The Long Fire by Meghan Tifft

Author:Meghan Tifft
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Unnamed Press
Published: 2015-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

19

IT WAS SIX O’CLOCK AND ALMOST DARK. I HADN’T TURNED ON A LIGHT in my apartment. I liked the way night slid in at this time, how it made me feel like I was going underwater, slowly, without fear. The deepening sky was like one big slow wave washing through me, easing me out of my separateness. It was the kind of good feeling that I had to be still for, that didn’t last long once I started noticing it. The streetlights flushed slowly on outside my window, and after a few moments my apartment was much darker. All the black shapes bobbed around me.

I had the phone in my hand, ready to call, but still somehow far away from doing it. I felt like I did when I was young, heavy and adrift, looking up from a book in my hand, the aqueous blue world welling around me. All those times when the darkness seeped over the page and the words got lost, and I’d find myself struggling in the midst of that delicate delay, those long slow minutes of blind reading before I finally fumbled for the lamp, shining that cone of light that would make a black wall of the night that I could turn from, rejecting this world in favor of that.

Intermittently I could hear the muted sounds of people coming up from the street below—a car door snatching open, a skittering of seed pods underfoot, the faded clink of coins, even an almost imperceptible softness, like a jacket shrugging on, a dog breathing. As apart as I felt, here was evidence of other people, all around me. It was a strange thought, when the light seemed to brew up some thick broth of seclusion. It was the same with those distant evenings too, those lapses in the dark of my room, when I would rouse to sounds that told me I wasn’t alone. The flat, incessant pop of a basketball several houses down, the low sinuous thrum of clarinet practice, the distant clatter from the boys on the corner, circling the curb with their skateboards—my brother probably among them, probably getting flicked with ash from my mother’s filched cigarettes, ready to come home with evidence of some fresh assault. I remembered how he used to shamble down the hallway, hover in my doorway as if maybe he was going to say something, and through the fog of reading I would register that bleak and needy pause, tugging at me gently, waiting, and then before I had quite dragged myself up to shallow waters he’d be gone, his door shutting down the hall. A lot of those times, I’d be coming around in the aftermath of this, waking on that very shoreline of afternoon and evening, when another sound would finish what my brother had started. I could almost hear it still, the scuffing that was right there in my ear, raspy and close—such a secret, insinuating sound that I sensed its private communication before I heard it, like a static hiss in the dream I was waking from.

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