by Marley Simmons Abril
I can see how a storm might rob a lady of her way, though what way that lady thought she was holding up on the mountain, up past even the sensible roads, was harder to figure. Outside, the day’s easy breeze grew into heavy gusts, dragged leaves and twigs fast through the thin night. Gran, in her infinite fabrications, claimed nights so cold were airless and impassible but up the cart-path came the lady, passing through the night just fine. Tall and calm in the howl outside, she stepped through the gate and latched it right behind her. Me and Sophie watched her from the window while she stepped through slick ribbons of mud to bang on our front door.
“Jesus,” said Mom. Lamplight got gobbled into the yard. The lady ducked inside and stood dripping on the plank floor. The wood under her bloomed dewy.
“Jesus,” Mom said again. “What in heaven are you doing out here?”
“Heaven,” mused the lady, and began to unwind her scarf. It was very thin and long, and took many swings of her arm to unravel. She was lean as a signpost, and we all stared at her like we could read her intentions on the fabric of her coat. She didn’t look back at any of us: not me or Sophie or Mom. She held that scarf in her fist and slipped her gaze across features of the house as though reminding herself of something distant and tuneless. And then she looked at Gran, through Gran’s bedroom door, at Gran’s feet sticking up under the bed-cover.
Mom ordered Sophie to set out the woman’s coat and boots before the fire. Sophie leaned the coat over a stool, where it humped above the rug, smelling doggish in the close room.
Our house back then huddled above the town on a flat branch of land facing west over Galen Lake. It was no place to put up a structure of any sort. The slope all around it was burdened by pine trees, rough grasses wagging seeds across the dirt, mist and dew and sideways arrows of sun. Even when occupied, those rooms in that house suffered a lonely chill. Our one door opened to the rutty yard, out to a gate, and down to the road. A turbid creek crowded the house from behind as it passed on its fast way down to the lake. At night, a sneak into town required mud-boots, candles, a close eye for the curve of the grey cart-path. How adrift must a wanderer be, to find themselves up that road in that weather that night?
“I’m Isa,” said the lady, “and I thank you for taking me in.” She stood just outside Gran’s door, humming. Her dry eyes moved dark in the lunar frame of her face. She smiled. On her, it seemed an unlikely feature. When she spoke it was as if to Gran, through the open bedroom door. “You stand to lose one of yours tonight, and I have come to help in any way I can.” Help with losing or help with keeping, I realized later she never did say.
Four days before the stranger showed up, Gran decided that she’d prefer to be dead. She stood at the kitchen window and watched swollen clouds blow up the ridgeline behind the house and stick to the hill’s needly trees. “That’s it,” she said. Her nose flattened on the pane and the glass under it puffed, portentous of the storm. “I’m ready to die.” And she took herself off to bed to make it happen.
“Don’t be silly,” I replied. Sophie and I watched her from the kitchen, through the open bedroom door. She folded back the spread, corner to corner like a kerchief, arranged her legs inside the fold, and fell back onto the pillows. She pulled the spread up over her shoulders. Dusty motes clouded around her hair. At the fat-belly stove, Sophie dribbled spit onto the iron grate to watch it whistle into damp then nothing. The sun dropped behind the peak of the mountain, and I fed logs into the stove. We ate dinner without Gran, but talked to her in the next room as normal.
“Storm coming,” I told her.
“Batten the hatches!” Gran wagged her toes under the tent of the spread.
“You do it,” I said, to which Gran said nothing. Gran got up once to go to the toilet, but then went straight back to her bed and ignored Sophie’s plea to let her make tea.
“At least drink tea,” Sophie said.
“Nothing,” replied Gran. “I’m ready.”
I wired Mom down-mountain and she came back to Galen from the city. She’d been gone for months, full seasons had passed. Her hair was lighter but cut short, which made her look thinner than I remembered. She let herself right in the front door, set her purse on the table and yanked open the curtains like she’d done it every day. That night I lay on the couch, unsleeping. Under my blanket I listened to the night air crawling around up in the rafters. The crooked pine tree at the window dropped cones against the roof, and beat at the windows, and I tried to lay like Gran with my toes straight up and my eyes straight up and my hands folded at my chest, but I saw nothing in the lamp-less air.
