Then came events that would change everything forever.
One August mid-morning, when the heat was thick enough to spread onto a piece of bread, Esther sat with her mother and brother in the front pew of the church. Her father, hands gripping the lectern, was leaning forward, his sermon in full swing. Esther, in the unmoving heat of the church, felt herself wilting like a flower, slowly drooping into her mother’s shoulder. Rose’s face was intent, fixed on her husband. Suddenly, in mid-sentence, Edward Cole’s voice cut out. Esther bolted up straight, her heart hammering, and peered up at him in dismay. His eyes bored back into hers, and his mouth opened and closed soundlessly. For one awful moment, Esther thought he was going to scream at her for not sitting up straight in church. Then, his hands slid away from the lectern, and he dropped to the floor. His papers and enormous bible followed with flutterings and thuds.
At first, no one moved. Rose, in her shock, stared straight ahead; Gabriel rubbed his eyes. Then two men ran up the aisles and leapt up onto the platform.
Rose whispered vaguely then, “It’s probably just a bit of the heatstroke.”
One of the men came back down and knelt on the floor beside Rose.
“I told him to wear his other suit,” she explained, calmly. “It’s lighter. That heavy black suit, on a day like this. Is someone going to fetch the doctor?”
The man cleared his throat and looked away.
Esther stood then. She edged past her mother and walked straight ahead, up the steps. The other man who had run up was still there, crouched beside her father and holding two fingers against his wrist. “Go on back and sit down,” he told Esther, in a voice that was shaking.
Esther just stared. Her father lay on his back, eyes fixed on the ceiling. An ugly, purplish-red welt was beginning to rise on his forehead where the bible had hit, after its descent from the lectern.
“Father,” Esther said.
“He won’t hear you,” the man whispered. “Go on back to your mama.”
“Is he dead?”
“I got no pulse. His heart’s stopped. I’m sorry, little girl.”
Esther blinked. “If he’s dead, his eyes ought to be shut.”
The man stood, took Esther’s hand and took her back to her mother. The congregation, still sitting, bent their heads together and whispered. Some of the ladies were crying.
One of the women came forward and offered to take Esther and Gabriel to her house for awhile.
“All right,” Rose agreed. She fixed her wide eyes searchingly on the woman’s face. “What should I do, do you think?”
“Stay put, dear. Wait until they come to take him out, then one of the men will bring you on home.”
“All right.”
Esther and Gabriel went along with the nice lady to her house. They had egg salad sandwiches and sweet gherkin pickles for their lunch, and then they were taken upstairs to the playroom.
“My little grandchildren play here when they visit,” the lady told them. “Go on; it’s all right. Play for a little while; you have some rough days ahead.”
Esther gazed at the dollhouse, outfitted with lace curtains, tiny brass lamps, and little stuffed sofas.
“I could come down and help you with the lunch dishes,” she finally said.
“Heavens, no! That’s all right. You and your brother stay here. Play with anything you like. Just put it back where you found it when you’re done.” The lady went back downstairs.
Esther and Gabriel stood in the doorway. “Do you think it’s all right?” Gabriel dared to ask. He was eight; Esther was ten.
“I don’t know. Our father just went and died.”
“Well, he can’t yell at us for playing,” Gabriel shrugged. “If he’s dead,” he added.
“He is,” Esther affirmed. “I saw him.”
The children stood, holding hands. They hadn’t seen such a feast of toys in their entire lives, and didn’t know where to begin.
“I wish Mother were here,” Esther said. “She’d really like those little dolls.”
“Yes,” Gabriel agreed. After a moment, he confessed, “I always thought it was her going to die.”
“You did?” Esther was incredulous. “So did I!”
“Where will we live?”
“Well, at home, of course.”
“That’s the church’s house,” Gabriel pointed out. “They’ll put the new minister there.”
Esther was slightly aghast. Their father hadn’t yet been dead two hours. Shouldn’t they be a little more shocked?
Gabriel dropped to his knees and began to assemble tracks for a train set. “Ahhh,” he murmured. “Oh, boy.”
Esther went to the dollhouse, and rearranged every room, just so. She tucked all the dolls into their beds. “Sweet dreams,” she told them.
At the end of the afternoon, the children’s mother came to fetch them home. “Are you all right?” she whispered, gathering them into her arms.
“Yes,” Esther whispered back.
“Where did they put him?” asked Gabriel.
“Well, he’s back home in the parlour…”
“Did they lay him on the sofa?” Gabriel shivered.
“Oh, no, my Dear. He is in a box, and then on Tuesday, he will be buried in the cemetery.”
“Do we have to go in there, to the parlour?” Esther wanted to know.
“Only if you want to.”
“What happened? He wasn’t old, was he?”
“He was only forty years old, Gabriel. Not old. The doctor who came said it was likely in his brain…a rupture. That happens, but not very often.”
“Where will we go?”
“We’ll stay here for awhile. Until they find a new minister. I’ll write to my parents. After we leave here, we’ll stay with them for a bit. I don’t want you to worry. I’ll take care of you, and everything is going to be all right.”
That, the children already knew.
