Remifasolati

836 word fiction

Once there was a woman who moved into a cabin nestled in the bottom of a valley.

The broker advised that water would settle there at the foot of her door. She told the broker it did not matter; water always flowed to the lowest point and she would be no better. Besides, her husband was coming with sandbags and a boat to sail them out if need be.

The woman tended a garden and befriended her neighbors on either side of the valley. They traded grain for her ceramics, and during feasts she became champion of their card games. Drink was not hard to come by, so affection grew quickly between residents of the valley, and the woman’s sharp eyes and graceful neck earned her many a suitor.

The women of the valley gifted her jars of jam and baskets to get going. They advised her who to stay away from, which roads to take at night.

On a spring day the woman worked to uproot a bush along the front of her cabin. Its green buds had begun to open at the tips of the spidery branches. A tremulous voice called to her as she struck at the root.

At the foot of her property, by the mailbox, waited a boy of no more than twenty years. He explained his leaving home; his wanderings in the woods; the freezing nights. In exchange for food, he would take any work upon himself.

The woman noted his manners in spite of the trembling hunger. Although taller than herself, his length only pronounced his fear — of what she might do or say. A child.

She sat him down with cheese and bread while she finished the yard. After a bath he explained his flight from home as a shameful intolerance. She offered no correction.

When he hammered a shingle incorrectly or snuck an extra piece of bacon she reprimanded him as a foreman.

One night, a month into his stay, the young man rose carefully from the couch into her bed, placing a hand atop hers where she had it resting on her thigh. Without you I may have never known love, he said. In the young man she saw her old inconstant passions and declined him tenderly. She told him of the horrors he had yet to face and beautiful bride he would find. Besides, she said, my husband is coming with a cherry tree he has grown from infancy to consecrate our new home. In the morning she sent him away.

That summer she learned to make gin from cheap vodka and oranges she stole from the farmer’s market. She welcomed neighbors off the road for a glass and chat, so they might pass time in the long light of evening, their steel chairs close, angled out to either end of the valley.

How do you support yourself? asked the baker.

She waved her hand.

I don’t mean to pry.

No, it’s boring.

Well, said the baker, what causes you concern?

The woman thought, then said, that one day I’ll forget the difference between hot and cold and become immune to sensation. She propped her chin on her hand, leaning.

I fear spiders, said the baker.

You shouldn’t.

In the shade of the western corner of her cabin she set about making a new door frame, carved with creatures from another life: jackals, swallows, and hydras. She could not see the road but heard a truck stop in front of her cabin before winding away. And she could feel what had been left.

The man that arrived at the foot of that valley, at her door, was blind. He had lost the cherry tree grown from infancy; the boat had been traded for safe passage back.

The general store girl cooed, offering sympathies to the woman. She believed it a great love story, that his injury made him kind and wise. The woman carefully explained diminishment did not create character. Her husband was gone; she was learning a new man.

Yet in touch she found his signature unfaded.

And there were the chirps and melodies they made, pulled from work.

But by harvest he could not cook breakfast without admonishing where she had placed the salt. He could not recognize her warnings and amusement. She sent him away before the first frost. That winter she learned to bake bread, feeling the hardness of her heart as a thing she could knead.

When the valley thawed and the flood came to her door, the woman climbed to the roof of her cabin where she spent five nights, stranded. When she came down the cabin was no more and neighbors would not aide her. She gathered what shelter she could at the crest of a lake, newly soiled.

At night she woke to the pool aglow. A thousand fireflies waded over the disk. New leaves shook in the susurrate breeze of black folds. The woman felt an arc in her stomach and knew he had returned.

Romans

Aunt Jackie
Clarence Odbody
snakespearean
Theresa Snarski