by John Everson
I stepped into the blue-black shadows of the house, and strained my eyes to see into the room. A flame erupted from the oily black and there was Anne, a candle in hand, moving toward me.
Her face seemed pale in the orange glow of the flame, but there was no mistaking the perfect gleam of her smile. She was happy to see me.
“Come into the living room,” she said, and gestured to a couch I could barely make out in the gloom.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Why don’t you have any lights on?”
And then I saw him.
Silent and thin, he watched from a sheet-covered chair. His eyes glinted dangerously.
“And who is he?” I pointed.
“Sit.” She pushed me down on the couch.
“What’s going on is, this is my new home, I prefer the dark, and he is my new husband, Derrick. I wanted you to have the chance to meet him. Derrick, say hello.”
The strangely-still form sitting across from me whispered a steely greeting. “Welcome to our home,” he said. His too-wide smile lacked any warmth.
“But you can’t have another husband,” I yelled, getting angrier by the instant. “We haven’t gotten divorced! You’re my wife!”
“I was your wife,” she corrected. “The vows said, ’til death do you part.’”
“But neither of us are dead,” I sputtered, suddenly realizing that perhaps I should be scoping the room for an escape route.
It was then that I noticed the coffin.
“Jack, I’m dead.”
I laughed nervously at that. “And I suppose that coffin is where you sleep at night.”
“Don’t be silly,” she replied. “Those stories are romantic, but dead wrong. The coffin is for you.”
I launched myself from the couch then, but I’d waited too long. I never saw him leave the chair, but Derrick had me restrained in seconds. The intimacy of his embrace allowed me an all-too-close whiff of his hygiene.
“At least I always knew when to shower,” I said.
“Wouldn’t do any good, dear,” my apparently ex-wife sighed. “The dead simply stink. But they do eat well. And I’ve had a craving for you since I died.”
Anne opened her mouth then, revealing horribly extended canines. As her lips touched my neck for the last time in my life, it occurred to me that all the money I’d spent to have her teeth capped had been wasted.
~*~
A LACK OF SIGNS
There was no sign in the window. No hours posted on the door. Only the beckoning chill of the pink neon tube that ringed the shuttered window and the cool iceberg blue of its brother that outlined the door.
Jan had passed the shop for weeks in her car, glancing to the north side of the street as the dead grass of the parkway skimmed by, a Banana Republic blur of bleak earthtone colors, wondering what was inside. The neon always seemed lit, but there was rarely a car in the lot. Now and then, she would drive by and notice people entering the tattoo parlor to the east of the unmarked shop, but there was never any traffic in the other half of the decaying strip mall. Just the call of the neon.
A call promising… what?
It had been a long day, but Jan didn’t feel much like going home, not yet. There, she would only have to face the lonely chore of microwaving something to eat, while watching whatever mindless sitcom was on, to kill the hours and fill the void of silence until sleep rescued her briefly, before shitting her out into another day.
Tonight, would the studio audience exaggerate its excitement over an episode about the neighbor’s boy cheating in grammar school and the kooky hijinks as his friends sought to save him from both his teacher and moral bankruptcy? Or would they take on an even more serious subject in a “very special episode” about drug or alcohol abuse? The lives portrayed in those shallow sitcoms often seemed more interesting than hers. While their problems often seemed ludicrous, at least they were connected to other people.
As she pulled away from the light at Glen Ellyn Road, she decided that now was as good a time as any. She was tired of being curious. Slapping on her turn signal, Jan crossed lanes and pulled into the parking lot of the nameless store. She sat still for a moment, staring at the blank, white-coated cinderblock exterior, then finally shut off the engine.
The store revealed no more clues as to its specialty from up close than it did from the road. There was clearly a light on inside, showing through the white shutters. And the neon glowed brightly. But cold. Neon never evoked warmth.
She could see the building itself was in disrepair, chunks of mortar missing from between blocks, peels of dirty white paint lifting from the windows and gutters and revealing slashes of black building bone beneath.
The parking lot only held two cars besides her own, a rusting Chevy Impala, and a beaten up black hot rod, she thought it was a Mustang.
Jeremy would have known for sure.
A bell jingled to announce her as the door shut the outside out, quick as a guillotine. She knew immediately she had made a mistake.
The room was painted a chalky white, and carpeted in a neutral beige. The paint and carpet were new, but they had as much color and life as her apartment. It was like stepping into an eggshell that held no embryo.
The room was empty.
A lone bulb hung from the ceiling to light the room. A hallway led away into shadow. Jan shook her head at her own foolishness. There was no sign here because there was no business here. At least not yet.
Someone was probably redressing the space, and just taking awhile to do it. Maybe the new renters had run out of funds, and had had to postpone the opening of their new store, whatever it was to be. In any event, it did not appear to be a proprietorship of anything right now.
As Jan turned to leave, a voice reached out from the hallway.
“Can I help you?”
She peered back over her shoulder, keeping her hand on the handle of the glass door.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize you weren’t open yet.”
