A Lot of Nothing

 

The house on Tenth West is gone. A patch of dry boredom stands quietly in its place. The sagging fences and broken gates, unruly grass, water-starved gardens, all scraped clean by the teeth of bulldozers. We used to joke about ‘new owners’ scratching their heads trying to figure out how such an odd collection of rocks ended up here. Two decades of stones carried home in the pockets of a family of rock hounds. The family is gone now, too, scraped clean by time and choices. 

There will be no new owners. No more patches, no more layers of paint. It was never about the house—even for us. The potential was always in the land, about what could be, not what was, and now, it is a lot of nothing. 

The house was a Realtor’s nightmare. A two-story, white, cinder block house that urgently required a new roof. It sat on an acre of unkempt land, almost unheard of within the city limits. The single-pane windows were covered by heavy floral curtains, and animal heads hung on the dingy plaster walls. The two bathrooms were tiny. The ramshackle addition of a laundry room was practically falling off the house. To top it all off, it had the ugliest kitchen I had ever seen. The shit-brown cabinets and laminate countertop crammed together on one wall looked more like a workshop than a kitchen. 

A polygamist family built the house in the late 50s or early 60s, which explained the lack of outlets in the kitchen. They raised twelve children in that small house. The majority of them were boys. Later, we would find the vintage porn and erotic novels they hid under the floorboards. None of the house’s shortcomings mattered to me. Ben was a master carpenter. I had no doubt he would create a beautiful home for us, despite the evidence of his unfinished house warning me otherwise. 

We closed on the property and moved in the weekend before Halloween 2005. We ripped up carpets and tore down the blinds. We stripped her bare. Then we all started over. At first, the move put our newly blended family on neutral ground. It was our house. Farm boots and flip-flops lined the front door. We planted trees and a large vegetable garden, but the plans to update the kitchen and replace the failing roof remained paper promises on Ben’s drafting board. There was always a reason to put it off. 

That’s not to say he didn’t make changes to the house. He most certainly did. One day, without warning, Ben knocked out the kitchen wall with a sledgehammer and installed a second-hand sliding glass door. It fit poorly in the hammered-out hole, but Ben never bothered to trim it, leaving the jagged edges of the concrete block on full display. 

He did the same to the large picture window in the front room, installing a salvaged atrium that he crammed full of potted plants. The tinted glass was dark and attracted spiders. Still, Ben liked the effect so much that he created a larger version on our front porch. He enclosed the concrete pad using a collection of sliding glass doors. He loosely attached them with a corrugated piece of tin roofing and a section of downspout he fixed as a post. The heavy glass panels leaned precariously, causing the zoning enforcers to cover their heads with the clipboards while hastily attaching violation notices to our door. 

Ben was wholly unpredictable. He cut exploratory holes in the ceilings and floors. He tore out the upstairs bathroom wall to fit a wool rug he had mis-measured. The carpet could have gone downstairs, but he said it was too fine to get ruined in a high-trafficked area. 

We were already one bedroom short, but that didn’t stop Ben from pursuing a vaulted ceiling by ripping out the little room under the upstairs that the two youngest children used as a bedroom. Its destruction was almost a relief. The space was a death trap. The door was so small that even the kids had to duck. The ceiling was so low and the pitch so prominent that the only place you could stand up straight was the dead center of the room. The small oval window Ben installed was merely decoration. It didn’t open, but the single-walled chimney he ran from the woodstove in the kitchen below through dried wooden rafters into the corner of the room was fully functional.      

Losing that space meant all four kids had to double up, which violated Ben’s parental agreement with his ex and gave them more to fight about. The two boys didn’t care, but when I moved a three-year-old into my oldest daughter’s room, the high schooler politely moved into her father's house full-time by simply not returning home during our visitation weeks. Dealing with an alcoholic father and the revolving door of questionable girlfriends he moved in, was better than living with a preschooler on the wrong side of the tracks. Adding insult to injury, Ben refused to finish the project for years because he didn’t trust the roof that we hadn’t replaced. He worried it would leak and ruin any new drywall he refused to hang. 

Eventually, Ben demolished the staircase to move it from the center of the house to an exterior wall. It created a great room for the hideous kitchen, with half wooden subflooring, half peeling linoleum, and a piece of plywood between them. His renovations also left half a door frame and a live wire hanging over the refrigerator. It took him over a month, but he rebuilt the stairs. He handcrafted a beautiful open staircase with reclaimed oak treads, rounded bullnoses, and a handrail made from a twisting tree branch—that he snapped at anyone who used it because he didn’t want it to come loose. 

