Valhalla

A dark comedy about death, one with what I'd like to think is a unique way to look at how in the end of all things, all that's left are the memories that we have of each other, and the choice of what to do with those memories.

 

As soon as Olivia Delayne’s paint brush touched the pure white canvas, her eyes crisscrossed.  It could have been the cramp in her hand, the dull pain in that sore spot on her back between her shoulder blades, or inhaling too many paint fumes, but she lowered her arm and let her brush rest upon the easel, recognizing this as yet another failed painting that would need to be tossed out.

She was sitting at the edge of a stool, eyes gazing with such intensity at her canvas that the wrinkles on her forehead meshed together.  Shadows cascaded across the drawn blinds, but the sun bled through barely enough to cast somewhat of a slit of light, to draw illumination to either what was the encouragement of her making a mark for the first time in days out of paint, or the frustration of knowing that it would never become more than a mark.  In the far corner of her studio, out of reach of the sunlight through the only window, resting beneath the sill was a pile of failed paintings.  All of them were meant to be thrown out, but the garbage can was so far away.  She would have to put on a robe to walk outside because she couldn’t go out naked.  Her house was secluded in the woods, but not that secluded.  She would have to shower to put on a robe.  She would have to go upstairs to shower.

Forget that.  She knocked the painting off the easel with one hand.  It landed atop the pile beneath the window sill, smothering a man sitting on a park bench.  His streams of cursing were soon muffled from the weight of the new canvas.  She slumped forward.  Her hair dropped against the pallet of paints and whipped green marks onto the easel.  Motivation shouldn’t have to die with my husband.

She yawned and stretched before picking up her cell phone on the hard wood floor.  4:05 p.m.  Her sister would be there any minute, so it was time to get some clothes on.  She loved the freedoms that came from living alone.

Before her cell phone could slip from her hands and fall with a lazy clunk against the floor, there was a knock on her heavy oak door.  Right on time.  Well, almost.  There was no time for her to shower anymore.  She tossed an olive green bathrobe over herself and tied the front as she approached the entryway.  This house was large enough when she had shared it with her husband, David, but with him gone, every footstep she made seemed to echo endlessly.  On numerous occasions, she’d considered carpeting the rooms and halls so they wouldn’t echo so much, but that would require her to clean, so that idea was out of the question. 

A middle-aged woman with frazzled blonde hair wrapped up tightly in a beige coat met her as she peered through the peep hole.  Olivia smiled before her eyes darted to the heavy brown box her sister carried with ‘Peking House’  stamped in red ink on the side.

“Abigail,” Olivia held open the door. “Come in.”

“Happy Birthday,” Abigail said as she stepped inside.  Rather than accept her sister’s hug, Olivia took the box from her hands.  Until that instant, when she felt her stomach growl with such ferocity that she shuddered, Olivia hadn’t realized just how hungry she was.  The women made their way to the kitchen.  All the while, Abigail talked.  “I brought dinner, the cake and groceries.  Did you even get dressed at all today?”

“What for?” Olivia asked as she rummaged through the cabinets to brandish utensil before remembering they were all sitting in the sink, accumulating grime and silt.  “Chinese?”

“Take out seemed easy enough,” Abigail laughed.  “Don’t worry, I remembered your Moo Shu Pork.  I also feel like I shouldn’t have bought you these plastic forks, like they’ll give you an excuse to hold off doing dishes, but I’m too hungry to clean right now.”

“Abby, I love you,” Olivia’s eyes glazed as her sister revealed the takeout boxes.  Abigail always seemed to know exactly what she needed. 

“I know.”

The sisters each took a seat at the table.  The two women pushed aside piles of old newspapers and styrofoam flatware to reveal a place on the heavy oak table that didn’t exactly give them elbow room, but enough space to sit and eat. 

Abigail poked at her food with a fork.  She twirled a few noodles around the prongs, before paused and lowered her gaze to her sister’s robe.  “So you still can’t bring yourself to wear that smock I bought you?”

            “For the last time, clothes restrict the creative process,” Olivia replied.   “Whose bright idea was it to invent the smock anyhow when you have perfectly good skin to paint in?”

            “If it were anyone but you, I’m sure I would have called the institution by now,” Abigail said.  “Have you gotten a job yet?”

            “Nope.  I still don’t need one.”

            “David’s life insurance money isn’t going to last forever.”

            “I know.”

            “If you don’t do something soon, you’ll just become a ragged old hag.”

            “Abby,” Olivia laughed.  She motioned to her sagging chest with one hand and pointed to the faint lines forming on her face with the other.  “I am a ragged old hag.”

            Abigail shrugged, recognizing this to be one of the numerous situations in which she couldn’t win an argument with her sister.  Their childhood was rich with those moments.  “Finish your dinner so we can get to work.”

            “Work?”

            “Cleaning the house.” Abigail had a wicked glint in her eyes. “Happy birthday.”

            Olivia thought back the voicemail Abby had left in which she announced that she was going to be coming over after work with a surprise birthday gift for Olivia.  It was Abby’s visit that had her excited, not the thought of a surprise; she had long since understood that surprises didn’t always mean something good.  Her husband, David’s, death was a surprise, and it wasn’t the kind that had her jumping excitedly and blowing out candles on a cake.

            “Why do we have to clean it now?” Olivia groaned.  She leaned forward.  Her thinning blonde hair almost fell into her food, which would have done wonderful to accentuate the green paint that was still there, waiting to be washed out.  Abby, prepared for this, brushed the strands back over her sister’s shoulders.  “There’s too much to do.  Can’t we just burn it down?”

            As if Abigail was only capable of two nice things for the evening, bringing dinner and keeping her sister from getting hair and paint in it, she straightened up, brought her hands back to her side, and with a stern voice and narrow eyes said, “Dishes.  Now.”

Everything made sense as to why Abigail said she would need to stay for a few days as soon as she pulled out a sheet of paper with a chore schedule listed in bold red ink.  The tricky part was finding a place on the fridge to hang it, not because there was clutter from papers or magnets, but because of the grime that clung to it.  She had scheduled a day to each room. 

Olivia wasn’t exactly the model domestic wife, but back when she had shared the house with David, she did her best to help him keep it clean.  When she looked around at piles of dishes that had been accumulating since the day of his death, a realization settled upon her.  Did she help David clean it, or was it just David?

“This place could be a model Victorian home if you would just give it the tender loving care it needs,” Abigail commented from the dining room.

“I didn’t buy this house for myself,” Olivia said.  She thought about reminding her sister that this was David’s dream house, but didn’t feel like getting into it.  She appreciated the fact that he’d purchased ten acres, most of it woodland, so she had enough privacy from the neighbors—easier to paint naked if you don’t have to worry about people peering in—but aside from that, nothing else about the architecture thrilled her.  Their first few years living in the neighborhood, he would spend every dinner telling her something unique about Victorian society.  That wasn’t uncommon for David’s behaviors.  Their first few dates involved them sitting down under the starlight and him telling her all about the astronomy and mythology.  Olivia had her own obsessions, such as that silly dream to one day become a famous artist, so she let it slide. 

