Maryellen returned to her house the day it was sold. Olive and her horrible son were moving to Oregon.
“I’m not going,” Maryellen said.
“Fine,” Olive said. “You don’t have to.”
Olive had taken up smoking. She tapped her long filter-tip on the table-top, end-over-end, tap tap tap tap then lit it and tilted her head back but did not inhale.
“There is some money,” Olive announced, her matchbook on the tabletop tap tap end-over-end, “for your college. If you want to stay here, I can put it into an account for you.”
She rolled the ash of her cigarette delicately into a saucer.
Maryellen didn’t have anything to say. She watched her stepmother’s hands, nervous and thin, their blue veins stark against her pale skin. Maryellen’s hands curled in her lap. Behind her hands, inside her warm abdomen, she imagined she felt a quickening.
“You have a week to find a place,” Olive said. “We have to be out by the first of the year.” She finished her pink wine and dragged on her cigarette.
tap tap tap tap
Olive poured herself another glass and gulped down half.
“Someone will have to be responsible for you,” she said. “I’ll get a lawyer to do it if you don’t know anyone.”
tap tap tap
She gulped the other half, set down the glass and finished her speech.
“Your share is twenty-five hundred dollars. Chris and I don’t have any money to spare; this move is eating me up. I’ll put it in the bank Monday. You’ll probably need a job.”
Olive finished her cigarette and stubbed it out in the saucer. She brushed all the little pieces of ash off her black sleeves and off the tabletop. Maryellen looked past her, out the window towards the river and Afriqua Lee.
“If people think you’re crazy nobody’ll rent you a place or give you a job. Snap out of it.”
Then she was finally alone. She found what she’d known all along—that breath came easier, and even temporary secrets were safer when she lived alone.
All the shadows of evening began their slow melt through pink to gray. Out the window a crow or raven lifted off, his wings bowed and slow. Maryellen glimpsed his quick eye looking back, bright in the last of the sun.
“Nevermore!” she hollered after him, “Nevermore!”
Christ, she thought, I bet they hear that all the time.
The End
Acknowledgments
James M. Mathias, MD; psychiatry
Robert B. Olsen, MD; psychiatry
Robert Colfelt, MD; neurology
Karen Hart, physiology
The McCarron family, the O’Keefe family and Johanna Nitzke.
Portions of this story appeared in slightly different forms in the following publications: The Kansas City Star, Portland Review, Willow Springs Magazine and Iron Country.
Thanks again, Frank.
Silver Departures by Richard Kehl
Landscapes of the Night, Christopher Evans
The Country Between Us, Carolyn Forché
Life During Wartime, Lucius Shepard
Gathering the Tribes, Carolyn Forché
The Origin and Treatment of Schizophrenic Disorders, Theodore Lidz
The Drawing of the Three, Stephen King
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
We the Divided Self, John Watkins
Here Among the Sacrificed, Finn Wilcox/Steve Johnson
On Nature, Daniel Halpernen
The Destruction of the Jaguar, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno
Dreams and Schizophrenia, Benjamin B. Wolman
Chaos, James Gleik
Collected Works, C. G. Jung
Soul Catcher, Frank Herbert
Crow, Ted Hughes
Ravens, Crows, Magpies and Jays, Tony Angell
“Letter to a Sister Who Lives in a Distant Country,” Daisy Zamora
“Prayer for the Soul of my Country,” Otto-Rene Castillo
Maxims, Marcel Proust
The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Gaston Bachelard
Sigmund Freud, Pindar, Herman Melville