The night after the funeral, Gabriel padded into his sister’s room. “I had a bad dream. About Father dying.”
“That wasn’t a dream,” Esther gently reminded him. “It really happened.”
“I dreamt that it didn’t.”
Esther shuddered, and hugged her rag doll closer. It was flat, from being under the mattress. “Come and sleep with me,” she said to Gabriel. “Mother won’t mind.”
The new minister was coming at Christmas-time. Esther and Gabriel began to look forward to meeting their grandparents; they’d never laid eyes upon them before. Rose had always told them it was because they lived too far away from each other, but the children had known it was because their father hadn’t approved of their mother’s people. Esther and her mother began to put things into boxes. Esther wrapped the china teacup in a rag. It had been sitting out on the sideboard since the day after the funeral. The new minister would own that sideboard, and all the other furniture in the rectory. He had just graduated from the seminary and this would be his first post. He purchased all their furniture, and Rose Cole used the proceeds to buy train tickets.
Esther and Gabriel sat ensconced in the train car and ate the fried chicken and cake that the Ladies Aid had packed for them for the trip. They watched the snow-covered scenery flashing past the windows, and drank cold sweet tea. The three of them had been eating like released convicts since the funeral. Sad-faced women had turned up in droves on their front porch, laden with casseroles and cake plates. Thanking them quietly, the children serenely closed the door, and scampered off to the kitchen to feast. They ate every morsel, every crumb. Gabriel wore an almost permanent chocolate frosting moustache under his nose.
The solemn-faced church custodian and his wife delivered the little family safely to the train station. The custodi
an’s wife swabbed at her eyes as they said goodbye, murmuring about God’s Will and His Strength. The children looked down at their shoes. They had not shed a single tear. When the train began to pull out, Esther had to sit on her hands to keep from jumping up and down and laughing.
Once they were on their way, and Esther’s heart had slowed down, she noticed that her mother was wearing an unfamiliar dress, yellow with tiny blue and green flowers sprinkled over it. Esther touched the little buttons on the skirt.
“This is an old dress,” Rose told her. “Your grandmother made it for me, a long time ago.”
“You never wore it,” Esther noted.
“I’m wearing it now.” Rose smiled, and Esther, with mounting joy, realized that her mother’s eyes were bright, and there were actual dimples in her cheeks.
In their grandparents’ farmhouse, the children had their first real Christmas. Rose’s folks were still not wealthy, but with the rest of the brood grown and gone, they got on well enough. Esther and Gabriel each had a present, and there were nuts and candies in their stockings. Rose baked gingerbread boys, and their grandfather cut a tree. Grandma went about with a feather duster, singing carols at the top of her lungs. “It’s good to have children around again,” she told Esther and Gabriel. “Never mind those dishes—run off and play!”
Each night, Esther went into her mother’s little room under the eaves, and brushed out Rose’s coppery curls. Rose had left the tight rolls behind, and wore her hair tied back with a ribbon, like a girl.
“I think she’s prettier now than she was when she left all those years ago,” Grandpa told Esther.
He wasn’t the only one who thought so. Tom Foley, an unmarried farmer from a few miles over, had happened into their kitchen one spring morning for a cup of tea and a chat and had been happening into the kitchen persistently ever since. Rose got in the habit of having a little bite ready for him, and Grandma frequently set a place for him at the dinner table. The children, cautious at first, grew to adore him. Tom was dark-haired and brown as a berry, his face weathered by sun, wind, and laughter. Gabriel marvelled at Tom’s arms—he could make knots of muscles twist and ripple, just by clenching and unclenching his fists. He took the children on his tractor and over to his farm for horse-rides and ice cream.
Every three weeks, Rose took a towel, comb, and scissors out onto the porch, and she would trim Tom Foley’s hair while Grandma snapped beans into a bowl. Esther, almost twelve by this time, felt queer and fluttery, watching her mother’s long fingers brush against Tom’s bare, brown neck.
“Why aren’t you married?” Esther asked him one time. Tom laughed, and chucked her under the chin. “Me? I’m just waiting for you to grow up!”
Esther flushed. “I’m never getting married,” she told him. “Not even to you.” She paused. “I’ll bet my mother would, though. You ought to ask her.”
“Well…she might not be interested in all that again…” He glanced uneasily at Esther.
“You’re nothing like him,” Esther broke in.
“Still and all…”
“Wouldn’t hurt to ask.”
One night, Esther wandered downstairs to the kitchen to get a cup of milk. Everyone had gone to bed early, except for Rose. She was sitting at the table with Tom; their chairs close enough for their knees to touch. They were looking deeply into each other’s eyes, almost smiling. Esther’s breath caught in her throat; they hadn’t seen her, and she took a quick step backwards. Rose turned her head slightly, sensing movement in the doorway. Not about to let the moment get away, Tom caught her head between his palms, bent his dark head, and kissed her. Rose’s head tipped back; Tom’s fingers overflowed with her bright curls. The ribbon slipped away and trailed down behind the chair.
It was the singularly most romantic thing Esther had ever seen in her life. Even her own first kisses and passionate embraces never completely measured up to it.
