were submerged and he never heard the door opening or her walking.
Thomas, she said softly to no avail.
She spoke up and her throat tried to clench: Thomas, she said, we are not connected. Like we are dots in the sky and we look up at ourselves and trace lines, intricate, to connect us and but then our lines turn out separate and don’t cross over much.
Thomas looked at her and blinked hesitatingly.
I don’t understand, he said.
And the water lapping at the pool’s cracked sides was too loud and Thomas’ nakedness beneath the moon and the water made him look smaller and not fully present.
Lily backpedaled towards the door, still looking at Thomas, and, when she stepped back into the room, Thomas lifted himself out of the pool, opening and closing his lips softly.
When she was a girl in her father’s big blue house tucked in the woods, Lily would dream that she was running down the dust and sundrenched halls, opening doors and looking inside endless amounts of rooms filled with mezzanines and spiral staircases and others resplendent with neatly ordered boxes, keys laid out in front of them by some unseen caretaker. She dreamed of opening doors in her father’s big blue house and those dreams were her only memories, however nebulous, of that distinguished home from which she departed to live with her mother at the age of six.
In the room, Lily took her duffel bag, packed and waiting at the foot of the queen bed, and put on her sandals. The bathroom fan whirred beside her as she opened the door and walked out.
Thomas entered the room shortly after she had departed and, now noticing his nakedness, he wrapped himself in Lily’s still-wet towel from the hanger on the back of the bathroom door. He couldn’t find his shoes so he left without them, his left hand clasping at the towel and his right extended awkwardly in front of him as he scampered down the wanly lit hallway.
After taking a right turn he came upon her. She was walking briskly.
Lily, wait, he said.
She turned round and he reached for her shoulders with both of his hands. The towel fell onto the speckled carpeting.
Lily, wait, he said mewingly.
His lips were breaking profusely and he licked a spot of blood away.
A cleaning lady exited a door to their left and they all stopped. Suddenly, Thomas noticed himself. All the masks were taken off.
The cleaning lady retreated with her cart into the room from which she came, marked Maintenance.
You check out, Lily said.
She turned and walked away past the empty reception hall and the front desk manned by a pockmarked teenage boy and into the parking lot.
In her car, she put the key in the ignition.
The two left the train’s cabin. The heat swarmed them and Lily’s white camisole stuck sweetly to her chest. The rusted, mangled steps down to the platform rattled underfoot and left sharp impressions in Thomas’ knees. They lacked cartilage: a high school track injury. Lily wore face paint to his states meet; she rubbed the red and black onto his flushed face after his race. He only came in third.
There is an altar in the valley, Thomas said.
He put his bag down on a mossy wooden bench. He leaned down to tie his shoe. She waited; slowly taking in the curtain of trunks whose leaves cut swaths of green across the sky.
Thomas had suggested a train ride to the country to get out of Brattle Falls, if only for a day. Lily’s mother had had them stay in a motel, rather than in her house, for their visit.
There’s an altar where they all gathered. Or used to gather. That’s what I hear at least, he said.
His shoe-tie complete, they walked into the yews interspersed with cherry red mulberry-gutted earth. The sun, peering through the canopy, made light-Rorschach’s on the tree needle ground.
The rock formation in the clearing was the deepest pool of pen ink. It seemed like it had bubbled over, out of the grass. They came from the woods into the meadow where one lonely dogwood was in bloom across from the rocks. Lily pointed to the mallows on the far side of the clearing: they had flowered, some dropping fragile, bleached purple petals.
I see a hawk, she said.
There are no hawks where we are going, he said after pondering the cloud cover. It was cirrus and the wind pushed it quickly.
They sat on the rock in the center, it was irregular, with large and angular shelves and lichen growing, and it hurt them to sit down.
I would be a hawk, she posited, I would be meant to be a hawk; up there in the sky.
Silence grew from the ground. Everything was hot and ecstatic. The silence was warm and he loved her.
On the Fourth of July of their senior year, Thomas drove his father’s Pontiac from Will Suther’s house to Lily’s. She rode in the back seat, looking at fireworks shatter over the harbor. Freshmen at Will’s party sat at the bottom of the hill and smoked gas station cigars. The braver ones took long hauls into their lungs. They all threw up.
The streets were packed as moms and dads led theirs by hand towards the gazebo on the green where a big band in red cummerbunds played; grandfathers walked slowly, talking baseball and of the Falls’ shipyard where they worked as pages and timecard operators during their youths. The Pontiac was dull silver; it had a gummed-up stick shift that Thomas never learnt to drive too well. Whenever he slowed to let pedestrians pass, the Pontiac would stall out.
Lily had fallen asleep. The water tossed its salt and night scent into the air. Everything was hot and ecstatic. Wind ran through the car; Thomas drove on and they had loved each other.