The relocation of the stairs cost us the utility closet. This was an afterthought to Ben. He shoved the water heater into the mudroom on a makeshift shelf. It leaked down the concrete steps to the cellar and blocked the view of the garden from the kitchen sink. He wedged the furnace into the exposed upstairs attic space left by the unfinished vaulted ceiling project. To get it to fit under the steep angle of the risers, he hammered down the corners of the steel frame to match the roofline. The vent he cut in the roof leaked straight onto the dinner table below. The furnace never worked right after that. It always came on, but it didn’t always blow hot air. 

Hardly anything in that house worked as it should have—including Ben and me. I tried implementing creative solutions to hide the mess and dodge the messages from the zoning and building departments, but it was like bailing out a boat moored under a waterfall. Ben began salvaging larger construction materials. He bought a semi-trailer filled with doors and windows that he parked half in the front yard and half in the back, making keeping the dogs in the yard an impossible task. 

My sister died, and my world came to a crashing halt. I quit school. I was always sick. The house on Tenth West rebuilt its hairshirt of junk. The paint peeled, pipes froze, and small black spirals of mold crept out of the corners. The kids were embarrassed to bring friends home. Eventually, the roof we never replaced began to leak. I moved chairs and rugs to conceal the holes in the floor. I taped the children’s art over broken windows and hung curtains where there should have been walls. 

Buckets of drill bits, hinges, light fixtures, pipe fittings, and brackets spilled out of Ben’s truck and trailers. The mess spread to the driveway and the garage. Attempting to hide it, we built a fence and parked our cars on the street. He built a greenhouse, and the piles migrated in. Stacks of salvaged building materials cluttered the edges of the large vegetable garden and climbed the steps of the front and back porches. He built a beautiful workshop for himself, and it was stuffed full long before he finished roofing it.   

We raised our four kids in a slowly crumbling house, the sweet green smell of the Jordan River drifting in and out, lulled to sleep by the trains singing at night. By the time the kids were grown, the house was surrounded by leaning stacks of discarded granite, piles of broken tile, and rows of salvaged windows and doors. Stacks of slate and roofing tiles pressed against the garden fences, pipes, oak banisters, and old water heaters were scattered throughout the yard. Ben bought a portable sawmill, and the yard began filling with towering stacks of lumber. 

Decades of neglect, a sinking foundation, and an earthquake finally caused cracks too large to ignore for both the house and the relationship. Retreat was the only move left. Luck for us, by then, the promised wave of gentrification was finally flooding the west side. Despite the severity of the house's deterioration, we could sell it for the value of the land and make a small fortune. It was a fortune we didn’t deserve. We walked from the house on Tenth West, knowing the home we created together resulted in a house unfit for people to live in.

The house and all the landmarks of life, including the dogs buried in the corners, are gone. Bones and collars pulled up in the roots of the felled trees. My beloved Juneau, a fiery red Queen Ann Heeler, was hit by a car while I was at work. Kilo, the black reservation dog we adopted in Southern Utah, was also hit and killed in the street. We brought in a vet for Moses, the standard poodle. He was so old, he nearly died before the needle could be placed. Zeek, the giant Dane—he wasn’t even really our dog—but we had to break his legs to fit him in the hole.

Life didn’t have to be that hard. I wish I had known that then.  

THE BOOK OF ONLYS (sample)

 

August 2006

Ben wakes late and leaves for work without making coffee. He doesn't say goodbye. 

I think I have it figured out. Wendi took off her swimsuit bottoms, fell, hit her head, and passed out. Then I remembered the comforter and the towel the police found in the tub, and I started all over. When the dog begins whining, I get up and wander outside with him. The yard looks worse than usual. Slowly, I realize why. The wind storm had blown the clothes off the clothesline. Instead of collecting them, I lay down in the dirt on the pile of spoiled laundry, wondering how Wendi's comforter and towel ended up in the tub. 

The voices whisper in my head, 'Your sister is dead,' as the wind plays with the weak morning light filtering through the leaves. The raft of fabric beneath me is an amalgamation of sisters. A careless load containing the rain-soaked clothes I wore to the funeral and the dresses, saturated with the smell of Wendi's death, I took from her closet. A cat passes by. The dog chases it off. I turn my head and see the toppled basket containing the shoes that walked through her blood, leaving greasy brown footprints on the floor. Maybe she would want to be absorbed into my life, seamlessly consumed, a diluted haunting. I don't know. That doesn't seem like Wendi. 