Besides, it was fascinating to hear a guy who was so passionate about his interests, especially after growing up in a rural Nebraska farming community where no one’s conversations seemed to expand beyond corn and John Deere.

 

 

On the first night, after cake, Olivia took the kitchen while Abigail worked on the dining room.  Abigail started by scrubbing a year’s worth of dust and dirt off the curio cabinets while Olivia found herself scraping macaroni out of the microwave. 

“I think this has been here since the summer solstice,” Olivia commented as she clawed at the microwave’s walls. 

She removed the circular ceramic plate and dropped it in the sink, or at least attempted to, but the dishes were piled so high that it rested level with faucet.  So much for letting it soak.  Olivia turned away from it to scrub the dough from last month’s pizza off the hard tiled floor.  She heard Abigail call out, “When’s the last time someone cleaned this place?”

 “No clue,” Olivia said.  Lies, she knew the last time she cleaned, but didn’t want to reference a day like, well… “A year, I think.”

“You could’ve just hired a maid.”

“And have a stranger snooping around my house?  Besides, I’d have to wear clothes whenever she came over.”

“Any sane person would’ve hired a cleaner.”

Olivia grunted.  “When’s the last time I’ve done anything normal?  And don’t turn this on me.  You could have just as easily moved out of Omaha when I did.  Whatever happened to that guy I set you up with a few months ago?  He’s up in this area.”

“Philip?” Abigail asked, her voice suddenly glum.  “It didn’t work out.”

“He didn’t hurt you, did he?” Olivia sat up so quickly she felt a sharp pain in her neck.  She couldn’t wait to lay down flat that night, give her muscles and spine a break from arching and bending over.  “Give me his address and I’ll go kick him so hard he can’t have kids.”

“I appreciate the offer, but no thanks.  He was too bland.  Where’d you find him?”

“One of David’s friends,” Olivia said.  She dropped back to her knees to finish cleaning under the stove.  “I should have known better, though, than to hook you up with a guy who’s claim to fame was being a forty-eight year old virgin.  I just thought that he had some hidden wit that would come out in the right company.”

“It’s all right,” Abigail said.  “I’m more worried about you getting friends than me.  I think about you every day, out here alone.”

“You said you think about me every day.  Don’t.  I’m perfectly fine.  Until my paintings start talking to me, I don’t think you need to worry.”

“You mean they don’t already?”

“Well, so long as I don’t talk back to them.  Oh, damn it.”

“What is it?” Abigail asked.  Olivia looked up to see her peering into the dining room.

“David,” Olivia said as she reached her hands under the fridge.  “How did he get his things all the way down here?”

“What do you mean?”

“This,” Olivia said.  She pulled her arm out and held up a dust-covered book.  “It was David’s.  How did it make it all the way out here?  Hand me the trash can.”

“You don’t want to keep it?” Abigail reached for the trash can but hesitated before bringing it to Olivia.  She finally set it down beside her sister.

Olivia dropped it in the can.  “No.  There’s more than enough where that came from.  Trust me.  He had enough books to put the University’s library out of business.”

They laughed as they returned to their work.  Before the night was over, their knees were rubbed almost to the bone from kneeling, their wrists and knuckles ached from scrubbing, and a sharp pain rippled up both their backs each time they moved or sat up.  There was an illusion cast when the two were in each other’s company that all the decades they’d spent apart, married or working, had never happened and they were just two kids running around or climbing through dirt, mud and trees.  The only thing to shatter it was the pain in their exhausted, middle-aged bodies that could no longer handle so much activity in a day.

Olivia finally sent Abigail off to bed after the seventh time she watched her sister’s eyes droop.  She thought about following, but decided she’d have a cup of tea first.  She sat down with it at the dining room table, which was finally clean enough to eat off of without knocking things over or dragging her hair into something else.  It was late at night, but the light from the full moon bled through the glass into the dining room, spilling a sallow glow on the mess of everything that was still left to clean.  She soon got tired of looking at it.  Everything was easy to ignore on a day-to-day basis as she let the piles of trash and clutter grow, but once she finally got to working at them, it was impossible to ignore them. 

She left the dining room to retreat upstairs.  There was no choice but to pass through the hallway that led to her studio.  Foolishly, she paused in the doorway and glanced inside the one room in her house that had always been distinctly hers.  The door was still open, her pile of failed paintings in the far corner, taunting her.

“Why don’t you come finish us if you don’t want to go to bed?” the woman with no more than the outline of a dress asked.  Olivia remembered telling herself she was going to add polka dots to her clothing one of these days, but she could never decide if the polka dots were going to be a forest green or a baby blue, and then she one day mixed together this nice shade of purple that wasn’t quite a lavender but still would make a nice touch, and then she remembered the lavender air freshener in David’s car, when it had been a car and not a hunk of twisted, smoldering metal that the paramedics had to slice through.  She had immediately dropped her brush in the paints, knocked the painting off the easel, and never got back to it.

The man with the oversized limbs that rested beside the woman in the dress spoke up, “Don’t you miss us?”

She could hear the man at the park bench from underneath the other painting, still muffled but with enough power in his voice to make himself audible, “B***h is like all women; they use men and throw them out.”

“She’s had a bad day,” a little girl said as she picked at a daisy petal that had fallen onto her white Sunday dress.

“She’s always full of excuses.”

 “Not now, guys,” she muttered before she walked upstairs, her steps light as to not disturb Abigail.  As she laid down in bed, she tried to remember what it was like to live in her and David’s house where nothing, not even cleaning, was less daunting than painting.

 

 

The next day, Abigail got to work on the family room while Olivia went upstairs.  David’s study was on the list for her that day.   She tried to turn the knob but the door was jammed into the frame.  She pushed against it with her shoulder and it budged, leaving her to stumble inside as clouds of dust spilled into the air.  She cursed as she tripped over a pile of books left in the doorway.  While she cradled her foot, she was met with the most raucous stench that caused her to wrench forward in a gag reflex.  A year had given enough time for a colony of bacteria to grow inside the coffee mug that had been abandoned on his desk as he left for work the morning of the accident.  With one hand pinching her nose shut as she held her breath, she dropped it in the garbage bag, lifted up the sill of the back window against the wall, and tossed the bag out the window.

With that said and done, and the door and window open to help clear out the stench, she glanced around to assess the damage.  Cobwebs had formed and a thin layer of musk had settled, but it wasn’t as frightening when she thought about it.  She’d only once entered this room without David’s presence, which was to retrieve the students’ papers that he had been working on before the accident.  It was awkward for her to be inside, knowing he wouldn’t be there.

