Pew(34)

Annie leaned back into the window, and the blinds clattered.
I’m probably talking too much. They all say I talk too much. I know I shouldn’t but there’s so much that bothers me and everyone just keeps acting like it’s normal. But it doesn’t have to be normal. You probably just think this is stupid.
No, I said.
Well. You might be the only one who thinks so. I don’t know how anyone can stand this place. My mom said that saying you hate your hometown is the sign of a boring person who thinks they’re better than everyone else. And anyway this week is the worst of it—right before the festival. I already know about three different girls that— Well, it’s the worst for girls, I think. Everyone’s more worried about their houses or cars getting broken into, since everything gets forgiven at the festival and it all goes away. Anyway, most of the time the girls don’t even say anything about what happens to them because then they get into trouble for it … and anyway they’d just tell you to pray about it at the festival anyway, that there’s nothing they can do about it now …
We heard footsteps in the hall and Annie braced, looked toward the door.
It’s locked, she whispered, isn’t it?
I nodded.
I better go anyway. As she started to crawl back into the vent she’d come from, she turned to me again and whispered, Pew isn’t your real name, is it?
I shook my head.
Does anyone know what your true name is?
I didn’t know what to say.
Somebody does know your true name, don’t they?
I just kept sitting there, breathing in and out, running my fingers along the slick sides of the bathtub. Annie began to cry a little, silently, her face crumpled up and reddened. She slapped herself hard in the face, once, then twice, then once more.
Somebody should know, she said, then she slid herself back into the vent and crawled away, replacing the slatted cover from the inside.
Bye, she said, within the wall.
Alone again I felt a prickling sort of illness. I shut my eyes, flattened my body against the bottom of the tub, tried to hide myself into nothing the way snakes do when a storm is coming. I tried to remember what a damp field smells like in the morning, in that kind of morning before the true morning, those hours before the sun has risen and the earth feels like a lung. I tried to breathe in the way the field breathes then.
Several hard knocks at the door. Harold’s voice came from the other side—Pew, my friend?
A long pause.
It seems you’ve had quite enough time in the bathroom, my child. There’s some people down there in the living room that would like to say goodbye to you and it’s just not polite to keep them waiting so long.
I came to understand that I was not a field. I was not, today, just dirt and seed and grass. A field is a living thing. Fields began and ended. Every plant has a true name that no one had to give them. People were the end of something. The body is already dead.
If I need to, Harold said through laughter, I can pick the lock, but I don’t need to do that, now, do I?
People cannot be kept waiting. Sometimes one of us will hold the other by the neck. Sometimes one of us will hold the other by the neck and no one will do anything about it for many years, so many lifetimes of necks being held. I know what I am. The body is already dead.
Wouldn’t you like to walk out on your own accord?
All breath is taken and given through the throat. All air is borrowed. People cannot be kept waiting.



HILDA DROVE IN SILENCE. Whatever had made it possible for her to look into my eyes, it seemed, had now expired. There would be no more of that. She cleared her throat several times, trying and failing to fully clear it. I stared out the window and saw, every mile or so, a plain white sign with red type. The first one was beside a large, gnarled tree—
THE FESTIVAL

SAVES.

And sometime later—
FORGIVENESS:

FOR OR AGAINST?

And the last one, stuck crookedly in the grass of a highway median—
THE

FORGIVENESS FESTIVAL:

SOUL HEALER!

Harold—well, he’s very prominent. People respect him and when he gets going on something, well, he can be a little overactive. That’s all.
By the time we had arrived at her house, she had submerged into silence again. On the front porch a potted plant had somehow been knocked over.
Oh, Hilda said as she passed.
The plant was trying to grow toward the sun again, bending, trying. Soil spilled out through the cracked ceramic. Dark afternoon clouds crept into the sky, turned the house ghostly and gray. I could hear two different clocks ticking, each to its own count.
Hilda opened the door to the attic, and as I climbed the stairs, she said I was free to come down whenever I wanted, but that she and Steven had agreed that the attic door would be kept locked just to be safe and should I need to come downstairs I should just knock on the door as loudly as I could and she would come let me out and sit with me in the living room or the porch or wherever I would like to be. Her focus fell from me to the floor, to a wall, to a stair, to the door, to the knob in her hand, to the floor, briefly to me again, to a wall.
I knew I would not leave the attic. I nodded.
And it’s not that we think you’ve done anything wrong—it’s just that we don’t know what you’ve done. We just want to be careful.
She stood there quietly awhile, no longer breathing from the top of her lungs and no longer letting her focus drift from one place to another; it seemed she wasn’t breathing at all, that she wasn’t looking at anything.



I SAT BESIDE the attic window, waiting for night to come, for the light to leave us and for the fireflies to appear. It was somehow more important than ever that I see the fireflies hovering in the yard, the way they flashed and vanished and reappeared and vanished—that they could be and not be, be again and again not be.