Some years later, Esther overheard a conversation between her mother and a female visitor as they drank coffee in the Foley farmhouse kitchen.
“…strange that he never married, before you.”
“Well, he had the mumps as a teenager,” Rose explained. “The doctor said he could never father any children. Tom figured no woman would want him that way.”
“But does that mean…Can he…?”
Esther heard her mother’s bright laughter.
Esther, hidden around the corner, smiled wide.
“Tom always said,” Rose went on, “The gun’s fully loaded. Just packed with blanks.”
The two women laughed some more.
Rose continued. “After the last baby, right before Edward died, the doctor said the next one would kill me. Edward said that was for the Lord to decide. But as far as my Tom goes, it couldn’t have worked out any better. Esther and Gabriel are more than a daughter and son to him. No father could love them more.”
“Not even their own,” the visitor interjected. “Have you ever tried to imagine…if that day in the church had never happened…”
“I don’t think about that anymore,” Rose answered firmly.
Esther didn’t either, not consciously. But sometimes, in dreams, she visited that other Esther, a little girl who lay very still, so that her movements would not flatten the doll hidden under her mattress. After Esther was married, with children of her own, even those dreams faded away to the same faint sepia shade of Edward Cole’s face.
La Morte de La Résistance – by Holly Ice
Katrīne sat atop a stuffed dragon, last week’s birthday present. She faced a twenty by twenty suction cup projection of The Soap. The toy boomed with an animal screech each time she shifted from her imprint in the carpet. Katrīne didn’t notice: it was seven o’clock. By her instruction, all light was off save the pale electric glow of the screen. The sound crackled from the cheap speakers, fire to her ears. The remote lay under ready fingertips, resting over the volume keys.
Toms could do nothing but watch from the kitchen, doodling screams in black biro as she laughed, frowned, cried out. He bit and the warm flush of pennies drowned his tongue. The pen tore the paper and snapped in half. She didn’t look up.
Dinner was cooling on the plates in front of him; it was her favourite.
“Katrīne?” He tried again.
“Kathy, dad.”
Toms scrunched up his nose. “It’s your favourite, bangers and mash.”
“You mean sausages. It can wait.”
Toms glared at the white and brown nutritional mush that littered their plates and turned to the TV screen, glaring at that too. The walls matched the mash: white, or grey in low light. The floor was the same – one big white, bare canvas. The house even smelt sterile, scrubbed clean of perfume or incense.
The theme tune rang out, plucking every nerve in Tom’s shudder. Katrīne mouthed the words of the chant, her thin, dry lips a mere drawing of what they should be – plump, red, playful. Bones jutted from her sunken skin: reruns of The Soap at school were aired over play time so she didn’t get much exercise, or daylight. It would only be another year, maybe, before she matched the walls, a living wallpaper.
“Oh my god! Danny no, he’s Laura’s father! So he did do it with Mel!”
The dinosaur roared as she squealed and bashed the keys of her pink mobile. Toms winced at her casual reference to sex but, again, could do nothing; the show was the source material for fifty percent of her classes and context for the rest. She had to watch it.
“I was right!”
She threw her stick-like arms into the air with two loud clunks of bone, dropping the phone. Her smile lit a sunny yellow glow inside her that tried to brighten the toothy hollows of her dry, peeling lips and wilted skin. But the story wasn’t hard to guess. She had the false happiness of answering an easy question
on an exam: she wasn’t really tested. Tom sighed and sunk another glass of wine. It bit his tongue with each wash-over. The bottle was hidden under the sink, the door locked with a code puncher, safe from outside eyes.
He dithered a moment, crouched with arms resting on his knees, and stared at the bottle right at the back with the damp. It held his wife’s last diary entry before she was taken away. He looked at his daughter and uncorked the bottle: it was time; she couldn’t stay like this.
His pinkie finger wormed out the pale pink notepaper and he brought it to his nose. It smelled of white lilies, fresh as the day she’d bought it off the black art market. Illegal, but so very right. He smiled, pulling the crumpled paper out of its cylinder and flattening it on the cupboard’s bottom. Sitting on the cold kitchen tile, he began to read.
I found something today off a man at the market, Carls. There’s a warehouse down by Daugava that keeps some of the old art from the museums. A guy guards it but he’s with the cause. I hope this changes things for me and Toms. This black and white world...it’s driving us both mad. And Katrīne...I wish she could have seen the old days. Well, wish me luck.
-Anne.
Toms sighed, his eyes shut, and curled the notepaper back into the wine bottle, re-corking it; things had certainly changed.
The microwave dinged two hours later. Toms handed Katrīne the radiated plate and retreated to his study to finish his wine in peace.
“Put yourself to bed Katrīne.”
“Kathy.”
“Just go to bed.”
She snapped her art book shut on pages of Danny, Mel and Laura, illustrated reproductions of The Soap.
“Don’t you want to see the people I’ve drawn?”
“Can’t you draw something else? Bunnies, people, oranges even?”
Fall - A Collection of Short Stories (Almond Press Short Story Contest) Page 3