She darted downstairs to retrieve some cleaning supplies before she went to work sanitizing the room.  Once the air was thoroughly doused in aerosol, she began organizing everything.  David was renowned by his colleagues for collecting clutter and had amassed enough books on Norse mythology to make libraries envious.   Books everywhere, on the floor and desk, and she half expected to look up and see some stragglers clinging to the ceiling.  She took the better part of the day tossing them in trash bags.  There was just no reason to hold onto them anymore.  David’s openness and honesty had been a rare and much appreciated quality, but a perhaps not so humble and respectable quality was his need to recite everything that he had read. 

The first few years of marriage were fine.  She’d been able to look past his constant ramblings because every day he had something new to talk about.  It kept their conversations fresh, and they still had those nights when she was resting against him, feeling his heartbeat, and the entire world was silent.  He had phases, and that was all mythology was meant to be.  She let him get it out of his system at breakfast.  A talk of Thor over pancakes and then a mention of Valhalla at dinner.  She loved the excited look he got in his eyes when he read his books, so she even thought to buy him one as a birthday gift.  Just so long as he didn’t let himself get consumed by the books, she promised him that she would say nothing about his obsession.

One night, she’d called him to bed.  When he hadn’t responded, she went looking for him in his study.  She’d called to him from the doorway but he’d been too busy reading to hear her.  She’d decided at that moment that something had to go—the myths or her.  She wouldn’t have been so drastic if it wasn’t the night of their tenth anniversary and he couldn’t pull himself away from a book on Valkyries.  She’d made a comment jokingly about maybe he didn’t need to go to bed with her if he had something as beautiful as those winged goddesses of Norse Mythology.   The real problem had come when she noticed he was too involved in the text to reply.

He’d seemed hurt when she first tore the book from his hands.  After a hefty argument and fuming over each other for days on end, when David sat down to talk about something as boring and drab as the stock market over dinner, she couldn’t help but think that he was still angry with her.  She’d let him throw his tantrums, expecting he’d calm down after he got his fit out of his system.  She couldn’t even figure out what the big deal was.  They’d agreed that he could read about his myths in his study so long as it wasn’t a night that she wanted to have him all to herself.  With him now gone and her free to rummage through his study, it was made painfully clear to her just how much he had taken advantage of that offer.

The endless fighting continued.  It was their first true fight, and seemed far from the grasp of Olivia’s nature and capabilities to simply let an argument slide.  They would see each other for meals, then go to their own separate corners of the house.  She was only naked in her study, which he was never allowed into.

One afternoon, she came home from grocery shopping and found roses in the doorway to her studio.  He’d never bought her roses except for the night in which he proposed.  They’d talked about Michelangelo over dinner that night and she could scarcely recall a time throughout their marriage where she’d felt so content and relieved.

Olivia shook the thought from her head.  Dinner and Michelangelo would be nice, but it would do little, if anything, to finish cleaning up this mess.  She needed to take a break midway through the day and dropped into his desk chair to relieve the stress building in her aching back and muscles.  Curiosity got the better of her.  She rummaged through his desk drawers.  The bottom left hand drawer contained important files and documents.  His social security card, home insurance information, and anything else that was meant for safe keeping.  The top drawer was considerably smaller, containing only a few pens, dull pencils, and a thin black leather-bound book.  She blinked at first, confused by the book, until vivid images flashed in her mind of all the times David had sat in his study, marking in the book.  His planner.  For all twenty-four years of marriage, she had watched as he kept diligent notes of everything in his planners.  It was most likely to keep track of the lectures, but that was all up for debate because he never let anyone look at it.  This latest one was a Christmas gift to him, but since the accident was in January, he hadn’t been given much time to use it.

She took the planner into her arms and pressed it against her chest.  Closing her eyes, she inhaled the scent of leather.  It had to be put somewhere safe so it wouldn’t be lost during the cleaning spree and there was no place like that in this room.  She slipped it into her pocket, knowing she’d remember it later. 

Soon, Abigail called her down to dinner.  While they ate, she and her sister joked about how the dust-covered drapes in the kitchen looked just like that sickly shade of brown their mother used to hang up around the windows of their old house.  They finished their meal and got to work immediately on the dishes, and by that time, Olivia had forgotten all about the planner.

 

 

As night settled over the house, Olivia couldn’t stop her mind from racing.  The potent moldy stench from David’s coffee mug still remained with her.  She tasted it at the tip of her tongue, fought back a gag reflex each time she swallowed, because the last thing she needed was to have to do laundry and wash the bedspread on top of everything else. 

Outside the walls of her bedroom, a December storm raged.  Come tomorrow, the trash that she’d thrown out would be covered under a thick layer of white powder, and for that, most likely forgotten until the snow melted.  She rolled onto her side, covering her ears with the pillow to try to drown out the sound of the wind.  Skeletal trees clawed at the windows, rubbing their sharp fingers against the window pane and walls.  With the blanket pulled over her head, she was finally able to get some semblance of peace.

That’s when the white noise set in.  It started as a faint buzz, one that she was not even truly aware of until she started to drift off into unconsciousness, and then all of a sudden, like her cell phone on vibrate, she heard it, felt it, and couldn’t shake it.  She shuddered, cradled her limbs.  Something was so unsettling about the night, and it took her rolling over to David’s old side of the bed to realize that it was having someone else in the house, but not having them up there, in the bedroom, with her.

The monotony of dull noise in her head was finally shattered by the clock’s heavy dull, chiming three times over.  She was tempted to go downstairs and wake up Abby just to have someone to talk to, just to not be up alone, but was held back by the suspicion of just how much her sister would laugh at her.  As soon as Abigail left the farmhouse they grew up in, she immediately moved into her own house.  She had very few visitors.  Judging from how rare it was that anyone ever received an invitation to come over, she appeared as accustomed to living alone as she was to her sister’s antics.  It was a level of solitude that Olivia, even after eleven months as a widow, didn’t think she could ever be comfortable with. 

Wasn’t Olivia the older sister?  Wasn’t she the one who was supposed to be strong, independent, have all the answers, not the one who was so helpless to stay up all night, wondering if it would perhaps be better if her sister never even left at all?

In all their married life, Olivia and David were only ever able to make one trip to Abigail’s house.  The excuse of her still living in Omaha never worked well, considering Abby had never had difficulty in making the drive down south whenever she felt like visiting.

Their one visit was special, though—it was the first time Abby had ever invited Olivia over to meet a man she was having dinner with.

Abby was a victim of what Olivia liked to think of as the Nebraska Syndrome.  Symptoms included corn on the dinner plate every night, learning to drive a tractor years before so much as touching the steering wheel of a car, no more than two families within a four mile radius, and most prominently, a stereotypical farm house with a wrap-around porch, all of it painted pollen yellow that had faded from exposure to the sun.  Lead paint, the kind that chipped everywhere and had a sweet taste that Olivia’s mother used to slap her for when she’d try to eat.  That was Abigail’s excuse for why she turned out to be so different from most other girls their age—too much lead.  It was even a long running joke that the whole reason Olivia got into painting was to try all the other different flavors.

