On the afternoon you die, we keep asking for a sign, a blink, a twitch. We sing “All of Me,” “Today,” “Moon River.” And when it is finally time, Jeannie and I both know at the same moment. We feel it, a static tension in the air, and we communicate it without words, rushing to get Mom to come in from outside where she has finally agreed to go for a rest, rushing to bring your brother to be by your side. And when you take your last breath, you blink—one strong blink, and then you are gone.
NOW I HAVE DREAMS. One takes place in our old backyard. The swing set casts long-legged shadows toward the house. I pull you up on a swing, tie your arms to the chains to hold you upright. Your head slumps down. You wear the robe of a sick man and I sit beside you, watching and waiting. I am a kid, my hair cropped short, my knees scabbed, my feet bare. My swing creaks back and forth while yours stays perfectly still. And then the people come. A steady stream of strangers passing, looking, nudging, whispering. You are a sick little girl, they say. Sick to sit and hold onto the dead.
But, I say, he’s not. He is not dead.
Over and over I argue and then dusk comes and all the people go away. It is almost dark and we are all alone and you lift your head and look at me, your eyes a blue gray I had almost forgotten. You wink. Point your finger and wink. You’re right, you say. I am not dead.
YOUR DAD HAD an old collie he called Bruno, a black-and-white creature he walked to the corner store every afternoon. He was retired but he still liked the smell of cold cuts. He liked the way the little market still had a floor covered in sawdust and plenty of bones stashed away for Bruno. This is how I remember your father. Small and neat with a hat he politely tipped at everyone he passed. He held my hand when we crossed the street. His eyes were the same color as yours. This is the man I knew, not the troubled one of your childhood, not the one who stumbled out in front of the bleachers at a high school football game where you sat in the middle of a warm flock of kids, Mom’s smooth young hand held firmly in your own. And without a word, you rose to your full height and made your way through the crowd. You never thought to do anything except to carry him home. And if this single act were all I ever knew of you, it would be more than enough.
NOW I DREAM you are in the mirror, bathrobe loosely tied, arms outstretched. I know with the strange knowledge dreams allow that you cannot speak. All the energy you can gather is used to shape your image. And one by one we enter the room. And one by one we ask, Do you see? In the room there are three of us left to mourn and grieve. In the mirror we are a family of four—a simple image of thousands of days. You sign to us with arms reaching, You, and then, hands pressed firmly to your chest, are my heart. Hands crisscrossing, a shake of the head. That’s all that there is.
You actually spoke these very words near the end, when your eyes were still able to blink. Tiny tear, cool saliva. “You are my heart; that’s all that there is.” And on a later day, nearer the end, your eyes dry and frozen in that distant stare, I leaned in close and whispered, “I’ll be looking for you.”
A SHANNON RAVENEL BOOK
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2001 by Jill McCorkle. All rights reserved.
Some of the stories here originally appeared with different titles and in slightly different versions in the following magazines and anthologies, to whose editors grateful acknowledgment is made: “Snipe” appeared as “The Snipe Hunt” in Off the Beaten Path, published by The Nature Conservancy/Northpoint Press, 1998; “Dogs” appeared as “Mad Dogs” in the Boston Globe Summer Fiction Issue, 2000; and “Toads” appeared as “Fake Man” in Epoch (Volume 48, Number 3).
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.
ISBN 978-1-56512-720-3
Praise for Jill McCorkle’s
Creatures of Habit
“I guarantee that these twelve near-perfect renderings of small-town life will sabotage your best efforts to pace yourself. Bet you can’t read just one.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Creatures of Habit distinguishes itself on the strength of its author’s clear view that an animal lurks in us all.”
—The Cincinnati Enquirer
“As a storyteller, McCorkle seems to wander randomly like a coyote through the grass, a playful jaunt that ends with a sudden, deadly pounce.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“These stories are funny, yes, but unadorned anguish and compassion inform every piece, registering the poignancy of the not-so-human condition.”
—Chicago Tribune
“McCorkle . . . writes near-perfect dialogue and is able to create powerful emotional moods within the space of a few paragraphs.”
—Booklist
“She has a rare gift . . . She is not just omniscient but wise.”
—Boston Herald
“Most important, McCorkle makes you realize the core of what matters in life and value the fleeting moments of happiness.”
—The Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier
“There is a heightened awareness at work in these stories that cuts through myriad distractions and targets the center, the truth that holds and is important in life.”
—The Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger
“Her stories flow so well and are so pertinent that they seem to have already existed in the reader’s mind. It’s tempting to keep shouting ‘YES!’ . . .”
—The Durham Herald-Sun
“Though McCorkle deals uncompromisingly with often grim material, there’s still plenty of tough-minded humor and an elegiac tenderness for happiness past, struggles long ago won or lost, our perennial yearning for love.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“McCorkle has a way of writing female characters that leaves out the sentimentality and the victimization.”
—Nashville Scene
“She demonstrates that she does indeed have the ability to convey powerful, complicated emotions with subtle brushstrokes.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“These stories are like looking through clear windows into lives which are sometimes desperate and yet always rich.”
—Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
“Weight as well as wit, characters that can crack you up one moment and break your heart the next.”
—The Orlando Sentinel
“The stories are at once intricate and compulsively readable, redolent of the small failures and triumphs of human life.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Each story resonates with the author’s unerring honesty and wit.”
—Southern Living
“McCorkle has the greatest respect for her characters, and she writes like a queen— with all the authority and assurance of someone born to the task.”
—The Columbia (S.C.) State
“These simple tales . . . underscore McCorkle’s adeptness as an archaeologist of the absurd, an expert at excavating and examining the comedy of daily life. And, yes, also the tragedy.”
—Richmond Style Weekly
“Creatures of Habit is as good as short fiction gets.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
Also by Jill McCorkle
NOVELS
The Cheer Leader
July 7th
Tending to Virginia
Ferris Beach
Carolina Moon
STORIES
Crash Diet
Final Vinyl Days
Going Away Shoes
JILL MCCORKLE is the author of nine books—five of whic
h have been selected as New York Times notable books. She is the winner of the New England Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. Now a professor of writing at North Carolina State University, McCorkle has also taught at Bennington College, Harvard University, and University of North Carolina. She lives with her husband in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
Creatures of Habit Page 16