Lily glanced up: a cloud passed under the sun, casting a thick shadow over the meadow. Thomas’ eyes quickly followed hers. After the sky, he looked at her face. His hand slid over hers. Lily looked down to her feet, down into the earth.
Train rides go by now, she said, most things go by and I don’t even know they do.
---------
It was night back at their motel. They had returned from their excursion as the sun was going down.
Things were still and calm as Thomas sat on a chair by the motel’s pool, the sides of which were a cracking red and had moss growing and brown and grey water purling from the fractures. The moon wavered in the pool’s reflection like a gigantic dime flipping into a wishing well. He thought the moon was a gigantic dime flipping into a wishing well and he drank, pulling at a ginger ale and vodka from the minibar, and as he drank he thought about it more.
The room’s shades were drawn behind him; they were a gauzy white on which television light limned, dancing a shadowy dance onto the deep folds. The moon and the shadow dance opposed each other: the moon had a set and noted trajectory, it would float –had floated- over the houses and roads and people to another face of the earth, he thought.
Rising from his chair, Thomas took off the complimentary motel bathrobe. The moonlight is sweet like white wine, he thought as his toes grasped the cracking red edge of the pool.
He leapt into the water. It is cool and wet, he thought. The water was cool and wet: the hairs on Thomas’ arms stood up and he shivered but felt relieved and unwound. The vodka circulated through him and his mind went blank, swept clean and not yet retaining marks, encompassed by thin fog: unreachable.
As he started swimming laps, slowly turning onto his back and then back to his chest, Lily, inside their room, turned the television’s sound off and listened to the water hit the pool’s porous concrete edges.
Within the room, the bed was lumpy and the sheets coarse. Lily’s feet felt hot and strange. She had had a thought that her feet felt hot and strange while the sound was on and now, with the sound off, she felt the same: unchanged. It always stayed with, like facts didn’t affect her. Everything is facts, she thought, everything is facts: I am a fact and the fan spinning is a fact. The facts were spinning and twirling and uncomfortable to her. They melted and slipped through her fingers.
Lily crawled from beneath the sheets and peered through the curtains at Thomas blowing water from his chapped lips. His lips bled all the time. He carried medicated chapsticks and left their plastic wrappers in Lily’s car and on every table in their apartment.
I would be a hawk, she thought. I would be a hawk. I would be a hawk.
She repeated it over and over looking at Thomas in the pool, at the skinny trees swaying in the wind, at the way his bathrobe had shrugged onto the damp concrete.
She repeated it over and over leaving the motel room and sliding her bare feet towards the pool.
Thomas didn’t notice her. His ears were submerged and he never heard the door opening or her walking.
Thomas, she said softly to no avail.
She spoke up and her throat tried to clench: Thomas, she said, we are not connected. Like we are dots in the sky and we look up at ourselves and trace lines, intricate, to connect us and but then our lines turn out separate and don’t cross over much.
Thomas looked at her and blinked hesitatingly.
I don’t understand, he said.
And the water lapping at the pool’s cracked sides was too loud and Thomas’ nakedness beneath the moon and the water made him look smaller and not fully present.
Lily backpedaled towards the door, still looking at Thomas, and, when she stepped back into the room, Thomas lifted himself out of the pool, opening and closing his lips softly.
When she was a girl in her father’s big blue house tucked in the woods, Lily would dream that she was running down the dust and sundrenched halls, opening doors and looking inside endless amounts of rooms filled with mezzanines and spiral staircases and others resplendent with neatly ordered boxes, keys laid out in front of them by some unseen caretaker. She dreamed of opening doors in her father’s big blue house and those dreams were her only memories, however nebulous, of that distinguished home from which she departed to live with her mother at the age of six.
In the room, Lily took her duffel bag, packed and waiting at the foot of the queen bed, and put on her sandals. The bathroom fan whirred beside her as she opened the door and walked out.
Thomas entered the room shortly after she had departed and, now noticing his nakedness, he wrapped himself in Lily’s still-wet towel from the hanger on the back of the bathroom door. He couldn’t find his shoes so he left without them, his left hand clasping at the towel and his right extended awkwardly in front of him as he scampered down the wanly lit hallway.
After taking a right turn he came upon her. She was walking briskly.
Lily, wait, he said.
She turned round and he reached for her shoulders with both of his hands. The towel fell onto the speckled carpeting.
Lily, wait, he said mewingly.
His lips were breaking profusely and he licked a spot of blood away.
A cleaning lady exited a door to their left and they all stopped. Suddenly, Thomas noticed himself. All the masks were taken off.
The cleaning lady retreated with her cart into the room from which she came, marked Maintenance.
You check out, Lily said.
She turned and walked away past the empty reception hall and the front desk manned by a pockmarked teenage boy and into the parking lot.
In her car, she put the key in the ignition.