He turns to Kit. “I used to bow hunt. Mostly deer.”
“You should come with us,” she says. “Bow season starts next week. We’re driving up to the game lands.”
“We’re only here for a couple of days,” I say.
“I’d like to try my hand at bow hunting again.” Andrew smiles at Kit and me, his head bobbling back and forth. “Susan keeps trying to get me up here more.” The bobbling has changed to a definite nod. “Yes. Next weekend.”
Before I can protest, Mark presses a glass into my hand. I rarely drink more than a glass of wine on an empty stomach. I swallow three cosmos in succession before Mark ushers us into the dining room. He’s saying something about their last fishing trip, “…and guess how many bass I caught that afternoon. Guess.”
I shake my head. “I have no idea.”
“Andrew, what do you think? How many?”
Andrew’s eyes search the table. “The wine,” he says. “What did you do with the wine?”
I raise my fingers to my lips and try to look contrite. “I never left a bottle of wine at home until I met you.”
Andrew hisses into my ear. “You’re drunk.” I busy myself with my napkin so no one will see the flush spreading across my face.
“Would you believe a dozen?” Mark says.
Kit sets a plate in front of each of us. The last thing I remember is the empty eyes of trout staring up at me.
In the morning Andrew and I occupy the kitchen and avoid eye contact. He starts the water for my tea, opens the refrigerator and sniffs the cold, fusty air escaping into the room. I stare at a croissant deciding if it’s worth the effort to eat it. A brown paper bag sits on the counter, its smell revealing the contents of leftover trout from last night’s dinner. Andrew shoves the bag into the trash and carries it to the porch.
“Do you want to go for a hike later?” He thrusts a box of herbal teabags on the table.
“Aren’t you hunting with your friends?” I jab strawberry preserves into the croissant. When I take a bite, crushed red fruit oozes down the side of my mouth. I grab a napkin, hoping he hasn’t noticed what a mess I’m making.
A cloud of steam rises from the water he pours into my teacup. “Sun’s out. It’s not cold.” He drinks his smoothie straight from the blender carafe. “Do you want to hike or not?”
I shake my head. A slice of sunlight cuts the kitchen in two. On one side I sit hunched in my chair, wool sweater buttoned to my throat, bare feet pressed against the floor. He could walk across the kitchen, touch my hair, and the day would be different. He remains at the counter, a hulking presence stuffing granola bars into his running shorts.
“Maybe I’ll shoot skeet.” I try to chuckle so he’ll know I’m joking, but it comes out like a gurgle. He’s too busy filling his water bottle to notice.
“Suit yourself.” The thick hair on his arms bristles when he opens the door. “Make sure you put the trash in the shed.”
My head aches from last night’s alcohol. I open the door to the deck to let air into the room. Too fatigued to read the morning paper, I make a pillow with my arms on the table and rest my head. Almost asleep, I imagine hiking to the mountaintop and sitting there, waiting for Andrew to find me. It’s the kind of thing he used to do—guide our canoe through white water, talk me down steep ski slopes. That was when he wasn’t so distant, before he started going on camping trips without me, before he started locking the glove box of his car, before he started making excuses for not calling when he worked late.
A breeze blows against the wind chimes. I’m unsure how much time has passed. The tea is cold; I make a fresh cup. Outside, the bushes rustle. Something strikes the side of the house, a branch, perhaps. It’s not unusual for birds to fly into open windows or raccoons to saunter onto the deck for a handout.
Gripping the cup with both hands, I sip my tea. Although the erratic thumping continues, I refuse to let my “overactive imagination” take hold. It’s probably a deer. I peruse the newspaper headlines.
A musty odor blows into the house. Remembering the discarded trout, I stiffen. The trash can crashes against the door. I swing around.
The shadow of a six-foot bear crosses the deck. I fling the mug toward him and half run, half stumble up the narrow circular staircase to Andrew’s study. I try to still my hands long enough to lock the door.