I get up and find a Sharpie in the mudroom. I pick up the basketball sitting out of place on the dryer that Ben won't let us use because he thinks it's too expensive to run and the sunlight is free. I write: THIS BELONGED TO WENDI M. BROWN, MAY 2, 1970 to—then I stop. I don't know what day she died. They never told us. I set the ball down. 

I move around the house, picking things up and setting them down. I touch the glass I rescued from her apartment with the two cuttings. I should have thrown out the weaker, anemic-looking plant, but I don't. They will slowly die together on my windowsill.

Beach appears in the kitchen. One side of her shoulder-length blond hair is matted from sleeping. Fiercely independent from birth, she has dressed herself, wearing jeans under a sundress. She stands with the wisdom of a grown woman trapped in the body and mind of a near-sighted toddler. We greet each other in silence. I've become so quiet, listening to the flies buzzing around Wendi's rotting body, that I barely speak. I make Beach macaroni for breakfast. I think someone should come and get her, but there is no one to ask. This is the elevator moment all over again. The difference is that even if I managed to scrape the words from my mouth, 'I need help,' there would be no one around to hear them.

I take Beach for a walk because I know I should be doing something. To the outside world, I am a typical mother pushing her child in a stroller on a summer walk. The cars drive by in a sheen of amorphous ribbons of heat rising from the asphalt. I feel nothing but the bass of the words stomping through my head, 'Your sister is dead.' The flies buzz. We stopped at a park to play, but I suddenly panicked and needed to go home. Back inside the house, the phone is ringing. I don't answer it because I know if I pick it up, it will be Wendi screaming for help. Trapped in this mirage of life, I don't know which one of us is dead.

I felt it again yesterday after the wind died—that feeling of having accidentally survived.

I put on my snowshoes and disappeared upfield with the dogs in tow.

Down in the valley, the men of Clear Creek nodded and spit, 

'Well, I'll be damned. She did better here than we thought she'd do.' 

Now, I belong to a place where I shouldn't even be.

PILLARS OF GOMORRAH

 

Chapter 1

Paola appeared out of nowhere to watch the boy. He was the first child she had seen in the canyon, and she was curious. The five ghost towns nestled within its stone walls drew plenty of tourists but never children. Paola guessed the boy was about six. He was pasty-pale and awkwardly thin, teetering precariously close to the crumbling concrete edge of the bridge spanning the dry wash. 

A tall, blonde-haired woman was trailing, wearing a wrinkled denim dress and flimsy sandals. Paola assumed she was his mother. Behind them, parked in the dry grass on the side of the dirt road, was a white SUV. The open doors allowed Paola to evaluate the pair based on the wrappers cluttering the interior. Mass consumer: she labeled.

Spotting Paola leaning over the cattle gate barring the road, the boy’s mother gasped, “Oh—we don't have facemasks!”

Paola raised her hand. "I won't come any closer.”

The boy’s mother flashed a nervous smile. Her eyes darted over Paola’s dingy clothing, landing on the head of the dog creeping from the sage. Zag’s blue heeler eyes remained unblinking as he sniffed the air and slowly melted back into the landscape. She stepped back, pulling the boy with her. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? All these buildings—just abandoned. The way they look on the internet, I thought we could go in them. Are you a local?"

That was a good question. Paola looked at the thin, blue summer sky tiptoeing over the striated cliffs framing the canyon, then over the low fence and across the field to the brick skeletons of the abandoned coal town of Peerless. She tried but failed to recall the emotions of seeing it for the first time. She was in shock, and those initial few days of peering through the broken windows of the abandoned houses and down mine shafts were overshadowed by the dark nights spent in the belly of the lodge listening to the news. The desperate cries for help were dispatched like messages from a sinking ship as the world slipped below the dark tide of a rising global pandemic. Then the riots. When the summer wildfires began again, Paola unplugged the radio, muting the outside world. She was now so lost in her self-prescribed isolation she didn’t even know what month it was, let alone what day of the week. She simply labeled the time as hot, summer.

“It’s too dangerous to go in the buildings,” Paola said, returning her attention to the boy and his mother.

“Because of the ghosts?" the boy asked, blinking the phantom eyelashes framing his bleach-blue eyes. 

"Where are you from?" Paola asked.

“Ogden," he answered.

"Are there ghosts in Ogden?"

Looking for the answer, the boy turned and faced his mother. 

