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Three Letters

Three Letters

It was autumn. Although still afternoon the journey had been spent peering at slowly moving red lights through clouds of condensing exhaust and the intermittent slip-slip of wipers. Now as she turned off the ignition darkness gathered silently around her. She walked head down, hood up, feeling plastic handles moulding themselves around her fingers, the carrier bag spinning one way then the next as it clipped against her leg. The pavement was thick with the slippery brown mulch of fallen leaves and the smell of bonfires wafted across the common. A thin mist clung around the streetlights producing a shifting yellow gas. Sounds were muffled and movements lethargic. Cars slipped slowly by on a film of dirty water. At her gate she delayed, unwilling to break the stillness with squeaking hinges; not yet teatime and the city was being put to sleep.

The terrace before her hugged the curve of the road tumbling erratically down the hill and into the gloom. Bending around the edges of her vision she was conscious of curtains being swished closed, stone faces bathed by the grey light of televisions, broken roof tiles, satellite dishes, bay windows, the whole higgledy-piggledy collection of guttering and skylights. For a moment her home was a stranger, a simple compartment in this huge connected structure.

She rattled the key into the lock, tilting it to the particular angle that would allow it to catch. She stepped inside, her hand brushing the light switch as she closed the door behind her. The softly lit warmth of the interior walls were a welcome contrast to the dark slimy surfaces of the outside. Two elderly neighbours warmed the house from the sides and soon she would hear the comforting noises of the boiler rousing itself into life.

She kept her mind occupied by these happy details of returning home as she walked along the hall and into the kitchen. She lifted the carrier bag onto the worktop and reached for the kettle. Standing in the centre of the room, still in her anorak, she listened to the sound of the water boil and felt the house adjust itself to her presence. Now she returned at all times of the day she sometimes sensed she had caught it unawares. What ghosts that had been running through rooms were now slipping reluctantly back into walls? While its inhabitants had moved the house stayed still, preserving pockets of time in dusty corners. The blue-tak tears on bedroom walls, a water-colour sun and stick man hiding behind a fitted wardrobe, a dent in a table, a crack in a mirror, were all passing moments etched into the physical world, like voices pressed into vinyl.

< 2 >

Steam began to rise vertically to the ceiling where it changed direction aware of the presence of some subtle draft (or draft of some subtle presence). Through the window she could see the outline of the narrow garden, the fuzzy grey shapes of a rusting climbing frame and overflowing compost heap. Along one side a scruffy fence lent drunkenly one way then the other, while a brutally straight line of six-foot high boards marked the other side of the territory. What further anti-cat measures (minefields, tripwires perhaps) lay waiting beyond? As if summoned by her thoughts Rahel, green eyes and a flicking tail, appeared on the window ledge, her silent meows making small circles of condensation. Smiling, she unlocked the door. The cat padded in, figures of eight around her feet represented by muddy paw prints on the kitchen floor. The kettle worked itself towards a crescendo, beads of perspiration appeared on its sides and it shook violently unable to contain the bubbling pressure inside. Abruptly it finished, sat back on the filament and turned itself off.

She reached up to the top cupboards for the coffee jar and bent down for those that contained the mugs. Here she paused, confused by the vast number of assorted cup, mugs and beakers that stared blankly back at her. Why did she have so many? Where had they come from? She sighed as she straightened pulling out a standard shaped mug with handle; colour - light blue; design - three letters emblazoned in gold, S U E.

She took off her coat and laid it over the back of the oak kitchen chair and sat down. She let her feet slip out of her shoes and raised them onto the fitted bench across the other side of the table. Above the bench were shelves supporting decorative plates in wire stands, a Charles and Diana mug (more mugs!), and a collection of photographs showing either madly grinning or defiantly sulky children (both on the verge of crying). As she looked the image of a growing family seemed to slowly recede to reveal the image of a shrinking woman.

< 3 >

There was the sudden sound of water flooding into a drain as somewhere nearby a plug was pulled from a sink, a toilet was flushed or maybe a washing machine emptied itself and she realised that her coffee had gone cold. She moved to the sink and ran the hot water. Staring out into darkness she listened to the succession of far-off bangs and shudders from the network of pipes. Bathed in yellow light hovering over the gloom of the garden she looked in at a woman repeatedly working a tea towel around the inside of a mug. Who was she? Why was she so miserable?

She shook herself and took out the plug. Slipped away again into nothing time (that time that flowed into the gaps between the things you did). Wouldn\t a wasted minute become a wasted hour, wasted hours become wasted days? Where could she be now if she hadn\t been doing, what? - making tea, sitting in traffic jams, reading the local paper, standing in a supermarket queue. Best avoided, the thought of her life draining into these moments.

She unpacked the carrier bag. She put away the milk, the orange, the biscuits and the cat food, then struggled to slide the two pizza\s into an already crowded freezer spraying tiny shards of ice across the floor. An overflowing collection of polythene bags scrunched inside other polythene bags in the bottom of a cupboard was her commitment to recycling. When it was opened a white plastic avalanche slid towards her. She threw in the latest addition and slammed the door. A lone bag made a break for freedom and buoyed by the swish of air it lifted across the room like a jellyfish. Two pairs of eyes followed its progress over the spice rack and breadboard until it was caught on a bottle of olive oil.

