FOOD

She thought selling the house would change everything. She’d leave the wall marks from his chair, the radiator he never fixed but she mentioned every week and mostly she’d leave the grass that never got mowed poking through the leaves that never got raked. “I’ll have a real garden”, she told herself. There’ll be a fence around it to keep her in and nothing out of place.

So her new house had a back yard, an unruly mess whose sheer ugliness would force her to take action. She went to buy garden tools, unsure of what she needed but figured something with a long sharp sickle, letting her slice through bushes like a Native Guide taking explorers deep in the Amazon. She left the store with clippers instead - good, dependable, old-fashioned with wood handles. She could gently trim her way through the tangled vines. She’d watched her mother clip stray strings off her clothes. Snip. It was the sound of appearing immaculate, together and alert. She felt older and responsible when hearing it.

She finally hacked away bramble until she was near the back wall and found a large wood board on the ground, like the floor of a tree house. It was rotting down the middle with a hole in the center like a long black eye. She lifted an edge until it snapped in half and one side flipped atop the other. She found Her Well.

At first she thought it was just a hole. Maybe a bonfire pit where the former home owners, Mr. and Mrs. Oswald Sutton, danced around in nude, orgiastic frenzy, their brittle old bodies silhouetted against the fire. There were no ashes or trodden circles and as she got closer, it was deeper than she expected. Weeds plunged over the edge as if sacrificing themselves to the abyss. Farther down the sides, stones lined the walls and she realized what she’d discovered.

Where was the roof? All wells have a little roof, square plates of wood looking slightly Germanic. Where was the rope coiling perfectly around the Thing In the Middle with a wooden handle like on her clippers? Most importantly, where was the bucket? The prime player, the one we send off with best hopes and look to return with Our Reward. She pictured the Perfect Bucket rising towards her, reflecting the sky in it’s round face like an open angel while birds twittered around her head.

She cleared away more grass though she was terrified of falling into her well. Boys fall in wells. Grown women do not as much, or don’t get as much coverage. Children falling in wells is Accidental. Adult Females falling down a well means suicidal or hormonal or TV Drama. Toddlers = sympathy. Crawlers = pity. She had, after all, saved the well. Why would it harm her now? She stopped expecting it to change shape or move like objects in wizard movies. It was just There, a round hole in the ground, and she finally got close enough to look over the edge.

The afternoon light was fading but she could see the stone side gaining perspective, closing down into some Inner Space, Well Space. She threw a stone, quickly jumping away before the Well could spit it back. She heard the rock hitting rock, hitting rock, hitting rock, like the fading tick of a metronome. It was a mystery and she thought something hiding so long deserved one mystery. In the dimming light, she finally left but went back more and more.

At Her Well, she’d think about him. She’d drop her feelings one by one, listening to them click click click along the stone sides into Well Space. She stopped caring about the bucket. She wanted whatever was at the end of the tunnel to stay and absorb whatever she dropped. Here, she remembered. Outside she forgot everything, all the time. She forgot her name on a phone call with the cable woman, her pause causing her to feel like a fraud, someone who makes up names to cover deceit. Later, at Her Well, she recalled his voice, heard the words echoing up to her. She repeated them like she was speaking a Foreign Language, not knowing what they meant but hoping her effort made sense. Words like “road” and “house” were messy groups of letters needing a leap of faith to accept as things that exist.

Her daydreams fell in the well. Did she remember a Birthday Party or had her memory changed? Colors seemed brighter, conversation cheerier like a TV show she watched as a girl. Balloons, streamers, cardboard horns with mangled crepe paper fringe. She felt obliged to remember the truth but time passed and it became harder to recall Actual Words, the exact Picture on her cake. A ballerina? A bunny? She felt robbed by the replacement she’d conjured.

Once he and she were lying together on her bed reading and she stopped to watch his eyes move back and forth like a metronome in his head. The type peeled itself from the page and rushed into his eyes to deliver a clue, a secret message, a detail. In his brain they all danced around the metronome and told the story of the book. Words to symbols and symbols to sounds, born from movements of our mouths and tongues and ending in the reverberations of our eardrums.

Staring at the drive-through menu at McDonald’s, she forgot what she was doing. The pictures of the food were mutely lit, devoid of enticement, none of them offering mouth formations. Had she come to buying something without sound? She drove through the window and told the bored worker she’d changed her mind. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

Back at her house, she pored over pictures of him, took them to the Well where she lined them on the ground like pictures of hamburgers. The pictures of his face never matched those inside, they were symbols not words. She wanted words and sounds, she wanted it all. She wanted the letters in his brain to come here, to the bonfire, and dance in her head with her.

9:40:15 PM    sro home /