Lost in a Place So Small by Rick Collignon

Author:Rick Collignon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bower House
Published: 2021-01-04T01:42:00+00:00

EIGHT

When Bernabe Medina woke just before dawn, he lay in bed for a moment and then, half asleep, reached out a hand and felt for his wife. He did this every morning, and like every other morning for the past three years all his outstretched hand felt was the cool, smooth expanse of the sheet.

“Pelimora,” he said, as he said each morning in the darkness of his bedroom. “Where did you go?”

Even after three years, and even after finding himself alone in his bed each morning, he still expected to see his wife in the kitchen when he went to make his coffee. He expected to see her sitting at the table sipping from her own cup, her legs crossed, her hair not yet brushed, smiling a little as he came into the room. Whenever he was gone from the house, he pictured her writing the poems that she would read to him later, or straightening up the house from the day before, or pulling weeds from among the flowers that grew along the front of the house, all the time listening for the sound of his truck. When he sat in the living room staring out the window or at nothing on the television, he waited to hear the sounds she would make while cooking, the scraping of a ladle, water boiling in a pot, the rasp of corn husks, the soft hum her voice sometimes made. Even after her death three years before, a part of him believed that Pelimora was just in the next room. But when he went to look for her, she was always gone, just beyond his reach.

They had been married for sixty-seven years, and though he was often irritated with having to hear yet one more poem about a sad sunset or how one’s heart could beat like a soft rainfall or why she persisted in planting flowers around the house instead of cucumbers, he felt her absence in every waking moment. Other than his sheep and maybe his pickup, which had had the decency to start even on the coldest morning for the past twenty-five years, Pelimora had been the only good thing in his life.

They had been seventeen years old when they married, and so shy and timid that they had slept in their clothes on their wedding night. Early the next morning, Bernabe had woken to the touch of his young wife’s hand on his back. He had turned away from her sometime in the night, and for a moment he just lay there staring at the wall beside the bed and feeling Pelimora’s hand move beneath his shirt. Then he turned to face her.

“Pelimora,” he said.

“I don’t want to begin our marriage this way, Bernabe,” she said. Her eyes were damp, as if she’d been crying while he slept.

“What way?”

“Like this,” she said, and her fingers pulled at the neck of his shirt. “I want to see what’s beneath this. My mother told me that when I married, the man I chose would be mine to do with as I wished,” and here she pulled again at his shirt.

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