David Nahm - Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

She was able to keep these feelings in and to present nothing but the most generous smile and gentle touches on an arm or a shoulder and those non-committal grunts that signal to a speaker that she is listening , but she felt it and it bothered her that she felt that way.

“They’s just screaming and screaming but I ain’t never heard them.”

But she was good at listening. She listened to the women talk all day. She listened to their children. She listened to the staff talking idly at their desks to spouses on their cell phones or to catty chatter in the kitchen break room. She listened to people at tables next to her at restaurants and to attorneys talking to clients in the hallways at the courthouse and to children arguing in grocery stores and to old people talking to whoever will pause long enough to listen. Leah listened, whether she wanted to or not, and she wondered what it would have been like to be someone else.

“They traded breath all morning and then ate lunch in front of the television.”

She listened and she watched, everyone bleeding everyone else’s stories, even the ones they promised not to tell, all too good to keep to themselves.

“No one can hear us. Come on.”

At the school, ghosts spoke from the pipes in the winter.

Prior to the lawsuit, Leah Shepherd had nearly saved up enough for a down payment on a small ranch house, built circa 1968, in a small subdivision just outside of town called Streamland. She’d been renting a house within walking distance of work for years and saving what she could, but the suit took her savings and her retirement and she ended up moving not into a house of her own but into the one-bedroom apartment on the bypass, and at night with the window open, she listened to the trees and at dusk she walked in the woods and wondered about the woman she saw slumping around town. That filthy woman. Her long hair in greased tangles. Her face set in a sullen scowl. Her back bent beneath her backpack. Where was she right then? In a dimly lit room with walls ruined by rain, plaster buckling with veins of black mold. Behind a dumpster unsuccessfully holding out her hand for help getting up off the ground. Some place with the smell of damp. Some place with the smell of ripe bodies. Why not in a field in fresh air? Why not by a stream in fading light? Why not still in a small room? The woods drew in dark around Leah lost in thought.

Standing on the corner, before the judicial center, Leah Shepherd watched a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair bubble at the sight of a cigarette butt on the ground, between bricks. The exhausted nub contained a few happy puffs still. He bent to retrieve it, swinging long arms and rained joy. With the courthouse bell, it is time for work, so all went to work or to wait for the bailiff to unlock the doors so that they may go on in.

“Oh, honey, listen, just so morbidly obese…I don’t know why I looked it up on the Internet while at the house alone…but yeah, he died…but I can’t bring myself to make up his bed…I had the child with me yesterday…She wanted to see his father…I said to him, I said, What is your problem…yes it is my perception…a game, a whole big game…I am sick of being played for a fool…looking at women…smile…checking your house out…yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Some mornings, the sheriff’s deputies paraded prisoners to the courthouse for preliminary hearings tethered to one another. The deputies, four or five, in tan and brown, short cropped hair, shoulder CBs joshed and hummed, talked and joked. A cluster of coughing guffaws fluttering up. They called out to each other and their eyes wrinkled. The prisoners in orange jumpsuits, together waist-to-waist. Wrists bound penitently at the hip, fingers fingering fingers. They didn’t jaw. What would be worth saying? It all is what it is. So they sauntered, heads lolling on necks. They were a stream wishing for a single smoke in the morning air. Young men in no rush to get on with anything. The bell in the courthouse tower clanged the hour and they slipped inside the heavy glass door. Families stood by and watched. They rang with sorrows, their clapper tongues clapped lip, mouth, sounding waist, shoulder, head, and crown. They tolled: bring cousins, sisters, neighbors. Cell phones bubbled with incoming messages. Thumbs texted truncated tales to someone, somewhere. Outside on cement steps, they smoked, pitching butts to bricks, left to smolder.

“I am not a vindictive person, but I want him to be in pain. God help me. I’m a Christian, but I want him to suffer.”

“The interest rate is just too high.”

“I’m daydreaming.”

There was a fountain outside the courthouse. AGUA ESTA MALA FAVOR DE NO BEBER. A group of men in jean shorts and Polos set up a small amplifier and began to preach the Word. They sang hymns. The air conditioners in the bank building across the street dripped water on the heads of those skulking by, trying not to be noticed. Purple stretch pants, high-waisted, acid-washed, wrinkled, rumpled, untucked t-shirts, Sunday best, suits crisp and new, sport coat, tie tacks, pressed, tucked, contacts instead of glasses, tattoos revealed when coughs, wheezes, crutches, motorized wheelchairs. Poor surgery, poor thing, poor surgery. Young bailiffs lounged by the metal detector like young bathers at a pond in the spring, wands in lap. “So it was me and Chris and Hanglade.”

“Hanglade? What’s he doing?”

“Hanglade? Going to school.”

The sky was bunched and soiled batting, the contours of which are lit by some sun that cannot be seen.

“Would you send her a card? She’s really depressed. She feels alone. Just get a little one from the Dollar Store. Just a fifty cent one. She never gets to see her son. Just say a little something. For her…” The copy machine overwhelmed the rest.

The spine read: Dead Bodies through Declaratory Judgments . It rained and leaves gullied past. The telephone rang. Dead bodies broken waiting for names called broken waiting. Blood giving new life. The telephone rang and rang and rang. On a post, in the spring, two birds, one on another. The small tree with bark like peeling wallpaper sat alone and considered the snack cake wrapper at its feet, half-hidden in the dead leaves. The parking lot was empty except for a black Escalade half-hidden in back of the office of a lawyer who lost his license. Perhaps it waits for nightfall, which came soon enough. In the evening, a last light overwhelmed by flashing blue and red licking sidewalk and brick. A car stopped on the side of the street. Whir in front of a yellow-green hedge. Off-white Mercury Cougar full of stuffed animals. Purple bears pressed into taupe puppies and sun-bleached humanoids spilled on the backseat and dashboard. Nameless forms with splitting seams. When she was a young girl, Leah carried a stuffed rabbit with her to the summer camp and on the last day gave it to the deaf boy that had played with her all week. He had a large head, large eyes, glasses, and others yelled mean things at them while she made the rabbit dance for the boy. She gave it to him not because she liked him enough to give away her most precious possession, but because giving her rabbit away hurt not to have it. At home in her room, she would think of that rabbit and begin to cry and her mother would come in and hold her, feeling Leah’s warm tears and they would be quiet. In the dark, in her mother’s embrace, she would sink inside herself, past her own pitiful little sorrow, her room and the night and her mother and the rabbit glimmering smaller and smaller on the distant surface of his being, and then it was morning and her mother was gone and there were birds trilling in the branches outside of her window. The rabbit had been Jacob’s before and she’d always been jealous of it.