Wapiti Nocturne

Jul 1, 2019

“Farmhouse Room Near Store Heddinge,” oil on canvas, by Christen Dalsgaard, 1847.

For a month or more after our mum percolated a long dramatic breath, sighed it off like a steaming radiator and never took another, my sister and I did something like live in the forever-year-old farmhouse where we had allegedly grown up. Who can say what we thought we were doing there. We certainly weren’t cleaning up the collected mass of a lifetime our mum in her perdurable inquisition had assembled, records labeled in foreign languages and countless volumes on the histories of countries we’d never heard of before or since, folio upon folio of sepia and silver-print photographs showing people who apparently were our progenitors engaged in the rites of self-preservation, a kitchen and pantry chock-a-block with brined mandrake and currant jams and bufo butters dating back to before either one of us was born. Certainly we weren’t corroborating among this orphaned paraphernalia on our obvious common loss. If we were nuns, we’d be the kind committed to a permeating order of silence. But I suspect, then and now, ours was the only sisterhood who’d ever admit us in.

Mum died in the last days of October, leaving—among other things—a lot of fall-time chores incomplete. We filled our days splitting and stacking the remaining cords of maple and birch rounds, banking the foundation with vinyl sheeting and junky bales of hay, digging and stowing beets and gentian in the musty crypt of the cellar. No talking. Nights silent by the woodstove while nightwind rattled the nude trees outside, making haunting nightmusic to which we couldn’t sing along. I wasn’t yet aware that my gap year before college was to be a lifetime appointment. It’d be a few months still before my sister took to grumbling about the dubious promises of a baby-faced Army recruiter. We were holding still, I’m sure, for fear of what might happen if we dared break what was still.

But what is stillness but a denial of all that’s real? Even the steam and shrivel of the dead can’t be slowed to a stop. What ended our attempted stasis of not talking and not really grieving was an owl and a mouse and an elk’s marble eyes. So how’s that for some natural witchery? An early December night like any other but not really night yet—I guess whatever winter preparations that day had us aching and tired early, because there was still some Disney-magic light left outside like a thick beeswax candle hiding the flame its wick-belly contained—and at our rocking-chair nightstations by the woodstove and window we saw first the outlines of basswood and aspen black against the wax-dusk sky, then the demigod mystery of a barred owl descending with a mouse pinched through in its beak, in a talon-flurry trying and failing to perch on the closed window’s sill, then in the instant the bird gave up—vaporizing back into the deepening twilight—the elk’s primordial head appeared. And by this I don’t mean to say that the beast emerged somewhere within the wide lens of the window’s scope: no, the elk’s head, from rack to bell, filled the entirety of the window. As if the bull had sidelong approached the house expressly to peek inside. Which is exactly what he did. Examining us each with one appraising black eye like a shooter no boy wants to lose—taking our measure with the idiot judgment only an animal can levy—then lifting his head and walking on by, the geography of his red hide for a moment defining all the outside world we could see. Because the window was a door the beast saw fit to open, then to shut. When he passed, the candlelight of the sky was gone, the coming threat of dark replaced by true first dark, first stars, first grief.

Then again, ripe as we were for a change, anything, I’m sure, could have stepped forth from the dusky unknown and shocked us into seeing signs. Yet I wonder, does it ever get tiring, being mistaken as a symbol of profound and consistent might? Even now, I can still clearly see it, how the pierced mouse writhed in the owl’s piercing beak, no urgency left in its struggle, its mournful mouth open to cry a cry I’ll never hear.

Our sisterly cloister disbanded soon after. My sister one morning hung up her ax, moved back into her apartment above the gas station on the borderland highway, and that was that. I managed a way of staying alive among the cryptic wreckage of our mum’s life. Eventually, we all went away. But here’s the thing about memory: try to hold on or try to let go, you carry it with you throughout. You leave home and travel to unimagined cities and bedrooms, discover yourself enacting sins and virtues impossible to anticipate, and through it all like a penny in your pocket rides a valedictory light and a preying owl looking for one second’s rest and an elk whose curiosity is too ancient and bold for our mortal hearts to ever comprehend. The death scream of a mouse muted behind glass. Don’t think for a second it’s in the past. We leave nothing behind. We just forget the burden is not light.

Douglas W. Milliken is the author of two novels, To Sleep as Animals and Our Shadows’ Voice (forthcoming 2019), the collection Blue of the World, and several chapbooks, including The Opposite of Prayer. His stories have been honored by the Maine Literary Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and Glimmer Train, as well as published in dozens of journals, including Slice, The Collagist, and The Believer, among others. He lives with three mammals of decreasing size near a post-industrial dam on the Saco River.