Olivia had lunged at Abigail’s invitation for her and David to come over.  She refrained from eating paint that day.  Aside from growing out of that habit simultaneously as she left behind diapers, she told Abigail on the phone that the main reason was that she had to save room for her cooking.  Abby’s dishes were the kind that left Olivia salivating before and after she ate, from the spices and scents in the air to the fact that no matter how much she ate, she always wanted just one more bite.

Abby had offered no description as to what kind of person the new man she was dating was, so just to be on the careful side, Olivia arrived wearing a nice blouse and David in a sports coat.  He always looked amazing in his sport coat, with his black hair left just the slightest bit unruly, like he’d run his hands through it with gel, but he never used gel.  It was all natural.  Everything with him was always natural.

Roy was the name of Abigail’s date—Roy Jones.  Sounded just like someone who grew up in a farm town, and his knowledge of John Deere and combines was certainly on par with all of the peers that Olivia had finally escaped five or so years ago by marrying a history professor.  At least he didn’t wear his overalls to the dinner table, and when he spoke, his voice was calm, controlled, rather than excited and spitting up food everywhere like Olivia’s first date, and every other date after him up until David.

It was a conversation that Olivia at least knew how to help carry on.

“An’ it took me hours to drive that combine into the shop,” he had said with a mouthful of corn that he had the decency to swallow.  “Since it was in th’ middle o’ harvest, I was mad as ‘ell to miss the rest of the day.”

“That’s too bad,” Olivia commented.  Commenting often created the misconception that she had actually been listening and, even more than that, could give a care about what was being discussed.  In reality, she spent the whole meal thinking of how horrible Abigail would sound with the last name of ‘Jones’, and how she couldn’t imagine anyone who would want to spend their life being Mrs. Roy and talking about combines over dinner.  “I’m sure Abigail told you the stories about when she, our parents and I used to sell our corn door-to-door.”

“Yes’m,” he said.  “You girls seem to know a mighty bit about the trade.”

Olivia kept her foot ready with her heel raised to kick David at any moment he might start to laugh, but he was perfectly obedient.  He wore a pleasant smile throughout all of dinner, nodded whenever Roy addressed him and responded briefly but politely, such as “No, I’m sorry, could you please explain?” when Roy asked him if he knew what a calf puller was meant for.

Fortunately, Roy waited to talk about the calf puller until after they’d finished eating.

“A calf puller,” David had said as he chuckled all the way on the drive back home. “Amusing.  Did you ever use one of those?”

“Regretfully,” Olivia had replied while rolling her eyes.  “One of the calves was born while my dad was away at a tractor convention and—”

“You needn’t say more.”

So she didn’t say anymore.  But she couldn’t help but wonder that night, after she and David had both laid down in bed and her husband was finally in a deep sleep, why it was that that was the first time she’d ever been able to answer a question for him.  It was nice, for a change, to appear knowledgeable to someone, instead of playing the role every dinner night of David’s talk of mythology and history to her.  Tonight was his opportunity to be the one to ask questions, even if it was just about farm equipment.

And maybe it was Abigail’s fault that Olivia started to notice all these things, but regardless, it felt awkward to have Abigail in the house when it was around the first anniversary of her husband’s death.

 

 

            Olivia found herself in the doorway of her studio downstairs the following morning, arms folded over her chest and lips stubbornly pursed together.  It was too soon to enter.  Standing there felt like a waste of her time, and it was all Abigail’s fault.

“I’m not doing something with my studio just because my little sister’s telling me to,” Olivia had said flatly that morning.

“Just do it,” Abigail said.  “You’ll thank me later.”

No I won’t, Olivia thought to herself.  Since when am I supposed to answer to her anyhow?  She’s supposed to answer to ME. 

The paintings sat in the corner, looking at her.  That woman with the unfinished dress appeared way too smug.  She looked away for fear of having her own work taunt her again.

            Paint cans were piled in the corner, most of them empty, some tipped over so that the last few drops spilt onto the hardwood floor and stained the finish.  Dust was all over the floor.  Sitting just outside the entry way was another one of David’s books to throw out.  Had she been able to make herself step inside, there was more than enough to clean up.  No matter how much she thought about it, and no matter how much Abigail would snap at her for it, it just felt wrong to move everything in the only room left in the house that she felt was her own.

            She finally decided to stop wasting her time and wandered into the kitchen to scrounge up something even remotely edible for lunch.  Abigail had brought just enough ingredients to make home made chicken soup.  It was Abigail’s favorite dish, not Olivia’s, so she had to guess on how much of each seasoning to add, and how long the vegetables and broth needed to boil together, which she plainly failed when her and Abigail sat down to take their first spoonful.  Most everything was right, or so they assumed, because it was all masked by the onion taste that was so overwhelming she nearly choked.

            “Sorry.” Olivia winced as she reached for a glass of water.

            “That’s all right,” Abigail said.  Her hair was in disarray and her complexion flushed from a long day’s work, but she managed to offer Olivia a smile. “I found some old photo albums in the guest room today.  Crazy what you can come across when you finally start to dig through a mess.  It’s like a treasure hunt, especially with all these books I’ve been finding.  How about you?  Did you find anything?”

            “Not really,” Olivia said.  “There’re enough books to have a bonfire.”

Abigail laughed.  “I know exactly what you mean.  I got bored and read some snippets today while taking a break.  I remember you saying something about how sick you’ve been of hearing about mythology, but it’s not boring like you’d think.  What do you have against it anyhow?”

            “Just didn’t interest me,” Olivia said with a lose shrug.  She didn’t feel like getting into the details of her pillow talk with her husband with her younger sister.  “If you find any of those books, either keep them or throw them out.  I have more than enough clutter to put away to where I don’t need anything else to worry about.”

            As soon as dinner was over, Olivia found herself with her hands in the soapy sink.  The pile of dishes had shrunk to where they were finally beneath the faucet.  Abigail kept her company by sitting at the table, flipping through one of the numerous books she’d found.  Her sister was always the packrat of the family, never being truly able to throw away anything.  At certain times, it was nice, like when she stopped Olivia from throwing away an old doll that Olivia later on used as a model for a painting.  Other times, there were things that just simply didn’t need to be in Olivia’s life anymore.

            “I wish you’d come visit me,” Abigail said.  It startled Olivia, because it’d been at least a good ten minutes since they’d spoken to each other, each of them engrossed in their own project, their own thoughts.

            “I visited you once,” Olivia said, defensively, as she tried to scratch her nose without getting soap suds in her mouth or eyes.