Gran never left the house. Even before she got the bug for dying, she only stood around in her bed-shoes and chewed grey twigs from a potted herb on the windowsill. The twigs were for protections, she said, and she liked to scare us with all the rotten ways there were to suffer. Gran told us winter nights grew cold because the season leaked air through the leafless trees, air slipped up through the loose grip of the branches and away, where we’d follow if we stepped past the porch. She sniffed about in her house robe, twig in her teeth. “You’ll whip up into the night and be gone forever.” We played checkers instead. Gran’s mind used to snap like a flag but after Mom went down-mountain to the city, to the coast, Gran sagged flat as the laundry. She took on a severe air of she-told-us-so, as though every silly story that came from that mind was plain truth, and she was simply waiting around for it to arrive and prove her right.
Maybe Gran got tired of the waiting. Once she got the bug for dying, all she did anymore was sleep. Sophie didn’t understand the sleeping and tugged at her spotty hand to come make a puzzle. Mom shuffled Sophie out of the room, but then whispered to Gran, “Get up. Make a damn puzzle with your granddaughter.” I tried and failed to think of any recent time when Mom had made a puzzle with Sophie. I wanted Gran to get up, too.
But Gran kept her eyes shut. “I want to die.” She said it slow. Her throat was dry as a burrow, and the words crawled out like moles to slump on the sheets beside her. “I. Want. To. Die.”
On the fourth day of Gran’s fast, with fat foamy clouds in a race to cross the horizon, Mom went down into Galen. Sophie had the puzzle pieces all spread out. The box showed a lighthouse. Sophie’s puzzle on the table showed globs of frothy color around the outside but the middle was still a garble, as though some great bite were taken. Mom stalked out to the road in a swarm of her own hair, hooking the gate-latch carefully as she went.
That afternoon brought the windstorm to burst against the mountain slope. By the time Mom came back wind cranked up the mountain so fierce she had to press the house door shut with both hands, as though some grim spirit were just behind her, set to follow her inside. That night, the night of the storm, was the night that brought us the stranger.
That afternoon brought the windstorm to burst against the mountain slope. By the time Mom came back wind cranked up the mountain so fierce she had to press the house door shut with both hands, as though some grim spirit were just behind her, set to follow her inside. That night, the night of the storm, was the night that brought us the stranger.
Mom swabbed liquid from a brown bottle onto the inside of Gran’s cheek and pressed at her fingernails. They stayed white a long time. I tried it on myself, ribbons of brown under the trim. She lifted one of Gran’s eyelids, then the other, then both at the same time. Gran’s pupils were shaky little nothings, and jumped like fleas across her face. She wasn’t awake and seemed hardly even asleep. Her eyes were bugs and her breath was a mole.
I made noodle soup for dinner. Sophie slurped hers from the spoon and got a little whip of soup on her nose. About once a minute I heard the gate crack. From the window, I watched it lull then crash into the post the first moment the wind turned a new direction. I ladled soup with a coffee mug, and in the last light of the short day we watched the gate swing, swing then slam.
Mom stood at the window holding herself around the ribs. “I thought I shut that.”
Worms crowded around the dirt step outside our door. I picked one up and flung it, like testing the doneness of noodles. I pushed another with my shoe and it rolled up in the mud. The air smelled mossy, the yard slick under my boot heels. I dragged gouges behind me. High-up, clouds screamed past. Unmowed grass raced under the fence line and the gate sailed around like a weapon wielded in panic. Up the slope and down, the heavy pines bent over then rose again, in the slow and ponderous way that they must do everything.
