David Nahm - Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

The sizzle of its electric-lit windows and the soft, hazy waver of the horizon of glass towers and neon signs—

It was always the same: Jacob was scared and wanted to get into bed with his big sister, but he wouldn’t let her sleep, wanting instead to talk all night, clutching his toy car and talking and flailing about, so Leah would tell him that if he didn’t lie quiet, a monster would come for him, and then he would start to whimper and she would feel sad for having scared her little brother and then she would put a long freckled arm over Jacob and tell him that there were no monsters. No ghost or witch or vampire. No creatures clawing or baying. No secret codes or forgotten tales, whistling languages and alien photography. No God in the sky making your skin sick for saying something bad. Nothing. No monsters, no ghosts, but the man she’d seen, how could she tell her brother to be careful of him? Their father had had a talk with them about not going with strangers. She’d gone into her parents’ bedroom one night and told them, “Jacob said there is a man in the backyard,” but Mr. Shepherd, after looking at the glowing green arms of the clock next to the bed, said, “There is no one in the yard. You two need to go to sleep,” and he rolled over on his other side. So Leah took it upon herself to fill her brother’s head with a fear of anything she could, but she always felt guilty when he cried, so she backpedalled. Jacob, for his part, loved his sister, there in the burrow of dark, and he listened to her comforting words, but he didn’t believe her. He’d heard someone knocking on the door in the middle of the night once. He knew better.

“Isn’t it nice, Jacob. Your big sister got it for you. A little car. Say thank you, Jacob. Say thank you.” Leah told her mother that she’d saved her allowance and bought the car at the Convenient across the street from the school, but Leah had actually spent her allowance on candy for herself and then stolen the small blue car, walking out of the store with it hidden in her pocket on the last day of school before Christmas break and even though the middle-aged woman behind the counter hadn’t noticed Leah take the car, Leah was certain that she would be caught, that the woman would notice the car was gone and would know that she had taken it and all Christmas break Leah worried that she would get caught. Every time the telephone rang, Leah’s heart leapt, sure that this was the middle-aged woman calling to tell the Shepherds that their daughter was a thief, which never happened because the woman didn’t notice Leah taking the toy car, and even if she had, it was unlikely that she would have cared — they didn’t pay her enough to care — yet Leah never went back to the Convenient, too full of shame and fear, and even now, three decades later, she avoided the store, the name of which was changed to Chill’s Quik Stop.

They coursed through the house, up the front stairs and down the back, out the front door and around the side of the house, hands reaching out to beat at the holly bushes, the holly leaves scratching their tender palms, feet stomping earth and they bellowed and mewed at each other, howled and howled, ran past the back of the house where the porch was half-enclosed, the solarium half-formed, and sprinted across the endless stretch of green yard toward the bushes and trees in the back, seeking the cool of overhanging branches, slapped the trunk of the dogwood, screaming Safe and then legs folded and bend on the impossibly rough edges of the blades of grass. Their mother was out of town visiting one of her sisters, hoping to get the sister to call, or maybe even visit, their father who was much changed since he started going to church and stopped drinking, had given them five dollars to go to the Convenient, but Leah wouldn’t go, promising to give Jacob her half if he would pretend that they’d gone there and bought candy, so they larked in the yard.

Jacob said he didn’t like going to school, because the other children didn’t like him and the teacher didn’t like him and he didn’t like going to church because the Sunday school teacher didn’t like him and the stories scared him and he was scared he was going to be bad and the Creature was going to get him like it got Jonah. An ant crawled across his leg, the barest tiny thing, so small Jacob couldn’t even feel its six legs on his one leg, and Leah looking down and seeing the ant told Jacob that he didn’t have to be afraid, that nothing bad would happen to him at school and nothing bad would happen to him at church and all he had to do was do everything she said and listen to her and then she was up and her young legs were leaping from the shadow to light across the yard, and Jacob jumped up and ran, the ant gone from his leg in a cataclysm too profound for it to comprehend, and Leah was an unstoppable bolt, nearly to the house before Jacob had risen, before his own legs were moving and exploded through the door and through the kitchen and down the hall, Leah disappeared ahead of him, into the house, the rooms and rooms, the shaded windows, the ticking of the old clock in the hall, the small toy car that he loved and never let go of, a small blue Bug, still in his hand, and Jacob called for her as he stood in the hall and listened to the house as it creaked and moaned softly and he began to softly speak Leah’s name again when the door to the basement just behind him slowly opened and a hand reached out from the darkness and took hold of his shoulder and pulled him into the void. As he began to scream, another hand covered his mouth and at his ear she said, “Shhh.” Leah held him there in the doorframe, at the top of the steps that lead down to the dark basement. They heard something and both fell silent. “Listen.”

“Is someone knocking walls?” There was a rhythmic creaking upstairs, and they listened to the sound, faint and soft like a knuckle on wood. It continued unabated for a few minutes and then muffled voices and they scrambled for the doorknob and spilled out of the basement, slamming the door behind them and then they burst forth again from the house out into the bright but waning light of the day and were again racing across the grass, but they did not stop at the line of trees, beating the bushes and flying across a neighbor’s yard into another street where they finally stopped to leap and laugh. Later, their father angrily asked them if they’d been in the house that afternoon and Jacob pretended to eat candy.

Pale mountains made of water, the forgotten things, old memories, unexceptional moments they fade before Leah opened her eyes, all off in some unknown place together, a land of reverberations.

A black clock hanging on a white wall above the white sink, had stopped. A yellow field on her grandfather’s farm full of cows, heads lowered and lowing to themselves. A long wall, dry masonry, separated the field from his yard. In the center, an oak or maple or elm. Not knowing its name, she cannot remember what it was. The cows are gone, the field is empty, the tree has a disease of the bark. The fire goes out. The night remains night, however.

A replica of the night sky crudely described on the ceiling above their beds by their father. Glow in the dark stars in the shape of Orion and Cassiopeia and Ursa Major and Ursa Minor and Cancer and Taurus. During the day the cracks in the plaster were black rivers cutting a dry and white land, a bare place with no civilization. At night, the universe appeared before them and they watched as it faded and then there was nothing but the dark and the occasional light from a passing car.

The morning was warm. Each drop of light suspended in the air. Against the bricks, the ceiling was a universe of sun-bleached geometric forms and figures waiting for young imaginations to see them. A small head, muzzle drawn to a short point, a mark, a black eye or nostril. Running nymphs. Beasts raising up on hind legs. Maws gaping. Thick fingers. A long neck created by a drizzle of lines. Two bodies filled with scribble, arching outward with uneven appendages toward one another, but an insurmountable gulf of ceiling between them and all of those stars and their fading light.