Panging Noise

The overcast morning had showed kindness to a few lemon chiffon rays, but by midday the sky sizzled with sparks and spit as Erksine Q. rushed up the stairs to the door, the waves of hard panging droplets beating his shoulders. He pushed the small rectangular cream button and pulled on the collar of his coat, a two-note ring instantly sounded on the other side of the door and the door was promptly opened. His Uncle, Thomas N., stood smiling in the doorway with his hair combed smoothly to the side, and stood back as Erksine stepped in and shut the door behind him.

"Erksine," his Uncle exclaimed, and arm invitingly opened. "How delighted, it is wonderful to see you again. Let me help you with your coat."

Thomas and Erksine Q. shook hands as Erksine set a bag of books and a letter that he had been meaning to read on the floor. There was a lot of talk in one of the other rooms, loud panging voices dancing up and down scales of words that carried with a shudder through all the walls till the house quivered.

"Thank you," Erksine replied modestly, coughing once, "but I'm fine�just soggy."

"Of course, please, let me take your bag up to your room."

Uncle Thomas grabbed Erksine's bag and whisked through the dining room and off into the hall, leaving Erksine in a petite standing room with little amaranth square tiles and an attractive painting on the wall to his left: two faintly bored women to the right of large bush of cerise pink flowers in full bloom. The pattering sound the rain made outside on the porch was quickly overshadowed by an intense discussion going on in the den that Erksine could hear quite clearly. Reverberating off the corners and walls, four distinct voices could be distinguished from the furor, two of each sex, and all the ruckus and bad jazz seemed to be over something dealing with morals. The whole rumpus thing was very loud, and the harsh moist air coupled with the overbearing noise permeating the entire house tampered unfavorably with Erksine's sinuses. A particularly nasal feminine voice cut through the air, a shrill high note that shattered some nerve and then a few domino ones that threatened to let the sinus headache romp freely into his forehead. "The interesting thing about lying is that it gives the liar the most unfair advantage, I read something on page two thirty-six about how the very implication of language itself is violated by lying, because language is supposed to communicate ideas and so on�and lying miscommunicates ideas for an ulterior purpose." "I have often noticed it is harder to say something that is true than an exaggeration, people just don't believe something that is true unless you can prove it. When you lie, you usually are appealing to something they already want to hear." Erksine took a breath and rubbed his forehead as his host came back out, stretching the edges of his lips tight against his dimples.
"Now, I remember you mentioned over the phone that you have some special food needs, nothing really that troublesome at all, so I got you some things and the kitchen is at your disposal."

Picking his head up and straining to subdue the throbbing ache, Erksine smiled politely.

"Thank you, I am somewhat hungry. Quite hungry actually, I haven't eaten since yesterday."

"Well then," Uncle Thomas said, "let me show you around the kitchen."

Erksine turned and hung his coat up on the rack above the heater, broad dark spots on the shoulders where the fabric had been soaked. The jumbled noise from the den continued and Erksine rubbed his forehead slightly, tightly clenching his eyelids together. The kitchen was painted a soft azure with a deep brown countertop and nice flamingo colored flowers�complementary white and pink. The scheme of the colors struck him as odd, but not totally unnatural except for one yellow and red orchid that had bloomed brilliantly a few days ago, but was now withering into a sad frail blob. "You'll have to excuse us," Uncle N. said across one of his shoulders, "we've been reading Martin Slorin's new novel, so intriguing and deep, Knaves and Cattle Prods. We've been having these discussions you see, and they are just so enlightening we spend all our time living out those same debates his characters are caught in." Erksine politely said the name sounded familiar, the author not the title, but fell silent at that in expectancy of his host picking apart all the compartments of the kitchen to show him what this was where.