I scrunch down on the floor, my head pounding. Shit. Why didn’t I grab the cell phone?
Below me, glass shatters. I close my eyes and cling to the side of the cold leather sofa. In his search for food, the bear is having his way with my kitchen, riffling cabinets and tossing plates. I have to get to the shotgun in the closet. I crawl across the carpet.
A chair scrapes the tile floor. I envision the bear sitting at the pine table waiting for me to feed him. I glance at the clock. Andrew should have returned by now. I think of the bear tramping through the woods. Would Andrew have seen him? What if the bear found him first? I imagine my husband running on the trail, the sun casting a golden glow around his head. Even the thick hair on his arms seems luminous. His quadriceps throb, the muscles hardening and thickening. The bear lunges for him, crushes Andrew’s heaving torso between his paws, and tears at his clothes. He rips the granola bar from Andrew and tosses his damaged body to the ground like an empty soda bottle. What if Andrew is bleeding in the woods awaiting help? No. He’s probably at the Barton’s discussing their hunting plans for next weekend.
A rumbling belch echoes through the house. My mouth is dry; sweat pours down my sides. The bear will sniff my fear. He’ll rip my heart out.
I pull the shotgun from the closet and pray my shaking will stop so I can load it and aim straight.
I creep to the landing and huddle behind the stair rail. The sun is so intense now it distorts my vision. My head throbs. The hulking figure is silhouetted against the windows overlooking the forest. He moves closer. Our eyes meet.
In that moment we recognize something familiar in each other. He gives a guilty shrug, and for a fierce instant I want to bury myself in him, forgive him for everything he has done. We stare at each other. I inhale, raise the gun, and take aim. The pounding in my head blurs my vision. He shakes his head.
I lower the weapon and close my eyes, knowing he will do with me what he wants. Outside, trees rustle and wind chimes sing softly in the breeze.
Rayne Debski’s short stories have appeared in literary journals, anthologies, and e-zines, and have been selected for readings by professional theatre groups in New York and Philadelphia. She can occasionally be found on the Six Sentences blog. She wishes her muse would visit more frequently.
Take Care
By
Margaret DeAngelis
Susan had the idea when she got a letter from Greg Campbell and a boy she knew in high school on the same day a month before school started. She wasn’t surprised to hear from Greg. He told her he was joining the army and he told her he’d write. The letter from Robert, the boy from high school, was a surprise, and if he hadn’t mentioned POD class she might not have been able to place him. He was the boy who sat in front of her and had a stammer that got worse when he had to give an answer. Mostly she remembered how patient their teacher was, and how she wanted to be like that when she was a teacher.
She got some names from her pastor and from the campus chaplain, and the other girls in her prayer group got some too. Since they got back to campus in September they have been meeting each week to pray for all the boys over there. On their own they pray for one or two boys specifically and write them letters. Susan prays for Greg and for Robert Hughes, the boy she knew in high school. She writes to Greg twice a week, but to Robert only once a month or so. The letters to him are shorter and less personal than the ones she writes to Greg because she doesn’t remember him very well.
The chaplain calls what Susan and the girls are doing a ministry, and that made it sound so important that she bought special papers just for this. The kind she uses for the letters to Greg comes
in a box of twenty-five decorated sheets, five plain sheets, and twenty-five envelopes. The paper is thin and crinkly and printed with rosebuds. It has a fragrance card wrapped in cellophane that you are supposed to open and slip between the sheets, but she hasn’t done that. The paper is too thin to use both sides, so she has learned to write small so that she can say a lot. She is half way through the second box and has three undecorated sheets from the first box left.
The paper she uses for Robert’s letters is plain, not as thin as the Greg paper and with a slightly slubbed texture. It comes in gummed pads. The envelopes are packaged separately and she doesn’t have to be so careful to match the number of sheets to the number of envelopes. Because she has less to say to Robert she makes her handwriting slightly larger, so that she can often use two sheets and the letters look like more than what they are.