The oak bench was not just a foot rest. She had made this discovery during a rigorous cleaning session one New Year. Under the lip of the removable cushioned seat she had found a small catch, rusty enough to break two nails. Eventually it yielded and raised to reveal a dark, hollow chest. Despite a few moments when her heartbeat seemed to fill the house, it proved to contain nothing more exciting than a pile of old newspapers - more dirtiness to clean. It was, she decided, an ideal place to store tablecloths and tea towels, but steadily it began to swallow bedding, pillowcases and blankets of various sorts. Really, it was ridiculous to think that no one else was aware of its existence (was she the only one ever to change a bed, lay a table?) Still, she always thought of it as hers, and, when alone in the house, she opened it, she experienced a flush of childish excitement. She felt it rise now as her fingers fumbled beneath soft layers of folded cotton searching for the sharp cold of a shiny metal toffee tin.

< 4 >

She put the tin on the table. Inside lay a medal from the Polish Airforce; a commemorative coin; a pebble taken from Ilfracomb beach in 1978 (could she really remember the heavy heat of that day or did she need the proof of the pebble to tell her she had been there); a present bought but never given; and inside a neatly folded bag, three envelopes. She glanced around the room, from somewhere inside a wall a pipe clanked - the house clearing its throat - and took out the top envelope.

An antelope leapt across a colourful stamp. It looked startled as antelopes often do caught in the sights of the black postmark. The paper inside was thick and cream-coloured, it had a blue letterhead and the date in the top right hand corner was July 2000. As she let her eyes wander over the page she noticed it was just a little crumpled, stiff in places, as if it had been wetted then dried.

*

This must be something of a surprise. If, that is, this letter gets to you. I remembered your address, of course, but then it suddenly struck me that maybe you had moved and I didn\t know and anyway the post round here isn\t exactly reliable. So perhaps I am only writing a letter to myself.

Really now that I\ve started I can\t think what it was I wanted to say. I think it was just the act of writing that was important, just to feel as if I was still in contact with things, although I guess a blank piece of paper in an envelope would have seemed a little strange.

I\ve really no need to ask how things are with you. It all seems to have worked out pretty much as you planned. But still I hope you are both healthy and happy.

I am afraid I\ve done nothing very exciting to tell you about. Here is just an endless succession of long boring tasks, and then there\s the heat and the clouds of flies that rise from the river and make everything twice as hard. But this evening as I washed and dried my clothes suddenly there was this feeling of satisfaction. Strange, five months of toil and worry then calm descends as welcome and unexpected as an ice-cream van clattering through the bush.

< 5 >

Maybe that\s why I am writing this letter. Perhaps it\s thinking about England in the summer, perhaps it\s the sounds of the river at night but my mind wandered back to the place of long afternoons, listening to Pink Moon and Lay Lady Lay. Can you still find a way back to the taste of cheap wine, the feel of grass between your fingers and a world that was all shimmering reflections?

All those people disappeared into the world. How would they be recognised now - perhaps only by the sound of their laughter?

I\m afraid I once damaged the environment in your name and took a penknife to the willow we used to sit by. I can remember wondering if the bark would ever grow back. If you ever find yourself driving past one weekend . . . Well perhaps not, it\s probably so sadly different. But I know your name will still be there, carved in the memory of a tree.

*

She re-folded the letter and tapped it several times against her top lip. From the hall the clock calling out the quarter hour, then a moment of stillness - time stalling - before, faintly, the clock in her study responded.

She took out the next envelope. While her fingers searched for the flap she looked at the Queen\s silver silhouette. The letter was written on paper so white and thin that as her gaze fell across it she saw it as a shade of blue. The date was April 1976.

*

Do I remember that September afternoon when I first met you? Is it possible to remember the slide into sleep or the hypnotist\s fingers on your eyelids? I only know that it happened because at some stage I awoke.

Some things are clear, the lucid fragments of a dream, a conversation over the phone one Easter. We both felt down because I was working in a stuffy shop and you in a sorting office. I hated it and asked you how it was that time moved so slowly. It\s okay, you said, it doesn\t matter, because it will end and time passed is all the same, and anyway, in the end it\s not time that you\re left with.

< 6 >

You told me to go look for happiness and bring some back when I found it. But you can\t bank happiness. You can\t keep it for when you need it and you cannot give to someone else simply by having it yourself.

I thought I would be content to watch the river flow past and drift away on the scent of water lilies. I watched days become nights and nights gently give way to days, believing I was shedding my cares when really I was storing regrets. Now I know that reading is dreaming, that dreaming is sleeping and thought inaction. When I wake I find that all I have left is thoughts of you.

*

The noise of the cat jumping clumsily onto her lap, the feeling of her pressing up and down with alternate paws, claws snagging loops of cotton.