“She’s kidding.” His mother’s assurance was chased by a high, nervous laugh that awkwardly skipped away. The boy shrugged and headed for the SUV. His mother turned to follow. 

“Look,” Paola said, feeling guilty, “up the main road, there’s a cluster of old miners' cabins that aren’t fenced off." 

"Thank you—and I'm sorry about…." The woman stopped talking because Paola was gone. Unobserved, Paola had jumped from the road, receding like a rat into the metal culvert and out of sight.

"That wasn’t nice, Kitty," Jack said over the can of beer perched at his chapped lips. Startled by his appearance, Paola covered her mouth to damper a yelp. 

"You probably scared the shit out of them," he continued. "I bet they think you're a ghost." Behind his mossy eyes and the haze of dark stubble on his cherubically round face, Jack waited for her to explain why she hadn’t offered to let them explore the ruins of Peerless—half of the fallen town was on her land.

"The boy was clumsy, he'd have gotten hurt, and the woman was inept,” Paola said, picking a spot to sit that was a safe distance from him. The heeler moved down the tunnel toward them, his eyes up, watching the sound of the car turning around on the road.

"Still, it wasn’t nice of you to disappear like that," Jack objected between soundless sips of the beer. "Are we gonna stay here all afternoon like moles?" Jack ran his wide fingers through the twisted dark waves of his hair. "I thought we could hike to the bathhouse." Cocking his head, Jack cracked half a smile. His tongue slid out of his mouth to lick the blood from one of the deep splits in his lower lip. 

A shiver rolled down her spine. Paola pulled her knees into her chest. “It’s too late for a hike like that. You know I don't like being in the canyon in the dark.”

"You don't like being anywhere in the dark." Jack smiled again. This time his full grin sunk the corners of his eyelashes so far that they nearly kissed the upturned sides of his wide mouth. Paola always thought it made him appear stoned, especially when he wasn't. 

Still smiling, Jack closed his eyes, sinking into the curve of the metal conduit. His amusement at her expense made her feel sorry for herself. Paola got up. "I'm going home.” Hearing the magic word, Zag turned and began retreating down the tunnel.

"Have it your way," Jack shrugged. 

"I always do now," she said, stomping off. 

"Stop fucking around in the past. It won’t change anything. You need to decide, Paola, because people are coming.”

"Wait, what people?" Paola spun around, but Jack was gone. She stared into the emptiness. "That has always been the trouble with you, Jack Wells," she called into the dripping vacancy. The weight of her loneliness pressed on her throat, making it hard to swallow. "Just like when you were alive—you're never around when I need you."

Literary Review by Tory Hunter

"Incredible writing and incredible scene-setting. I’m immediately sucked in by the dark and gritty imagery."

"The use of language is truly excellent. It generates a gritty, unsettling atmosphere." 

"The descriptions are amazing... realistic and haunting."

"Dark" 

"Clever"

"Just when I thought there couldn’t possibly be another twist..."

"It’s extremely rare that I complete a manuscript and don’t have any big picture concerns to address, but I simply don’t. The character development, pacing, structure, imagery, descriptions--everything is incredible. This is such an intricately woven plot with so many shocking and clever twists that just keep coming and coming and coming. I’m truly blown away by this novel."

The Wendy House

Long before they arrived at the cliff, Granger Madsen felt uneasy. It was the wind. All night it wheezed down the mountain, through the trees, and across the lake. It broke at dawn with a final haunting sigh, like an animal taking its last breath—only to resurrect itself midday. It always seemed to be windy around the reservoir. Even on calm days, rouge gusts flew around corners, scurrying through the shrubs, fitfully tossing leaves and dirt into the air. It seemed inescapable. Even indoors, the wind hunted, rattling windows and shaking the vents like the Big Bad Wolf. Little Pig, Little Pig, let me in.  

The afternoon was fading when the Madsen brothers' canoe crossed in front of the dam. The air was wet and biting, slipping chilled teeth under the long shadows of a tepid sun. The cresting whitecaps summoned by the wind climbed over the low sides of the craft, soaking their feet.

Regardless of the conditions on the reservoir, it was the last weekend of summer, and it was the ritual of the local teens to meet in the cove. Their friends were already there, jumping from the narrow band of granite cliffs that twisted down the mountain like the giant tail of a stone dragon. It was rumored that the Native Americans, the Uintah, and the Ouray tribes buried their dead in the cavernous holes in the white rock. Although, if it were true, looters had long since picked the graves clean. 

