Halcyon

They slept in knit caps in the farmhouse. Sweaters and long johns and anything flannel. Saw their breaths when they got up February mornings, even with radiators gurgling and clanging. They didn’t care. Quietly reveled in it, in fact, since the rusticity, or whatever, sure seemed part and parcel with the thing seizing their lives, lifting their proverbial boats like the wind lifted those bald eagles they watched amazed from the tilted front stoop, soaring over the stubbly cornfields across the road. Her short stories were getting published left and right. So many there was talk she’d need an agent for her first book. Tim’s numbers-theory articles were landing in journals unchaperoned grad students weren’t supposed to be in. Grants and scholarships out the wazoo. Both of them. They kept startling their profs, who, though they taught at really a very good school, didn’t expect to have TAs gunning for their own jobs. And it scared them at first. Not the success, which seemed, in its way, right and proper, if not full-on promised. The farmhouse. With its scabby-red-paint iron roofs. Its turbid-water-vomiting backyard pump. Its creaky, perilously winding staircases. Yet the house had gotten it done. Cockeyed their lives sufficiently to let the success pour in. Country life. The left-field surprise of it. Even if they did still shop at SuperFresh. Even if the old rustbelt city was right there, other side of the “mountain.” Because had anyone told two-years-ago her she’d be planting zucchini. Going to class makeup-less, freckles flying. In threadbare OshKosh overalls from Goodwill. That Tim would grow that scraggly beard, so strange on so gentle and—okay—feminine a soul. And she did know it was obnoxious, maybe, the place’s becoming hangout du jour for both their departments, stealing social thunder from certain untenured faculty, one of them, Rachel O_____, her thesis director, fresh from a program so huge you trembled just hearing its name. Every weekend, by their second spring there, people crowding the yard. Girls (women) lounging in dilapidated lawn chairs under the big elm, under the soulfully glowing Japanese lanterns she’d hung. Boys (boys) strumming guitars, throwing frisbees, arguing Scorsese vs. Kubrick, Chomsky vs. Foucault. People’s dogs romping in the sunflower patch. Everyone drinking. Everyone. All the time. Crashing overnight, as necessary, on the grungy old futon in what it amused them—as it had perhaps amused those getting hammered in it a century before—to call the parlor. Odd interdepartmental hookups. Clouds of patchouli and pheromones drifting over the unmowed, unfenced backyard on summer nights. Scenes seeming, with enough wine, weirdly meaningful, Whitmanesque, every glistening bicep, every un-bra-restrained nipple an expression of the universe’s urge, urge, urge. Cheap shiraz and ice cream made her the teensiest bit chubby and now even girls were hitting on her. Women. Not that she and Farmer Tim weren’t off the proverbial menu. But still. Halcyon. All of it. Until, at least, their third summer there. When their guests, or whatever, suddenly started sitting around staring at those wretched, wretched devices. Caveman-typing with their thumbs. Deploying idiot hieroglyphs to express whichever of three corporate-sanctioned emotions. Morphing themselves, out of some perverse-unto-satanic impulse, into screenbound advertising campaigns for themselves to be consumed by the same people in whose physical company they sat. She could not get her head around it. Couldn’t believe the whole world was poised, at the very moment it was blooming for her, to vanish up its own digital ass. How did she compete with vacation porn, fancy-drinks porn, home-decor porn? Porn porn? How did you write for people craving a nonstop dopamine drip of GIFs and memes? The violence with which her soul, or whatever, rejected it helped explain, maybe, why she let an inebriated Rachel O_____ lap at her mouth and feel her up one August night in the shabby Formica kitchen, a half-dozen highly entertained guests in witness. Compelled, finally, to pay attention to something other than their goddamn iPhones. A reassertion, call it, of the primacy of the real. Unsurprisingly, it was the beginning of the end. Rachel O_____ abruptly quit speaking to her—about anything, anyway, other than the thesis. It wounded her out of all proportion. Probably because she’d never had so pedigreed a friend and an Olympus dweller’s rejection augured nothing good where her own heights-scaling ambitions were concerned. Tim, for his part, pitched no mortified-partner fit. Did, however, seize an opportunity to tearfully confess he was hot for an infuriatingly beautiful undergrad boy—a senior, but still, for Christ’s sake—who sang Jeff Buckley songs like some sort of fucking angel and had over a thousand Facebook “friends.” She wanted to tell him this was not who he was, only it was tough arguing with anything as moronically honest as a hard-on. Circa that fall semester’s start, it occurred to her she hadn’t seen an acceptance in months. That her new stories were insipid. That the raves Rachel O_____ kept scrawling on them were disingenuous or mean or both. That her father was right about her “career choice.” Glancing out the farmhouse’s bedroom window one November morning she discovered a different sort of party happening: buzzards feasting on a car-struck deer gone down in the veggie garden, one standing priestly atop the exposed ribcage, wings outstretched. All those soaring eagles were doing was corralling terrified rodents. After she and Tim split up and vacated the farmhouse—a mere rental, for all their fondness—she took a medical-tech-writing job in Chicago. Which moved her, after a few years, to Atlanta. Which moved her, a few years after that, to D.C. She kept waiting to meet the person—dude, chick, whatever—she’d fall for the same way she’d fallen for Tim. In some state park it would happen. At some gallery. At a work friend’s kid’s graduation party. Kept waiting, too, for the not-just-want-but-need to write to come back. Thought she felt, every so often, her old muse tugging her wrist, then found, sitting down with the legal pad, it was just the ghost of Jackie Collins. Such a long road back it would be. To writing. With ever more years passing. Outrageous, time’s breathless gallop. She often thought of Tim. Teaching pure mathematics, whatever that was, at UC Riverside. Still bearded, she saw online. Married to some younger man. She thought, too—usually while staring out her condo’s dining-room window at a sunset mirrored in the twin high-rise’s glassy façade—about the farmhouse. Permitted herself, finally, to hunt for it in Google Maps. Discovered, dropping down to street view, a McMansion enclave on the ancient beanfield where it had stood. That adorable, scary little house. She’d been harboring, she realized, some vague plan to go see it again. To stop the Volvo on the road out front, mount the tilted stoop. Summon, if possible, the courage to knock. That same night she dreamed what she thought, startled awake, was a memory. Was it? Of the time a Jesus Christ-grade racket woke her in the dead of night. Emanating from atop the ceiling atop Tim’s and her bed. Something murdering something. Farmer Tim unrousable. Post-party fumy. For some reason the power was out. She bumbled downstairs, hand on plaster wall so she didn’t slip and break her neck on that insane staircase. Knocked over God knows how many empty beer bottles in the kitchen, groping around the counter for the flashlight. Which, happed upon, actually worked. Sort of. She headed back upstairs, stepping over places she knew jutting nailheads to be. Opened, on the second-floor landing, the creaky door to the attic staircase. “Tim!” she hollered. Got only a rumble of thunder for an answer. That and more slapping, thwacking, screeching racket from up above. She started climbing, free hand on the steep, dusty stairs in front of her. Air getting warmer and closer and warmer. Holy hell, she was brave back then. Heat lightning throbbed in a dormer window. Her head cleared the tops of the floorboards and she twisted in place, naked feet braced on two different steps. Aimed the fast-dimming flashlight beam into the attic’s nether regions. Stood transfixed by the pair of bright red eyes glaring back at her from deep inside all that dark.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.