            “Yeah, but that was a long time ago.  We didn’t get to do enough because David was such a book worm that I thought he’d scare Roy away.  That was the only time you guys ever left the house, it seemed.  I just thought it would be nice for the both of you to have a break and come visit me instead of me always driving to Lincoln.”

            Olivia shrugged.  There was no response to say to that, so she simply let silence slip in between them until it once again blanketed them.  It was her sister’s laugh that came minutes later to startle them out of it.

“This stuff is amazing,” Abby said.

Olivia peered out of the kitchen to see Abigail’s flipping through the pages of the same book.  Olivia was curious to know what it was, but because she didn’t own many books, she knew she was better off not asking about what was obviously David’s.  She said dryly, “I’m sure it’s not that amazing,”

 “I’m trying to imagine this place.” It was as if Olivia’s words went into one ear and right out the other.  “Valhalla, is that how you pronounce this?  Five hundred doors.  Hah!  Olivia, you could paint better than this.  Come take a look.”

“Busy,” Olivia said, even thought she was ready to drain the water.  She looked frantically around the kitchen for anything to shove in the sink and decided to wash that coffee cup one more time.  Did it smell of egg?  How could a coffee cup smell of egg?  What was last in here?  She would have asked, but she might have needed carbon-dating to get a precise age on it. 

            “It has a picture of this crazy guy with one eye.”

            “Odin,” Olivia said before she flinched.  Damn it, why do I remember this stuff?

            “He’s got some winged woman hanging off of him.  She looks beautiful.”

            “Valkyrie,” Olivia said.  Damn it.

            “Is everything all right?” Abigail asked.  Olivia turned to watch her sister stand up from the table.  “You’re flinching a lot.  Did you burn yourself?  Don’t run the water so hot, you’re killing germs, not scalding your hands.”

            “No,” Olivia said.  “I’m fine.  What are you looking at?”

            “A picture book,” Abigail laughed.  “Look at this place.  It’s beautiful.  A building with five hundred doors.  There’s a caption.  Home for Ode—Odin and his winged women.  It says he resides above the sky in this building called Valhalla with some five hundred doors.  Of all the books David left lying around, this is the best by far.  I can’t read that much at once, but if it’s given to me visually, I have no problem taking it in.”

            “That’s why you were an art history major,” Olivia said.  It was the best way she could think to change the subject.  How could I remember all that stuff?  Didn’t I block it out of my head a long time ago?

            “Yep,” Abigail said and closed the book.  “All right, bed time.  I’d hate to say this, but can you wake me up at 5 a.m.?  I want to get on the road early to be able to make a stop off at my house and drop off some things before work.”

            “Sure thing.”

            “I wish I didn’t have to go.   We can just clutter up this room and clean it all over again.”

            “No.”

            “Fine.  But you know, you could be the one to get a job and let me crash here all day.”

            “I’ll get a job when I’m good and ready.”

            “If you say so.”

 

 

Olivia’s feet crept up the staircase, trying her best not to disturb Abigail in the guest room directly below, but her feet carried themselves a bit heavier with her mind too distracted, too muddled, to concentrate on anything.  How could she have possibly remembered all of that?  She knew David’s favorite was Norse Mythology and there was a time when he had practically preached about Odin, the Valkyries, and his paradise, Valhalla.  It’s not like she purposely listened, though, when David rambled.  She did her best to block it out, but it obviously hadn’t been good enough.  She kicked off her clothes and haphazardly threw on pajamas that hung loosely off her arms and shoulders.  If her attitude was prelude into anything, then it was no surprise that she had such a restless night, falling in and out of slumber like a shifting wind.  When the alarm clock finally went off, she felt as if it wasn’t even midnight.  She threw on some clothes to be decent.  There had been enough of giving her sister a hard time; on her last morning, she wanted to at least be presentable, to create the illusion that Abigail had done something to help Olivia piece her life back together.  Gluing the shards of a broken mirror together didn’t do much good, either, but at least they still reflected as they should be, even if it was just fragments of the image.

Abigail seemed just as sluggish as she to get out of bed.  She took sweet time getting dressed, despite how much Olivia nagged her.

            “Remind me to come back in the spring so we can do the yard,” Abigail said, smirking as she stepped out the door. 

Olivia shook her head.  “I think it’ll take me longer than that to recover from all of this.”

            By the time Abigail was gone, Olivia’s eyes were still heavy.  Her muscles felt too exhausted to exert the energy to wander back upstairs so she decided to collapse in the guest room.  She crawled under the nest of sheets Abigail made and closed her eyes, not bothering for once to slide out of her jeans.  She probably wouldn’t wake up until mid afternoon, but there was no reason to get up, now that the house was empty again.

            There were no more schedules to follow except for the ones that Olivia created herself, and those were all jokes, such as the time she wrote a reminder to herself to put on a robe for when the mailman came to the door.  It was easy to forget that she was naked, considering she was more comfortable in just her skin than in any clothing.  Still, the first thing on her list to do would be to throw out that picture book, unless Abby had taken it with her, but she hoped it was still there, just for the satisfaction of bending the spine as she would try to force it into the trash can.    

            It was a gift from David’s, but unlike many of his gifts, which came in the form of jewelry, new furniture for the house, or dinners out on the town, this was one that in which she’d be better off if she could forget it entirely.

 

 

Just a few days after she and David had had the argument about Valkyries, followed by and the dinner focused entirely on Michelangelo, Olivia would have been blind if she hadn’t been married to her husband for nearly a decade to not notice that something was still bothering him.  He was silent over the dinner table, and breakfast table, and any other time of day, and for someone like David, the man that she claimed to fall in love with because he was an overflowing fountain of knowledge and information to be behaving like this, she was so flustered that for the first time in her life, she couldn’t paint.

She’d gone through the whole procedure—stripping off her clothes, leaving them at the door (no clothes allowed in her studio, which was another reason other people rarely entered), sitting down on the stool with one foot propped up and the other flat on the floor, her back hunching forward, brush in her right hand and the left eye squinting.  The tip of the brush dipped into a fresh new tray of blues, finding a light frosty shade to help her with the winter landscape she was hoping to create, and still, she couldn’t paint.  The brush approached the canvas, but her hand felt forced back, like opposing ends of a magnet.  Something felt wrong on so many levels, morally, emotionally, mentally, and it didn’t actually settle with her what was truly out of balance until David arrived home and they ate a quiet dinner, her in her bathrobe and him in his suit jacket that he was too tired to take off when he walked in the front door.  He almost got spaghetti on the sleeves when he reached haphazardly across the table for the pepper grinder.

“All right,” she had said as she dropped her elbows on the table.  “What’s wrong?”

“Bad day at work,” was his quiet reply.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

He shook his head.  Chewed at his food for a few minutes.  An awkward, unsettling silence fell over them, only broken up by the feint sounds of his teeth grinding.  Finally, after he swallowed, coarsely and accusatively, he turned to her and began, “You’ve never had a problem with mythology, or me talking about it.  And as much as I’d like to think that what happened a few days ago didn’t matter, anything that comes between us is always serious.”

