lost things
MICHELLE ASKIN
Chokecherry trees by the lake, their soft pink leaves rinsing in the roped-off wading pool. Ballroom music—strings and choral murmurs echo through an abandoned radio on the barnacle adorned driftwood at the shore. Someone should be dancing to this with another, she thinks staring out the window. Or maybe it’s just things should not always feel so alone.
So much has happened, she remembers the one resident saying while crying herself to sleep within the grey walls of the institution, where she used to scrub the floors and play games in which red jelly balls were tossed around with voicing scenes from their dreams and worlds wanted to return to. Terribly, hard things all around. We forget what it was, that is, the sad things from this life before, for better or worse in the private rooms of this earth, we may have, a little lost, and therefore a little too hopefully, wandered through.
She, the care worker, had been at the time young, but also at the verge of being older. That time in one’s life when it seems you are carrying in your eyes a yellow light wading within silvery-blue wavy water—a blending together of sunrise and sunset or what cannot be met beyond the far off rooms of dreams and vivid scenic films in art booths of museums made of star-white glass.
She had been mostly alone, but waiting had felt nice too in a small mountain town outside a Northern Lake, where the beaches were grey and the sand soggy; the ships smokey and eerie in sound—a sort of alluring and beautiful haunting.
At home, this morning, she sits alone in her walled-off corridor within the rooming house where she has a small study and grand bedroom. The foreign cinema television channel plays the grey grainy scenes of what it is to be of no husband’s in a barren land. Rifle and hard laced gun powder everywhere. Shot lambs for another’s fatted Easter brunch.
She thinks of him from time to time, the handsome one who found her in her time of service to the hurting and her lonely dream-like wanderings along that snowy main street of radio repairs shops and soda shops. They married soon after, and she was then considered part of the good and beautiful world.
But now, he plays tennis on a soft grass court with a lover, named Beauty, just outside the sunroom window downstairs. The peeled-back dark green curtains open not to the lake but the knolls and homes of this village; its stations of leisure and imported collectable automobiles. She goes down there for the paper sometimes, mostly the International and Art pages, underlined just for her, by another tenant—a Greece born man who spent much of his years in American diplomatic service, traveling and collecting art along the way. She showed interest during their first few morning coffee run-ins, asking for stories in the photographs of the women weaving rugs in the markets of Beirut and the merchant men of gems and oils in the heavy mast ships within the deep royal blue waters of the Marmara Sea. But he is older and sleeps most of the day and has convinced himself a wonderful story of her that is hopeful and intriguing, yet simply untrue. So she avoids him as to not let him catch on that she is in the stage of losing the world and not reaching it.
So alone, she watches their yellow wooden rackets rise to the morning’s last shot of the white threads of the moon. Two angelic halos ordained by the mouth of God, and she is left inside where the mirage of a maiden aunt from her childhood strolls by with a china cup tea and jelly muffins, telling her it is not polite to stare.
And the window is open to the rum scent of his aftershave savoring through the damp air, her lungs inhale it as though it is a cologne ad from an old magazine from a time remembered, yet was not hers.
She writes a letter home: Mother, he goes to war every morning, and his children rise to kiss him from the garden’s thickets of marigold like small wooden dolls from a storybook of the enchanted forest—the kind with hidden bronze striped candy mills from butterscotch creameries. ‘Is this what is in the book of life,’ the lost grieving yet hopeful child says in the film version. Father, I am what it is you would refer to at the steak and fish house within the casino, your lone daughter. Family, all is lost for me to give back to you in this cruel and yet sometimes tremendously gorgeous-dreamy world.
She prays, Oh Holy Rita, Patron Saint of Loneliness, pray for me. My friends no longer come to see me with giggling hearts and black lace garments wrapped in cream boxes and paisley bows to wear for him. I am just a sad ghost in their view as they come to see Beauty, showering her with jeweled stars and rosemary and thyme perfume. Though sometimes one stops to say on their way out, ‘We’re sorry it wasn’t you. We’re sorry.’
On her walk to the beach, the old friends wander on pointing out how white and puffy the sky is. Like snow is in heaven, they say. And as they leave, yellow sun rays slowly break through shades of the ground where there are vintage grey Volkswagens and passed down after the wedding patio lawn chairs and after the birth bicycles with strung on jersey like tinsel shades of a sports team now defunct—some blue in there, but also some orange, the color worn by the youth she will find at the beach this early afternoon.
They are Christian and cleansing the pebbled sand of garbage, caught up in church gossip and laughter. They still feel the wonder in themselves and in one another. They are still wonderful to God and whatever rain he will send down soon.
It wasn’t just him that left her, she knows, but it’s easy for the body to understand what’s been taken through the form of another body.
It’s been years since that first true, or at least revealing, abandonment, and yet it still waits for her like some well in a meadow. That is, the one passed through this noon and every noon where she must remember to stop at it with some sort of deep reverence, a room of the earth with no light, just water. All that dark water.
Michelle Askin‘s poetry and short fiction have appeared in 34th Parallel Magazine, Pleiades, Santa Clara Review, Fogged Clarity, Raleigh Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Virginia.