by Gray, Amelia
We are all sorry, then.
She regards the two men with disappointment before turning and walking in the direction from which she came. They watch her go. After a minute, DAVE turns to look at SAM, his expression unclear.
THE END
THE PICTURE WINDOW
There once was a woman who lived on the far edge of town, where the houses had courtyards and vegetable gardens. The woman grew a small amount of flowers and vegetables in her garden, a small plot behind her house. The picture window in her bedroom faced the garden, and she spent many happy weekend hours watching the scene.
One day, she turned away from the window and noticed that the rest of her room looked darker than usual. She assumed that her eyes had gotten too used to the brightness of the window but the room grew darker and darker by the hour and finally vanished into blackness. The window, however, was bright with sunshine and color. She looked out at the beautiful garden for a long while, frightened to look away, and when she finally did look away again she was confronted with total darkness, and she cried and touched the walls and found her telephone and called her doctor.
The woman’s doctor and his colleagues were entirely baffled. They traveled to the woman’s house, tested her sight, and found it to be entirely disintegrated. At the window, she seemed to recognize the plants and flowers by general color and shape, but when one of the doctors stood in the garden, waving to her through the open space, she continued describing geraniums and the leafy tops of the carrots as if they were all she saw.
Baffled, the doctors stood in the kitchen and discussed the ethics of their situation. It was only right to tell her the truth: the tests on her corneas and pupils had revealed no reaction, and it was total blindness. They were drinking coffee, which they had made for themselves. Certainly, the doctors reasoned, they would tell her to be prepared for the worst while they did some final tests.
When they told the woman that her selective blindness was focused on her window, and perhaps the condition was permanent, the woman looked out the memory of her window and nodded, though she didn’t entirely understand. Sunlight filtered in through the tall trees and lit the grass and the garden in shades of green and brown. Soft breezes rustled the leaves and gave her a comforting sense of the wide, changing world. The doctors quietly washed their coffee cups and left them to dry next to the sink.
The woman passed many satisfactory days at her picture window. When she opened her eyes in the morning, she was always briefly afraid of the darkness, but out of the corner of her eye she was comforted by the sight of the glowing window. She stumbled and touched the walls and found her shower, and then dressed herself for the day and dug in her pantry for breakfast. In those first days, she was ashamed to call her friends, so instead she worked through the canned foods in the pantry for basic sustenance. She spooned up pieces of tuna while watching the wind work through the leaves of her summer squash. She tried to go outside, was disturbed by the blindness that remained, and headed back inside.
The woman was suspicious of the idea of selective blindness. The doctors asked how her garden looked when they called. She stopped asking about the test results and they did not offer them. She sat in front of the window and held her hand in front of her face. All she saw was the garden. She was a smart woman but the blindness made her desperate, and she convinced herself that the selectivity of her condition actually blocked out anything but pure beauty, and that was why she couldn’t see her shower curtain or her stove or even her own body, but still saw so vividly the outside world from inside.
And then, because it eventually had to happen, word got around town. It was only a matter of time before the woman’s home became somewhat of a local attraction. A steady stream of students and church groups and retired folks and scientists and psychics and skeptics passed through her doors. Her friends joked that she should take admission, and eventually set up a donation box by the door. They requested any amount for the upkeep of the house as well as care for the poor woman, which they had all partially assumed. The woman woke in the morning to gentle knocking at her bedroom door and sometimes fell asleep at the window and had to be moved into bed by her devoted friends and visitors.
As one grows used to anything, the woman grew used to her visitors. They were friendly, after all, and brought gifts, and told her news from the town and the world beyond, and listened with great interest to events of the garden only she could see. Skeptics sometimes tried to convince her that her vision was false, that there were clouds where she saw solid blue sky, that many of the plants she was describing had in fact died long before and had been replaced with flowers or trees planted by other visitors. The skeptics were hauled out and denied reentry, and the woman was reassured by those who remained that everything she saw was real. A theory had begun to circulate among the believers that the woman’s vision of the garden was the true vision, and what they all suffered to see approached the ideal but would never reach it.
The woman’s vision never faded. On the day she died, she described caterpillars ascending the vines on the far wall and sunning themselves on wide leaves. After her death, the towns people made plaques and intricate pieces of art in the woman’s honor and created a holiday within the town wherein everyone was required to look very closely at something and to discover something new about it. In this way, they turned the woman’s vision and eventually the woman herself into an idea, and their own ideas became much easier to believe.
THE VANISHED
The man had always aspired to live his life as inoffensively as possible, and when his woman came home one evening and found he was gone, she was sure for days that he was around there somewhere. Perhaps he had gone to the bathroom and was in there, quietly creaking, making silent curses over the pipes. Maybe he was in the attic. Or maybe he was working late, something he did not treasure but did with a kind of silent pride that suited him and had always bothered her.
