Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

They reach the bottom of the stairs and Iris darts in front, beating him to the back door. She swings it wide open and he follows, their paths splitting as she approaches her car and he his, on the other side of the lot. She gets into her car and watches out the window as he opens the back of a hulking white van with tinted windows, pulls out a cardboard box, over which he drapes a dirty down comforter, and carries it back into the building. She starts the car and pulls out of the lot.

Iris understands that there are times when she physically cannot speak, when her vocal chords and her mouth can’t make a connection. But what is it that she would say, if she could? Even the voice in her head seems to leave her at these times, and then what? It is as though her essence, the her in her is rattling around aimlessly, so small, lost in the winding corridors of her body. She drives toward home, the sky fading pink, and she grips the steering wheel a little tighter. She turns on the radio and “Incense and Peppermints” is playing. She turns it up, and the sun keeps sinking. Her pulse feels quick, like she has had too much coffee, though she’s had none. She feels that if she let it, her heart could push its way out of her chest, her blouse flapping with its beat, blood soaking through in an ever expanding circle.

Waiting at a red light, she wonders if it would be so strange if she went back to the office. She imagines the man, holed up in his suite, alone in the building by now. What could he be doing? What would he do if she knocked on the door, or didn’t knock— what if she just walked in and sat down cross-legged on the carpet, if she looked up at him expectantly, expecting what?

Turning onto her street, Iris imagines a host of scenarios. He doesn’t notice her. She kneels beside him as he works on whatever he is working on and he never looks up, even as she breathes heavily, an inch from his forearm. Or— he looks to her. He says, please stay. He says, I was wondering when you would come back, or I need to tell you something, or sit down, or close the door behind you, or I’ve been waiting, or you don’t know how alone I am — or hello. Hello. That would come first, wouldn’t it? And anything at all could come next. She pulls into her parking spot and turns off the car, closing her eyes and focusing on the tinny, coughing little noises of her engine settling into repose. She leans back in her seat for a moment. In the reverberating quiet of the garage, if she listens closely, she can hear the coursing of her blood.

Neil wakes up as the plane makes a bumpy landing. In the dream that was just beginning to fade, he had found his parents living in a shoebox under his bed. Kneeling down to face them, he hadn’t asked them why they were living in a shoebox, but rather, how they had landed where they did.

He ponders this as he makes his way through the terminal, past the pizza kiosks and keychain booths, the banks of TV monitors and payphones. He hasn’t spoken to his parents in some time, not due to any kind of ill will, really. Chatting on the phone just doesn’t seem to fit into the rhythm of his days, theirs either, he imagines. They’ve just moved again, Iris mentioned to him. He figures he ought to get their new address some time, before they move again.

In the dream, he took to carrying the shoebox around with him, because he didn’t know what else to do. He’d be driving, and would glance over at them on the passenger seat, his mother feeding the dog, his father cooking breakfast, all their belongings in miniature, neatly arranged against the walls of the little box. His car began to fill with the smell of bacon.

At a red light, he finally asked them if they needed him to take them anywhere, while he was out. He said he had a lot of work to do, and maybe they had someplace they’d rather be.

“Oh, don’t mind us, honey,” his mother said, her neck severely craned to look him in the eye. “We’re fine. Just do whatever you’re doing, and we’ll do the same.”

And he didn’t have anything to say to that.

Following a morning spent shredding great stacks of papers— a supply continually refreshed by her boss, tiptoeing behind her to slide another pile behind her ankles and skulking off as she turned around— Iris returns from lunch to find a pile of dollar bills sitting on top of a note on her desk, a sheet of notebook paper with the words Please get rubber bands written on it in blue ballpoint ink. She can hear her boss talking loudly in his office, either on a phone call or rehearsing for one. Okay, she thinks, picturing herself slinking onto the front porches of thirty or forty strangers’ homes to steal the rubber bands off of their afternoon newspapers, slyly pocketing the cash. No problem. Maybe she will wrap them all together into a rubber band ball, like Neil did endlessly in fifth grade, his bedroom floor littered with multicolored globes of varying sizes, slapstick lying in wait. How convenient it would be to have them all together like that. But how would she start it? How would she fashion the core? She doesn’t remember that part. She turns around and back out the door, purse still tucked under her arm.

She walks the three blocks to the drugstore slowly, wishing to prolong the errand, to enjoy her solitude and the sounds of the street. The cars rush by, speeding through crosswalks with no lights, never hesitating, and the wind causes her hair to fly messily behind her like a mass of weeds.

She stops when she sees a shoddily mounted chain link fence around a vacant lot, just half a block down from the office. It seems to her that there used to be something there, but she can’t say what it was. She feels that she would remember a vacant lot, would probably stare at it on a semi-regular basis. There is a rusted metal sign on a post, jammed into the patchy grass just on the other side of the fence. On bumper stickers affixed to the sign, in big block letters, it says:

I’m home.

I’m home.

I’m home.

There, in three rows, like a chant. She stands staring at the sign for a moment. She wonders who put the stickers there. What were they trying to say, or cover up? Is there something underneath the words, or was this a blank sign, erected in service of the people, to display the message of their choosing, first come, first serve?

As she walks on, she keeps hearing the words repeated in her head, in some voice other than her own, I’m home. It is neither a woman’s voice, nor a man’s, and the longer it keeps repeating, I’m home, I’m home, I’m home, the more disquieting it is, this voice inside of her that she has never encountered before. She walks faster in an effort to overtake it, to leave it behind her in the crosswalk.

She buys a large bag of rubber bands at the store, and when the cashier hands her the change, her eyes wander to a display of Sharpies at the register. She blinks, and picks up a black one. She weighs it in her palm and folds her fingers around it.

“How much?”

On Iris’s way back to the office, a woman, half a block ahead of her, steps into the crosswalk, little yellow lights flashing on the pavement to indicate her right-of-way, and a mere second later, a silver SUV comes barreling toward the intersection, with no sign of slowing. Iris sees it at the same moment the woman does. She stops and watches as the woman first waves an arm, thinking the car needs only a stronger indication of her presence, before, in a panic, she changes tactics, jumping back to the sidewalk a second before the car blows through the intersection. The woman turns around and watches it go, and what Iris sees on her face isn’t indignation, or even fear, but pure speechless puzzlement, as though her understanding of things has just floated up and away like a white balloon.