Erin Fisher - That Tiny Life

She’s an idiot. When they stepped onto the porch Kendra was drinking Milo’s hootch. Axel had clearly had a few, or maybe he always stripped down and barbecued in the dark. She assumed because she watched them all summer — loitered by the fence when they trained falcons, took shots at crows, hunted her pasture — she assumed that they’d seen her. She thought, she realizes, they’d rescue her. Take her in. But then they stepped onto the porch and barbecued like the storm was just a storm.

Why doesn’t it feel that way to her? She aims the flashlight toward her house and begins to run again. It’s like this winter, it’s a darker winter. She can’t run fast enough in the rubber boots, in the snow and the freezing mud beneath the snow. She almost tramples Milo, barfing in the snow beside the tractor, and she veers toward the house. Inside, she slams the door behind her. Lets her coat fall on the ground, wet. And the boots, they can stay in the kitchen. She pulls a blanket around her shoulders. Snow rustles the window. The wind drags high-pitched above the roof. Through the walls, the old man’s wet cough.

Why always her? And not even time to catch her breath. She feels her way across the hall to the old man’s bed and finds his hand — softening calluses, knuckles and skin. His arm, too. She works her fingers behind his shoulder, then raises his head and adjusts the pillows so his neck is supported. The cough stops. Then a loud, filmy breath — almost a gag — that triggers a round of wheezing. He stinks.

Why can’t Milo do this? It looks like he started to — there’s a pail of soapy water next to the bed. She bites her lip. She peels back the blankets. She hasn’t put the old man’s pyjama bottoms on him for months to make cleaning easier. She holds the flashlight in her mouth and unpins the cloth at his hip. The flashlight tastes of eraser and rubber bands, and its beam focuses directly on him. He doesn’t look as old as he feels — yes, his skin is dry, and thin, and the purple bruise on top of his hand has stayed for over a month, but there’s no wrinkles outside of his face. His skin’s like hers. Well, paler, puddlier, but without the light it feels like he’s about to lose his thighs, like his flesh will drop from the bone. She closes the safety pin and flicks her eyes — flashlight still in her mouth — to the dark where his face is. It’s hard to touch him not knowing if he’s in there or if he’s gone. Out of sight. Incommunicado. She gets the diaper off.

He sniffs as the cloth touches his groin — the water’s a bit cool. Under the light, his penis is a drip of flesh, extra dough that sloughs from his frame. Like a sad pet. Poor little guy. She rinses the cloth and rolls the flashlight in her teeth. She could touch it. Run her fingers over it. That seance at her old place, the one the boys crashed, where Rowan tried to stuff her hand down his pants — his hip bones peaked as high as the old man’s in front of her, but Rowan’s skin, tanned, warm and firm, smelled of bread. The pressure of Rowan’s hand splayed over the back of her head.

The hard plastic of the flashlight pushes aside her tongue. She spits it out. What if — what if she really is that kid? The girl who walks from the high-school bathroom carrying her own stool. Real solid shit, not the energy bars that idiot boys melt into turd shapes and leave in the water fountains. What if she’s the kid the counsellors encourage other kids to avoid? She’s here staring at her grandfather’s wiener thinking about blow jobs.

She can’t even finish wiping the old man down. She fastens the diaper and covers him. Then undoes the diaper and makes herself finish.

He’s holding the leg because, after Axel handed it to him and he’d carried it to the porch, he’d had to carry it back in and wasn’t sure where to put it. For all the world it feels like vacuuming — heavy at the base and light at the top. He expected it to be more solid, wooden and chipped, but the leg is closer to a bicycle: a metal rod with a plastic foot, and a cup at the top with a corset cinch and fastener.

Kendra takes a deep What’s With Him? breath and spreads out her cards. What is with Axel? They’re fed, so he can’t use hunger as an excuse, and back inside and with the fire there is no way anyone could even pretend to be cold. Cody pictures his gramps — the man who stood unsmiling in the photos behind his family — self-flagellating his back with a belt beside a potato patch during a dry, dusty mid-afternoon, under a prairie sun that casts and coats the scene sepia, like the filter in the antique family photo. Axel doesn’t know what he’s talking about. From what Cody’s mom told him, his gramps never hit her or Aunt Jen. He was a serious, super-old dad they didn’t get to know much before he died. Car accident. Or maybe lung cancer. He collected, his mom said, proverbs. Sayings — “Living is licking honey off a thorn” — that sort of style. She said he had a line for every family issue and it drove her mad. But who knows? It’s not like she doesn’t lie.

Cody tries not to look at Axel’s stump, but the only things to do are: 1) Wander the house. He did that. Every spare drawer — forget room — is wacky with ankle bells, leather ribbons, feathers, photo albums, books on tanning hides and taxidermy, folders of typewritten breeding observations, and boxes. He could 2) Watch the crib game — what’s crib? — or 3) Load the stove. The room’s way too hot already. Kendra’s down to an undershirt and jeans, and Axel’s way past underdressed.

The stump, pale and small, comes to a finish above the knee, and doesn’t quite look like the leg is bent — that’s how they do the effect in movies. A scar curls along the side and back of the thigh where the skin must have been folded. The scar is waxy, white, and raised — like the flesh was soldered rather than stitched — and he has an overwhelming urge to pick it off in one long strip. Axel adjusts the elastic of his briefs and meets Cody’s eyes. Cody jerks his gaze to his lap and brushes at a stain.

Axel swipes the cards and shuffles. Cody bites his thumbnail, then stands and moves from the chair to the couch. He leans back and tilts the prosthetic so that it rests like a pet against his own leg. Axel glances his way. He straightens the leg and sits forward again. He shouldn’t have looked at the stump. Why does he always stare? Though that girl stared too, through the porch without any excuse at all. And Axel is stare-worthy. In the candlelight Uncle Old has gone from ancient to prehistoric in a way that’s freaking scary. He’s topless — bottomless too except for his undies — and hair sprouts from the collarbone down. Almost his entire body is crazy with wiry white fuzz — he’s hairy like the fluffy baby falcons in the picture albums. His foot is Tendon City, his skin stretched over the ligaments and scooped under the ankle bone in a dip that could hold water. The calf is astounding — larger than Cody’s thigh, and a vein wanders it like an underground river. Axel’s eyes are blue, the skin around them leathery brown, as his eyelids probably are too, though Cody can’t tell — Axel’s staring Kendra down like she’s about to bolt, like he dares her to make the first move. Like he crawled out of some cracked avian fossil bed as a revision of raptors himself.

He fingers the buckle of the prosthetic. Axel’s leg, which is nothing when it’s on him, has become its own thing when off. What should he do with it? His mom, when she was tired in the hospital, jokingly said, “I wish you could take my bladder and go to the bathroom for me.” Aunt Jen closed her book and said, “I wish I could take your stomach and eat the damn food for you.”

Cody lets Axel’s foot stand for itself and lies down on the couch with his head close to the woodstove. He tucks his legs under the kilt. Cards flip across the table. There’s the whirr and thunk of the shuffled deck and Kendra says, “You can sleep in the room.”