Palloncino

Jun 4, 2019

“Head of a Boy,” oil on canvas, by Gottlieb Schick, 1802.

The boy was holding a balloon. That’s what everyone could agree on—he’d been walking along the edge of the wall, atop the soot-stained balustrade, and he’d been holding a red balloon.

No, a pink balloon, said the man who sold arancini at the cart near the entrance of the park.

There was no doubt it was blue, from the woman who’d been walking her bichon near the fall.

The little girl who’d been swinging on the derelict old swing set (which the town council had been rallying to remove for several years now) said that the adults were all wrong, that the balloon had been the color of raspberries when you mash them into the bottom of your bowl, and that she had gotten a splinter from the swing seat.

Whatever the color, there had been a balloon. There had been a boy. And there had been a fall.

The sky had turned its eight thousand shades of crimson and purple, before it happened. Really, everyone agreed, it was too late for children to be out at the promenade (this, with a judgmental glance at the little girl’s mother, who was rumored to be no better than she should be). The working men had cleared the streets for their dinners; the babies were in bed, dreaming their sunset dreams.

Someone, though, had not understood the meaning of conscionable time. Someone had allowed their son to play out on the city streets, to play atop walls, to slip at the place where the stone grew slick and mossy.

In the absence of any other information, they agreed that the child must be an outsider. Any of their children, should they be atop the balustrade in the first place, would never skip on that particularly traitorous stretch of stone, knowing full well that the sea air hummed up off the rocks below to create a damp and slippery sheen just there, next to the third bench of the promenade. Any of their children would understand the inherent risk of holding to a balloon, one hand incautiously distracted; they would surely never walk without two feet and full focus planted firmly on the narrow beam below them.

The butcher’s wife, who had not seen the fall but who had come by at the sound of commotion, had been heard to cluck distastefully—her husband knew the chief of carabinieri, who’d said that the boy had been dressed in cheap wool shorts and a ratty old cardigan, with a tiny cap on his head. Shorts, in the middle of October; all she could say was that no child of hers would be seen in the middle of winter, half-dressed.

Or, it was to be presumed, walking on top of a balustrade, with no one to watch him, said the florist, who was known to be a particularly spiteful man.

It goes without saying, sniffed the butcher’s wife, before remembering a prior engagement.

The florist’s daughter, as it happened, had been the first to come upon the crumpled little body, broken on the shoals under the promenade’s walls. She’d been boating with her paramour, ignored his horrified protests, and steered them to the boy. When the more sentimental members of the crowd asked if she’d attempted resuscitation, the practical florist’s daughter had replied simply—it was obvious that no efforts in that direction would be needed, since the boy’s skull had been crushed in by the rocks.

She did not relay that she had, in a moment of unusual sensitivity, plucked the little boy’s hat from where it lay perched on a shoal; she imagined it had floated down after him, taking its time to descend, whereas the boy’s body had plummeted in no time flat. The hat was well-mended and sturdy, the sort of thing you’d find in an old antique shop.

The police had inspected the hat for any identifying details, and found none; when they’d turned their backs to address the medical officer, she snatched the hat from the table and shoved it in her purse. It was illogical, of course, but she suddenly could not abide the thought of the lonely little hat sitting, bagged, in a cold evidence drawer.

One young police officer, new to the force, had had the brilliant idea to canvas the balloon sellers in a two-mile radius; the buoyancy of the thing, as reported by spectators, ensured that the balloon could not have traveled far from its origins.

The balloon sellers, to a man, claimed that they had sold no balloons to a child of such description, poor little tyke. October was not a brisk time in the balloon trade. They also found it unlikely that the child would have bought a balloon and inflated it himself; when this tack was suggested, they smirked knowingly at the carabinieri, as though these starched shirts would never have any idea of the mystery and the majesty of their trade.

Only the florist’s daughter was left to think, that night, after the boy’s body had been cut open and investigated, his description posted on flyers and news alerts, his little form locked safely away in a drawer and tucked in to sleep under a paper blanket, at the ugly truth of it all—that the juxtaposition in the sight, the boy’s body tumbling through the air and the flight of the balloon, tinted fire-heart red by the last flicks of the sun, up into the half-shadowed sky, was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen.

Lauren Lynn Matheny is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Colorado State University in 2018. Her work has won prizes from Third Coast Magazine and Literal Latte.