Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories [S.S. Col.] by Majka Sara

Author:Majka, Sara [Majka, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories
ISBN: 9781555979249
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2016-02-16T07:00:00+00:00

NASHUA

When I travel, I often visit another town nearby, someplace I wouldn’t otherwise go. Nashua, I think, was like that. It was after Christmas and I was watching, for a time, a teenager and two dogs for a family west of Boston. I rarely saw the teenager, except to drive her from place to place, but I let the dogs out and walked them and picked up the garbage they had strewn about. I cooked meals I found in the freezer—shrimp, individual-sized lasagna. The house was large enough that cleaning people came every few days, and, when I couldn’t find something, I always thought that the cleaning people had moved it when I had probably just forgotten where it was. One night I drove to an old, unheated cinema to watch a musical. It involved driving unknown roads in the snow and then driving back, hoping I would find the teenager at home, chasing the dogs, trying to get them in their cages. There was, as always, the relief of living within a life that wasn’t mine, of raising the heat and walking barefoot across the bathroom’s stone floor.

Around this time, I realized I had fallen in love again, this time with a man who was a drinker. I remembered a story by Alice Munro in which a woman, sensing she is falling in love, and fearing what had happened the other times, gets in a car and starts to drive and keeps on going. It was a snowy day when I thought about this and I sat in my bedroom and imagined waiting it out, how long it might take. Outside there was the scrape of shovels. But for what other reason are we alive? I thought.

I had driven to Nashua from Boston to look for farmhouses. I was researching abandoned farmhouses and wanted to find a part of New Hampshire with both rural and urban poverty. Once there, I bought a bottle of whiskey at the tax-free shop, then found the Salvation Army. I bought fabric to make curtains and asked the woman behind the register about directions, but she knew the roads by different numbers than were listed on my map.

As I drove the hills, the sun hit low across an apple orchard and it was so striking that it didn’t surprise me to see an abandoned farmhouse—just like that, just what I was searching for—at the top of the hill. I pulled over and started to walk. There was a neighborhood watch sign nailed to a tree, and I thought of the neighbors watching me in the snow.

Through the window I saw furniture, not arranged to make the room habitable, but grouped together as if to be taken away. It wasn’t a beautiful farmhouse—it was in the style of a musty-looking ranch—or I would have felt the desire to go inside. I was glad the desire was less than it might have been. Still, it was hard to leave, and below the hills I stopped at a church.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.