The Madsen boys were late, delayed by the overbearing will of their dad. The cord of wood Granger had spent the morning chopping and stacking had not met Iron Ian Madsen's acrid approval, and Granger was forced to rebuild it while his younger brother Rory waited. Being late only added to Granger's anxiousness as he navigated their red canoe into the flock of boats bobbing in their moorings in the deadfall of graying logs wedged between the rocks. 

The white bands of past water lines came in at eye level. Fear bristled up the fine hairs on his neck. In all his seventeen years, he didn't think he had ever seen the water so low. A few years ago, Samantha Neilson died cliff jumping. She was the daughter of the Mayor of Promise, the little town that sprouted into existence in the 1960s after the reservoir filled. It sat a mile below the Mayhap dam, nursing its green fields and gardens on the water seeping through the spillways. 

Rory had been too young to go that summer, but Granger was there. He witnessed Samantha jump. The way Granger recalled the impact, it was as if the lake had become solid when Samantha hit the surface. Then it liquified and swallowed her. 

Once the Park Rangers were on the scene, her body eerily bobbed to the surface—something about ruptured organs spilling gas inside her abdominal cavity. The coroner ruled that she died from the impact of a broken neck. It was called a tragic fluke, but Granger still had nightmares. In his dreams, the water formed an enormous fist that met Samantha on her way down. Colliding with her body, it flung her like a rag doll so violently that her head snapped from her spine. He'd wake with the horrible feeling he was holding her decapitated head, only to discover a wad of blankets or a discarded sweatshirt between his trembling hands.    

 Granger told Rory to wait while he double-checked the safety of the landing. Slipping over the side of the canoe, he dived deep, searching for any hidden hazards below the cliff. His best friend Abel Burbage nearly took him out in a cannonball. Abel popped up laughing, shaking his dark hair and sending a rainbow of water droplets into Granger's face.

The landing appeared safe enough, and Granger knew high water could contain as many hazards as low water. This did nothing to slow the queasiness dining on the lining of his gut. It wasn't that Granger was a nervous kid. He was intuitive. He could anticipate the phone ringing or the doorbell chiming a split second before they sounded. His dreams often held information that was eerily foretelling in a Delphian way. He possessed a strange ability to know when a deer was about to dart from the woods onto the road. He always seemed to know when to leave a party before it got busted and when to stash the old copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang that he and Rory shared inside his History textbook seconds before his dad entered the kitchen.

He knew other things too. The day Samantha died, she had turned and looked at Granger. He hardly knew her. Still, the look she gave him was that of naked terror. Not the terror of a trapped animal but the dread of an already dead one. It was as if they both knew she was about to die, but neither could stop it. 

"I was worried you weren't coming," Abel said, spitting out a mouthful of lake water. His lips and the skin around his wide mouth were blue from the chill. The ashen pallor enhanced the spray of brown freckles covering his sunburnt skin stretched over his abnormally long face.  

"My dad." It was all that needed saying. They had been friends since Kindergarten. Abel knew how hard Granger's dad was on him. 

Together they swam back to Rory, and the three climbed the rocks falling into the jumbled line of jumpers. Someone was playing music from a radio stashed in a pile of discarded clothing. A few older kids were huddled in a pool of thick sunlight, drinking stolen cans of cheap beer and smoking cigarettes. The wind chopped and remixed the music and the laughter into a sicken funhouse of noise. 

When they finally reached the top of the cliff, Rory leaned over the edge. His rigid joints cast his fourteen-year-old thin shoulders in unnaturally wild angles. The glaring light encapsulated his pale skin and shockingly white hair. He appeared to melt into the sallow clouds floating on the cadaverous horizon. He was scared.

It was likely that Rory, with his diminished hearing, couldn't hear the goading from the others growing increasingly clamant. Scanning the line behind them, Granger's blue eyes landed on the body of Abel's girlfriend, Lena Jones. Her waterlogged sneakers sloshed on the rocks as she fidgeted and shivered in her faded suit and cutoff shorts. She smiled at him, and suddenly Granger felt a new sense of urgency.

Standing wet in the wind, he was too cold to uncross his arms, so he nudged Rory with his elbow. "Jump."

"I don't know, Grang. That looks really far," Rory said, stepping back from the ledge. 

Granger moved forward, taking his brother's place on the ledge. He eyed the water and understood what had scared Rory. The high September sun was glinting off the surface, making the waves look like the blades of a saw churring. With the water so low, it had to be a thirty-five-foot plunge. 

