Life Among the Terranauts by Caitlin Horrocks

Author:Caitlin Horrocks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

And Looked Down One As Far As I Could

Winter clings to the porch, a sheen of ice across wet boards, a hard white crust on the railings. From a recliner in her living room, Gloria watches birds flutter around a feeder hanging from the porch gutter. Seed hulls scatter dark across the sinking snow, punctuation marks without words. There is no urgency to this weather, just its slow dripping from one moment into the next. There is no urgency left in Gloria, just the slow settle of her body into her chair in the mornings, into the bedsheets when night falls.

Inside the house, the priest comes, the church ladies. It is a small town, and her neighbors watch the mailbox, salt the walk while checking for footprints. No one wants to find her days after the fact. They’re not that kind of neighborhood, that kind of congregation, to lose track of someone in her final days. But this kindness feels macabre to Gloria, as if they’re trying to arrive as close as possible to the event, to be there when it happens. When she was a girl her mother told her that a window should be raised in anticipation, to let the soul escape. Her mother died, decades ago, in an eighth-floor hospital room whose windows did not open. She tells the church ladies this, about raising the sash.

“Oh, let’s not talk about sad things,” they say.

Not one of them will open a window for her, Gloria thinks.

They bring soups and casseroles and lasagna, microwavable single portions. They sit on the couch and watch her eat while they chatter: errands, recipes, children, work. Gloria wonders what stories she is supposed to be offering them in return. She gives away objects instead: a set of coasters, a glass bell, a porcelain parakeet. She props beside her chair the framed poem the principal gave her when she retired from the high school. It is the poem she was asked to read every commencement for forty-five years—two roads diverging in a wood, one path slightly grassier than the other. She has always hated this poem.

She holds on to the family pictures of siblings gone, husband gone, children gone in a different way, voices on the phone, the grandchildren bigger at every holiday than it had occurred to her to imagine them. She keeps her Audubon prints, her Minnesota bird guide, the pair of binoculars on a side table in the bay window. Most of the birds that come to the feeder are ordinary. There is a colony of sparrows in the juniper bush in the yard. Chickadees, finches, wrens. Sometimes a blue jay or cardinal. A bluebird. The bluebird of happiness. She doesn’t know where the phrase comes from, but there it is, in her head.

“A bluebird?” the church ladies ask.

“It m-must have just flown away,” Gloria stammers. But having erased the bluebird, what has she done to the happiness?

Her husband used to call her “chickadee,” sang chick-a-dee-dee-dee as he poured the morning coffee.

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.