The girl thought of all of the things she was supposed to be by now; all of the places she should’ve lived. She thought of the cold but truthful laboratory back in Idaho. Dividing the seed by hand with a blade. Counting out bits of fluff with tweezers. Oceanspray. Kinnikinnick. Each seed had its own smell; its own difficulty to it. The walnuts would rot, the embryo shriveled. The willow, propagated, would remain a stick and you would pull it from its foam and throw it onto a pile of plain-looking twigs beside you in a bucket.
I.
Every day he woke up to a new landscape. The impossible mountains of Banff, purple and beyond. The technical wizardry of Seattle and its ups and downs, sculpture in his backyard. Sometimes Portland—sidewalks and neighbors.
He had a lot of work to do, involving accounts; business propositions and hours on the phone with young women, and these you had to be patient with. You had to repeat yourself and be kind.
When the girl would arrive on her bike, she would pound on the door and yell his name until it became a chant, and he would peer at her through the fishbowl eye, but sometimes it would be dark and that meant she had her hand over the thing, and then he would swing open the door and she would be there with the full sun behind her, turning her to shape.
It seemed she was always hungry. Always opening and closing the refrigerator. Have you eaten?, she would say. Should we eat? Do you want to eat now?
Today he gets up early and opens the door to see which city he is in. He isn’t sure, and he walks down the street to the corner. Ah, Portland. He collects a few flowers, a few berries. This time of year is gentle—summer’s slow death. He comes to his front yard. This is a good little house, but he might sell it soon. Might take the girl to Canada or LA, where they can hear some decent music, see a decent show.
At night the girl sleeps on his couch and he throws blankets on her, falls asleep himself inthe EazyBoy in front of the television.
II.
“Plants are interesting,” he says, holding a sprig of berries that look poisonous. She looks past him to the business across the street. A mannequin. A gold-painted shoe last. Three men smoking. The woman who works there is eight months pregnant and wearing a serious gas mask. She waves.
The girl thought of all of the things she was supposed to be by now; all of the places she should’ve lived. She thought of the cold but truthful laboratory back in Idaho. Dividing the seed by hand with a blade. Counting out bits of fluff with tweezers. Oceanspray. Kinnikinnick. Each seed had its own smell; its own difficulty to it. The walnuts would rot, the embryo shriveled. The willow, propagated, would remain a stick and you would pull it from its foam and throw it onto a pile of plain-looking twigs beside you in a bucket.
The nursery was out on the edge of town, next to the unreal yellow of canola. Just behind the office trailer was an outdoor sports arena, where slim women in boots would draw back their bows and set forth arrows, tight and straight. And the young men, in their cleats, would climb up to the top of a two-story log, coming down like monkeys on a string.
The girl knew that these things were good and that the air was healthy—the rhythm of the plants lending structure to her days. But that is not what she wanted then. She wanted mathematical chaos. She wanted to feel something.
She looks up. He is bending over to pick up the same sprig of berries. He looks at her with his washed blue eyes. “Plants are interesting,” he says. And then, “Don’t you think we should go back in?”
The girl pats his hand. “We are waiting for the locksmith. Remember?”
She thinks people can be kept from the things they want. She believes in distance, in time, in keys, in years that will amount to something.
III.
The cat is like something you might see in a third-world country. He is a tiny version of what he maybe was. His feeding area is a mat with multiple bowls of milk, a Swanson’s spinach soufflé and corn flakes. This is where he hovers, rubbing himself across the girl’s shins.
The girl thinks of how the cat must look to him—like a lion, like something real. She thinks of how to break the news to him.
“Does the cat have a vet?” she asks.
He is following Judge Judy from a few feet away.
“Who cares?” he yells. “Who cares!”
The girl picks up the cat, which is bones and a belly. She puts him in the cat carrier and starts walking.
****
“Jaundice. Some sort of intestinal disease. Probably advanced cancer. Obviously dying of malnutrition.” The doctor looks at her.
“Do we have to do it today?” the girl asks. The doctor nods.
“I’ll stay with him then.” The girl pets the head with the yellowed eyes already closing. When he goes, she goes with him a little. Feels the vast emptiness and the quiet maul of time. She walks back to the house with the empty cat carrier swinging into her knee.
“Where is he?” the old man calls from his front porch.
“Who?” the girl answers.
“The cat!” he shouts.
“You never had a cat,” she says, and walks through him like he is a ghost.
IV.