"We could go at the same time?" Granger offered to his younger brother.

Rory nodded. 

Granger turned to see if Abel wanted to jump with them, but Abel had stepped out of line to wait for Lena. A shadow crossed the sky. Granger looked up into a massive gust of wind. Something touched his back, and then he was falling. 

The laughter echoed off the rocks as Granger hit the water hard. It felt like he had fallen through a pane of glass. It stung his skin and rushed through his ears and nose in razor-sharp shards. The water should have slowed his momentum, but it felt like he was speeding it up—like a rope around his waist was pulling him down to the bottom of the lake. 

It took Granger a few seconds to react. He spread his arms and kicked his legs, but it did nothing. He was trapped in some kind of undertow. Was he being pulled into the dam? Again he tried to swim but with the same aught result. He was far too deep. It'd be a hell of a swim to the surface. 

Starting to panic, he thrashed his limbs, demanding his body rise. Despite his efforts, he continued to descend. Then his feet collided with something with so much force his jaw chipped at his teeth, his ribs compressed, and his hips and knees folded. Pain shot up his leg, electrifying his spine. Kicking furiously, he tried to swim away. The effort shot bottle rockets of pain up his leg. 

Granger realized he was trapped. His foot was wedged in whatever he had landed on. His eyes popped open. What he saw through the murky, green water didn't make sense. His foot had punched through the roof of a house. 

Like all the kids raised around the reservoir, he had heard the stories about the ill-fated town of Mayhap. The mountain hamlet on the foothills of the Uinta Mountains had been dying from the moment it was conceived. It was settled by pioneer families sent east from Salt Lake to claim more territory for the LDS church. It stepped well over the boundary of the newly designated Tabeguache Reservation. Yet, the local tribes offered no objections to the new white settlers. 

At its crest, two hundred souls lived in Mayhap, but the winters were harsh, the snow deep, the wind relentless, and the nearest gristmill too far—not to mention all the strange deaths. In the 1960s, when government checks were issued to build a reservoir, the number had dwindled to twenty-three individuals. Those who had not already moved to the higher ground took the money and fled without a fight. 

Historians took photographs and commented on how remarkable it was that none of the remaining townspersons objected to the government buyout. The state surveyors mark each building with black plaques, numbering them like toe tags in a morgue. Because the state was in a hurry for the water, they didn't bother to waste diesel bulldozing the town. Mayhap was left as they found it except for the soil sites dug up for the earth-filled dam. 

With the path of the rivers and tributaries blocked, the rising water consumed the valley. The streets flooded. Doorsteps were breached. Windows filled and burst while roofs and chimneys were swallowed whole. The church steeple was the last to disappear. It took two years for the condemned buildings and all their secrets to slip below the body of the new Mayhap Reservoir.    

In drought years, if the wind was dead and the water on the reservoir was calm, one could see the stone foundations glowing through the lake's depths. Occasionally, rotting boards with rusting nails break loose and float to the surface, washed up on shore. Children chasing minions would find the odd abandoned item lodged in the rocks, bedsprings, tin cans, and leather shoes. But for the most part, Mayhap was reduced to a campfire ghost story.

The water was so low Granger had landed on one of the houses. His torn flesh and fragmented bones were locked in the teeth of the rotting trusses of the roof. Grabbing his thigh, he pulled on his leg. The green, moss-riddled shingles groaned and buckled, releasing a swirling cloud of debris that enveloped him. Slowly, out of the murky depth, a brumous face appeared. Pearly and gray, its orifices gaped like the flesh of a rotting fish. The face sprouted a neck and shoulders. A hand reached for Granger with its gnarled fingers spread wide. 

Granger screamed. His mouth and lungs filled with silt and water. Pounding the heel of his unbound foot on the roof, Granger finally tore through the rotten wood, releasing his trapped leg. Granger aimed for the slight glow over his head, but he collided with something flat and square. It was a brick wall. Through the strange underwater current, he had been swimming the wrong way. 

His lungs felt like they might burst in his chest. Granger pushed against the wall. It crumbled in a cloud of sediment. Terrified and out of breath, Granger stopped struggling. Suddenly a hand grabbed his neck and then his arm, dragging him up. He and Lena exploded together through the surface into the barking waves. He tried inhaling a breath, but it hit a wall of water in his chest, pushing it deeper into his lungs. He began violently convulsing. 