“It’s nothing,” she said, taken a bit aback.  Nothing was plenty enough to get David to drop his fork and the pepper grinder on the table with a loud clatter, drop his arms to his sides, and stare directly at her.  She exhaled and arched her back.  This was going to be painful.  “Do you realize you married an idiot?”

“What on earth are you talking about?” he frowned.

“Me,” she said.  “I’m an idiot.  I can only help fill someone’s knowledge gaps about John Deere and corn and calf pullers, and I can talk about art, but I can’t make anyone appreciate it.”

“I appreciate your art and you know it.”

“But do you ever understand it?  Will you ever?”

Silence.  It pressed on for seconds, but those seconds ticked away like a lifetime.  The two of them were on the verge of Ragnarok, and even the slightest breath might be enough to shatter the sky into pieces.  When he finally spoke, it was to say, “What was the historical context in which it was created?  What kinds of genres do you like?  What periods were they most prevalent?  Art tells so much about history, and vice-versa, so if you study one then you’re more connected to the other than you realize and—”

It was back to history again.  She walked away from the table and sat down in her studio, but didn’t take her bathrobe off because she knew she wasn’t going to paint.  She sat there, staring at her easel until the slits of pink and orange that slipped through the cracks in the blinds faded into darkness.  And that took far longer than even a sane mind could handle.

The next day, she knew he wouldn’t be home until after she went to bed.  There was a board meeting at the history department that she’d known for weeks about, and when she woke up, she’d expected to spend the day alone and busy trying to paint something in her studio, but was taken by surprise from the package that was resting on the table that morning.  It was a slender box wrapped up in shimmering red paper, almost like it was Christmas time.  Her name was written on a tag, and she tore it open, only to find an art book inside, and the title on the cover, read “An Artist’s Guide to Norse Mythology.”

Was he trying to connect with her?  Or was he trying to prove a point to her?  Maybe both?  Either way, she couldn’t stand arguing with him.  They’d never argued before, and it was going to ruin her painting if they kept arguing.  She decided to let it be.  What was the worse that could happen?  They’d find ways to fill their days together, and eventually, he’d have to understand everything that was truly bothering her.

 

 

            Olivia woke up to the sensation of something digging at her thigh.  She reached into her jeans pocket and pulled it out.  Without looking at it, she flung it across the room.  It took her a second to realize that she had just thrown David’s planner behind a dresser.  She knelt down next to the dresser and reached behind it until she felt she had a firm grip on what she thought would be the planner.  Her hands were sweaty and slippery against the leather, but with minor difficulty, she pulled it out.  One of the corners was bent but it was otherwise in good condition.  How had she forgotten all about it?  She wanted nothing more than to tear into it and read it.  It would be nice to have some company with Abigail gone.  After all, this was finally something of David’s she actually wanted to read.

            With a yawn, her hands went limp.  The planner landed on the floor with a clatter.  She glanced towards the floor.  It landed with the covers closed.  She exhaled coolly, dropped it and retrieved it again.  She wanted nothing more than to read it, but it was David’s secret book that the world wasn’t meant to see.  But if she accidentally read it, to say, it accidentally fell open and invited her, what was the problem giving in?

            Dropped it again.  Threw it.  Each time, the planner landed with the covers closed, the pages not even ruffled. 

Taking a break, she picked it up and carried it to the kitchen.  A glass of orange juice sounded excellent.  She poured a glass and sat down at the table with the planner in her lap.  A plate of scrambled eggs later and seven more times of throwing the planner at the ground, only to find it still falling with the covers closed, she rolled her eyes. 

“What’s the point in doing something on purpose if I can’t make it accidentally happen?”

            She peeled open the cover.  Sorry, David, but I can’t wait any longer.

            There were less than a month’s worth of entries in it.  Upon opening it, she noticed he had taken advantage of the December dates thrown in the beginning.  He didn’t seem content to write the times and dates of his meetings, but he had to take advantage of the margins for his own notes.  The first one, on Christmas—“Olivia bought me this new planner.  The leather smells fresh, straight from the animal.”

            She giggled and moved onto the next entry, which started with the first day of the new semester.  “History 101 at 10 a.m.  History 404 at 3:30 p.m.  There’s really nothing to say about my freshman class that isn’t typical.  The quiz they took the other day was like Russian Roulette.  They fired off answers, hoping to just once be right.”

            They continued through the third week of January: “Meeting with the Head of the Department at 4 p.m.  Note to self: stop staring at that bald spot, even if it shimmers under the office lights.”

            She continued to read them, skipping over the long entries to save for later and reading the short snippets that stood out to her.  Why didn’t I just get him a journal?  One final entry on January twenty-second: “Dinner tonight with Olivia at 7:30 p.m. at the Lakeview.  I’ll do my best to not talk about mythology, but I can’t promise anything.  The restaurant is supposed to be the closest thing to Valhalla on earth.”

            Valhalla?  Olivia’s fingers dug into the leather.  She shook her head.  The last night he was alive, he was thinking about Valhalla?  Beneath his writing, he scribbled something down.  She squinted her eyes, struggling to make it out.  It appeared like boxes piled on top one another to form some kind of building or colony.  In the center, he drew a large door with an arrow pointing towards it, and a caption, “Valhalla, or the Lakeview?”

            The rest of the planner was left blank.

            Valhalla.  That was all he ever cared about.  Odin’s fortress.  

She felt as if she needed to do something, and throwing a bucket of white oil-based paint at the wall seemed like the best idea for the time being.  She stormed into her studio, clutched the bucket by the sides and flung it with all her strength.  It splattered over her mess of used canvases.  It felt amazing.  In a frenzy, she scooped up a brush and started trying to shape it with one of her pallets into anything that came to mind.  At first, intuition told her to make black swirls that could eventually become the outline for something.  Sweat gobs developed on her forehead as she squinted her brow in a desperate attempt to make something worthwhile out of her mess.  At first glance, she thought she was looking at a mangled seagull.  She stripped out of her clothes to be rid of the constrictiveness, and it allowed her to take enough time staring at the painting to realize it was a pretty good start since seagulls had wings and feathers.  There were all sorts of things she could do with wings and feathers.

            She began with what she thought would be a fairy.  With the basic shape of the wings down, she worked diligently to add detail and definition to each feather.  In the middle, she traced with her brush the general outline of the fairy’s body.  It was a woman with voluptuous, enticing curves and a creamy complexion.  Her face was thin and long, with deep burgundy eyes and silver pencil-thin eyebrows to accompany thin straight silver locks of hair.  It intertwined with the loose feathers that fell off her wings.  Unfortunately, her fairy looked too cold to give her a gold pixie wand.  Eyes with such ferocity needed a weapon that spoke of strength and valor.  A spear seemed appropriate.  She painted one with a gold handle before she took a step back to see how well she was progressing.  She slumped forward and groaned.  This wasn’t a fairy.  It was, as much as she hated to use the word, a Valkyrie.

