Dawn Raffel - In the Year of Long Division

Rae covered her ears. “Mercy,” she said. She was not making predictions, she said. “Jordan,” she said, “Hey, River,” she said, “come on.”

He was spilling over barrels, a gas pump, toasters, frisking Mrs. Hatch.

“Heavenly Father,” she said as wet wind roared.

“Save it,” he said. “Nothing,” he said. “Rae,” he said. “She don’t got so much as a dime.”

Rae sat herself down on the riotous earth. There was something she was holding by the tail. “Missus,” she said. “Please,” she said, “do you think you could give us directions?”

THE valley loomed stark and gloomy, dwellingless. A dented-in basin. A miserable trough. For days, they’d eaten ice. Nights, they’d eaten ice. Her hair was iced with ice. He had, as you would surely imagine, an unshaved chin, which was not without ice.

It chafed her, she said.

Birds were lying stiff-winged and bent-necked.

“Don’t eat them,” he said.

“Why north?” she said.

“What?” he said.

“Why not south?” she said.

His breathing was audible.

“Don’t you rightly wonder?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Fact,” he said.

“What fact?” she said.

“Fact is,” he said, “this is the way we been heading. Women,” he said.

“There’s no one here,” she said. “Not one lone soul.”

“Us,” he said. “We are.”

She lifted her hair. “I ache,” she said. “Go carry these yourself.” She was pulling out shirts from out of her person, stitched: Daryl, Red, Jack.

“What are those?” he said.

“What do you think they are?” she said. “Yours.”

“Mine?” he said.

“Who else?” she said.

“Stole?” he said.

“You know I don’t like that word,” she said. “She didn’t so much as look.”

“I see,” he said. “So where will I wear them?”

An owl lay busted. Trees began to screech, tormented by the elements.

“I don’t expect I know,” she said.

A hawk stretched boldly, deadly on the earth.

“Night bird,” she said.

“Vulture,” he said.

“I never killed a thing,” she said.

“Lucky you,” he said.

“I didn’t,” she said.

He smothered a yawn.

“Oh, that,” she said.

They stood there, stunned with ice.

“Where all do we sleep?” she said.

“You’ll sleep,” he said.

“Where?” she said.

“Hereabouts.”

“Don’t step on that,” she said. “We’ll need to set a fire.”

A bullet lit on by.

“Rae?” he said.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Why?” he said. “Do you happen to have any coal on yourself?”

“Why would I?” she said. “I’m surprised you even asked.” She was toeing the hawk. “Will it burn?” she said.

“Straight up,” he said.

She sat. And sat and sat, devoured in shadow. “Got us as much as a match?” she said. “A piece of sorry flint?”

THE house was all in light. Expansive, pillared. Solid, and seemingly impenetrably windowed. Deliriously trimmed. It seemed to be growing.

Her fingers were fat, red, raw. Her knuckles bled from knocking.

A crack.

A glint.

A woman. A feathery rug. The woman wore a nightdress, nightcap, gloves. She was holding a candle. Lit. White. Her hair was white. Her face was lit and in some brutal way, Vern’s.

“Mother?” Rae said.

A sound like air, a hiss.

The woman shrank. The candle dropped. Gloves were at her eyes — Rae’s eyes. “Do I know you?” she said.

“It’s me,” Rae said.

The rug began to spit. Night things were searing. Dress, cap, bone. “Murder,” she whispered.

“Doll,” he said. His chin was at her ribs, at her mouth. A heat was at her throat. “Where are you?” he said.

“Do I know you?” she said.

“HOW do I know what you know?” he said.

She was stealing from a pitiful tree. “You don’t,” she said. She bit.

Over the mountains and into the caverns, out of the earth vents, steaming, cold, around invented cityscapes, ghostly in their industry, a steam stack, a house drenched brightly in flame, past nestings of darkness, red-eyed and hungry, a graveyard where someone had lifted the wings, had tampered with the earth, had beaten with the body, on ragged tongues of shoreline, clacking into rivers, streaming, clogged, with carcasses bobbing and sinking and bobbing, pockets full of sweat, tears, clenchy little fingers, smoothing, crying, stealing into merciless, lucid afternoons, simply, the two of them went.

And went. And went some more.

Starved, scared, frozen up and boiled down, pocked, knifed, cursed, drowned, scratched out and bulleted are ways they could have died.

They did not die.

They limped. His stride grew noticeably shorter. Their shoes were only holes. “Our feet seem to carry us nowhere,” she said.

A small wind carried the smell of a season.

“Does this seem familiar?” she said.

“Let me think,” he said.

He squatted.

She squatted. Brittle.

Tall trees arched across the road, intertwining in a ceiling overhead.

“This house,” she said. She wiped her mouth.

Blood was on his lip.

“What of it?” he said.

“Do you think we maybe missed it?”

“Could,” he said.

“When?” she said.

Sunlight was streaking through the branches. Something was flitting.

“Don’t suppose I know,” he said. He buttoned the thin-skinned shreds of his jacket. Crossed tight his arms.

“You think we were ever inside?” she said. “Vern,” she said. “Whoever you are. Could a person be there and not know?”

“Here is what I think,” he said. He stood again. “There must be someplace else.”

No one would stop them. This he predicted. No one was going to give them away. “North will turn to south,” he said.

“It will?” she said.

“It will,” he said.

Old now, expectant, they went on bloody claws of feet — step, step, step, step — a hard, abiding prayer on the surface of the earth.

“THIS house in August sweats,” the man says.

“Crawls,” the woman says.

“Oh, flies,” the man says, “flies,” and he is moving his hand in the direction of the woman or of something that the woman can not see. “I can live with the flies,” he says.

“Something’s living in the wood,” the woman says. “Infested,” she says. “And it is nothing sweating.”

“Drip,” the woman’s daughter says, but softly from the kitchen. She is feeding the plants, which she does in this house, and they are droopy in the heat.

Little pitchers is a saying of the woman’s.

It is true, this much: The man and the woman and the woman’s daughter have been all summer catching and swatting with various swatters, slapping at the walls, the slitty louvered doors, skin. Nights, they roll the news. In the mornings, there are markings on the moldings, wingy and smeared, something drying on the valance eyelet. There’s a pucker in a cornice. Things have been known to disappear, too. Thin flickings can be heard against the fans’ slick blades, a hiss and sizzle from the porch, where a bare bulb is burning. Clues, hints is what the daughter of the house has said—“There’s a hole in my sock and in the dark, who knows?”

“Bees,” the woman says to the man. “Even bees. And what can you expect?” the woman says. “She is always overeager with a window, slamming and banging, and the screens in disrepair. And you,” the woman says to the man. “You, too.”

“But this pilling and fungus,” the man says. “Look.”

It is true, in a manner of fact, this: There’s a tic in the pipes, a spastic lapse, and the clock, which is made to run on last year’s yams — a hobby of a certain party in this house — is sluggish, losing seconds on the hour, in the sweep of an inch.