When Uncle Thomas had toured Erksine through the kitchens pots, spoons, goods, and so forth to his own satisfaction, he left his nephew loose to get whatever he desired and promptly joined the rest in the den. "If you need anything, please let me know, otherwise I know you need your time so why don't you get something and we won't disturb you any further. With that, Erksine glanced at the newspaper left casually open on the counter and turned to the refrigerator to rummage for something to satisfy a quaking hunger growling at the bottom of his stomach. A few unopened packages of tempeh in a thin white wrapper were sitting on the bottom shelf as well as a few blocks of tofu, a bag of assorted vegetables, and a small rectangular quart of Almond milk. A salad with some tempeh sounded particularly appealing, but Erksine wavered and reached his hand into the bag of vegetables to probe its contents. He could see some mushrooms with long ribbed stalks and flat heads, cucumbers, black olives, onions, carrots, three ovular tomatoes, and at the bottom his fingers could make out a few small peppers that felt tacky. Erksine pulled out an assortment of everything and copped them all neatly, and started to saut�ed them in a small pan. Since he was very little Erksine had been lactose intolerant, and he didn't remember the days where he was sick for weeks at a time. That all had escaped his painful memory and it had made way for other genres of despair to the point where it had become clich� when he became a vegan many years later. All that though was somehow intrinsic to some intuitive hint he saw: a kind of inexplicable order to things that made him supremely indifferent to fate.

Once the sizzling had smoldered into a rich stir fry scent Rachael N. wandered out into the kitchen, followed by her Andrew, both with plain brown hair and perfectly clear ivory skin. Andrew stood stupidly in front of the refrigerator with the door propped open, staring inside at its contents and then closing the door and looking at Rachael with a blank face. She stepped in front of him, opening the refrigerator door and immediately pulling out a bag with three small steaks. There were a few plates and glasses in the cupboard that she seized and set neatly on the table, and then she dished out the steaks onto a plate and put them in the clunkish white microwave set above the stove. Erksine brushed all of the vegetables to a side with a wooden spoon and then poured them out onto a plate. Rachael's father called out from the den. "Rachael, are you cooking something?" "Yeah Dad, I got those steaks from the other night. Do we have any gravy?" Thomas's wife Ashley answered, the lower note of the two nasals. "I think so, look on the second shelf, are there any more steaks in there?" Rachael opened the refrigerator door again, leaning more on her left leg. "Yeah, I think there is enough for you. I count five more. One's kind of big too I guess." The rest of the family vacated the den and moved their enlightened commotion out into the kitchen, and Aunt N. rinsed out the pan Erksine had been cooking in and started to bake two of the stakes as the rest stood, leaning on the counters. In the middle of the conversation, Aunt N. noticed Erksine's coat dangling on the rack above the heater in the standing room.

"Andrew," Ashley N. asked, "that isn't your coat on the rack is it? Oh, or is that yours Erksine? Don't put coats there, that's where I dry things. The closet is over to the left, put it in there."

"Yes, of course," muttered Erksine, clearing his throat. "Excuse me, I wasn't aware."

While the N.'s stakes simmered, Erksine relocated his coat, still damp in the shoulders, into the closet. As he turned around, the dead smell of animal caught his nose. The foul aroma of meat was an unbearable stench as a variable by itself, but the headache multiplied its effects to a burning throb covering his face and an acrobatic intestine. Erksine tensed the muscles in his forehead and under his eyes as he returned to the table and sat down, rubbing his forehead again. Only another bite or two of his vegetables followed, but he quickly felt a choking feeling in his throat and excused himself politely to the bathroom. Burying his face in the toilet his stomach churned and heaved, rejecting its contents and wrestling with his hunger until it gave up and left Erksine to a ruinous state of misery, the crowd in the kitchen chattering a backdrop opus appealing to his palpitating headache.

The white tiled walls smelled of baby powder and dead flowers, a few yellow tulip clippings basking in a tall green jar with a simple spiral pattern working its way from the hips to the lips of the vase. The voices all blurred into some surreal delusional that blended with the stench that could still be distinguished through the baby powder. After a moment, Erksine shut the lid of the bowl and flushed the toilet. The roaring gurgling sound of water rotating in a swirling spiral to some unknown end appealed to a mysteriousness he pondered often when he was six or seven. Standing over the toilet he would wonder where the little silver funnel shape went to in the bottom. Erksine sensed an interesting theme was developing.

Erksine Q. left for his room, sitting down by the window with a letter from his fianc�e that he had been meaning to read. Even with the door closed, the loud demanding voices from the kitchen cast a large shadow over the serenity he expected to have in his room. The pattering sounds of drops outside were still hardly discernable over the commotion, and as he tried to work through his letter the voices from the kitchen intervened with the words and phrases written in her lovely cursive. Erksine would only be here a week, just until his finances were in order and he could move back to the city. Laying on the bed, the yellow walls of the room plastering a feigned sense of serenity to ward off the throbs in his head, and Erksine closed his eyes in search of some dream.