            A Valkyrie.  She hadn’t been able to finish a single painting in nearly a year, and when she finally was done, it was a Valkyrie.  Another haunting reminder of what had crippled her marriage.  The Valkyrie was beautiful, with her perfect body and round, inviting eyes, but there was something else about her that was hideous.

“Don’t fool yourself.  You wish you were as beautiful as me.”

Olivia flinched at the voice.  She looked over her shoulder.  Had Abigail come back?  There was no one standing behind her.  Maybe she just thought she heard something.  She glanced towards the pile of paintings to where the woman in the polka dot dress lay, gazing at her, shrugging as if to say, “Don’t look at me.”

“Hey, I’m over here!  Look at me when I talk to you.”

Olivia attempted followed the voice, but it led her in circles around the room.

“Are you blind?  I’m up here.”

Olivia was hesitant to look up at the Valkyrie.  When she did, she couldn’t help but acknowledge the woman sneering back at her with those vicious burgundy eyes.  “About time you look at me.  I thought I’d have to spend all night yelling at you.”

I’m not going to talk back, Olivia told herself.  Yes, she’d snapped at her paintings before, but it was different.  She couldn’t explain how or why, but it was.

“Fine, don’t say anything.  I can keep at this all night.  I mean, it’s not like you haven’t ignored people before.”

“What are you talking about?” Olivia scowled, folded her arms and rested them upon her chest.  For the first time ever, she realized she’d worn a blouse into her studio.  Already, it was covered in paint that dripped down the sides of her arms.

“You know what I mean,” said the Valkyrie.  “All those lonely nights you spent in bed because ignoring your husband seemed like the best option.”

            “Liar.  Who do you think David cared about the most?” Good job, Olivia.  You tell it to your painting like it is.

            “Do you really want to ask me that?”

            “Like you know anything,” Olivia said.  “If anyone knew my husband, it was me.”

            “Are you sure?”

“Yes, and I don’t need to prove myself to you,” Olivia said and turned her back on the painting.  Frustrated to be told off by her own creation, she climbed up the stairs to her bedroom.  The window beside the bed was cast open, letting in the cool December air.  She collapsed on top of the covers and closed her eyes, but her mind was racing.  There was no way the Valkyrie had any idea about David.  Yes, Olivia had asked him to keep his interests out of their lives, but they still had a very stable and happy marriage, mythology aside.  She could prove it if she wanted to.  The journal was still in the kitchen, downstairs.

“No, I won’t do it,” she said to herself.  At the same time, she sat up, brought her feet to the cold floor, and walked downstairs.  She was quiet and refused turn on any lights at risk of alerting the Valkyrie, because there was no way Olivia was going to let that tramp know how much she’d gotten to her.

The blinds in the kitchen were still open.  Moonlight pooled onto the floor, outlining the journal as it lay by the fridge, but the rest of the kitchen was dark.  Olivia felt over the counters to find her way, and for once, she was thankful to have a clean place.  Her hands stumbled onto some dishes she’d left out and a box of half-used birthday candles, but at least she wasn’t tripping over crusted pizza boxes.  She knew she’d found the planner when her fingers sunk into soft leather.  She picked it up, cradled it.

With a deep sigh, she opened up the cover and turned to one of the elongated entries that she hadn’t read beforehand.  January 11th, a Wednesday: “Meeting with Brian Myers at 2 p.m. about the plagiarism hearing.  Why would such a good kid do something so foolish?  I would give one of my eyes like Odin if it would give this kid the wisdom to save himself, but that’s not my choice to make.  Watch over me, whoever of you all are up there guiding us.  I’m going to need a lot of strength if I’m going to help him get his life back in order.”

Olivia looked at it for moments on end in silence.  Why didn’t he talk about any of this with me?  She turned the page to another.  She searched to see if there were any other entries in which the name Brian Myers was mentioned.  Nearly a full week later, January 17th, a Tuesday: “3:30 p.m.  Jacob’s plagiarism hearing.  We agreed that he was going to be honest and open to the committee in hopes that their punishment will be light.  I told him the story about the time that was accused of cheating on an exam in my University and how they withdrew my admission without giving me a chance to plead my innocence.  I did everything I could at my local community college to restore my grades and my integrity on my campus before transferring to another University to finish.  I would hate to see something like that happen to him.”

The planner slipped from Olivia’s hands, this time not on purpose.  She retrieved it from where it landed on the mattress, but her fingers were stubborn about opening it again.  David was kicked out of school?  Why hadn’t he told her?  They didn’t start dating until he was in the process of getting his Masters, but still, she would have liked to have known.  She flipped back to the date of January 17, but her fingers made it difficult.  They were trembling, stumbling with the pages.  When she found her old spot, she had to place the journal down atop the table because her hands where shaking too much to hold it still enough for her to read.

“I think he realizes this isn’t the end for him, so long as he’s willing to work for it.  5:30 p.m.  Dinner with Olivia, and then hopefully a movie, since I’ve been too busy for her lately.”

 She set the planner back on the floor and turned off the lights, but it certainly did nothing to relax her mind.  How could two people live side by side for twenty-four years and not know how to connect enough to talk about things like this?  She pondered this as she closed her eyes.  David, where are you when I need to understand you the most?

Was this all that’d she’d shut out of her life?  So just how much had he chosen to share?  How much had she convinced him wasn’t worth sharing?

Odin was the God of the Sky, she remembered him mentioning that many times over dinner.  He had a home up in the sky called Valhalla and was followed by wretched women named Valkryies, and she knew they served him, but she couldn’t remember what they did for him or why.  She hoped they weren’t all as annoying as the one in her studio.  Oh, if she could do anything to that woman, she would.

“So,” Olivia said as she entered the studio.  She was hesitant to turn the lights on out of fear of waking the other paintings, but there was no way she was going to be quiet enough to let them sleep anyhow.  “You think you know my husband more than me?”

            “I know he spent one of your anniversary nights looking at me.”

            “We settled that,” Olivia grit her teeth.

            “You don’t look like it’s been settled.  Something just didn’t rest right with him, sitting down and having a normal conversation on all the boring topics you were into.   You know, the Sistine Chapel wasn’t even all that impressive.   Odin sacrificed one of his eyes to a lesser god so he could gain knowledge.  Now that’s impressive.”

            “What’s impressive is a man who was willing to speak his mind about anything.”

            “I suppose,” the Valkyrie said.  Olivia could have sworn she saw the Valkyrie loosely toss a strand of hair over her shoulders.  “That’s to say, until you told him that you couldn’t tolerate it anymore, and what did that make you?”

