Paul Curtin - Gray Snow

Relentless. Every few seconds someone was sucking in the soup like a shop-vac. They didn’t understand how much work Sean had put into collecting all those ingredients or the money he had sacrificed to get it. They just consumed, like it was their right to eat his food without a thought or care or thanks. With each bite, he imagined the jars and cans downstairs and the supplies shrinking in size and the shelf space laying empty. Cobwebs forming in the corners of the shelves until they were all that remained.

His wife’s voice came out of nowhere. “Sean, you okay?” she asked.

Everyone stared at him, though Aidan kept eating. He said, “I’m not feeling too good.”

She nodded, and he got up and walked toward the stairs. They gawked at him—he knew it. The ringing in his ears arose again with even more intensity. His head felt like it was baking in an oven. His intestines were stabbed with barbs. He sprinted up the stairs and shoved the bathroom door open. Grabbed the toilet bowl and dropped to his knees in front of it just in time for the fiery vomit to erupt from his mouth. He heaved and gagged and more spewed forth. After what felt like an eternity, he finally fell back and wiped his lips with his shirt, the acidic taste still spread across his tongue.

He rested his head against the tub. Although the ringing subsided, his mind didn’t shut off. Sean could no longer ignore the situation. There was only six months of food left.

Six months.

He thought of his neighbor Lilly, gaunt and freezing to death with a gunshot wound in her leg. He vowed that he wouldn’t let those he loved end up like that.

And he intended to keep that vow.

ELISE TWISTED THE last bit of water out of the shirt. She sniffed it and stuck out her bottom lip. It didn’t stink, but it didn’t smell great either. It was the nature of her homemade soap. It never smelled like normal.

The water grew unbearably cold, so she grabbed a dry towel and hung the last shirt on the drying rack in the back mudroom. She sighed and wished she could run the dryer. Oh, the sensation of warm clothes fresh out of the dryer, the softness of the fabric. She longed for that warmth and comfort again. But the sun never shone so the solar panels couldn’t create the power needed to run it. For a moment she let herself imagine the sun shining, standing outside and basking in its heat, closing her eyes against its intense light and letting it soak into her skin like a hot bath. Feeling like everything would be okay.

She grabbed the basket and turned around to find her husband standing in the doorway. She yelped and dropped it. “Oh, Lord. You scared me,” she said. She watched him for a second. His eyes focused across the room at something. She turned to see what, but he was just looking at the wall. He had been acting strange—stranger than usual—since dinner the two weeks before. Since Molly passed.

“Something on your mind?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, or you don’t want to share?”

“I’ve done things, Elise. Things I’m not proud of.”

Her mind flashed to the woman on the front lawn. She never saw the body, now covered in a layer of snow, but it always looked grotesque in her imagination. The woman’s guts were spilled out, her blood dotted around the dirty snow. And then her mind took her to the man at the top of the stairs, his head cocked to the side, half his neck missing. She shook her head.

He said, “I think about the hard things I’ve had to do, but I always thought—in the end—there was a reason for it. Even though it was terrible, I understand why I did it.”

“I know.”

“But they can still be wrong, even if I did it for the right reasons.”

“I don’t know.”

“Elise,” he said and paused.

She met his eyes, and he looked away, shaking his head. As she waited for his next words, her stomach flooded with nausea.

“Do you think I’m a monster?”

She frowned. “No,” she said in a whisper, “No, no.”

Elise took a step forward and then hesitated. It had been a while since she had been intimate with her husband, but she pushed through the awkwardness. Snuggled her face into his chest and wrapped her arms around him. A welcome, long-forgotten warmth filled her chest.

Sean said, “You always told me you would love me no matter what. Do you still mean that?”

She waited a second to answer. “Of course.”

And she meant it, but there was a thought she didn’t want to acknowledge, one she pushed back against. Kept it at bay. No use engaging it. It was all a bunch of lies from Michael’s mouth anyway. No use in drudging it up.

But it was there.

It was there.

ANDREW MADE HIMSELF useful and helped prepare a meal.

Elise seemed more detached than normal, not saying much to him other than a few terse commands to grab an ingredient and bring it to her. Molly would have been the one helping her with the meal instead of him, so he thought that might be it. They were all enduring her absence.

Elise’s mood could have stemmed from their discussion about Sean the day of Molly’s burial. She hadn’t been willing to talk about it after, and Andrew didn’t want to bring it up again. The whole idea made him shudder. This wasn’t a game, and the people in the house weren’t pawns. But that’s what the conversation had made it seem like.

“Andrew,” she said, snapping her fingers.

He shot his gaze over to her. “I’m sorry, what?”

“The dried basil,” she said, motioning with her fingers to bring it.

He grabbed it from the coffee table next to him and handed it to her. “You all right?” she asked, taking a pinch from the jar and sprinkling it into the soup above the fire.

“Today’s been a rough day.”

“We’ve all had some rough days lately.”

He looked to his side and watched Michael reading a book on the couch in the adjacent room while Kelly and Aidan played a speed card game. A speed card game that Aidan and Molly used to play. A speed game Andrew’s child would have played with his mother…

Elise’s voice came out of nowhere. “Thinking about her?”

He brought himself back to the present and nodded, though he shrugged while doing it.

“Or not?”

He pointed to his head. “There’s a lot rolling around in here.”

She sprinkled more basil into the pot and said, “You know, this isn’t my first time losing a child.”

He leaned closer to her. Andrew knew the story, but Molly had always told him Gracie was a topic the family didn’t talk about. For Elise to share was almost like he was being accepted into the family.

“I remember the day it happened. I was at work, and Sean was working from home. When I got the call, I remember wanting to throw up right before I picked up the phone. I knew something was wrong.”

Andrew nodded.

“I still, to this day, can’t get Sean to talk about exactly what he saw.”

“I don’t blame him. When I saw the—” He stopped.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“When I saw what happened to Molly—” He sighed. “I would do anything to get that image out of my mind.”

“Not seeing it happen wouldn’t make it any easier.”

“I think it would.”