After a few days, it became apparent that the man was not in the backyard or behind the television. She grew nervous, imagining how disappointed he might be upon returning to find that she had not kept the house clean. Indeed, she had forgotten she was in a house at all, and had scattered newspaper across the bedrooms and allowed branches to crowd the door. A thin skin of dust covered the bookshelves and countertops and toaster oven and toilet tank, her desk and his desk. It piled up like snowdrifts in the framed pictures on the wall. She tossed and turned in the bed until the covers parted and formed a protective whorl around her body.
The woman stopped leaving the house. She decided that if her man peeked through the window or knocked lightly on the door and realized that she had gone, he would leave for good. She ate all the fresh food in the house, and then all the canned food, and then the expired food, and then the spices. She washed tablespoons of cinnamon down with tap water. She reached out the windows, pulled leaves from the trees and ate them with the last of the salad dressing. She released the cats so that she would not eat them, and then she ate their food.
The man’s father called to ask if there had been any updates, and to inform her that he had called the police. At the time of his call, the woman had been using a dainty flathead screwdriver to open the man’s computer. She had wanted to see if the man had left any clues in there, but there was only more dust. She swallowed the computer’s tiny screws.
It became apparent that the man had not taken any of his clothes with him. The woman knew that her man owned 3 black undershirts and 5 white, 7 pairs of jeans and 27 button-down shirts, 5 collared polo shirts, 4 t-shirts with silkscreened graphics and one novelty shirt that he only wore as a joke, a button-down two sizes too large and covered in neon images of ice cream and hot dogs. She could not bear to eat it but took it out of the closet and observed it every morning, salivating.
She ate all the pages out of his books.
When the detectives arrived, she apologized for her appearance. She explained that she was too worried to leave the house. She showed them the man’s clothes and his
personal effects. She took them on a tour of the home and showed them the toilet he used and the ironing board and the grill. The things were untouched, she noted, she had left them untouched. When the man came home, he would appreciate his things being untouched. He was very particular and appreciated her respect and in exchange, he showed her respect. The detectives looked at her distended belly and asked if she was pregnant. She cradled the mass and said that she was.
Things started arriving in the mail. There were bills and notices that the woman no longer understood. It seemed like someone was asking the man to pay a huge sum of money to a credit card and a house. She took all the paper money she had not yet boiled and stuffed it into the envelopes provided and sent them back.
Other letters were more troubling. There was a handwritten letter from the man’s grandmother that didn’t make any sense until the woman cut out all the words and rearranged it:
TAKE WITH YOU ALL TIME TO WEATHER EXCELLENT PARTS. HELLO WORK TOGETHER UNTIL YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOUR FATHER TELL. LOVE YOUR WIFE THEN RETIREMENT. WARM DAYS FORGET NIGHTS. DON’T NEGLECT ENJOY MONDAY.
The woman thought that was all pretty good advice, and taped it to the refrigerator. She opened the refrigerator and ate the baking soda from its box with a spoon.
Some days later, the man’s phone rang. He had left it plugged in when he vanished but his woman had not heard it ring before. When she heard it, she vomited into a small trash bin next to the phone. She could barely summon the strength to pull herself up to look at the phone. She couldn’t make out the number displayed through the layer of dust. The phone’s ring sounded like the old rotary phone her parents kept in their home. She wondered if it was the man calling his own phone, and why that would be. Perhaps she had gotten phones switched and was confused. The phone stopped ringing. The woman placed the phone in her lap, pried the number 2 from the keypad with a screwdriver, and ate it.
It was a terrible idea to go outside again. The woman had seen a couple out the front window and was sure that the man had placed them there for her to see. She banged her fists on the windows to try to get their attention but when they didn’t make a move to acknowledge her, she threw open the locks on the door and rushed out.
The couple was a boy and girl couple, and they were eating love right out in the open. They swallowed great handfuls of love, sticky tangled masses of it, standing nose to nose with one another. They were gorging on the stuff. Love dripped from their hands and landed in spatters on their shoes. The boy wiped his hand in his hair and left a long slick. These gluttons of love spread it across each other’s mouths. They made wet noises as they consumed.
The woman rushed up to the people and slapped the love out of their hands and said Don’t eat that! That’s poison! and the boy laughed but the girl looked at her unkindly and bent down to gather the ruined pile of love up from the ground. The woman watched the remainder seep across the asphalt.
Get a hold of yourself, the girl said. The girl clasped the slop to her chest. It bled through her shirt to her skin. Look at what you did, the girl said. The woman looked. She felt relieved, but of course it was not enough.
THE SUITCASE
After a few weeks, Claire noticed that Alex’s suitcase was gathering dust. Dirt and cat hair lay piled up against it. “Today’s the day you put the suitcase away,” she told him.
“What if I have to go on a trip?” he said.