I hooked the gate latch and when I turned back to the house I caught Sophie through the window, lit in silence. She slumped alone at the table, and jumping light from the wood stove tossed orange and pink all over her face. She snapped a piece of her jigsaw apart and dropped it onto the floor. She snapped another piece and put it into her soup bowl. She snapped another piece and walked it over to the wood stove, cranked the door open and crouched to watch it swell in flame. She tugged a hair from the nape of her neck, held it in her hand, turned it over then brushed it off her fingers to reach up and tug out another. She didn’t look into the bedroom, where Mom sat all day to hold Gran’s feet and pedal blood through her lame legs. She didn’t look, but maybe heard the catch in Gran’s breath as her tongue sagged into her throat. We didn’t know it yet, but the stranger Isa was already on her way up the road. Sophie stood from the stove, shut the heavy door, and pulled the flue. Outside, the cold night thinned.
“I have come to help you,” Isa said again. She studied her palms, and behind her her own brown clothes loosened wet breath into the closening room.
“We here are well.” Mom stepped between Isa and Gran to shut Gran’s door.
“You have a dying woman in the bed.”
“She wants to die. It’s not what I want, or the kids, but it’s not ours to choose.”
Isa tilted her blank face to the ceiling. The fire illuminated the thin cords of her neck, the hollow of her throat. “The human body rarely wants to die, and the human soul, never. It’s a wicked thing that tricks the mind into thinking it wants to die.”
Mom opened her mouth but Sophie interrupted. “Help how?” She had got all the puzzle pieces turned upside down so only their cardboard backs showed, and she stacked them based on shape, their blind arrangements of knobs and notches. They rose in uneven towers.
“I want to tell you a story.” Isa nodded towards Sophie then closed her eyes. She tugged at her hem and hummed as she looked back and forth under her eyelids. Thin lids rippled then she opened them, and she looked at Sophie. “Did you know that badgers lived here before you?”
Mom pointed at the lady. “You can keep nonsense to yourself, or wait out the storm elsewhere.”
Isa looked up from where she sat at the rug. She made a twitchy motion with her hand. She wore no rings but the metal hoops on her wrist mingled up and down her arm. Mean wind tunneled behind the window glass. “You opened your door to me. You let me in.”
“And I will see you out in two beats of my heart.”
Mom talked like a novel. She talked like a character invented out of the sense-memory of chimney stacks and old silk. I looked out the window but saw no mountain no road no moon. Just us inside a room, doubled in the glass. Two Moms, two strangers, two sisters, and all the doors open and the night beyond the walls a vast amount of nothing at all.
Sophie got up from the table and sat on the rug with Isa. “I used to have a mouse named Bessie,” she told her.
Isa’s mouth went round. “Used to?”
“She got sick and I had to let her go.”
Isa tossed up her hands. The hoops on her wrist clacked. “How tragic! Tell me a story about this mouse.”
Mom interrupted her. “No stories.”
“Gran likes to tell stories, I said.
“And her stories were false. No mouse. No stories.”
“You should hear about Bessie,” I pointed to mom. “You should know.”
She slammed in the flue damper. “It’s my house.”
“It’s not,” I told her. “It’s not your house. It’s Gran’s.” From Gran’s room came a rough wail, a moan of something human but dried, dragged through sand. We all turned to Gran’s open door, stared into the dim room, while the wail creaked on then dissolved into coughing, then silence. Isa looked into her palms.
Mom leaned and showed me her teeth, like an animal, “You’re smarter than that.” She went back to Gran’s room. We all three sat in front of the fire. The room smelled like moss, and something spicy from Isa’s coat. Sophie’s cheeks pinked with heat. In the bedroom, Gran went quiet again.
After a bit, Isa said, “So your Gran likes to tell stories?”
I said she did, but that they weren’t true stories.
Isa said that even the false stories were true in some way, that’s why they stick around to get told again and again. “Tell me a false story, and I’ll tell you the truth in it.”
