Living Things: a Novel by Landon Houle

Author:Landon Houle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2019-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lynn washes her face. Then she changes her mind and turns on the tub faucet as hot as hot will go. The tub isn’t clean like she kept it, but there is a bottle of Mr. Bubble, which Lynn opens and pours under the running water until the foam begins to stack.

What’re you doing? Knock, knock, and it’s Ed saying it’s the middle of the afternoon, saying we just got here, saying, A bath? Now? Lynn. He jerks the doorknob.

Lynn eyes the swiveling brass, the lock that catches, and for a minute, she tricks herself into believing that on the other side of the door is a criminal. On the other side of the door is a person with only bad intentions. The knob shakes one way and then the other, and within Lynn, there is that turning of fear, a genuine surge of dread and panic. Stop it, she yells, and she tells herself she has to be heard over the water, but underneath the fear, there’s an anger, a frustration that is every bit as solid as the faucet she grips and turns. Just stop already, she screams. Can’t you hear I’m in the tub? I’m in the tub, Ed!

She’s on the edge of the tub, still in her clothes, crouched and listening, and on the other side of the door, the thug, the creep, the enemy says, All right, all right, and something else Lynn doesn’t hear because, finally, he’s gone. Finally, he’s left her.

He’ll hate her for this, for leaving him alone with David no sooner than they got here, he’ll say. You know how me and him get on, and what he means is not at all. What he means is David doesn’t get on with anyone.

Lynn pushes herself up from the side of the tub. She undresses and eases over the side. She’s started hanging onto things. Her hands at the end of the day are a grimy mess. She feels herself clinging. Stair rails and door knobs and when there is nothing else, at the very walls around her. She’s had some trouble with her hip, and at her age, she knows, there is always the danger of falling. Several women from the watercolor group have gone down just in the past few months. Broken ankle. Broken leg. Broken wrist from the hand that tried in vain, too late to catch the body’s weight. And then the hospital and the rehab. And then the nursing home. The very earth on which they stood pitched and rolled so that they were always fighting against it, and Lynn would have preferred to retire to any place besides the ocean, any place that seemed steadier.

But even now she’s pulled toward the water. Mr. Bubble smells like bubblegum, the kind she chewed as a girl—that initial brilliant, if fleeting, sweetness. She leans back and closes her eyes and against such darkness, and sometimes now in the light, certain pictures appear. This time a feather-capped lady and an

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