the silent and still

please send me

"What are you doing?" Annie asked.

She was standing behind a boy squatting on the sidewalk. He was so engrossed in what he was doing that he hadn't even noticed her. She could see he held a stick in his hand, but she couldn't see what he was doing with it. She leaned over to get a better look.

The boy looked up. “Just playing with this bug,” he said.

He lifted the stick up. Annie could see something with long legs clinging to the end of the stick. She took a step back.

“You afraid?” the boy asked.

“Not of a little bug,” she said defiantly.

The boy stood up. He kept turning the stick to keep the bug on top where he could watch it. Annie watched the boy’s face. She could not understand what he found so interesting about a bug. Finally he shook the stick, and the bug fell down to the sidewalk. As soon as it hit, the boy stepped on it, flattening it under his foot with a soft crunch. He looked up at Annie and smiled.

“Why did you do that?” she asked.

“I was done with it.”

“You didn’t have to kill it.”

“It’s just a bug.”

Annie bent down to look at the smashed mess of legs and guts. It didn’t really bother her that the boy killed the bug. She killed bugs before when it was necessary. But she couldn’t understand how one moment he looked at the bug like it was the most interesting thing in the world, then the next moment he killed it.

“I dare you to touch it,” the boy said, squatting down next to her.

“No,”

“Are you afraid?”

She shook her head.

“Then why don’t you touch it?”

“Why don’t you touch it?”Annie asked.

“Because my Mom told me not to touch dead things.”

“Why not?”

The boy shrugged his shoulders. “So you don’t become dead too,” he said.

“That won’t happen.”

“Yes, it will.”

“No, it won’t,” Annie said jutting her chin out, “Dead things can’t hurt you.”

“They can too.”

Annie frowned. She didn’t like smarty pants boys. She bit her lip and looked down at the dead bug. Then slowly she reached out with her finger. The smile slipped off the boy’s face. His eyes widened. Annie noticed the bug’s green guts spilled out on the sidewalk. She didn’t want to touch it there. She considered its cracked shell. The pattern of lines that ran down its broken body caught her attention. She considered touching it there. Her finger hovered for a moment about an inch away, then she pulled her hand back.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s disgusting,” she said.

“You’re afraid,” the boy said.

“No, I’m not. I just don’t want to touch a disgusting dead bug.”

Just then a group of children came running up.

“Come on!” a girl in the group said, “We’re going to see Dennis’s dad!”

Annie stood up. There was excitement in the girl’s voice. She forgot about the bug and followed the other children running down to the house at the end of the block. Annie recognized Dennis, a boy her brother played with, standing at the gate of the yard. She noticed a black wreath hanging on the front door of his house.

“You got to be quiet!” Dennis told the group of children, “My mother’s in back.”

The children followed Dennis up the walkway. He stopped at the porch steps and shushed them to be quiet again. They tiptoed up the wooden steps. Slowly Dennis opened the screen door. The children quietly filed in one after the other. Standing in the hallway just inside the house, they heard voices coming from the kitchen at the back of the house. Annie smelled a candle that reminded her of church.

“In here,” Dennis whispered.

He led the children through dark, heavy curtains into a side room. Somebody had moved out most of the furniture, except for a small, round table with a candle burning on it, and a long wooden box against the back wall propped up on each end by two chairs. A crucifix hung on the wall. The shades were all drawn, so it took a moment for the children’s eyes to adjust. Once they did, they noticed a man lying in the box. He seemed asleep. Annie half-expected him to wake up. But he didn’t move. He didn’t make a sound.

“That’s my dad,” Dennis said, “he died yesterday.”

Anne stared at the man in the box. He didn’t look like Dennis’ father, at least not the way she remembered him. His hair was combed. His face was shaven. He wore a tie and a nice suit. He looked like a man dressed up to go to church. It reminded her of her own father who sang in the choir.

“Come on,” Dennis said to the other children. “Get a closer look.”

He walked over and stood next to the box, but none of the other children followed him.

“Come on!” Dennis urged them, “Don’t be afraid!”

But the others hesitated. They looked at each other, waiting for somebody to make the first move. Finally, the boy who killed the bug pointed at Annie.

“She said she’s not afraid of dead things,” he said.

Annie felt all of the children’s eyes on her. She heard someone say her name. The children cleared a way for her.

“Come on, Annie,” Dennis said.

