Read Online The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters by Timothy Schaffert - Free Book Online

on the wall. It was as if Lily knew her clock-winding would drop the women into quiet and hesitance, would turn them reflective, pondering what a young girl winding clocks might mean to their old lives. Above the thick ticking grown noisome in the room, Mrs. Beard said, “Mr. Beard thinks he’s finished his breakfast before I’ve even cooked it. He’s dressed for bed hours before he’s tired. He doesn’t even know a clock anymore.” As she spoke of how she was teaching him time again, her spotted and wrinkled fingers gracefully drew a clock in the air, creating a round face and the long and short hands, casting fragile shadows against the wall. But Mabel was anxious for old age; she admired the old women’s resignation and knowledge. She thought it must be a powerful thing to know for certain that you wouldn’t die young.
    When Mabel brought Lily her sandwich on a plate, Lily said, “Take it away.” She performed a lethargic puppet showfor herself with two raggedy puppets that normally hung from nails in the wall. “Fish,” Lily said in the shrill, disgusted voice of the puppet on her left hand, a sailor in a cap. The sailor lay a lazy kiss against the head of the other puppet, a Spanish senorita. Then Lily lowered her hands and let the puppets slip off to the floor.
    “I thought you said you were hungry,” Mabel said. “You have to eat.”
    Lily held her fat fingers in the air, pinching at the imagined lid of a pot, holding its handle, then pantomimed the pouring of tea. She smiled sweetly and mouthed polite conversation to the absent guests. She then expertly peeled a fictional orange.
    Annoyed by being left out of Lily’s silent party, Mabel began to noisily clear the table, stacking cups and saucers onto a tray. Bent at the back, she carried the tray to the kitchen. She happened to look out the window and saw people in the old Riordan house on the hill. One wall of the abandoned house had fallen away with the weight of the last heavy snow, and all its insides were exposed. There was nothing to see but the bare wood of walls and floors, the squares where doors and windows had been. But only a few days before, as Mabel had walked up the hill, examining in the palm of her hand the husk of a locust, she happened to glance up just as the sun shifted. The house filled, for only a second, with a sharp light, and shadows of things not there fell and moved.
    Mabel took the opera glasses from the windowsill and looked at the people in the Riordan house. They tiptoed overthe floor like walking across an icy pond. They bent, picked things up, put things in their pockets. Mabel hated that they found things to take; she’d been through the house several times and had found only the chipped enamel of a piano key. One woman even climbed the stairs to the second floor, something Mabel had been much too afraid to do. The woman appeared weightless and undisturbed walking across the weak wood planks of the floor that was barely there.
    Suddenly, Mabel worried that these women were birdwatchers, part of one of the many groups that passed through looking for cranes and herons and prairie chickens. She put the opera glasses in the pocket of her robe and headed for the front door, determined to go find her wounded crane before these women did. She wanted to be the one to care for it, to nurse it back into flight.
    A fire engine, as it wailed past, shook the road next to the shop, and the rows of empty perfume bottles and atomizers jingled against each other. At the kitchen window, Mabel saw the smoke rising from a neighboring field. In the last week, farmers had been burning the old stalks from their fields before plowing, and sometimes the wind, with a mean-spirited twist, would shift directions and send the flame somewhere unintended. Mabel already missed winter, missed breaking the brittle stumps of cornstalks beneath her heavy winter boots. In winter, when the wind blew and the snow on the plains broke like dust, she