Gina Ranalli - House of Fallen Trees

She sighed, drank more OJ. Part of her was tempted to just go back to sleep. She couldn’t think of a reason to be awake right now. Then she remembered her current novel and, more importantly, the deadline for the current novel. Groaning inwardly, she capped the juice and got up to put it away.

Despite not wanting to work — feeling too groggy and discombobulated — she knew she had to. And she knew coffee was the answer. She moved around the kitchen like an automaton, still dressed in yesterday’s clothes, hair wild and sticking up in all directions, needing a good scrubbing, along with the rest of her. Waiting for the coffee to percolate, she pulled at the collar of her T-shirt, tucked her nose down inside towards her armpit and gave it a quick sniff. Not so bad, she decided. A shower could wait a while longer. Get some caffeine into her first, wake up a little, and maybe check her email. All the usual crap she did every day. As she stared at the coffee maker, willing it to brew faster, her mind returned to last night’s dream.

So peculiar.

Two men have the carcass .

What carcass? Which two men? She shivered, folding her arms across her chest. And carcass ? What kind of a gruesome word was that? Who even used that word anymore? She plucked a tissue from the box on the counter, blew her nose loudly.

Just the mind of a writer, she thought as she tossed the tissue in the garbage. A creative mind working overtime, just as she had trained it to do. Pick up every little morsel of life, store it away, and pluck it from the heap whenever it may be needed. Remember every little thing, even the most insignificant.

This is what she strove to do in her life, though she knew it was an impossible goal. No one could remember everything and so, whenever she left the condo, she would always carry a pocket notebook with her, to capture and keep anything that struck her fancy. A snatch of dialog overheard in the grocery store. The look of a skater kid as he rolled down the sidewalk on his board. An ancient monolith of a truck tucked into the side yard of a rundown house, overtaken by brambles, rusting away in the sun and the rain, season after season after season. Everything was fodder. Everything was grist for the mill.

Everything, that was, ss fff, except for Sean, and she was working up to that, had promised herself she would get to it, get to him , excavate him from her subconscious and allow herself to live again in a way she hadn’t been able to in the five months he’d been gone.

The coffee finished brewing and she blew her nose again — damn fall allergies — and began to make herself a mug and start another day at the salt mines in her cluttered head.

Over the next several days, Karen did her best to immerse herself in her latest novel, tentatively titled Downtown Masquerade , a story about a group of street kids and the former nun who essentially saves them.

Writing, she came to learn only after spending several tens of thousands of dollars on a shrink, was really the best therapy she’d ever known. The way she felt about the process was almost religious and she often thought of it as a search for God.

Though not religious herself, she could see the correlations between God, people, and art. God was the great Creator and had made humankind in His image. People were creators and for Karen Lewis the only way to feel close to God was by creating. Writing was a prayer, a meditation, an offering, and a sacrifice. She had to do it every day or her soul would sicken; two days without the balm of words, the search for something holy, and she would barely be able to move about her day. Three days and she was lost to depression and getting out of bed became a chore she would rather not do.

And so she wrote and her characters became her best friends and sometimes her worst enemies, but she loved them all, much, she thought, the way God was reported to love all His children, good or bad.

Deep in the guts of the novel, Karen completely forgot about her strange dream — if it had been a dream — of the bizarre phone call and finding her door open to the night. She sat on her couch, computer perched on her lap while afternoon sunlight snuck in through the slats of the window blinds and fell across her face and hands while she wrote. The digital clock on the bottom right of the taskbar told her it was 3:20 and she had sat unmoving except for her fingers on the keyboard for almost two hours already. She’d meant to get up some time ago to fix herself another mug of coffee, but oddly, she wasn’t suffering from her usual caffeine withdrawal headache.

When she couldn’t have coffee, she would have iced green tea or occasionally a caffeinated energy drink. But it was her aching back causing her to wake from the world of her characters and want to get up and stretch.

She paused in her typing, glanced back over what she’d written, closed the laptop, and put it aside.

The room was growing chilly and she wanted to check the thermostat. The online weather report had said it was supposed to drop nearly ten degrees overnight and she wanted to get ahead of the cold. There was nothing worse than waking up to a chilly house.

She rose, stretched, and rubbed her hands together as she crossed the room to check the temperature. Before she got there, the phone rang. Pausing, she glanced over, the dream of a few nights ago flooding to the forefront of her brain, causing her to shiver with unease.

Snatching up the phone before it could ring again, she said, “Hello?” Her voice sounded harsh in the still, silent condo.

“Karen, it’s your mother.”

“Oh, hey, Mom. What’s up?”

“I was just calling to remind you about Sunday.”

“Sunday?”

“Your father’s birthday, remember? You agreed to meet us at that Mexican place he likes. I knew I would have to call and remind you. I swear, you’d forget your head if it wasn’t attached.”

Karen ignored the dig, trying to figure out what day it was. Wasn’t it only Monday? Why would her mother be calling so early in the week? Surely she knew she’d just have to call her again as the weekend grew closer. Karen was just that way; she loathed social gatherings — especially when family was concerned — and a part of her thought maybe her subconscious made her forget the events on purpose. She scratched her forehead and said, “Aren’t you calling a little early? It’s only Monday.”

“Monday!” her mother snorted. “Karen, it’s Friday .” She sounded vaguely disgusted that her daughter would be so oblivious to the world around her.

“Friday?” Karen started. “It can’t be Friday. I got the phone call on Thursday.”

“What phone call?”

“The…oh, never mind. It’s really Friday?”

“It really is, yes. Are you okay?”

Karen was glancing around the living room as if unsure of where she was. Or for that matter, when she was. “I’m fine, Mom. Thanks for the reminder.”

“No problem. Looking forward to seeing you. It’s been an age!”

“Yeah, it has,” Karen replied absently. “See you then.”

She hung up the phone and went immediately back to the couch, flipping open the laptop once more and moving the cursor over the clock until the day and date appeared.

Friday, November 2 nd.

She frowned. “Huh,” she said. “What do you know about that.” She was still puzzling over her apparent time warp when the phone rang again. What the hell? Her phone never rang this much in a week, never mind a day.

Assuming it would be her mother again, she was tempted to ignore it, but then figured she’d better not. Maybe with any amount of luck her mom would say, “Whoops. I forgot. Your father and I are moving to Tahiti on Sunday. Forget that whole birthday thing.”