The letters follow a pattern. She begins with where she is while she is writing. (“I’m at the front desk of the dorm on phone duty tonight.” “I’m upstairs at the Rat before I go to European Novels of the 20th Century.”) She talks about the weather, about the authors she’s reading and the papers she has to write. She gives Greg news about people he knows on campus but she doesn’t tell Robert those things because it wouldn’t mean anything to him. Sometimes she reports that she’s gone to a movie (“They showed The Birds again on Saturday night.” “We went downtown to see The Graduate. I bought the album.”) but she doesn’t say that she’s gone with a boy from her creative writing class or her friend’s older brother. Sometimes she comments on things Greg or Robert have written to her. (“Sounds like you guys did your best to have a Merry Christmas.” “I like the names for your scout dogs. We had a Blackie when I was little.”)
She mentions the war only obliquely when she ends each letter, “Greg (or Robert), you take care.” On Robert’s she puts just her name, but Greg’s she signs, “Love, Susan.” She’s not sure what she means by that. She likes Greg a lot and she cares for him in a way that is more meaningful than the way she cares for Robert, of whom she has only hazy memories of his round face and his stammer. If he had not written to her she probably would never have thought of him unless he came to their class reunion, still two years away. She would have thought of Greg even if she hadn’t heard from him, of the way he touched her knee during the gunfire at the end of Bonnie and Clyde, the way he kissed her on the cheek at the door of her dorm.
She has not written to either boy since before spring vacation. She is on phone duty again tonight. The phone isn’t ringing much but it is too noisy in the lobby of the dorm for her to concentrate on Sartre’s Nausea, whose main character she finds boring and whiny. She wonders if his self-absorption might sound better in French and regrets, albeit briefly, that she took German so she could be in the same class with a tall, handsome aspiring journalist named Dan who transferred to another school after one semester, before she had a chance to get to know him.
She takes out two undecorated sheets of what she thinks of as the Greg paper.
“April 17, 1968, Dear Greg,” she begins.
“Sorry I haven’t written for almost three weeks. Over Easter break I went with Tracy (the girl I told you about that I did the diagramming of “The Silken Tent” with for Dr. Price) to her family’s house on Long Beach Island. It was too cold to go in the water, of course, but walking along the beach was nice when it wasn’t windy. I’m sending you a stone I picked up on one of my walks. Archibald MacLeish says that what you see when you hold a stone in your hand is what has fallen out of the water. The water and the stone come together and separate, come together and separate. The little white patch in the crease of the stone caught my eye. While I was walking I was saying the names of all you boys over there that I pray for and I had just said your name when I saw the sun catch the white patch as the tide went out. It reminded me of the white patch of hair behind your right ear, the patch I saw every day when you sat in front of me in Ed Psych. You turned around one day to ask me if I knew Dr. Huzzard’s office hours and I said, ‘Do you know you have a little patch of white hair behind your right ear?’ That was the first thing I ever said to you. I remembered that when I saw the stone. I picked it up and carried it in my shirt pocket for the rest of the time I was there. I thought you might like to have it, to think of me when you touch it, and remember that I’m praying for you.
“I think Tracy and I are going to live at the beach house this summer and work at Playland. Her brother is graduating and in the fall he’ll be teaching at Long Beach High, like he always wanted, and we’re going to fix the house up so he can live there all year.
“That’s all for tonight. I have to work on a paper about Hebrew mysticism for Dr. Spotts’s class. It’s really interesting stuff.
“Greg, you take care.
“Love, Susan”
She slips the stone and the letter, which she has written on two of the undecorated sheets of the Greg paper, into a padded envelope. The glue has a sour taste, and when she presses the flap down hard to seal it, she can feel some of the bubbles in the padding pop, as they did when she wrote the address on the front. She will have to take this to the mail room tomorrow to have it weighed for the proper postage.
She sets the envelope aside and draws out the last undecorated sheet from the first box of Greg paper. She chooses another stone from the bag she has brought back from the beach. This one is round with some orange streaks. She turns it over several times. Then she picks up her pen again.