This time the silhouette is not the Queen\s but that of Nehru, a white head against an orange background. The stamp is stuck on at an odd angle (but still stuck after all this time!) and he stares down at the scraggly lines of a familiar address. The letter itself is written on a school child\s lined paper, as her eyes run down the page they linger on the date, Nov. 1968 and the dappling of yellow blotches. What were they? Had they always been there?

*

I still can\t believe you decided to go. Why go back to the grey, the dirt, the noise, the rush? There is a lifetime to do those things. I know you chase that dream of yours, but the dream is so sweetly deferred here. Here I feel as if I am absorbing the sunshine and serenity.

Since you left we moved further east where the earth here has a reddish tinge and so does the food. Today we met a group of Americans. We got a ride on the roof of their van and helped them collect firewood. They say there is an old man who sells the beads you wanted from the front of his hut, and eight miles of white sand.

< 7 >

I am writing this in a flickering of orange and blackness. This is the best time, talking and reading, the world melting away into words, although sometimes a phrase is so beautiful I have to walk around a little just to let them settle in. One of these made me think of you. \Do that which makes you happy to do, and you will do right.\

*

The freezer\s cooling mechanism rattled, then fell silent, and she realised that she hadn\t been aware of the noise it was making. In its absence the air in the house seemed to hang with that same question; how would her life have been if she had managed to send just one of them? But the air received no answers and went back to its lazy circulation.

In time she would fold the letter away and place it back in the envelope, place the envelopes back into the bag, the bag back into the tin and the tin into the trunk. She would cover it with layers of cloth and place down the seat and lock the catch. But now she just sat for a moment, the noise of the cat\s contented breathing filling the house

نویسنده: رضا سمرقندی مطلق

 

The Backward Fall

The Backward Fall

"Dad?" she says. "I swear, I can\t remember the words to my own songs." She is sixty-two and sitting on the edge of the couch, her old acoustic guitar perched on her knee.

Her husband of forty-seven years walks into the living room from the kitchen. "What\s that, Mom?" he says. For decades, ever since they had their third child together, he has called her Mom and she has called him Dad.

"I can\t remember how the second verse starts."

"Well, what are you singing?"

"You must be ignoring me. I\ve been trying to sing the same song for the last twenty minutes."

George, her husband, looks up at the ceiling. "Well, let\s see," he says, rubbing the gray stubble of his beard. "Picking Flowers in the Rain?"

She smiles and strums the guitar with a flourish. "Lucky guess."

"The second verse is when it starts to rain. Something about drops on the petals, I believe."

"Of course." She nods her head once. "How could I have forgotten that?"

She begins to play again, simple chords on a wooden guitar, and sings a song she wrote when she was much younger. It is the story of two lovers who walk in a field of wildflowers. A warm rain begins to fall, and instead of running for shelter, they pick flowers together and realize they are in love.

*

"Dad?" she says. She is sixty-four. "Will you get in that closet by the door and …"

"What\s that, Mom?" he says. He is instantly on his feet, poised to do her bidding. "What do you want me to do?"

He sees the look on her face and lowers himself back into his chair. He hates that look, although he sees it so often it has become his old, evil friend. It is a look of confusion, one of bewildered fear.

< 2 >

"I forgot what I wanted." She shakes her head, settles back into her own chair.

"That\s all right. It\ll come to you."

She stares straight ahead. Their two recliners are set up in front of the television, but she rarely watches anymore. After a few moments, she turns her head to him. "What are we going to do when I can\t remember anything?"

"The doctors said it might not get any worse. You know that."

"But what if it does? What if one day I wake up and I\ve forgotten everything?"

He reaches across the small table between them and pats her hand. "Then I\ll just remind you of everything."

She smiles at this and the evil look fades away. Above the television is a mantle full of pictures. Her entire family, from her grandparents to her own great-grandchildren, rest on that mantle. She ignores the television and stares at the pictures, even though they are too far away to really see. After a few minutes, she says, "My feet are cold. Will you get me the blanket out of the closet by the door?"

*

"Did you fill up the tank like I told you?" she asks. She is sixty-five. She is also forty-eight. "Once we get on the road, I don\t want to have to stop for gas."

He looks at her for a moment, bobs his head, and turns back to the television.

"Aren\t you going to answer me?"

"I don\t even know what you\re talking about, Mom."

"The tank. Did you fill up the tank?"

Sighing, he mutes the program he is watching about ancient people in Peru. He has always wanted to see the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu. Several years ago, he embraced the fact that he will never go. "Why would I fill up the car? We never go anywhere but to the grocery store once a week."

< 3 >

She laughs and shakes her head. "You can be so dull sometimes. The Grand Canyon!"

"The Grand Canyon?"

"We\re leaving tomorrow."

"Mom, we went to the Grand Canyon over fifteen years ago. Don\t you remember?"