She sits on the floor of her shower and lets the water pound into her head. Today is the day she will let him go. She makes plans to sneak back into the house, to take the good cereal and the olive oil and maybe a blanket. She knows that the back window can be easily slid open, with a chair beneath her feet. She found 400 dollars in a Save the Children envelope yesterday and hid it from him. She called the nephew and he told her where to hide it. But that yellow blanket is necessary. She thinks of all the meals she has made him, the bites that needed persuading, the plate scoot, the food not too hot but the milk with ice.
All this time she was hiding her own wounds, had an ache that took away her air. He had a choking effect on her, even two miles away. Even across the ocean she could feel the pressure of his thighs on hers, the sad face he made before pleasure, the smell of his neck and the scars like a string of hills. He was making her sick, and everybody knew it.
The girl had gone to a therapist. The woman wore owl glasses, yoga pants. The woman made the girl recount every traumatic event and then had her follow her hands back and forth so her eyes began to twitch. The woman cried. The girl tried to pay her last forty dollars with a check, but they didn’t take checks. She escaped out the front door and took a strange way home as if to lose herself.
She turns the water off. Looks at herself for a long time in the mirror. The blanket. Don’t forget the blanket.
V.
He has to decide what to do with the house. There is a lot to do, and the girl isn’t making any of it easier, moping around the house and throwing away all of his business mail. He tries to talk with her, but she answers in one-word statements. She takes his blood pressure and then takes her own, looking glumly at the numbers. “I am basically dead,” she says. “See?” And then she makes him get on the scale, and then she joins him there. He plays along with her, but is getting worried about the house. Who will he sell it to? Should he just lock it up when he leaves?
He hears the next door neighbor coughing. Marvin is drunk again. His morning papers are stacking up. The girl says he hasn’t been by for his coffee in days. Weeks. He is out of work, but the government is giving him disability. Marvin has two dogs that he dresses in capes and booties. The dogs eat whatever he eats. A few months back one of them had some kind of cardiac arrest and Marvin gave it CPR at every stoplight on the way to the hospital. He can’t help the thought that they are related now—share the same fluids—like when you offer your organ to your own brother. Marvin is more dog now, or the dog is more human, it’s hard to say which.
Regardless, Marvin is drunk and living off beer and candy and Winstons. He is on his couch without work and his dogs are probably hungry. He decides to go over and see what he can do.
*****
Marvin has an incredible front garden. The trees are supported by rubber and painted white at the bases of their trunks. Every flower has its own pile of bark around it. Coming up the steps, things begin to fall apart. There are squeaks and holes in the porch floorboards. The old man knocks briskly. No answer. Knocks again and yells.
Marvin peers out the front door in his underwear, a cigarette on the corner of his lip.
“What?” Marvin says.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
Marvin sighs and makes some noise with his throat. He allows the door to open wider. Marvin sits on the couch with a beer and looks at him with red droopy eyes. “What?” he says again.
“I need some new keys, Marvin. Someone keeps breaking into my house.”
Marvin looks at him for a long time, sees how he’s lost weight and is missing a front tooth.
“I gave you a set yesterday, man. Don’t you have it?” Marvin rises from the couch and begins patting at the old man’s pockets.
“Yes, yes. But I need new ones. How is someone copying my keys? They don’t make keys like they used to anymore. You could stick your fingers in my locks and get in... Is how bad it is.”
“Well, what’s missing?” Marvin asks. “Money? Anything important?”
“No, nothing like that,” the old man says, “but things are moved around. I can’t find my fan, for instance.”
The old man’s eyes are pale blue marbles, unseeing. Marvin finishes his beer and holds the dark brown thing by the neck.
“Okay. I’ll have some new keys for you by nightfall.”
The old man nods, takes a final look at the dump, sees that the dogs are vibrantly alive, and shiny-coated.
“Okay. Don’t forget,” he says, and walks down the steps and past the perfect plants, which are dancing in their greenness; more alive than anything he can remember.
VI.
The girl comes in and gives him a book. She takes it back. “I’ll read it to you,” she says.
The story has a decent beginning and a middle you can’t get mad at. But it ends like a new lover, without enough build-up or warning, or meaning, really.
“Well?”
He wants to say something in Norwegian, to make a fine point with words that grew up in his mouth. He turns his tongue to the sounds she will understand.
“Well. That’s rather anticlimactic, isn’t it?” he says.
Her face melts a little. She is turning into one of his ex-wife’s paintings. She is abstract and yellow and dripping. But if you step back a little, there is something there, something to be recognized.
VII.
“Is he ready?” the nephew asks.