“April 17, 1968. Dear Robert,” she begins.
Margaret DeAngelis is a lifelong resident of central Pennsylvania. After a long teaching career, she left the classroom to devote herself to developing as a fiction writer. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and has received fellowships from the Jentel Artist Residency, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Hambidge Center.
Angel in the Mist
By
Laurie J. Edwards
Annie O’Brien hurried along the gangplank, hunger and fear clawing at her belly. A solid wall of wood towered before her, gleaming in the sunlight. How could such a huge steamer stay afloat, especially once the crowd, shuffling along behind her, boarded?
Yesterday this long-awaited trip to America had seemed an exciting dream. Had she, of all her siblings, been chosen to go? Annie had no need to pinch herself to be sure; her younger brother Seamus had administered a swift kick to her ankle, which still smarted. Now this morning’s tiny ration of cornmeal mush curdled in her stomach, and thoughts of Seamus filled her with homesickness.
On deck the freshening breeze stung her cheeks and snapped the flags against the poles overhead, jingling iron rings on the ropes holding them aloft. The clanging metal reminded her of gaol gates slamming shut, caging her inside a prison. Drawing in a ragged breath, she struggled to still the quivering that shook her body as they steamed out to sea.
Suddenly, being a housemaid in America did not seem a wonderful future. Annie longed to lay her head on Mam’s aproned lap, to feel the work-roughened hands stroking her hair. What if she never saw Mam or Da again? America was so far away. She tried to comfort herself that all the money she earned would buy food to keep her family alive. The shriveled, blackened potatoes could not. Baby Norah had died of hunger in Mam’s arms. Old folks, like Gran, hands gnarled, bodies hunched, lay curled on pallets in low-roofed cottages awaiting death. And she, Annie, was to be their savior. She would work hard, send her pay back to feed first her family and later the village. Grandiose dreams, yes, but Annie had a mission. And succeed at it she would.
As the gulf grew between ship and land, the emerald grass of her beloved Ireland hazed into the distance in a blur of tears. Annie imprinted every detail of the coastline on her heart. She clutched the rail, straining to make out the sliver of shoreline on the horizon. When not a speck remained, she stumbled below deck to find her bunk.
Never had Annie glimpsed such a room. The ceiling rose higher than the thatched roof
of her house, and beds were stacked one above the other. If Annie stood with arms outstretched, she could touch both sets of bunks.
The first few women to enter spoke only in whispers, and the silence hurt Annie’s ears. The ship shuddering under her feet seemed a poor substitute for the laughing and squabbling of her brothers and sisters. Shortly, though, the room filled with mothers of squalling infants and whining toddlers, making Annie feel more at home. But that night, tucked under the coarse woolen blanket, Annie feared crashing to the floor as the ship dipped and rolled.
After breakfast Annie stood on deck, gazing back toward home. Then she strained forward to catch a glimpse of her future.
A shout startled her from her reveries. A red-faced girl holding a baby chased a runaway boy. The wiry, freckle-faced boy barreled into Annie, who caught him and twirled him around the way she did her younger brothers. He squealed and begged her to do it again.
“Thank you for catching him.” The girl, not much older than Annie herself, puffed out a breath as she reached them. “I’m Frieda, the Luddingtons’ nanny.” The baby she balanced on her hip stared somberly from one to the other.
The boy muscled his way between them. “She’s not our real nanny,” he informed Annie. “Papa only hired her to take care of us ’til we get back to New York. Bridget couldn’t come on this trip. She had to stay home on Long Island with Mama.” With his hands clasped behind his back as if he were a connoisseur studying a painting, he examined Annie. “I’m Joseph Luddington the Third. Who are you?”
“Joseph,” Frieda said sharply, “mind your manners.”
Annie hid her smile at the young boy’s aristocratic manner and made a mock curtsey. “Annie O’Brien, at your service.”
“You have red curls like our Bridget,” Joseph said. “Maybe Mama would hire you too.”
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