She raises a finger to correct him, pauses, looks off into nowhere with her eyes unfocused. The finger moves to her bottom lip. "But, I …"

He watches her for a time as her face voids of all emotion, all evidence of thought. He thinks of the Grand Canyon, which they visited shortly after he retired from the factory on disability. On his first day without a job, he cashed in almost all their chips and bought a motor home. They drove it all over the country – but first, to the Grand Canyon. They called it The Big Adventure, their three year jaunt from one ocean to the other and back again. They felt so young during that time.

He un-mutes his program and, like he does every minute of every day, tries to breathe through the pounding of his heart.

"I heard they have mules you can ride down into the canyon," she says. "You think that\s true?"

Her hand is resting on the table between them. He reaches over and grasps it. In his mind\s eye he sees her body rocking forward and back as the mule traverses the rocky trail, her reddish-gray hair lit from behind by the desert sun.

"I\m sure of it," he says.

*

A hand on his shoulder shakes him from sleep. He props himself up in bed and looks at the clock. Nearly four in the morning. "What is it, Mom? What\s wrong?"

"I need to tell you something." She is sixty-seven. She is thirty-one.

He sits up and turns on the lamp.

"Wendell Thurber kissed me on the mouth today," she says.

< 4 >

"Wendell Thurber?"

"We\ve been taking lunch together quite a bit lately and today he kissed me." She lowers her eyes to the blanket. "He did it before I even knew what was happening."

George remembers this conversation. It was years and years ago, during a time when she worked at the factory for several months to help save for their first real house. He stares at her but says nothing.

"Here\s the thing, George," she says. "Things haven\t been right with us for a long time. You don\t seem to appreciate me anymore."

"I appreciate you."

"You don\t act like it."

At the time, he hadn\t acted like it. For some reason, he\d fallen into a pattern of ignoring her, of taking her for granted, without even realizing he was doing it. This was the conversation when she had called him out.

"I\ve had a crush on Wendell Thurber for awhile," she says. "Today, he showed me that he feels the same way." She clutches the blanket to her. "I\m telling you this because I love you. I just want you to know that there are other men out there who might treat me like I deserve to be treated."

It was quite a chance she took. He could have gotten angry, called her a whore. He could have left. She bet their lives together on his reaction to a kiss from another man. And it worked. Instead of getting angry, he held her in his arms. He changed. He started being nice to her again.

And then a wonderful thing happened. The more he was kind to her, and did things just to make her happy, the more she did the same thing for him in return. Soon, it was like a contest to see who could be the best spouse, who could give the most love.

Smiling, he draws her into his arms. "I\ll change," he says. "I promise."

< 5 >

"What are you talking about?" she says.

He looks down and sees that her eyes are fixed on the clock.

"It\s four in the morning," she says. "What are you doing up?"

"I … couldn\t sleep."

"Well, turn off the light and try harder." She lies back and turns roughly onto her side.

He looks at her for a long moment. Then he turns off the lamp and closes his stinging eyes to the dark.

*

"I know you stole my ring," she says. "Where is it?" Her eyes are narrow but full of fire. She is twenty-three and sixty-eight.

"I don\t know where it is, Mom." He is standing in the kitchen, pebbles of broken glass from the coffee pot all around his bare feet.

"You\re a liar."

"You must have hid it again. Just calm down and we\ll go look for it."

She roars, a sound he did not think she was capable of making, and picks up the fruit bowl.

Pulling his arms up over his face, he says, "Please don\t throw anything else at me, Mom."

"Stop calling me that! I\m not your mother. You\re just a dirty old man."

"Don\t you recognize me? It\s me, George."

She slams the bowl back to the counter, hard enough to crack it. "You\re not my George. You\re an old man. You\ve got me trapped here. You stole all my money, and now you took my wedding ring."

"That\s not true."

She says nothing for a moment, breathing hard.

"I gave you that ring," he says. "I wouldn\t ever take it away from you."

< 6 >

She breathes faster, nearly gasping. Tears ring her eyes and that scrapes at his heart more than anything else.

"Please," he says.

Suddenly, she turns and runs out of the kitchen. He hears the slam of the front screen door, and with thoughts of her in the street, missing, hurt, he steps across the broken glass and runs after her. He has not run so hard in years. His heart feels large, bloated in his chest. He brings her down in the mud by the road, his twisted fingers, gnarled by arthritis, pulling at her nightgown. She slaps his face, pounds his chest. He only has the strength to hold her where she is, writhing in the cold mud.

Soon she ceases thrashing. Her body curls and shakes. He coaxes her to stand and then walk back to the house. When the warm water of the shower is running, he stands in the tub next to her and moves her beneath the spray. The mud rolls from her white hair and her white skin and mixes with the blood that spins in pink spirals from his feet.

*

She is sixteen. The old man is staring at her again, but she ignores it as she always does. She has more important things to think about than the nervous, always-crying old man.

George is coming today. She knows he is coming to ask if he can court her. He courted her sister for a few weeks, but that went nowhere. Her sister is pretty, but George couldn\t stop looking over his shoulder at the younger girl with long, dark hair. Today, he is coming for her.