“We’re open,” the voice answered, and Jan saw a face swim out of the darkness. He was an aged man, face warted and wrinkled like an old toad, but his eyes were gemstone blue and gleamed in the light from the unshielded bulb.
“What exactly is it that you’re looking for?” he asked softly, his voice as soothing as his eyes were bright.
“I… I don’t know,” Jan said. She turned to the door and pushed, jangling the bell again. “I’ll come back another time, when you have your displays set up.”
“Come back soon,” the old man answered, as she slipped back out to the parking lot. “Come back when you know what you want.”
* * * * *
Jan’s heart was still beating hard when she pulled into the potholed lot of her apartment complex, just a couple miles from the strange store. Something about the place, something about its cool interior, its wrinkled proprietor, its… emptiness, bothered her. Scared her, really.
When she’d stepped inside the store, she’d immediately felt disoriented, as if she were slipping… and then an overwhelming urge to run.
“What must he have thought of me,” she said, shaking her head as she keyed open the apartment door. “Foolish woman, doesn’t know what she wants…”
Jan set her things down on the small, white-tiled kitchen table, and took a breath. She had what she wanted. Her place, her stuff, her freedom.
She nodded at the matted posters so recently framed and hung. Street scenes of her favorite cities: Chicago ’s Michigan Avenue at night, New York ’s Times Square at noon. The streets were filled with people in white pants and dark coats and electric pink midriffs and heads boasting warring baseball caps (Cubs, White Sox, Orioles), a quiet competition of sports franchises. The people walked across the sterile white of her walls, offering a glimpse of energy – of living.
Jan’s life these days was all about filling space. Ever since Jeremy left and took with him all of the furniture in her heart. Not to mention her favorite blue ottoman. And the
stereo system (his since college). And the DVD player (you never watch movies). She had signed the lease on this apartment the day after his brutal announcement (you just don’t move me anymore, I’m sorry) and arrived the following weekend with a carload of clothes, dishes and old cassette tapes.
And the posters she’d reluctantly packed into peeling tubes when she’d first moved in with Jeremy the year before. He didn’t like the city. Too many people, he said.
“You wanna move to Idaho and be a hermit?” she’d asked once. “Yeah, why not,” he’d said. “At least the dumb-shit-per-capita is way down. And you can always get fresh potatoes.” He’d laughed, and gone back to running down computer-simulated pedestrians with the help of his joystick and an IBM Pentium.
Eventually, he’d run her down as well. Run her down, then left her. Jan had still harbored hope that they could be together again, but then she’d gotten the call. He’d been run down too, by a green four-door sedan. But Jeremy’s death had been no computer simulation. All she was left with were the pictures of their aborted life together. And the aching wish that she could have fulfilled his dream. She hadn’t even gotten the chance to kiss him one last goodbye. The family had decided on a closed casket, and she’d been denied even that last bitter consolation.
Jan pulled a frozen carton of Swedish meatballs from the freezer and popped open the microwave door with a button. Five minutes. Enough to change and sort the mail, she thought, as the machine began to hum behind her.
But when she crossed the living room and saw the white, empty wall of the entryway again, she stopped. A trembling began in her calves and shivered its way through her thighs through her groin and belly, to lodge like a spear in the center of her chest. Jan drew a halting, pained breath, and without warning, began to sob.
She didn’t hear the microwave’s dinging reminders, five minutes later, from her fetal crouch on the perfect, unstained carpet.
* * * * *
“…if we could bump up the revenue projections on the transitional quotas, we could bury the loss margin on the Tablet software, right?”
Jan blinked, and looked up at Evie, her workmate who’d apparently been leaning, palms flat on her desk for the past couple minutes, going on about sales reports and who knew what else.
“Jan?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I lost you there for a minute. What about the Tablet software?”
She’d been thinking about her living room, the way everything was so sterile, even with her street scene posters. Thinking about what she could fill the white space with. She couldn’t paint, it wasn’t hers to paint. But maybe an Oriental rug, with intricate twisting patterns of filigree and rich royal colors. Patterns to follow for hours with the eye, as the evenings slipped by…
Evie asked her question again, and managed, in the asking, to assign Jan with another job to do before day’s end (do you think you could help me and…) and then she was gone, probably to kill the afternoon talking with her boyfriend on the phone. And Jan was left with more work and a burning question.
Would a blue rug work better in that space, or a burgundy?
* * * * *
Jeremy.
Her eyes welled up at the very thought of his name, and Jan suddenly couldn’t see in the rush of traffic. Her chest was shuddering with sobs, and she pulled over into the first parking lot she came to. Shutting off the car, she buried her face in her hands and rested her forehead on the steering wheel.
It had been a few days, since she’d had an attack like this, and she cursed herself silently for it. Her lips murmured his name, over and over again as the tears flowed through the spaces between her fingers, and wet the wheel with her sorrow.
“I want a family,” he’d said.
“We could adopt,” she’d begged.
“I want my own family,” he’d answered, and was gone.
Jan dried her eyes with a tissue from the glove box and shook the thoughts away. That was past. Jeremy was past. Her life was hers to do with as she chose.
