buried milk
“hey, i’m just going to go ahead and leave this unlocked for right now, lady.” emmett leans in from the porch through the most unseemly window, shards and cobwebs staining his britches from the uncommon stance. “it feels better this way, lady. i won’t be long and when i return, i promise we’ll have zucchini for days.”
emmett is calling to simone, or this is one theory at least, though its been weeks since she lay within earshot.
he stalls until all the chew has spit through his jaw and on a single sheet of shoe printed college ruled he writes, “unlocked. not long now.” and nails it just below the sill. zebra ink, her favorite. he uses three tiny nails for this job secured from the thousands he keeps in the left pocket of his overalls. in the very last minute before darting away, he thinks to use his handkerchief to rub the shoe print clean from the page. no sense in careless fodder for further suspicion.
she’s sleeping very soundly is what he’s decided, a very peaceful sleep with dreams of scaling banyan trees for the company of a coquettish family of songbirds in the furthest reach from the rapacious world below. he pictures a gallant gown suitably bunched around her clothespin waist, garish magenta ruffles indistinguishable from the nest of curls fully consummated just below the left ventricle, ever so gently snoring. for sleep, yes, this is why she has gone from the sitting room, why his voice echoes to all the unremarkable bellows of the house with not so much as a rotten sigh in return.
their last conversation had not been a pleasant one.
there had been things for awhile, collected things that sat in a heap in the corner of his room a few miles down the road that he felt she should know. things he had not told her for one reason or another as the time continued to grow wild like an untamed stalk in their awareness of one another. sometimes it was late when he would lead her home and she took to the mattress faster than he could pull her name into a proper syllabic summons. other times, he got too dizzy from the jugs her father fixed for him after a long days of paint on paint. no point in trying to secure serendipity through a series of slurs, he thought.
the day he told her was a thursday, unfettered by intoxicants, backs to the floor.
by the time he was done, she was upright on other side of the room, the pallor of disagreement stark and wrung through her emerald glare.
“i can’t believe you just told me that,” she was having a difficult time finding a place to put all the air filling her mouth through the hunks of cuticle now painfully dislodged, muting all intent.
“what else was i to do? this business, i thought it should be yours too. i’m very generous in that way.” he had sat up very straight and tried his damndest not to fiddle with any extremities. yet another way he knew to best her.
“well, i don’t want it. any of it.” she mourned the intrusion as if someone very young and pure had drowned just below them. “you should have known. if only you paid attention to me when i was using my language, if only then you would have known. it’s like poison when i hear these things. for heaven’s sake, take it back or at least do your part in covering it up. i’m already tired of looking at it.”
he was so proud, so pleased with the words he had chosen for the telling, the order to which the sentences had sprung, one from another, and the cadence, the enthusiasm which he had allowed to govern the information, now hers, there was no room to imbibe the suffocant of protest she now produced. he went blank, helpless to this erasure. blank then furious.
“i’ll do no such thing.”
an instantly regretted admission.
“i’ll do no such fucking thing.”
silence hung from this while she paced the room through, whispering to herself fragments that sounded like poetry because they came in bursts of a language he knew nothing of. simone ascended the stairs to retire to the bedroom while he stroked the nearest jug for some semblance of calm without so much as a withering appraisal to his position. to follow her would admit guilt, a nuance missing from the sorrow felt at finding her unappreciative, so he remained. it was expected she would come down, perhaps late, for water and brush the knots from his hair until he awoke, a gesture she generally used to acquiesce hours past an argument. the wait for this extended through that night and the next. with little to love about watching a staircase, he became afraid and read every book he could find to tear the thoughts from his head about the things above. makeshift apologies rang from every sound that the world condones yet he could not climb the stairs to offer any of them.
he left after five days of this, returned after six to the window to call her name until his throat bled and he dropped off in a pile with the other dogs that prowled the porch after hours. when six became seven he entered and sat once again in the sitting room, brushing his hair with the fervor only a well trained catastrophe knows. he really should check. just a quick peek. he knew she was sleeping but just to be sure he should take one look, even if she became angry that he did so. i was awfully worried about you, he practices saying with a slight tremolo of concern, the faultless conduit for intimacy once scripted between them.
still, he could never could make the stairs.
in and out of the window to the sitting room now all he can manage. the door becomes a special occasion for time travel on the days he likes to pretend it was just yesterday he was arriving to her with a little block of cheese or begonias like all those other times. “right back, yes. right back. gonna leave it unlocked because i’m coming right back. gotta be there when she wakes up. hoo boy, will she have a lot of hair to brush…” he repeats this to himself on the road to the market.
he’s collecting vegetables for dinner tonight, so close he can almost taste the zucchini.
