No One is Here Except All of Us by Ausubel Ramona

Author:Ausubel, Ramona [Ausubel, Ramona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

The stranger awoke suddenly that night. In the corner of the moonlit barn she saw a dark shape. Immediately, her dream-heavy body was sure that the ghosts of the past had found her, and she prepared to be taken back to the old, burned-out world.

“All right, I’ll go,” she called. Her voice bounced from the hardwood of the walls. The shape jumped and scrambled. “Hello?” the stranger asked.

“What did you say?” the shape asked.

“I’ll come with you.”

“Oh, I was just checking for leaks,” the shape stammered.

“Leaks?” the stranger asked. Sleep softened, melted away, and the shape stood up from the place in the floorboards where the radio was hidden.

The jeweler came out from the corner and into the moonlight of the dusty window.

“I know about the hole in the floor,” she said quickly. “I know about the radio.”

“No. Oh, dear. Have you listened?” He fidgeted with the buttons of his jacket. He rubbed the back of his neck.

“No.”

“I am terrible. How could I have?” he asked. “I’m so sorry. I never meant you to know. No, no, no.” He punched himself in the temple. The stranger shook her head. Her outstretched hand was an invitation. Wordless, she opened the creaking barn door. The question of what she was doing appeared like a bubble. She popped it with an answer—loneliness. She knew the weight of knowing. Of feeling like the only one who knew, standing guard alone at the gate. Wind flapped the stranger’s white nightgown against her legs. They were an unlikely pair—she in her bedclothes kneeling in a patch of bloomless flower plants, digging—he, dressed for the day, his hair blown on end, crouched and waiting to see what she would unearth. Mudded, decomposed paper was born from the hole. Whatever words it had recorded were erased by the dirt and water.

“What is it?” the jeweler whispered, holding in his palm a handful of paper shreds, torn roots, earth.

“The mail,” the stranger told him. He pressed his thumb into the hand-warmed dirt.

“It never even occurred to me.” He trailed off.

“You wanted to believe.” The stranger picked bits of paper out, seeds from a lost species. She squeezed them together in a ball, tossed it back and forth between her hands.

“What did they say?” the jeweler asked.

“I wanted to believe, too. I never read them.” The stranger felt a sting for the single exception she had set sail, which she did not want to admit. The jeweler felt a sting, too: an orphan who finds himself full of questions about the past that have no answers in the living world. The other story was lost in the ground. The stranger placed the ball of paper back where it came from, then offered her empty, cupped palms, and the jeweler poured his burden in. She put the dark earth into the hole and began to fill it back up. The stranger patted the sealed wound. She scattered a few loose stones over it, and the jeweler thought how like a faraway

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