She steps out onto the front porch. A dirt path trails away from her door, down the hill into the holler, and then around a bend where it disappears into a cove of pines. On the other side of those pines is the wooden bridge that spans the Sandy River and then the railroad tracks.

She turns her head and sees that the old man is out on the porch now, sitting with his hands crossed in his lap.

< 7 >

"What do you want?" she says to him.

Raising his hands in innocence, he replies, "Why, nothing, Mom. I\m just watching the TV."

The old man is senile. She hardly understands a thing he says.

She turns back to the path. And there he is, emerging from the pines, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt draped loosely over his thin but sturdy frame. He walks with an easy gait, a little bowlegged, as he makes the bend and then lowers his head for the trek up the long hill. After a time, he looks up and she waves. He acknowledges only with a dip of his head. This is a man too proud to wave, but not too proud to pick a bouquet of wildflowers which she now sees clutched in one of his fists. Those flowers make her smile, and in the back of her mind the words to a song begin to form. She knows without the slightest of doubts that this is the man she will love for the rest of her life.

"Who are you waving at, Mom?" the old man says.

"My husband," she says.

"Well, I\m right over here. You\re waving at the wall."

The poor old man. He is senile, but kind. She turns and waves to him.

Lifting his hand in return, he says, "Hello, darling."

*

The faces are all around her, hovering. She cannot move, but she can watch them. The faces have no names. Within her, there are no memories because she is an infant. She has a vague sense that something has been stripped from her, torn away against her will, but this does not anger her. The faces bring her comfort. For even though they have no names, she knows that they love her, and that she loves them in return.

She feels herself breathe. Slowly. In and out.

The faces eclipse her vision, one at a time. Unknown words fall from lips. Tears fall from sad eyes. She breathes in each face and it soothes her. Last is a face that feels familiar. Its shape is familiar – its gritty texture as a cheek presses against her cheek. Familiar lips touch her forehead. She watches this face and realizes that while all information has been stripped away, emotion has remained. Untouched.

< 8 >

The face fills her with security, and she finds she has the strength to fall backward one last time.

*

She is in the womb, surrounded by warm water. In the water, there is no need to breathe. So she stops. Her eyes slide closed.

She sees George in front of her. He is far away, but he has made the bend. She knows they won\t be together for some time, but that is fine. His head is bent down and he has begun the climb up the long hill

نویسنده: رضا سمرقندی مطلق


Appearance

Appearance

It was during the first snowstorm of the new year. The color green was something you saw in pictures tacked to the wall or in a memory from what felt like years ago. I was living alone in a studio apartment in a shitty section of west Cleveland. Everything was the same color in that neighborhood, even in the summer. It was the kind of dirty grey that gets swept up into the air of unfinished basements and cold storage warehouses. There were no stairs to get to my apartment. I was as far down as you can get without going under. I slept in the same room as the oven, but I liked the smallness of it. When I was young my sister and I used to zip each other into suitcases. We would drag the suitcases up and down the stairs, and all around the living room, laughing hysterically.

That first morning I wrapped a scarf around my neck and lit the stove. I tripped over my shoes on my way to the sink to fill the pot. I looked down at them accusingly, as if anyone but me could have put them there. I looked up after kicking them across the room and that was when I saw him for the first time. I wouldn"t find out until later that he had been there for weeks. Inches away from me as I slept. An arm"s reach as I showered and dressed each morning. He sat with me while I overcooked my eggs and searched the internet for a cat to adopt, each time deciding against it because I could imagine it snowballing into two or three until I became one of those women.

The outside world that day, and every day since I had been living there, was a white swirling mixture of ground and sky. Set against the bright seamless backdrop was the outline of a man. He was fading in and out with each gust of wind, like a Polaroid gone backwards. But I saw him. I saw the tip of one of his pink fingers poking out of a hole in his glove. His hands were up against his mouth which was covered in a thick dark beard and his breath came in a long slow billow of white smoke, like the mouth of a gutter under a frozen street. His hood was pulled up over his head which made his eyes ever brighter in the shadow. I couldn"t tell what color they were, but they seemed to have a reflection inside them like the round outline of a flashbulb in the eye of a magazine model. I didn"t scream. I felt nothing like adrenaline, or dread. Or that feeling when your heart beats so fast it makes you want to throw up. Nothing like that happened. If someone told me that they saw a strange man staring at them through their window I would have expected to hear them say, "And then I screamed and dropped my glass and it shattered and I ran to the phone and dialed 911 and then I ran to my front door and pulled the deadbolt across and then I hid in the bathroom with the door closed and I couldn"t stop shaking." But I didn"t do any of that. I stood completely still as if someone was holding me there, and I watched as the man I saw so clearly disappeared into the endless white.