“You haven’t touched that suitcase in two years,” she said.
“You’re not going on a trip. You’re staying right here, forever.”
He leapt out of bed. “Christ’s sake. Don’t say things like that.”
“But we’ve built a life together.”
“Not that part. The other part.” He nudged the suitcase with his toe. “This part.”
“They call this a fear of commitment.”
“I’m not afraid,” he said, lifting the zip-up lid of the suitcase. He stepped inside and sat down. “It’s you who is afraid. You are the one who is afraid.”
Alex curled up in the center of the suitcase. It was a large rolling bag and there was just enough room for him. He reached over to the top flap and pulled it onto himself. Claire peeked over the edge of the bed and only saw a suitcase, closed, the dust disturbed around it. The light bulb in the bedside table lamp popped and went dark.
“I’m staying here,” he said. And he did.
* * *
It was embarrassing to go to the airport with him. The baggage counter women curled their lips at her when she hefted the bag onto the scale. “This bag weighs one hundred eighty-seven pounds,” one counter woman said. “There’s an extra weight charge. Are you carrying explosives, weapons, or perishable materials?”
“My boyfriend is in there,” Claire said, sighing. The x-ray would have caught him, anyway. She was trying to bring him with her to visit her mother in Fort Lauderdale. The counter women called security, who arrived with a luggage cart. They hid their faces behind clipboards and laughed. It was humiliating. They escorted Claire and her bag to the airport chapel, where they were welcomed by a man named Ted who wore a preacher’s collar.
“I will lay hands on this bag,” said Ted, once security had explained the situation.
“It’s really all right,” said Claire. She sat down in a chair next to the door. She was happy that she had not been arrested.
Ted lay hands on the bag. It was an olive-colored Samsonite. His hands looked pink against it.
“The devil out of this luggage,” he said.
“Piece of shit,” Alex said from inside.
Ted crouched to unzip the bag, but Claire put her hand on his arm. Alex had prepared her for just such a situation. “We would rather you didn’t,” she said.
“They would have needed him to remove his shoes,” Ted said. “Already taken care of,” Alex said.
Ted looked at Claire.
“He’s nude in there,” she said.
“I see,” said Ted. He ushered security out of the prayer room and returned with two paper cups of orange juice. “Interesting,” he said, handing her one.
The airport chapel was less of an event than she would have figured. The two rooms were softly lit and tiny like a closet. There were thin, colorful pillows on the floor, and five chairs, and a lamp with a stained-glass pattern on the shade. On one wall was a sticky note with the word “MECCA” written in blue marker. On the other wall, Ted leaned and sipped his juice. It was strange to see a man standing up.
“You insisted on traveling with him,” Ted said.
Alex jabbed at the side of his bag. “Screw you!”
“Shut up,” Claire said, kicking the place where Alex had jabbed. She felt her foot make contact and Alex went silent. She sipped orange juice and watched the bag. “I wanted to bring him to meet my mother. She won’t be around much longer and I felt it was important,” she said. “Even if it meant her seeing Alex going through this phase.”
“I’m not rightly sure how you see this as a phase,” Ted said. “That kind of verbiage always strikes me as somewhat armchair prophet, wouldn’t you say?”
Claire regarded the bag, which was already beginning to stir again as Alex regained his bearings. “Of course it’s a phase,” she said. “We’ll come out of it together. I can’t have a man fathering children when he won’t even leave his luggage.”
“How does he live?” Ted asked. “How does he feed himself, or use the restroom? Doesn’t he develop terrible sores? What of his work towards his Spirit?”
The Samsonite hopped a little with rage. “We manage, guy,” Alex said from within.
“It’s time to go home,” Claire said.
Ted stood up with her. “I worry,” he said. “He’s exceeding the weight limit on that luggage.” Ted slipped Claire a lined notecard cut down to business card size, his name written on it in marker. Ted closed her hand around the card. “Heaven be with you,” he said.
It was dark by the time they got home. Claire unpacked her own suitcase,
a small carry-on barely large enough to hold her clothes. She had rolled Alex back to his place at the foot of the bed. “You’re too heavy,” she said, as she laid him down.
“What a day,” he said. “I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t really want to meet your mother.” Alex tended to be more candid since he had gotten into the suitcase.
“I figured.”
“Had to do it sometime though, babe. You’re real important to me.”
Claire ran her index finger down the handle of the suitcase. “I know it,” she said.
The porch light went dark with a mighty pop that sounded like a kid had shot it with a pellet gun. She thought herself a relatively self-sufficient woman, all things concerned, but she hadn’t yet mustered the organizational skills required to change a light bulb.
“The light,” she said. “I’ll pick another up from the store tomorrow.”
“Plus two sixty-watt candelabra bulbs for the foyer,” Ted said. He knew everything about lights. “Plus, three mini halogens for the dining room.”
