Cicada Summer by Erica McKeen

Author:Erica McKeen [McKeen, Erica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2024-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE SLEEP HOUSE

In the dream, in her first real sleep in months, Anne walks through the front hallway and ignores her reflection. She moves into the kitchen and finds a bucket of water. She pulls it down from the counter and begins scrubbing the floor. Her back aches. Her strokes are rhythmic and circular, domestic ritual. Somewhere behind her head, she sees a girl pass through the kitchen doorway and head toward the cellar stairs.

In the dream, in her first real sleep in months, Cassandra passes through the kitchen doorway and sees a woman bent over a bucket of water, scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing the floor. Cassandra looks down and sees that she is bleeding. Her jeans are soaked an old red, maroon. Heat pulses down her legs, and she can feel the house throbbing around her like a heart. Her hand reaches for the cellar door.

In the dream, Anne looks up. The girl is going down is going down the cellar stairs. A smell leaks up through the open doorway. Musty, unwashed, the cellar has developed a smell.

In the dream, the blood is going down is going down and pooling in Cassandra’s socks. She leaves footprints as she walks. Behind her, the woman bends her neck into the doorway and watches her descend.

Anne looks down and sees that she is dressed all in white.

Her hands are old, full of wrinkles. She has been scrubbing until her fingers burn.

She stands, gathers her long wedding dress in her hands—gathers the dress that she rented for the wedding, the dress that other women wore before her, wore after—and heads down the stairs.

Cassandra, then Anne, finds the down-low damp of the cellar floor. The earth underneath vibrates. The house holds urgency in its hulking mass. An expectant tremble, a murmur: must.

This shake, ache, this trembling. The cellar descending inward. And outward (they are sleeping). She is sleeping she is screaming, mouth open. The house screams into the ache between Anne and Cassandra’s legs. If she could, she would straddle this mold, the damp, the dreaming and awake, the blood, she remembers the bleeding, the first bleeding, something like wet cement buckling between attic rafters, shifting the foundation. The stretch in the soles of her feet. Ah, ah, ah. She is walking down the stairs and sliding her fingers—ah

—along the banister. Swallowing the house’s must in mouthfuls. The smell of the house like sawdust, chunks of rooftop, paper drywall down her throat. The must hooking into her nostrils. The must, the must. The must that keeps her waking, keeps her awake. She sits on the floor and fits her hand into the mushroom-­filled crack in the wall.

Her knuckles scrape cement.

Her fingers grip.

The house imperceptibly latches.

And shakes.

Ah.

She feels another woman sitting there inside of her. She is young and she is old. She is mopping floors. She is holding a baby inside of her, heavy against her hips. She is growing breasts, hips widening. She is inside of her(self), inside this house. She opens up and draws the house in closer, leans back, clenches, and wails.

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