So I told her about Mud Dog. Gran used to say that Galen Lake had never risen or lowered the whole while she’d been alive. She claimed it to be deeper than anyone could measure, that it connected to the ocean through some evil tunnel. And next to the tunnel was Mud Dog, with his big open throat. She told us that Mud Dog’s appetite sucked every loose living creature down and away. Gran claimed everyone in town knew about Mud Dog and that’s why no one ever swam in the lake.
Isa pulled her knees up to her chest. She rocked back to look at the ceiling while she thought it over. “So the lake is his house. He wants company and welcomes you in but once inside he is protective and doesn’t want to let you go. Sound like anyone you know?”
Sophie said, “I think it’s just to tell you not to swim in the lake. Because the lake is dangerous.”
“Oh I know about the lake,” said Isa. “Do you want to hear my story?”
Mom came back in the room and gave Isa a hard look. She pointed to Sophie’s bedroom. “You can sleep there. I want you gone soon as you wake.”
Sophie dribbled spit on the stove but it just puddled on the greasy grate. I went into Gran’s room and Mom followed me in. The spread had fallen off and her nightie rose up on her legs. We stood there for a while looking at her swollen kneecaps, until Mom got in the bed and righted all the blankets around them. She worked one arm under Gran’s head, held it like a child’s. She sighed to me, “Shut the door when you go.” I looked at Gran’s eyes and thought of Mud Dog, pictured the soggy animal under its thin skin of water, fur adrift in the downsuck, pupils sharp with rust.
For a while I didn’t sleep. The long night herded wild hours through the dark, hands of branches clawing on the window glass. Sophie lay in front of the cold and broke-down fire, curled over tight as a bean. The moon cast pickets of light between the crowding clouds and into the room. I stared up through the window as branches and pinecones wheeled through the freed space of the empty night. Even through the wind I could hear the creek, and I listened to all that water going down-mountain, down to Galen Lake.
Sleep, when it came, came in dashes. After a while, a thin dawn crept into the yard and I filled the kettle for coffee. Sophie had got up in the night. She and her beddings were gone from the rug. Outside, over the ragged remains of the night’s storm, low light dragged vapor out of the rock hollows and branches and eaves and loosed chill drops into the stiff mud. Everywhere, the ground was filthy with forest.
The pipes clunked as wedges of ice freed inside and around the bends. My breath puffed around my face. I breathed clouds to the window light, and then I noticed the gate outside swinging loose. It sagged inward then back out, making visible the breath of the morning. A single set of footprints softened the spikey grass, across the shining yard, and out to the road. In places they were faint as a whisper, in others I saw the outline of Isa’s furry animal boots, the slight out-facing angle of her toes, the uneven weight of her narrow stride. I saw how careful she stepped across the frosty yard and back out to the road. In Sophie’s bed, where Isa had slept, the sheets were all pulled tight with the quilt snug under the pillows and folded down at the top. I paused at that: to take such care with the sheets, and leave the gate creaking wide in the nighttime.
I poured coffee for Mom, tea for Sophie, and toed into Gran’s room holding a mug in each hand. Mom leaned down into the pillow. She had two fingers on Gran’s neck, where a wide vein bounced in irregular beats. Gran’s mouth was cracked at the corners, and skin peeled up from the side of her nose. We counted her breaths, about one per minute, and each put on a noisy fight to rise up out of her throat. Gran’s eyes were shut. In the back of her mouth I saw all the black pebbles of her old bad teeth.
“Mom?” I asked.
Mom turned to me, her face limp as a sock.
“Mom. Where’s Sophie?”
wondered if Mud Dog could suck down thoughts from far away, if he could drag and gnaw at the vapory substance of souls, or if he was only interested in the soft bodies of know-nothing swimmers. I wondered if the airless nights held everyone safe indoors, or let hollow spirits pass through the hard body of winter. The stranger we’d let in. The gate she had left ajar on her way back to the lake, to the bottom of the world.
Marley Simmons Abril is a writer and teacher. Her work has appeared in Steel Toe Review, The Sonder Review, and others. Her short story “Good Neighbors” was nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Bellingham, WA with her husband, baby boy, and some chickens.