Emmetsburg: Eighty-one

Golden-brown. John woke early, just as the morning sun was hitting the highest roofs and treetops across the road, as though the curtain of night was being withdrawn from the world. The storm had moved off sometime during the night, but the world was still wet. The air was light with the scent of grass and of all things enlivened by the rain. He lay there for a time listening to Anna’s soft slow breaths. The room was still, almost to the point of becoming deafening. It still carried the essence of their love making some hours before. John took a breath, but it stuttered in his chest. A tear slipped across his cheek to the pillow.

John felt suspended, as if the world had congealed around him, formed into some sort of new mineral. Not like amber, but more like warm sweet molasses, in which he could move and breathe but with resistance. And he felt warm for it, as though at the edge of a fever.

John sat up quite suddenly, planting his feet firmly on the wooden floor, testing its veracity. He looked back to Anna. She was still asleep, apparently undisturbed. The blanket was stretched across her rounded belly. John dared to run his hand lightly across it, pressing the palm lightly, smiling with a mixture of love and terror at the slightest movement within. He stretched and rolled his head around once or twice to loosen the tension residing, dissipating a kink that threatened a headache. John sighed again.

He left her asleep in bed and went to the back door. He pushed the screen open disturbing a hand full of sparrows on the back step. They fluttered away, running low over the wet grass, chattering all the way to the trees at the back of the yard. In the early morning light the overnight rain rose as steam from the grass and bonding with the air in a symbiotic relationship, like too perfect lovers. That diffused light gave everything a dreamy, painted sense.

Just as in the dream, pieces of black tar paper from the roof littered the yard. The Irises, which had been flattened in the down-pour, were beginning to find their feet again. It all gave John an eerie sense of déjà vu, and helped to erase the flimsy line between reality and his mind.

We are dreams, thought John, and just as fleeting. We are moments in time, waves upon an unknown shore, falling upon the memory of those before and erased by the waves to come. He could count on nothing except his own arrogance and the decision to love Anna. Everything else was hardly more than a notion, which is where he was happy to leave them.

John looked at his hands. They were coarse and calloused and strong. He made a tight fist with each and flexed the fingers again, exhilarating at the life in them. The dream had alternately shaken and reaffirmed him. After a time, his thoughts spent on the dream, which was already fading from memory, John went back in and dressed.

Anna awoke just as he was slipping on his shoes. He smiled dreamily at him and stretched with a groan to awaken her senses. The sunlight through flowery lace curtains painted quiet shadows across Anna and the bed. She stretched again and smiled as though she might burst with light.

“God, I slept like a rock.”

“Didn’t hear the storm?” he asked.

“I was dead!”

“Storm took off part of the roof.” John stood and tugged the suspenders over each shoulder.

“Oh dear!” Anna gasped.

“Patches here and there.” He reached over and ran the back of his fingers across her cheek. “Run up to Mallard and see Bert Himmel about a roll of tar paper.”

He leaned and kissed her softly. John buried his face in Anna’s neck a moment, savoring the warmth and musk of her soft skin. As he drew away Anna wiped her fingers softly along his nose.

“Be careful.”

He started for the door, dragging his fingers along the edge of the bed, as if it was the world and he was holding on for just as long as he was able. “Won’t be gone long.”

“John,” said Anna, as he reached the door.

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

He nodded. The words lifted him. John found her green eyes. “Me too.”