Untitled

A Story by Robertson A

idk what this is but it's something, probably

He left, so I did. In all my ten years of being alive, I had always felt, if not seen, the presence of my father in this household: whispered trails of one-way conversations fluttering up the basement stairs, the sound of a desk creaking from below; even seemingly negligible peculiarities, such as particles of dust, illuminated by rectangular patterns of light coming in from the kitchen window, collecting themselves into clusters and then flickering for a few seconds before dispersing. As soon as these little details--and my father--migrated somewhere deep into the snowy landscape that enveloped my home (and, as far as I knew, everywhere else), I found my life politely bleeding itself dry, filling itself with cold showers and the brushing of teeth and blank stares at bugs exiting from cracks in the walls. So I left.

Since my life at home had not armed me with the knowledge of how to properly run away--a concept I had not even truly embedded within my consciousness by the time I was out the door--I had nothing with me. I was so ill-equipped, in fact, that upon first exiting the house I immediately went back inside and grabbed my father’s leather jacket from a hook on the wall next to the front door.
--Hello?
My mother was weakly calling to me from her bedroom.
--Hello?
I stood with my hand on the doorknob, frozen. My knees shook and then locked, clenching me between two futures. Then, in my peripheral vision, I saw airborne dust particles collecting and floating through a window to the outside world, where it left my view. I brushed the jacket off, opened the door and left. For hours I trudged about in an alien environment of monotonous opacity, dusty snow belting my eyes and then turning into water and forming rivers and brooks down the front of my face and along my neck. That same snow plunged into my oversized boots and numbed my feet until I could no longer recognize what was toe or sock or boot or snow unless I directed my glance downward, a difficult task on its own due to the frost accumulating on my neck. It became clear that my destination, already indeterminate to begin with, would not make itself known until the snow and dust arose from its current residence in the sky and on the ground and receded back to whatever hellish Beast had forced it upon this land in the first place. Though I knew I couldn’t keep walking, I didn’t deliberately stop so much as slow to a crawl and then droop onto the ground, convincing myself that I would get up and start moving again in a short amount of time. With this plan in mind, I dug my boots into little pockets of snow in the ground and then lay down my head and looked up at the sky and froze every process in my body and mind that the snow had not gotten to yet. At first, all was somber sky, extending its dreary reach to all four corners of my sight and obscuring everything that dared get in its way. After a while, though, faces started forming in the sky; faces of people I knew, or people I thought I recognized, or people who may or may not have existed. I blankly watched the faces in the sky go about their business, interacting with each other, talking and smiling and crying but never acknowledging my presence, and, indeed, I gradually became unsure of whether I was even there, watching these faces, or whether I was back home, eating a cold and bitter but somehow comforting dinner of lamb and roasted potatoes, my mother calling downstairs to my father and my father telling her he would be there in just a second. Soon all the faces began to blur together and I was unsure of whose face was whose and where each face ended and a new one began, or where the layer of faces separated from the sky itself, or even of my own surroundings and whether I was lying in the flat, perpetual field of snow or on some sort of raised platform, silently soaring above the sky and above the Earth and above every star and all of space until there was just a murky atmosphere of snowy clouds and indistinguishable faces, stretching itself infinitely in all directions.

III

Mrs. Margaret Wheaty had always been a nervous and fragile woman, and now any mother’s worst nightmare had been unleashed upon her: her son was gone. Her husband’s disappearance had certainly left her shaken for a few days but, in light of recent events, it was to be expected and she soon attempted to return the household to normalcy--successfully, she thought. It was only after her son followed suit that she realized she may have let some foggy notion of tragedy slip out from under the solid groundwork of her false projections of contentment. For thirty days after her son’s departure, she drifted from room to room like a ghost, staring out windows and sitting in chairs and pacing back and forth, wondering when he would come back. She almost never ceased thinking about his disappearance and the sense of helplessness it brought out in her. Her eyes and hair became grey and her skin starting wrinkling. She started talking to herself, at first brief mumblings about the weather or about how the shingles on the roof needed fixing, and then gradually transforming into full-blown conversations with herself, ones about the history of the house and how her grandfather had built it from his very own blood, sweat and tears after emigrating from Ireland, or how she and her husband’s favorite movie had always been Casablanca and how they used to be able to recite each line, or how her mother, Frances Lane, had an extraordinary talent in that she could whistle about as well as anyone else could sing and never quite lost that ability until she died from stomach cancer alone in her cottage in Maine and how she, Margaret Wheaty, refused to follow in her mother’s footsteps and die alone and that’s why she needed to find her son. On the thirty-first day after he went missing, she went up into her bedroom and looked out her window and felt an inexplicable eruption of hope all throughout her body, as if she suddenly felt her son’s presence stronger than ever and knew for certain he would be coming home after all this time. She know he had missed her just as much as she missed him, and any second now she would hear the front door creak open and he would run upstairs and jump into her arms and tell her that he was sorry for running away and that he still loved her and that he would always be her little boy. She smiled, whispered his name, closed the curtains, walked over to her bed, lay down, and died.

He knocked on the door three times, with his left hand nervously shuffling around in his trench coat pocket. After knocking, he turned around and faced his car, still running in the driveway, wondering if he should leave, if it was worth the trouble. As soon as he turned back around and faced the door, a man, about the same age as him, opened it from inside.
--Oh, hello!
--Hi, hello. Sorry.
--No need to be sorry! Come on in!
Almost unjustifiably cordial.
--Oh no, I just need something.
--Hmm? And what is that? You’re welcome to stay, if you like.
--I just used to live here, is all.
--Ah, did you? That’s fascinating! Perhaps you could stay for dinner and tell us a few things we’ve always wanted to know about this wonderful house here! It really is wonderful, really.
He extended an arm into the next room, probably to indicate a spouse that he didn’t realize couldn’t be seen from the visitor's position.
--Oh, no thank you. I just have something to ask, though. Do you know anyone by the name of Margaret Wheaty? Or George? George Wheaty?
--Hmm. Wheaty. Margaret? George...no, I’m afraid not. Never heard the name. Why? Are they friends of yours?
--Oh. Just people I used to know.
--Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t be of further help. Really, though, I insist, stay for dinner! Joanna’s making cornbread tonight. It won’t be an intrusion at all, I promise.
--Oh, no thank you. I couldn’t, really. You know what, I think I better get going. Yeah, I’m really sorry I couldn’t stay longer. Alright, thank you. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Alright. Goodbye.