The Sky Below by Stacey D'Erasmo

Author:Stacey D'Erasmo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

On a gray, freezing Thursday during which nothing was happening at The Hudson Times and my section was tidy as a freshly mowed lawn, the dead docile in their boxes of type, I got a tense call from Sarah. Could I come right now. Please.

I arrived at the crooked house behind the house to find Sarah sitting in her living room on her makeshift sofa. The fur had slipped down to reveal the black cotton futon beneath it. Sarah was biting a nail, looking as beautiful and undecided as I had ever seen her. There was a smudge over her right eyebrow. The floor was covered in boxes, some closed, taped, and labeled, others with clothes or shoes or pans sticking out of the tops. The curtains had been taken down and were lying in a crimson heap on the floor. The unfiltered light was brighter than usual. There was a pronounced draft. The room felt shaken molecularly, as if a rhino or a hippopotamus had just galloped through it and away, out the back door. Sarah wore a gold band on her left ring finger. Her brown eyes were wide. She was wearing jeans and a plain blue thermal shirt and a long indigo scarf around her hair, as if she was an ordinary woman in an ordinary old house with water-stained walls where the air was already going flat.

I sat down next to her and she nestled against me. Her familiar scent. “Where are you going, honey?” I said. I thought she must have found another, cheaper apartment. Or, I tried to think that I thought that.

“Vermont. I married the puppetmaker.”

I nodded slowly. “Okay.”

“The moving van’s coming soon.” She put her head on my shoulder.

“You should finish packing.”

“Yeah.”

The makeshift sofa was soft. The heat banged in the pipes against the cold. For an instant, I thought that maybe if I fucked her, I could get her to stay. But no part of the rest of me was interested in that. I was her brother, at best, chaste and melancholy, with pale, midwinter hands. I pulled her against me and I could feel her, her quivering. I didn’t forgive her. I went upstairs to pee. The windowsills in the bathroom were empty, with grimy patches. The tub was scrubbed clean and white.

Then we sat side by side on the sofa. I tapped her new, hard gold ring with my finger. It was the plainest of bands, blank and simple against my fingertip. “Wow. Very real.”

“Yes,” she said. “You’ll like him. He’s just a person. He has a beard, sort of.”

“I didn’t get into the show,” I said.

“Me neither.” Sarah rubbed her eyes. Then she got up as close as she could to my ear and whispered, “Gabe. I’m sorry we had a fight. I love our story, but it’s time.” I wondered grumpily which kind of time she meant—mythic or historical. Though I knew, of course, she was right. And women, poor things, had that ticking clock, cruel taskmaster, inside them.

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