            “You weren’t there in the beginning,” Olivia frowned.  “That first week of marriage, we never even got out of bed.  David never paid that kind of attention to you.”

            “So, you had one passionate week.  I would ask about how the rest of it went, but after twenty-four years and no kids, I think I have my answer.”

            “That’s our business.”  Why did she even let herself come in here?  The scenario had futile written all over it with bold letters, so fresh they were dripping trails of scarlet down the walls of her mind’s eye.  “And we made that decision because the last thing we needed were more people fighting with us for our attention!”

            “That’s right, because you had enough already doing that to you.  I understand.”

            “Just what are you trying to prove?”

            “You tell me.”

            Olivia smirked.  “I know exactly what this is about.  I stole David back from you.  I lost him to you for quite a while, I’ll admit to that, but I took him back for myself, and you can’t accept that.  Why don’t you go fly back up and cry to Odin?  Oh, that’s right, he doesn’t even exist.  And neither do you, which means I don’t have to listen to this.”

            “Took you long enough to figure that out.  So here’s the big question of the night.  You’ve realized you don’t need to be here, so why are you still listening to me?”

            The woman had a point.  Olivia reached for a bucket of paint on the floor.  Black splashed onto her finger nails.  She flung the bucket’s contents at the Valkyrie.  It splattered all over the painting, staining her face, her hair, and her perfect but hideous dress.

            The Valkyrie screamed.  “What are you doing?  This outfit was worth more than all this painting junk you never use anymore.”

            “Shut up already!” Olivia hissed.  She picked up another bucket, this one was green, and splashed it all over the wall. 

            “Make me.”

            The Valkyrie’s face was finally covered, but even behind the layers of paint, Olivia caught the movement of the Valkyrie trying to shake herself off.  How was she still talking?  Olivia searched for her paint thinner.  The can was no where in sight.  She couldn’t have flung it or she wouldn’t have had this much of a mess by now.  There had to be some way to get rid of all traces of the Valkyrie.  As it was, she could still hear her shrilly, menacing laughter.

            Thinking quickly, she dashed to the kitchen and grabbed the book of matches by the fridge.  Olivia snickered as she lit one and carried it back to her study, holding a hand over the flame to protect it.  She lifted it up to the Valkyrie’s face and heard the wretched woman’s breath quicken.

            “You wouldn’t,” the Valkyrie scoffed.  “You’d burn your whole house down.”

            “This was David’s house.  It was never mine.”

            She pressed the match into the paint.  “Take that, hussy.”

She felt sweet satisfaction from the way the Valkyrie screamed in agony at the flames peeling away her skin.  Because of the oil base, it the flames spread rapidly through the walls.  She instantly felt their heat.  Cinders nipped at her hair, skin.  There was no time to spare.  She found her bathrobe upstairs in her bedroom, resting on the floor beside her nightstand.  On her nightstand was her cell phone.  Thinking quickly, she pocketed it in her robe.

            She walked back downstairs and noticed the heavy layer of smoke building in the air.  The rest of the house wouldn’t burn as fast as her studio, but that didn’t mean she should dawdle anymore than need be.  There was nothing else worth retrieving.  Even the paintings that she had hoped to one day finish in the corner would just remind her of the Valkyrie, and there was no way she could have that in her new life.  She walked outside, and out of reflex, set the deadbolt to lock as she shut the door.

As she stood out on her porch, she whispered a quick thank you to David, wherever he was, for buying them property surrounded by trees to grant her the privacy that she would need, no matter what the situation.  Once she was out in the cool night air, away from the house and porch, she dialed a number on her cell phone.  A few rings passed before the other end picked up.  “Hey, Abby.  It’s Olivia.  Can I stay at your place for a few days?  My house burned down.” Pause.  “It just sort of happened.  It’s still burning, actually.  Pick me up soon?  I forgot to get my car out of the garage.  Thanks, you’re a doll.”

When the first sign of deep black tendrils floated out through the windows and chimney, she sighed in resignation and adjusted her robe.  She glanced at her watch.  Abigail was going to drive as fast as her little red car would take her.  It was in her nature to not take chances with things like this.  Still, she was out there for quite some time before her sister arrived.  Enough time for her bare feet to lose feeling as she jogged in step atop ice-covered stone tablets that formed the walkway between the driveway and the porch.

“Olivia, what happened?”

She heard Abigail’s voice before she noticed her car arrive down the long driveway.  Maybe she would’ve noticed her sister coming if she wasn’t too preoccupied with thinking about how much pain the Valkyrie was in as she died.  Olivia looked up and smiled.

 “An incident with a painting.  I kind of accidentally flung a match at it.”

Abigail stiffened. “Are you serious?”

“Why would I make this up?”

“What’s wrong with you?  You couldn’t just take it down?”

“It was on the wall.”

“Good lord.  That was your home.  Just paint over it!”

“I tried,” Olivia sighed.  “Oh well, the tramp had it coming.”

“What are you even talking about?  I swear Olivia, I’m ready to call the cops.  This isn’t funny in the least, so stop smiling.”

“It’s nothing,” Olivia said.  It was impossible for Abigail to understand.  Wasn’t even worth the effort to try and explain it to her.  “Let’s just get out of here first and I’ll explain later, and then you can call the cops on me if you still wish.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Abby said.  “But for now, you owe me that explanation, big time.”

“Sure thing.” Olivia climbed into the passenger’s side door of Abby’s car.  “Hey Abby, I’m sorry I messed up the house again.”

“Olivia,” Abigail clenched her hands on the steering wheel.  Her voice hinted at aggression that she wanted desperately to let out, but wasn’t sure if it was the time or place.  “Let’s just get out of here.”

“Yeah,” Olivia said.  “So, what sort of jobs do you think they’ll have for me in Omaha?”

            She vaguely listened to Abigail’s response, lulled by how nice it was to have a normal conversation on a normal, boring topic.  She would have gone for anything, so long as it wasn’t corn, John Deere, or Norse Mythology.

            “Abby,” Olivia said, when she noticed Abigail was no longer talking.  “Can you teach me how to make chicken soup?”

            “You just burnt down a house to destroy a painting,” Abigail said.  “And you want to talk about chicken soup?”

            Olivia shrugged. “Well, I want to help you out for once, before I get arrested.  So can you teach me tonight?”

            “Well talk about it later,” Abigail replied.

Olivia relaxed in her seat.  It’d be nice to finally do something for Abigail.  After all, whether or not she had the answers she wanted, she was certainly done living in the memory of David.  The realization and acceptance of that felt more amazing than scorching that Valkyrie. 

Well, almost.  Close enough.

Author's Note

I've changed the location of this story a few times, so I want people to take location and setting into account, as well as the various styles of voice I've tried to use, since when I first began, I wasn't certain if I wanted this to be a drama, dark comedy, or what. I know it was a dangerous move, but I decided to just write and see what came out =D