At first it felt like her feet were glued to the floor. She took a small step forward, then another. Before she knew it she stood beside Dennis at the side of the box. She stared down at the dead man in front of her. She looked at his hands folded on his stomach. She noticed his fingernails were clean and cut short. He held a rosary in his hands.

“Go ahead and touch him,” Dennis said, “I touched him this morning.”

Annie reached out slowly with her finger. She looked at the dead man’s face. He seemed so peaceful. It looked like he was just sleeping. She hesitated to poke him and disturb him. She stopped her finger, not sure where it should go.

As if reading her mind, Dennis said, “Touch him on the cheek. That’s where I did it.”

She willed her finger forward again. It approached the dead man’s face. The room suddenly became very quiet, and everything seemed to stop moving. To her right Annie saw Dennis’s hands frozen in a grip on the edge of the box where his dead father lay. Behind her she sensed all of the children looking on, holding their breath. On her left, out of the corner of her eye, it seemed the candle on the table stopped flickering. The air itself became heavy. Annie felt its weight. She needed to make an effort to push her finger through it.

She looked at the spot on the dead man’s face where she intended to touch. She noticed little whiskers. They reminded her of her own father’s face. Her finger reached the dead man’s cheek. It touched his skin, his cold and waxy skin. She pushed the dead man’s cheek in a little, just enough to make a dimple, then she pulled her finger back. She breathed, realizing she had been holding her breath the whole time.

Annie had expected to feel scared, but she didn’t. She expected to feel a chill creep down her spine, but there was none.

“She touched him!” one of the children said.

Forgetting to keep quiet, the children began talking all at once. I took only a moment for a woman to start shouting out in French from the kitchen in back. Most of the children who came from different immigrant backgrounds could not understand, but they knew the tone of her voice. They ran. Dennis and Annie ran too. There was a stampede of feet out of the bare room through the heavy curtains and across the hallway. Eyes squinting, the children ran back into the bright sunlight of the late summer day. Annie ran with them down the steps and back out the gate of the house with the black wreath hanging on the door.

She did not stop running until she reached her own block. Out of breath she leaned against a wall. There were only two other children with her now. The others had scattered in different directions.

“What did it feel like?” they asked her.

“His skin was cold,” she told them.

“Were you scared?”

“No,” she shot back, “He’s just dead. That’s all.”

She turned to leave. But she found she could not walk the rest of the way back to her house. She ran. She ran as fast as she could down the street to her house. She ran through the gate and up the porch steps past her brother who made a face at her. She hurried into the house, down the hall to the kitchen, where much to her relief she found her father sitting, talking to her mother who was making cornmeal cake in a pan on the stove.

Her father saw the look on her face. “What is wrong, Anna?” he asked.

Annie reached and touched his face. She felt the stubble of her father’s whiskers, the warm skin. He smiled at her, but with a puzzled look in his eyes. For a moment she didn’t say anything. Then tears began to well up in her eyes.

“What is wrong?” her father asked again.

“Dennis Paquin’s father died yesterday,” Annie said.

Her mother stopped stirring long enough to cross herself

Her father looked at her more intently. “Anna, did you see Mr. Paquin?” he asked, “Did you look at him?”

“Yes,” Annie answered.

“If you look at dead man,” her mother said over her shoulder, “You won’t get married.”

“I touched him,” Annie said to her mother. Then she looked at her father. “I touched him, and I wasn’t afraid.”

Her father nodded. He patted Annie on the shoulder.

“Go out and play now,” he said.

Then without another word, he pulled his chair closer to the table. He picked up his wooden spoon, and slowly he began eating his bowl of soup. Annie’s mother also fell silent, her thoughts lost in the cornmeal she was stirring.

Annie wanted to say something more. She felt words on the tip of her tongue. But she hesitated to give voice to an anger she suddenly felt within her. A moment later the words had slipped away. She turned and left. She went down the hall, out the back door. Finding a spot on the back steps, she flopped down. She could hear her brother playing with her sister around the front of the house. Usually she would go to see what they were doing. Instead she sat there wondering if she did something wrong.

“It’s just a dead body anyways,” she told herself, “why should it matter? I wasn’t scared.”

She suddenly caught sight of a big bug lumbering across the step below her. Without hesitation she lifted her foot and brought it down on top of the bug, squishing it underneath.

The End