Alex Bledsoe - Wisp of a Thing

“How do I know you’re not?” she shot back. “Doing that thang, I mean?” She drew the word out into a long, accusatory snarl.

“Because I have never, ever in my entire life slept with Bliss Overbay,” he said calmly. “And I never will. I love you. ”

“And I love you so much, I can’t imagine life without you,” she said sarcastically.

“Is that you or the beer talking?”

“I was talking to the beer,” she shot back.

“Whoa, guys, I didn’t mean to start anything,” Rob said.

“Oh, this was started long before you showed up,” Doyle said. “Berklee and Bliss have what y’all city folks call ‘issues.’ Never mind that they’re both damn near thirty years old and all this stuff happened in high school. Some people just can’t let things go.”

“Well, some of us didn’t run off to college,” Berklee snapped. “Some of us had to stay here and work and watch all the boys ignore us and chase after that smug heifer. You ever think about that?” Berklee seemed about to cry.

With no malice, Doyle said simply, “You’re right, I ran off to college. And then I ran back to you.”

Rob stood. “Look, maybe I should run back to the motel. My head really hurts, and if I drink any more, I can’t outsmart these mountain roads. Thanks for dinner, guys.”

A coyote howled in the distance. Rob froze, every sense alert, to see if the eerie voice from the previous night would reply.

“What is it?” Doyle asked.

“Shh!” Rob hissed. “Listen.”

“It’s just a coyote,” Berklee said, her voice slurred. She pronounced it “ci-yo- tay, ” and giggled.

“Just wait,” Rob said.

The response came, just as it had the night before, a long lilting wail that almost, but not quite, hid its human origins in mimicry.

“There!” Rob said triumphantly. “I heard that in town last night. What is that?”

Doyle shrugged. “Sounded like a dog to me. They holler back at the coyotes sometimes.”

“No, that’s a person,” Rob insisted. “Someone howling back.”

“Girls howl at the moon sometimes, y’know,” Berklee said woozily.

“Hush, sweetie,” Doyle said gently.

Then the cry came again, considerably louder and closer.

“Well,” Doyle said quickly, with stiff nonchalance, “I, uh, guess we’ll turn in as well.” He nudged Berklee with his elbow.

“Yeah. Nice to see you again, Rob,” Berklee said, and unsteadily got to her feet.

“I’ll call you tomorrow, maybe we can have lunch or something, grab a beer after work,” Doyle said as he practically shoved his wife toward the trailer. By the time Rob reached his car, Doyle and Berklee were inside with the door locked and all the lights off. He lowered the car’s window, but heard nothing over the chorus of insects that filled the darkness. There was no additional howl, either human or animal.

Bliss sat in her bathtub, feet propped on opposite corners, a wet rag over her eyes. Only a single candle in a jar provided light. She had both windows open, and the breeze grew cold almost as soon as night fell. She ran some more hot water into the tub and resumed her attempt to relax.

She felt the weight of the house almost the way normal people felt the clothes against their skin. This spot had housed Overbays for longer than most could imagine, and now she was the last one. Well… not entirely, of course. The last true one, if not the last with the true. And she was alone, and childless, and probably barren, and definitely not going anywhere.

A coyote’s cry broke the silence, followed by the inevitable response. She sighed and sank farther into the water. That second sound felt as heavy as the very mountains around her. Once it could make her cry; now it got only a weary exhalation, bubbled into the bathwater just below her nose. She closed her eyes and slid all the way under, enjoying the moments of silence and peace it granted. Soon enough, she would emerge from the warm water into the cool night, a pointless symbolic rebirth that gave no sense of change or future. For the moment, she’d forgotten the upheavals promised by her dreams.

The same Kate Campbell song ran through her head:

When she broke the surface, her cell phone was ringing. She got out of the bath, dripped water across the tile floor, and fished the phone from her jeans. “Hello?”

“It’s Mandalay,” the voice said. “Are you feeling the wind?”

Her wet skin was pebbled from the chill. “I sure am.”

“It has a message for you. And a job. Watch for the sign. Bye.” The line went dead.

Bliss shoved the phone back in her jeans pocket, in the process dislodging two guitar picks. Both fell into the bath and floated on the surface. As she reached for them, a gust of wind rippled the water and blew the two picks together.

She picked them up. Here was her sign, just as Mandalay had said, and it sure wasn’t hard to interpret. Only now, her chills had nothing to do with the wind.

When Rob returned to the Catamount Corner, he parked next to a dust-covered SUV with Michigan plates. Otherwise, the street was deserted. He double-checked the post office porch, but it, too, was empty.

He heard angry voices as he got out of the car, and it took him a moment to realize they came from above him, through a partially open window. The dim blue light from a laptop computer glowed on the room’s ceiling, which was all he could see from his angle. Shadows moved through this light, as one of the arguing people paced the floor. A female hand reached through the opening and flicked cigarette ash into the night.

Rob smiled wryly. There were at least ten NO SMOKING signs in each room. This must be the couple that had checked in while he was out at the Pair-A-Dice the previous night. They sure didn’t sound like honeymooners, though.

“That’s not what you said before!” a male voice said.

“I know, but that was before we were married!” a woman responded.

“So everything’s magically different now just because we wear these stupid rings?”

“Yes, it’s different because it counts now! Now your stupid little fuckups affect me, too!”

“You said you had all these issues worked out!”

“Well, I was wrong!” The woman paused, then added in a calmer voice, “There, I said it. That should make you happy.”

Rob quietly shut his car door. He carried his guitar onto the porch and settled into the swing. Except for the voices above him, the night was quiet. Only a dozen streetlights were needed to go all the way down Main Street, and three of them had failed, so the darkness seemed like a heavy tent held up by these isolated poles. He felt like a small child hiding under a blanket, safe and deliciously frightened at the same time.

He plucked lightly at the strings of his guitar as occasional phrases drifted down from the argument.

“…flirting like that with every guy who…”

“…not change who I am for you…”

“…don’t respect me at…”

“…trust me as far as you can…”

As he played, the voices above him provided the harsh, chopping rhythm. He echoed their words in his head and tried to fit them to his tune.

“…goddammit, I have every right to…”

“…not my fault that people just like being around me…”

“…work all damn day and come home to…”