Voices around them told Granger that others had entered the water to help. Eric Miller, the strongest and oldest boy, was sent in a kayak for help. The girls were whaling in high-pitch gasps that echoed around the rocky cove. Granger had no control over his body. Coughing and retching, he was towed like a rotten log onto the rocks. His foot was nearly cleaved in half. The big toe hung by a shredded mass of bone and glistening blood-splattered tendons. Shards of white pierced the skin like broken threads in a hemline; each one created a dimple of dark blood. 

Someone rolled him onto his side. Aiming his face at the horizon, he was forced to lay helplessly, layered under the clothing of the others meant to stop the violent shivering rocking his body. Over the pink froth bubbling out of his mouth and nose, he could see the gray waves like wolves nipping at the sky, attempting to bring it down. 

Beneath his ear, a sound was forming. A gravely rumbled that seemed to roll straight out of the depths. The lake was laughing at him. 

"Lena, where's Rory?" Abel shouted from behind Granger. 

"I don't know. I can't find him!" Lena was crying as she drew another breath and went under to look again. 

The Turth About Being Darwin

When my youngest daughter was eight, she caught a wild mouse out in the yard. She placed it inside a wooden box with thin wire netting for the sides intended to hold butterflies. Then put it on the same shelf that held Darwin, her store-bought mouse, in his brightly colored plastic cage. 

The wild mouse came without guarantees. We never assumed the wild mouse would still be in its cage. On the other hand, store-bought Darwin did. He was a Fancy Mouse. It meant stupid and boring: reliably tame.

After a few days, my daughter felt bad for the wild mouse wilting in the captivity of her room, and she let him go. It never occurred to her to feel bad for Darwin. She never considered that he might want out too. Instead, she held him in her tiny hands and created mazes for him to run and small salads to eat. He lived on her scraps of both food and attention.

In fact, no one seemed to think much about Darwin except for me. I, too, was a Fancy Mouse in a cage. I came with all sorts of guarantees. I was married at 18. I had two kids by the time I was 21, four by the time I was 30, and a grandma at 41.

I've been reliably tame forever. I thought that was just how it was until I met Sarah. For her and me to be the same thing redefines motherhood's boundaries. Sarah is a recovered alcoholic. She runs thick through the AA circles, gives motivational speeches, and holds workshops. She writes and recites poetry and paints in bright colors on giant canvases.  

Sarah avoided all the traps. She put herself first and second. Meanwhile, I cooked a hot breakfast for the kids, hers and mine, and let my coffee get cold. I did laundry barefoot on a cement floor between reading aloud and fixing hair. I cut the toast into triangles and the sandwiches into rectangles and ignored the uneaten crust. I watched hours of PBS and played board games. I drove our little souls around while they sang and gossiped in the backseat.

I answered every call.

I met every need.

I didn't do anything that Sarah couldn't have done herself. It wasn't beneath her to sacrifice her time for her children— she just didn't want to. And I didn't know how not to. I was constantly throwing out my plans to cover for her. She'd forget to pick up her kids from school. She'd run late, make promises and then blow it all up, and I'd have to step in and follow through. She'd forget to feed them. Forget to watch them. Forget they had emotional needs too.

It was incredibly stressful running around putting outing the fires she started while she bounced around chasing what felt good to her and only her.

I regularly managed to slip out of the house for a run, but I never really got to leave it all behind, not the way Sarah could. It is not in my nature. Don't go too far, get tired, and forget all you need to carry. Don't forget to buy more milk, pick them up from school, and drive them to gymnastics.

What I wanted for myself and what I needed showed up in my dreams. Added to coffee and the laughter of happy kids, it was enough.

Eventually, of course, I had to let Sarah go. From the moment my friendship with Sarah was conceived, it was ending. I didn't know that then. I wanted to believe there was something good inside everything I did for her and her children. What we had in common was we were both awake in a sleeping world. We saw each other.

The other thing was she reminded me of Wendi, my dead sister. Perhaps reminded is too weak of a word. She was Wendi.

And like Wendi, Sarah gave me just enough to hold on and keep me tied to her charms between the subsequent fault and the following favor. I now know that in the case of Sarah, it was simply a good illusion—a beautiful piece of chalk art under a thunderous storm.  

Sometimes I'd close my eyes and lay Sarah's image under my sister's shadow and wonder how thin the line really is. They were virtually the same person, so why did Wendi die and Sarah survive? How did Sarah stop drinking and Wendi drown? It's a mystery even to Sarah.

