The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019 by Edan Lepucki

Author:Edan Lepucki
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

I’d forgotten to tell the cleaning girl not to come anymore, so she showed up one final time, standing in the doorway, shifting her weight back and forth. I told her that Randy was gone. She chewed her gum and said she was very sorry. She asked if I needed anything, and I briefly imagined sitting down vacantly at the kitchen table while she shuffled over the tiles, making coffee, peripheral to my grief.

But in the end, I didn’t invite her inside. I said only, “No, I’m all right. You go on home.” And she left.

After the cleaning girl didn’t come anymore, the afternoons were filled with this constant hunger, electric in the stomach, and elsewhere—an itch for motion in the soles of the feet, a hand closing into a fist then opening again. I thought of hair itching for the scissors, growing too long for itself, pleading to be cut free. Before the mirror, I avoided my eyes, twisted gray strands into something small, forgettable at the nape of the neck. We are too much for ourselves—the body spreading out, seeking its end, the mind retreating until we remember that prick of fear that began with darkness. Once sight was introduced at our beginning, darkness was fearful ever after.

I thought of the crust forming at the corners of his eyes that I would wipe away, wipe each morning with the corner of a damp cloth. As a child he had ear infections, the white crust climbing up toward the hairline, a lichen tightening the scalp. He would scratch and sob as I pulled his hand down, flakes scattering beneath his nails, and spreading a cream that smelled of nothing. The crust itself held all the smells of a child’s body—that dampish scent of the skin that forms over a cup of warm milk. In the mornings, he left bits of himself on his pillow, the air full of him, mingling with dust motes and cat hair in the light falling sideways through the upstairs windows.

I wish we had talked to one another. It was as if I’d become so used to his infant silence that I never sought to replace it, not in all our years of proximity. I remember being so aware of his breathing, always loud even before the stroke, the air coming up from the lungs audible as he sat alone on the love seat, the pages of a motorcycle magazine rustling beneath his fingers. There used to be a long, steady warmth that came from the part of the room where he was. It made me think of walking into a stable, and you can sense the horses in their stalls, the swish of long hairs shifting, the sound of their breath moving through the velvet of their nostrils—their nickering so gentle and knowing. This is what Randy was for me—this presence that drifted in and out of the room, soft and animal. And just as the horses are a part of the stable itself,

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