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Thunder Sandwich #23 |
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Patricia Wellingham-Jones |
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FIRST NIGHT, HOUSE-SITTING So strange to walk into the master bedroom as if we belong, put our underwear in drawers scented with rosemary sprigs, hang robes in a bathroom with only a tub. Strange to wake in a king-size bed with the musky smell of someone's semen staining the mattress under fresh sheets. We blink at light from the wrong direction, open doors into closets instead of rooms, face down the yellow glare of a cat off schedule, pretend we're home. In a week we'll know the local bar, locate artichokes and bread, turn left for the bus that rumbles downtown but on this first night in a different house we feel like hermit crabs on a faraway shore wriggling into new shells. POCKETBOOK The last child, the accident, Jane knew her siblings only as teens, or grown. Knew her father as remote as the sky with gray hair curling out of nose and ears, matting in disorder along his neck. Her mother Jane knew least of all. After the birth, the mother slid deep into a dark empty hole of spirit. By the time Jane was five, her mother took to wandering the streets of their town. Hatless, coatless, stockings unrolling, hair plastered to her head in the rain, the mother walked to ease the grip on her skull, to shore up the gap at her feet. When Jane was 50 she saw a photo, a family scene from before her birth: Father, arm around mother, handbag dangling from her arm around daughter, father's other arm draped loosely over son's shoulder. Jane gasped in surprise at the faded photo, at her mother smiling. In those days no woman would think of leaving home without purse and gloves. Red-faced at reports of his wife crooning and chanting on downtown streets, Jane's father took her mother's purse, locked it away. Lost without her pocketbook, the mother stayed inside the house, drew the curtains, subsided into silence, then went completely away. |