< 2 >

There was nothing in my apartment that anyone would want. My possessions were piled in and out of boxes and I didn"t even own a real bed. I had a mattress on the floor that tripled as a couch and dining room table. I did own a laptop but I took it with me to work. I didn"t own a TV, or a toaster oven, or even a decent pair of shoes. I just decided that since there was nothing for him to steal, and I was sure he figured that out if he took a good look, that I would go on about my day despite his strange appearance outside my window. It felt less like a decision to ignore it, and more like it didn"t happen at all. Or like it happens all the time. And that is exactly how it ended up. Each morning while I boiled water and ladled my mug into the steaming pot, I saw him. I didn"t own a tea kettle either. I didn"t see why people spent money on things like that when they could function perfectly well without them. But anyway, each night when I came home from work and my apartment was dark and quiet and anyone would think that I should be scared, I wasn"t. There was no one waiting for me behind the shower curtain. Nothing was ever out of place. There were never any footprints circling my apartment, or scratch marks around my doorknob. I came and went peacefully and each morning I shared a moment with a stranger whose eye brows curled up like a puppy and whose fingers were always bent across his mouth.

It went on for about a week that way. I continued to start my car ten minutes early with the keys dangling in the ignition, so it could thaw. I guess in hindsight that was a pretty stupid thing to do in west Cleveland anyway, random man or not. But I mean I just lived my life normally, with the exception of my gloomy window friend stopping by more and more often. Once while I was watching TV late at night, something caught my eye at the window. Of course it was him. I just kept on eating my popcorn until I was full and there was still half a bowl left. I hated to waste food, and I always felt bad for the little birds that hopped over the snow, and wondered what the hell they ate in this neighborhood at twelve below. So sometimes I would throw food outside for them. Or for the squirrels. So I went to the window. I had never really…confronted the man. I stayed a room"s length away from him as he peered at me sadly. But that night I guess I got brave. I got up and saw his outline like the moon must have been fat and shining right behind him, casting a line of white around his face. My eyes went to the top of the window to unhook the lock, and when they returned to him there was only the snow. He had been erased by its pale hand. I put my face into the cold, that kind of cold that feels more like fire than ice, and I looked for him. The snow was covered in a layer of glass. I threw the leftover popcorn and it rolled like dice across the ground. There were no signs of his tracks. I noticed, as I pulled the window back down, that there was no moon that night.

< 3 >

The next morning I saw the white grey billows of exhaust fumes pouring out of a piece of shit station wagon in front of my apartment. I saw the woman"s eyes, and they were glossy and dull. I had seen her baby basset hound eyebrows before, on the man at my window. She just stared at the door as if she was waiting for someone to come out. I came out. She drove away.

It happened that way three times. Not all at once, but spread so far out across two weeks that I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn"t a déjà vu, and that yes, this had really happened before. The fourth time I decided had to be different. Something about her felt so much like the man at my window, but maybe it was just her coming and going. And her staring. And those eyebrows arching up. But her hands were not covering her mouth; they were white and exposed even in this weather, and they were gripping the steering wheel. So I could see that her lips were moving tightly against each other, and on top of each other, pulling in and out of her mouth. This fourth time she didn"t drive away when I walked out onto the ice. I stood waiting for her to do it; to drive away as she always had. But she just looked ahead at the road, and then back into my face. Then I saw her hand move to the door, and the window rolled down. I walked towards her casually, not like someone who had seen her on three previous mornings, but like someone who was going to ask her if she needed directions. Or if she was alright. So I did ask her that, because I wasn"t sure what else to say.

The wind stole the words and spread them out across the trees and the pavement and the kicked over silver trash cans. She said nothing. She looked like she might drive away again. She put her hands back on the wheel and looked straight ahead. But then she turned and looked past me at my apartment. I looked back then too, like maybe I was missing something. She was looking at the right side of the house, at the space between it and the neighbor"s fence, which was all of four feet. It was the space where I saw my window friend each morning standing, waiting to watch me curse at my hair for making me late.

< 4 >

"Are you looking for him?" I asked. Feeling as soon as I said it, the longing to take it back. I wasn"t sure what I would say if she asked "Who?" Oh, just that man who stares in my window every day. The one who for all I know could be a serial killer casing out his next victim. I know that"s what people would think if I told them. But it didn"t feel like that at all.

But she didn"t ask me who, she didn"t say anything for about a minute, she just stared blankly back and forth between me and the apartment, and I knew that I would be late for work again. She looked like she was about to say something, her mouth kept moving and tears starting falling into it from her eyes. I remembered the landlord speaking to me in broken English, telling me how grateful he was that he didn"t need to help me carry furniture. I remembered him telling me that a couple had lived there before me. And he kept saying something in Spanish that sounded like "tragic." And he kept shaking his head.

"Do you need help?" I asked, coming a little closer to the window. She just kept crying, harder now. I squeezed my cell phone for the time and saw that I was still early. I always turned my car on too soon, and by the time I got inside it the snow was pouring from the roof like rain.

"You can come inside and we can have some tea if you want." I said, imagining myself using a soup spoon to dish her out a ration of hot water.

"Or maybe you just want to talk? Is that why you keep coming here?" I just kept talking. I didn"t know what else to do with her.

"What"s your name? I just moved here a few weeks ago, actually I guess it"s been more than a month. I don"t know anyone. I work downtown at a magazine. I do graphic design." She started to calm down a little and looked at me.

