Read Online Celestial Inventories by Steve Rasnic Tem - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Steve Rasnic Tem
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bag I had filled with a notebook, a pencil, some crackers (which are the best food for any occasion), and extra socks. I looked up at the clothes rod, the rusted metal, and nothing left hanging there but a tangle of brittle vines and the old baseball jacket I wore in high school. It hardly fit, but I pulled it on anyway, picked up the bag, and ran.
She stood by the front door smiling, wrapped in an old knit sweater coat with multicoloured squares on a chocolate-coloured background. “My mother knitted it for me in high school. It was all I could find intact, but I’ve always wanted to wear it again.”
“Something to drink?” I asked.
“Two bottles of water. Did you get what you needed?”
“
Everything
I need,” I replied. And we left that house where we’d lived almost forty years, raised children and more or less kept our peace, for the final time. Out on the street we felt the wind coming up, and turned back around.
What began as a few scattered bits leaving the roof, caught by the wind and drifting over the neighbour’s trees, gathered into a tide that reduced the roof to nothing, leaving the chimney exposed, until the chimney fell into itself, leaving a chimney-shaped hole in the sky. We held onto each other, then, as the walls appeared to detach themselves at the corners, flap like birds in pain, then twist and flutter, shaking, as the dry house chaff scattered, making a cloud so thick we couldn’t really see what was going on inside it, including what was happening to all our possessions, and then the cloud thinned, and the tiny bits drifted down, disappearing into the shrubbery which once hugged the sides of our home, and now hugged nothing.
We held hands for miles and for some parts of days thereafter, until our arthritic hands cramped, and we couldn’t hold on any more no matter how hard we tried. We drank the water and ate the crackers and I wrote nothing down, and after weeks of writing nothing I simply tore the sheets out of the notebook one by one and started pressing them against ground, and stone, the rough bark on trees, the back of a dog’s head, the unanchored sky one rainy afternoon. Some of that caused a mark to be made, much did not, but to me that was a satisfactory record of where we had been, and who we had been.
Eventually, our fingers no longer touched, and we lost the eyes we’d used to gaze at one another, and the tongues for telling each other, and the lips for tasting each other.
But we are not nothing. She is that faint smell in the air, that nonsensical whisper. I am the dust that settles into your clothes, that keeps your footprints as you wander across the world.
THE
WOODCARVER’S
SON
The knock was soft, but the fine wood Alejandro’s father had selected for their front door carried it well, so that the sound still had a fullness when it reached the back of the house where Alejandro had laid down to rest, like the sound a wooden bell might make, or like the now-and-again beating sound of the wooden heart of the house itself.
He padded the long way through the house, avoiding the room where his father wept. All day his father slept, or his father wept, but he would not speak. Not to Alejandro. Not to anyone.
The man at the front door was Señor Echevarría. He had a face of split timber. “Is there work today?” he asked.
Alejandro shook his head sadly. “I am sorry. Not today. My father . . . my father says not any day. But perhaps someday. But not today.”
Señor Echevarría nodded but did not leave. Alejandro was ashamed, thinking that Señor Echevarría must recognize his lie. Alejandro did not know why he lied, except that his father’s crying and sleeping embarrassed him. Sleep eased his father’s pain but did not cure it, even after all these months. And as the only one his age in the village, Alejandro felt neither
hombre
nor
chico
. He had no one to tell the truth to. He was alone.
“De verdad
,” Señor Echevarría said. “After my
She stood by the front door smiling, wrapped in an old knit sweater coat with multicoloured squares on a chocolate-coloured background. “My mother knitted it for me in high school. It was all I could find intact, but I’ve always wanted to wear it again.”
“Something to drink?” I asked.
“Two bottles of water. Did you get what you needed?”
“
Everything
I need,” I replied. And we left that house where we’d lived almost forty years, raised children and more or less kept our peace, for the final time. Out on the street we felt the wind coming up, and turned back around.
What began as a few scattered bits leaving the roof, caught by the wind and drifting over the neighbour’s trees, gathered into a tide that reduced the roof to nothing, leaving the chimney exposed, until the chimney fell into itself, leaving a chimney-shaped hole in the sky. We held onto each other, then, as the walls appeared to detach themselves at the corners, flap like birds in pain, then twist and flutter, shaking, as the dry house chaff scattered, making a cloud so thick we couldn’t really see what was going on inside it, including what was happening to all our possessions, and then the cloud thinned, and the tiny bits drifted down, disappearing into the shrubbery which once hugged the sides of our home, and now hugged nothing.
We held hands for miles and for some parts of days thereafter, until our arthritic hands cramped, and we couldn’t hold on any more no matter how hard we tried. We drank the water and ate the crackers and I wrote nothing down, and after weeks of writing nothing I simply tore the sheets out of the notebook one by one and started pressing them against ground, and stone, the rough bark on trees, the back of a dog’s head, the unanchored sky one rainy afternoon. Some of that caused a mark to be made, much did not, but to me that was a satisfactory record of where we had been, and who we had been.
Eventually, our fingers no longer touched, and we lost the eyes we’d used to gaze at one another, and the tongues for telling each other, and the lips for tasting each other.
But we are not nothing. She is that faint smell in the air, that nonsensical whisper. I am the dust that settles into your clothes, that keeps your footprints as you wander across the world.
THE
WOODCARVER’S
SON
The knock was soft, but the fine wood Alejandro’s father had selected for their front door carried it well, so that the sound still had a fullness when it reached the back of the house where Alejandro had laid down to rest, like the sound a wooden bell might make, or like the now-and-again beating sound of the wooden heart of the house itself.
He padded the long way through the house, avoiding the room where his father wept. All day his father slept, or his father wept, but he would not speak. Not to Alejandro. Not to anyone.
The man at the front door was Señor Echevarría. He had a face of split timber. “Is there work today?” he asked.
Alejandro shook his head sadly. “I am sorry. Not today. My father . . . my father says not any day. But perhaps someday. But not today.”
Señor Echevarría nodded but did not leave. Alejandro was ashamed, thinking that Señor Echevarría must recognize his lie. Alejandro did not know why he lied, except that his father’s crying and sleeping embarrassed him. Sleep eased his father’s pain but did not cure it, even after all these months. And as the only one his age in the village, Alejandro felt neither
hombre
nor
chico
. He had no one to tell the truth to. He was alone.
“De verdad
,” Señor Echevarría said. “After my
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