Read Online Celestial Inventories by Steve Rasnic Tem - Free Book Online Page A

older children stood around awkwardly, as if they were reluctant guests at some high school dance, snickering at the old folks’ sense of décor, and sense of what was important, but every now and then you would see them touch something on the wall and gasp, or read a letter pasted there and stand transfixed.
    The younger grandchildren were content to straddle our laps, constructing tiny bird’s nests in my wife’s grey hair, warrens for invisible rabbits in the multidimensional tangles of my beard. They seemed completely oblivious to their parents’ discomfort with the conversation.
    “So where will you go?” asked oldest son Jack, whom we’d named after the fairy tale, although we’d never told him so.
    “We’re still looking at places,” his mother said. “Our needs will be pretty simple. As simple as you could imagine, really.”
    I looked out at the crowd of them. Did we really have all these children? When had it happened? I suspected a few strangers had sneaked in.
    “Won’t you need some help with the moving, and afterwards?” Wilhelmina asked.
    “Help should always be appreciated, remember that children,” I said. A few of them laughed, which was the response I had wanted. But then very few of our children have understood my sense of humour.
    “What your father meant to say was that moving help won’t be necessary,” my wife said, interrupting. “As we said, we’re taking very little with us, so please grab anything you’d care to have. As for us, we think a simple life will be a nice change.”
    Annie, always our politest child, raised her hand.
    “Annie, honey, you’re thirty years old. You don’t need to raise your hand anymore,” I told her.
    “So what are you really telling us? Are we going to see you again?”
    “Well, of course you are,” I said. “Maybe not as often, or precisely when you want to, but you
will
see us. We’ll still be around, and just as before, just as now, you’ll
always
be our children.”
    ----
    We didn’t set a day, because rarely do you know when the right day will come along. We’d been looking for little signs for years, it seemed, but you never really know what little signs to look for.
    Then one day I was awakened early, sat up straight with eyes wide open, which I almost never do, looking around, listening intently for whatever might have awakened me.
    The first thing I noticed was the oddness of the light in the room. It had a vaguely autumnal feel even though it was the end of winter, which wasn’t as surprising as it might normally have been, what with the unusually warm temperatures we’d been having for this time of year.
    The second thing was the smell: orangeish or lemonish, but gone a little too far, like when the rot begins to set in.
    The third thing was the absence of my wife from our bed. Even though she always woke up before me, she always stayed in bed in order to ease my own transition from my always complicated dreams to standing up, attempting to move around.
    I dressed quickly and found her downstairs in the dining room. “Look,” she said. And I did.
    Every bit of our lives along the walls, hanging from the ceiling, spilt out onto the floors, had turned the exact same golden sepia shade, as if it had all been sprayed with some kind of preservative. “Look,” she repeated. “You can see it all beginning to wrinkle.”
    I’d actually thought that effect to be some distortion in my vision, for I had noticed it, too.
    “You know what you want to take?” she asked.
    “It’s all been ready for months,” I said. “I’ll be at the door in less than a minute.”
    I ran up the stairs, hearing the rapidly drying wooden steps crack and pop beneath my shoes. When I jerked open the closet door it seemed as if I was opening the door to the outside, on a crisp Fall day, Mr. Hopkins down the street is burning his leaves, and you can smell apples cooking from some anonymous kitchen. I brushed the fallen leaves from the small canvas