“He’s ready enough,” the girl says, looking at the old man meticulously sort through his junk mail. He opens one envelope and yells at her from across the house, “This one’s handwritten!” She squints. Sees the purple loops and the sad big-eyed Native American child. He puts the letter down. Picks it up again. Chuckles. “This one’s handwritten,” he says again, this time to himself.
The girl enters the phone again. The nephew’s nervous voice.
“Is he packed, though? Everything needs to be ready in a few hours.”
“Everything will be fine,” the girl says. “I’ll have his toiletries together. I’ll pack some snacks. He will have a few changes of clean clothes.”
The nephew sighs.
“I’ll be there at two. He’d better come with me this time. Find his wallet, ok? Get his meds. Shit. Make sure to pack his meds.”
“Ok, ok. Don’t worry about it. He’ll be in your car and ready to go when you get here.”
They hang up. The girl washes her hands. She counts out his pills, halves the ones that should be halved. She brings him the pills with a little bit of milk.
“What’s this?” he says.
“Your pills,” she answers. “The same as usual.”
He takes them. Drinks the milk.
“That’s good,” he says. “Ice cold. That’s some good milk.”
VIII.
Marvin stumbles out of his house, smoking a cigarette and lighting another one. He is back from the coast, where he was tearing rotten wood from the front porch, getting drunk and fucking his ex-wife.
“How was your vacation?” the girl says.
“Great,” he says, eyeing her thighs, which are sunburned and bruised.
“Oh, yeah? Up at that crappy shack with the ‘Ol Girl?”
“Watch it,” he says. “I know what you been doing.”
“You don’t know shit,” she says. “You’re so sick you don’t know what you see.”
“If the old man wasn’t so far gone, I’d tell him everything. And quit breaking into my shed.”
But the girl is gone, jumped her bike off the curb and is flying down the street.
VIIII.
Before her appointment, the girl goes out to have a cigarette. Her mom calls. They talk about all the things that aren't important in this world. "When are you coming back home?" her mom finally asks, dragging her own cigarette over the state line, there over in Idaho.
Words are up to her knees the way the Snake was when she was twelve and her mom took her out to the sanitized camping ground, where water was clearly labeled "water," and upon the surface of everything was a picture of itself: the girl in a skirt on the bathroom door, the grill upon a grill, a tent above their very own tent.
But now her mom has moved past the point, and on towards her labradoodle, her new boyfriend, the sticky gears of the Saab.
It dawns on her that to talk or not talk would mean the same thing. They smoke together for a few minutes more then politely finish the conversation with simple goodbyes.
That day on the Snake when she knew her father had died. She'd looked across the river towards his ladder fall, back in the town she grew up in. She looked that direction as far as she could, but only saw the bluffs, and upon them was no sign.
****
“How do you feel afterwards?”
Feel. Feel. Feel.
Normal? Better? Less Bad?
“Good. It’s not like he knows,” she adds.
“But you know.”
“I wash his underwear,” she says. “I mop up his urine.”
“We’re not talking about him.”
“We’re $35 in,” the girl says. “Can we get somewhere?”
The therapist shakes her slowly from side to side. She sighs. She does her window thing, where she takes off her glasses and stares across the street.
“Forty,” the girl says, and pockets a pen. “I feel fine, and we’re done.”
*****
It’s another amazing bike ride. She closes her eyes and rides with no hands. She takes alleys. She rides up to the wingtip of happiness and then she drops down the hill like a dead crow falling, slapping at the willows on the way. Goes past Marvin’s house. X-ray vision. Cutout of a floor plan. Marvin deep in his wounds, catching the sparkles from his old marriage. Face down on the couch and filling himself with beer.
It is smoky here. No trace of firewood, anything incensed. She arrives at his house, which is covered in orange flames, licking.
She jumps off her bike and runs towards the smoke. Skin getting hot. She runs into him and he falls like a young tree.
He catches her; laughs. “You ever seen such a thing?” he asks. The flames are reflected in his glasses.
The junk mail is fast fuel. The nephew will be here shortly and she will have to explain. There is no cat to kill. There is Marvin, but he should be easy enough to wake. He only needs a nudge to come back to this world.
But the girl thinks about the blanket. It will be nothing but a wisp. She takes a step.
Becca Yenser lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of two chapbooks, Small Bright Things and the forthcoming I Am Here to Save You. She crawled on all fours out of the gut-wrenching, war-torn profession of social work only to arrive at the relative safety of a waffle cart, where she finds the waffle timer conducive to writing flash fiction.