< 5 >

"Amy," she said quietly.

"Hey Amy," I said, a little too cheerfully. "I"m Ellen. Is this where you used to live?" I said, pointing back at my little faded blue apartment and the trees, and the trash cans that were glued to the sidewalk now from all the ice. She stared at the apartment and nodded at it, as if it had asked her the question.

"Well, did you want to come in for a little while? I can"t stay long, I do have to go soon, but you can come in for a few minutes if you want. I know when I moved from my first house I always wanted to go back and see what they did to my old room. See if they painted it a different color or anything. I didn"t paint anything yet. Maybe I will in the summer." I smiled at her, and she smiled back slowly, as if her face had forgotten which muscles it took to pull up the chapped corners of her mouth. She stared at the house, and then at me and then back at the house again, and without saying anything she unlocked her seat belt and got out of the car. We were standing there in the middle of the frozen street, her car was still running and dripping fluid, making a little puddle that was curling and flowing over the cracks in the ice and the dirty solid snow that was pushed up onto the curb.

"Did you want to…?" I motioned to the keys hanging in the ignition. It was alright for me to leave my car running, but if hers got stolen I would feel pretty terrible.

"Oh, yeah, thanks," she said softly. I watched her lean into her car and shut it off, pull the keys out and put them in the pocket of her coat. When she turned to face me again I smiled a sort of awkward, ok right this way, kind of smile, and turned to walk to the apartment. She followed me hesitantly and I heard her take in a deep breath. The cold air must have stung her lungs because she started coughing.

< 6 >

"You ok?" I said, turning to look at her over my shoulder as I opened the door and walked in. She just nodded, and I saw her eyebrows start to go higher, and her lips start to pull into her mouth. I wasn"t sure if this was such a great idea after all. What was I supposed to do with some strange sobbing woman? I remembered that I didn"t have anywhere for her to sit, and it felt like an even worse idea. I took in a deep breath of the frozen air as we walked into the apartment.

She was my first guest and I was suddenly a little self conscious about my housekeeping. I scooped up the cold soggy tea bags from the counter and threw them in the trash, and moved a few things around so I didn"t look like a slob.

"Do you want some tea? Or hot chocolate maybe? I don"t have a coffee maker." I grabbed two mugs before she could answer, refilled the pot that was on the stove, and started it to boil. She didn"t say anything, and I looked behind me to see her standing in what I guess had been her living room, looking around the apartment like Dorothy when she came out of her little spinning cabin.

"I think I feel like some hot chocolate," I said, trying to break her from her daze. She stared at me as if she had forgotten where she was. "Sure," she said finally.

I attempted small talk, mostly to myself, while the water boiled. I asked her questions and got a nod here and there. Finally I had two cups of hot chocolate and I stirred at them violently trying to get the lumps out.

"I wish I had some of those tiny marshmallows. They"re fun," I said, smiling awkwardly as I handed her the mug. It was from some rest stop in the Redwood Forrest, Paul Bunyan and his big blue Ox. I wished I would have noticed and given her the one with the Dalmatian instead. That would have seemed a little less awkward. My mom sent it to me because when I was little I loved Dalmatians. I tried to explain to her that, thanks to Disney, lots of little kids liked Dalmatians and that the phase was over, but she still kept sending me mugs and birthday cards with black spots.

< 7 >

"I guess you could sit…on my bed if you want? I"m sorry, that"s pretty creepy but I don"t have any chairs yet." I looked around at the empty walls and the posters rolled up on the floor and told myself I would hang them up tonight. But I knew I wouldn"t. She walked over to my bed and sat down on the corner. I pulled up a box full of books and sat down on it. I sipped at the hot chocolate and got a big chunk of powder. I hoped I had stirred hers a little better.

"So, you lived here before me?" I asked quietly. Hoping not to start another round of hysterics; she had finally seemed to calm down.

"Yes."

"Did you live alone?" I squeezed the hot mug, already feeling like I knew the answer. She must have been part of the couple the landlord attempted to gossip with me about. Maybe it was a really bad breakup. Maybe he was still looking for her, still stalking her. I thought of the man who I guess was stalking me. But he didn"t seem like he would hurt anybody. He was too sad, too cold and lonely.

"No," she said, and then she breathed into the steaming mug, and I waited, hoping that maybe she would tell me her story so that I didn"t ask the wrong question and make her cry.

"I lived with my fiancé, Eric. He was a musician." She tried smiling. "We had rugs and towels hanging all over the walls," - she pointed to the tiny holes, the ones I never noticed - "and his friends would come over and practice."

"Band practice in this place? That must have been crazy." She smiled bigger now. I was sure she was transporting herself back there, and I pictured four or five guys with guitars huddled around the bed where she sat and listened, maybe a drummer with his chair stuck inside the bathroom. She stopped talking and stared down into her mug. We sat in silence and then my eyes went to the window. He was back.

