Volume 3 Number 1 • Spring 2011
She stands before the front door, feet apart, one arm extended, palm spread at the center, as if this simple gesture alone will hold him back. She calls his name, low and soothing, the way one might calm an anxious child. “Lon,” she says, “you're not comin in. Not when you're like this. I don't care where you go, but you're not comin in.” He hammers at the other side, slow and persistent at first, with one hand. I can feel his arm, his cheek, the weight of his body, resting upon the skin of the door and the steady rhythm of the thump thump thump in the darkness of the other side. The screen door leans against his shoulder and squeaks when he shifts position, standing directly before the front door now and hammering hard, shouting "Laauuraa," in a bellow which rolls above the percussion of his fists. I remember the oily heat of the night, the humid sweat of the room. I sit on the couch, fingering the pages of the book in my lap, refusing her pleas to go to bed, my eyes returning again and again to the door and her body erect before it, his blows as steady as a heartbeat tapering slowly to the moist sigh my mother releases when she finally joins me on the couch.
She cradles the cup in a saucer and carries it to the dining room table, to the new stack of magazines. Settling herself into the chair, cup steaming to her left, she opens the first one. It doesn't matter where she starts. She doesn't read the text but scans the page, enjoying the balance, varying from one magazine to another, of words and images.
The magazines are heavy in her hand; solid and manageable. She can choose the page she turns to, slipping quietly past one image, eradicating it with the next. At times aware only of colors, deep royal blue skies and verdant kelly green fields; awash in the shimmer of shifting hues until an image brushes against her.
On page 36, she finds a picture of a girl onstage in a play which might be Shakespeare and it reminds her of Karen's sixth grade and the theatre class she loved so much. On page 19 of another magazine, a beach house which resembles a cottage they had rented two or three years in a row. On another page, a cat sleeping in a windowsill; the angle of sunlight somehow recalling her own childhood, her dolls poised in conversation upon her bed by the window.
She slides her ruler to the edge of the table and tilts it into her hand. She pushes it deep into the cleft of the binding and, with practiced skill, tears the page away. She turns it over, flattening it with her palm in an uncluttered area of the table, and applies rubber cement to the edges. She dangles the sheet from two fingers and angles it wet onto the next blank page of her scrapbook; the book of her thoughts, written by other people, now hers again.
Steve Mitchell has published fiction in Peregrine, Contrary, The North Carolina Literary Review and The Adirondack Review, among others. Three of his stories were nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize. Steve has a deep belief in the primacy of doubt and an abiding conviction that great wisdom informs very bad movies. Steve is currently working on a novel, Rags of Light. He is open twenty four hours a day at:www.thisisstevemitchell.com.