And she chose to find an Oriental rug.
Sniffling a bit, she peered though the windshield to see where she was. In front of her, the cool glow of pink and blue neon shimmered and flickered. There was no sign in the shuttered window, but she knew immediately where she’d ended up.
Jan bit her lip, and focused on the idea of a vibrant, warm rug accenting the flat color of her apartment. The overpowering memory of Jeremy lessened.
She pulled the store’s door open and stepped inside. Again the frame snapped shut with a crack and a jingle of bells. For a moment, just the briefest second, she felt disoriented and the edge of her vision seemed to swim with white and mauve and burgundy and blue.
Jan grasped at the door frame but then everything seemed to still, the colors slipping like sand into solid swaths of black, powder blue and royal purple.
The store felt much smaller than it had on her first visit, now it was full to bursting. The walls were hidden behind ornate tapestries, from the Middle East, tasseled and the dyed in rich hues. They were just mottled enough to make it certain that these were not mass produced, but handcrafted by artisans.
On the floor lined all about the shop were baskets and urns, woven in a tight knot of strawlike wicker, and varnished in varying shades of henna, oak and pale sand.
A cash register hid among a melange of pottery and bronzed vases atop a small display case where ornamental statues of elephants, rhinos and giraffes stalked within. There were beads hiding the hallway to the back recesses of the shop, and tall vertical stands that reached nearly to the ceiling, spaced evenly throughout the room. The stands were layered dozens deep in just what Jan had been looking for: Oriental carpets.
“So, you’ve decided what you want, have you?”
The voice came from behind the beads, which parted then and the old man passed through, a smile wide and bright wrinkling his cheeks.
“This is wonderful,” Jan said, swiveling from side to side to take in the old man’s stock. “I just decided today to find myself an Oriental rug. And these…” she gestured toward the rugs embroidered with deep reds and greens and blues and golds, “…are beautiful. You really should put up a sign, though. I would never have known this was here except…”
The old man’s chill eyes twinkled, and he simply nodded.
She frowned then, and stepped over to view first one rug, and then the next, trying to surreptitiously find a price tag. The old man didn’t move, just stood in the doorway before the beads.
“What do the prices on these range?” she finally asked.
He shrugged. “They are reasonable. We can discuss. But first,” he nodded to the displays, “look. Look for your heart’s desire.”
With that, he vanished back from where he’d come, leaving Jan alone in the room. She ran her hands over the velvety fabric, admiring twists and twirls of satiny purple spiced with tangerine, and mauve laced with silver. They were all beautiful, she thought, turning from one pattern to the next, but always looking for the next, and the next, and the one that might be just a little better. More perfect. More her.
Finally, in the back of the store, just to the right of a clay pot hoarding a spray of fake flowers, she found it. A white tasseled rug with deep, rich blue runes, veined with burgundy streams and silver accents. Some of the twisting patterns doubled back on themselves like intricate knots. Others followed twining threads deeper and deeper into the pattern until they were lost, like creeks run down to their muddy grass-choked end.
“Yesss,” Jan murmured, and jumped when a voice answered her.
“That’d be the one, eh?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding exuberantly but then stilling her chin, slowing her enthusiasm, thinking of the rent that would be due soon, the rent that still didn’t feel comfortable. She still worried that she wouldn’t have enough in the bank to cover it, though so far she always had.
“How much?” she asked finally. The shopkeeper laughed.
“I
can tell that this is the one for you, and I want to make sure you have it,” he said. “In a regular store, this would go for upwards of a thousand dollars.”
Jan could feel the blood drain from her face and her stomach twist.
“But I certainly didn’t pay that much for it, and I know that you probably can’t either. So let’s find a solution that benefits us both. You get the rug you want, and I clear some space in my store and put some change in the cash drawer. How does $99 sound?”
Jan couldn’t stop her lips from rising. It was more than she should spend, but she knew sh couldn’t get a fake one for that price.
“I’ll take it,” she said.
The old man nodded, as if he’d expected nothing different. He lifted the rug from its hooks.
She’d worry about how she was going to pay for it later.
Jan shimmied the coffee table back and forth across the center of the Oriental rug. No matter how she positioned it, she couldn’t seem to get it quite right.
Finally, she hit on lining up the edge of the table with the square turn of one of the burgundy patterns. It still wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do. Wiping the greasy sweat from her brow with the back of her palm, she collapsed into the comforting cushions of her sofa, and stared at the rug.
She traced the curling threads of color with her eyes, following them into the weave like secret trails. It reminded her of the time she and Jeremy had hiked in the North Woods, and how he’d lost her when she wasn’t looking. He’d stepped off the trail to pee, but after several minutes passed, she followed him into the twisted brush and branches to see what was taking him so long.
When she didn’t find him, she’d returned to the trail to wait, but once there, she began to worry that she’d strayed too far from where he’d left her. She’d turned all the way around three and four and five times, peering into the dense brush that closed in the narrow dirt trail. She called out his name, softly at first, and then with increasing urgency.