What isn't a mystery is what happened to Darwin. He died alone in his cage and was buried in a box in the yard.

beneath still water

 

beneath still water 

Emma Snow sat on the sofa cross-legged, an unopened textbook across her lap, staring at the front door, listening to him drinking himself into a frenzy. Her dark eyes searched the polished oak finish for the familiar faces encased within the wood grain. Faces of women screaming with gaping mouths, flame-like hair, and teardrop breasts, their bodies nothing more than remnants from when the tree was alive, growing wild with designs of life.

Calmly she waited for what was coming. She had chosen this gamble, knowing she would lose—knowing the price of stolen hours. She had gone hiking with acquaintances on trails leading nowhere through box canyons on the ground, barely released from winter's tight hold. The spring breezes were cold enough to be painful on uncovered skin, yet in the patches of the late afternoon sun, Emma sweated beneath her thin fleece jacket. She followed her companions, walking among them as if she was one of them, knowing she was not. 

She is a thief, stealing away moments casually discarded by others. Anything she could carry and stash somewhere safe, somewhere he couldn't reach. Her sins were covered by the sound of the wind rising through the trees. The glint of melting ice in the sun, the weightlessness of the mountain sky, laughter echoing off the rocks, a footstep in the woods.

Yes, Emma had known the price of her actions before she found him standing in the driveway waiting for her. His smirking made her stomach lurch, but she reminded herself to remain calm. She had chosen this moment, and it would be here, and then it would be gone, nothing but a bad memory. Or better still, if she could, it would become forgotten between a thousand other moments. Maybe forgotten is too strong of a word, perhaps distorted like looking through icy water of a stream to the washed and worn peddles below too cold to feel.   

He had cornered her coming the long way around the back of the truck. Emma had been gone three hours, yet he argued over and over it had been four. Smashing his fist into the hood, already too drunk to add—but stable enough on his feet to have her pinned without laying a finger on her.  

As he ranted, the force of his fist knocked bits of red clay loose from the truck's underbelly. She watched the two of them as if from far away, removed like a stranger at the edge of the driveway. It was easy to concede to his clouded reality. The mountain was icy. It snowed. She was gone for four hours. All of it was true now. And with that, he had let her pass into the house, but it was far from over, and she had known that too.   

In the back of the house, glass shattered, followed by lumbering footsteps. The structure swayed with his noxious rhythm as he stumbled through the long narrow kitchen. Emma sat motionlessly as he towered over her. She thought about the door behind him, wondering with more curiosity than emotion why she had not gotten up and left or never come home at all.  

His jaw slid numbly side-to-side, expelling drops of spit as he yelled, but she could no longer hear him. She let his hollow eyes and limp muscles rotting with alcohol overtake her as if she was powerless to fight. He quickly knocked her to the floor. Within the darkness, she curled into the tightest ball she could. Her hands clutched around her skull, so fixed within her hair's dark mass, her knuckles glowed white.  

Protect your head, she told herself. Nothing else matters; just protect your head. And this moment will be gone. 

Emma heard the sounds of her body folding to pressure and force, but she felt nothing. She thought if she was non-reactive, he would grow tired, but she felt his fierceness unfolding. It was too late to change strategies.

The pain would come later. Later she'd be unable to sleep, the sheet of her bed raking across her bleeding wounds, too tired to stir and too hurt to settle. Later, she'd drag herself to the coolness of the bathroom floor, vomit blood, then huddle on the tile within a haunted sleep caught in dreams of icy mountains, dreams of falling. 

Beneath the heat of his anger, conscious thought slowed, her mind's clarity fading as the voices in her head were no longer hers. A thousand conversations swirled about, some shouting, others tiny whispers. Words spinning so fast she felt the hot burn of bile in the back of her throat. Most didn't even make sense, items on a grocery list, random elevator chatter, and unconnected out-of-date phrases from an era not her own. 

Through the overwhelming buzz, she began to make out the voices jeering, 'What chance do you have to make it here, in this world, when you cannot even open a door?'

She tried to cry out, but it was cut short by a hard blow to her back.  

The voices mocked her, 'He is your judge and jury. Who knows what you are worth better than him?'

"No," she managed to utter aloud.     

'Don't' doubt the sentence he gives you too much, for you might find out it is truly justified.'

Then ''no'' was a distant thought snared in a childhood memory of afternoon sunlight flooding through a bay window in a house that no longer existed. He landed a firm foot on her side. It hooked around to her lower abdomen. Emma felt her bladder give way. The warm fluid soaked her pants, flowing onto the wood floor. Satisfied with this, he finally stopped.