< 8 >

Amy noticed the way I looked at the window suddenly, and she looked too, but nothing happened. She didn"t see him. He walked closer to the window and cupped his hands around his face to peer inside. Then he looked sadder than he ever had. His cheeks pulled up and his forehead wrinkled like an old man. It looked like he was shaking. He put his palms flat on the window and I could see what looked like frost forming where the tips of his fingers touched the glass. I realized in that moment, what I knew I couldn"t say out loud. Either I had a tumor growing in my brain that was making me see this man that she couldn"t, or he was a ghost. He was her ghost. Her fiance"s ghost.

"Amy, what happened to him? To Eric." I halfway hoped she would say, "What do you mean? He"s at work." But then that would mean that I had a tumor, and I couldn"t afford a tumor. I didn"t have health insurance.

But she didn"t say that. She just looked at me as if she didn"t care how I knew, or what I knew. As if I wasn"t even there. She stared into the air and her mind went somewhere else again. This time it wasn"t somewhere happy at all.

"He killed himself. Right over there." She pointed to the cramped bathroom. The yellow tiles. I pictured the man at the window, staring into the tiny mirror over the sink, with a gun inside his mouth. I thought about what questions were appropriate, if any. And what do you ask first? Why or how? I guess how was the less complicated one so I went with that.

"Pills. He swallowed the whole cabinet full. I found him lying on the floor all curled up." She stopped and squeezed her eyes shut hard. I guess she was seeing it again. Seeing him. I looked at the window and he was squeezing his eyes shut too.

"What was he like?" I tried changing the subject a little. I stared out the window at him as she spoke.

< 9 >

"He was," she paused, "quiet. I never knew what he was going through. In his head. He just wouldn"t tell me. He lost his job and they kicked him out of the band. They said they didn"t need three guitar players, they said they looked stupid on stage with that many people. My parents never liked him. They didn"t want us to get married. They said he looked like he belonged in a homeless shelter. But he loved that beard. I loved it..." She trailed off and looked down at her shoes, which were making a puddle on the wood floor.

"I"m sorry, I don"t know why I keep coming here. I just feel close to him here I guess. I never got to say goodbye." She sighed and looked around at the empty walls. I was sure now that the man at the window was dead. That he was Eric. That he was coming here for her. I guess it didn"t sound as crazy to me as it should have.

"I think he"s been coming here too." I said, bracing myself in case she flipped out. She didn"t. She just stared at me and squinted her eyes like she was trying to read the fine print across my face.

"Someone"s been coming to the window. I thought maybe he was homeless or, I"m not sure what I thought. But maybe it"s him. He"s there right now actually." I expected him to disappear as soon as she turned her head to look out the window, but he didn"t. He stared into her eyes. She turned back to me.

"There?" she said, confused, pointing to the frozen glass.

"Yeah. He"s looking at you. He seems really upset. Maybe he didn"t mean to do it." I wasn"t sure what I was doing. Being an interpreter for the dead? She looked at me at first like I was crazy, and I understood. But she didn"t get up, she didn"t throw the hot brown liquid in my face and run screaming for the door. I think she must have wanted this, deep down. She must have driven here needing to find something. Needing this to be real. Her face softened and she looked back at the window as she spoke. I looked back too and of course, maybe to make me look even crazier, he was gone.

< 10 >

"Does he…talk?" she said, and I could hear the sane part of her trying to win out over whatever part believed it all.

"Well he"s gone now. But no, he doesn"t talk. Not to me."

She snapped her head back towards me, the fastest movement she had made so far.

"What do you mean, he"s gone?" She got up and went to the window. She looked out of it a little frantically, and then closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She stood there with her eyes closed for a long time. Just breathing.

Finally she turned and looked around the apartment again, this time with the softest edge of a grin. She looked down into her mug and then up to me.

"Thank you for this. For letting me come back."

"You"re welcome."

"I"ll let you go now. I don"t want to make you late." She walked to the sink and put her mug down next to the dirty plates and cups. I followed her to the door as if it were still her apartment. The sun was so bright against the snow that I had to shield my eyes with the half empty Dalmatian mug.

"It was nice meeting you." She said, smiling so that now I could see the row of white teeth that I never imagined existed.

"Sure. I"m glad I could…help?" I said, searching for the words to describe or explain what just took place. She turned and walked back to her car, seeming almost a little embarrassed for having been there at all. Then to my left, from the side of the house came at first a shadow, and then a man. Eric. Now he had a name. I watched as he walked with his hands down from his face now and at his sides. He stopped and looked at me, right into my eyes, for a few seconds that seemed to stretch out longer than any other few seconds of my life. Then he walked forward again, catching up to Amy.

< 11 >

"Amy!" I wanted to tell her that he was right there, he was right behind her. But I stopped. She turned to face me and she was really facing him. He was between us looking right into her face, close enough to touch her.

"You"re welcome to stop by anytime." I said, feeling like it sounded less genuine that it was. I guess I really did mean it. She got into the car and I watched as Eric got into the passenger"s seat.

"Thanks." She said, looking back at the house. I knew I would never see her again by the way she looked at it as she drove off, like she was saying goodbye

writer: Reza Samarghandi Motlagh