David Nahm - Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

All is wonder as the bricks of the old train station are swallowed by the creeping feet of ivy and moss. All is wonder as the left turn signals of the three cars in front of her pass in and out of sync slowly, phasing through all possible combinations in sequence. It is night, she crept toward home and the courthouse bell sang some closing hymn.

“Leah! Leeaaaah!”

She woke in the void, forgetting where she was for a moment, and remembered the faint light from the hallway, Jacob sitting on the corner of his bed, saying, “Can you hear it? Can you hear it howling?” and there it was, the howling howling howling and they shivered in their beds and listened to the rutting and snuffling just outside of their room and she whispered something to Jacob, some apology lost in the howling and they could smell their missing blood.

In the morning, Leah, tired even with an extra cup of coffee, listened to a woman talking on her cell phone to her daughter in the break room. “Bless,” the woman said, implying judgment. Leah sipped her coffee, flipped through the local news section of the paper and listened to two other women talk about children vomiting. How far into the woods does the path by the stream go, Leah wondered as she burned her lips and walked to her office. What if she just kept walking?

“So, I guess I’ll never feed him that again, but it was just weird, but my mother said—”

When Leah first brought communion, the woman smiled and Leah read the prayer and the woman chewed the small wafer and sipped slowly the small plastic cup of grape juice. They talked for an hour, a talk that was mostly silence, but which was warm and left Leah feeling happy. The next time Leah brought communion, a month later, the woman smiled, but did not remember Leah. Leah repeated her name, louder, but the woman shrugged and smiled. They went through the same actions as before, the prayer, the body, the blood, the sitting and talking, the pause, and Leah, disappointed that the woman did not remember her, said she would be back in a few days.

Leah began visiting the old woman once or twice a week, spending an hour or two just sitting. Sometimes she brought groceries or small gifts. The woman began to remember Leah, or said she did. Sometimes the woman called Leah by other names, the woman’s daughters or granddaughters, perhaps. Leah didn’t know. There were pictures of children and grandchildren scattered through the house, a nice house, but Leah tried not to look at them.

And Leah would bring communion and she would bring groceries which she bought with her own money and they would sit and one day the woman said she wanted to do something nice for Leah, but Leah demurred. The old woman insisted. “You’ve done so much,” she said and Leah said, “No, no, no,” but the woman wrote a check to Leah. At first, Leah wasn’t even going to cash it, but then she didn’t want to insult the woman, who asked several times if Leah had cashed the check, so Leah cashed it, but used the money to buy something nice for the woman. Then the woman asked Leah to run some errands for her and Leah did, because Leah said she would do anything for the old woman, who must have been in her mid-eighties, and so the woman gave her a list of things she needed and Leah got them for her and the woman gave Leah her ATM card and asked Leah to go to the bank for her and Leah did. Leah did what she was asked. The woman offered Leah money and Leah took it because the woman wanted Leah to take it and she reimbursed herself for the purchases because that is what the woman would have wanted and when the woman said she wanted to leave Leah something, Leah contacted an attorney, but only because the woman wanted her to do so. Leah did what the woman wanted. And when the woman insisted on making the little figurines in the basement for the children in the church, little figures with little felt clothes that the woman made with her knobby, trembling hands in the poor light of the basement, Leah asked her not to because it was too hard for her to get up and down, but the woman never listened.

One of the houses on the road that Leah drove each morning to work had a small dogwood tree out front. From the branches of the tree hung blue glass bottles. They were tied with graying string and spun slightly in the breeze. An elderly woman sitting outside with a black dog by her side. She had a green kerchief on her head and she waved at the cars as they passed. One day, she was gone but the bottles remained.

One evening, the sky was purple and the clouds were orange. They took on strange shapes. Dead grass grew. Paved lots were full of cracks with yellow stems pushing through. There was a taste to the water — dense and green. That woman walking along a country road, her boots along the gravel shoulder. In a pair of pants that were once nice, but were now soiled in the seat and the knees. A nice pair of pants that she must have been given by the Salvation Army. What was in the backpack that she carried on her bent back? Leah passed and tried to look into her rearview mirror to see the woman’s face, but there was a bend in the road and all Leah could see were trees dressed in the purple shadows of early evening.

A dead dog was found in the road that no one recognized. Everyone at the office was talking about it. There was one shoe on the side of the road. There were strange messages in the personals. The telephone rang, but there was no one there. The telephone rang and there was just clicking. The television flickered and clouds rolled in from the wrong direction. Grandchildren called their grandmothers without having to be told. A strange man helped a woman who’d dropped her things. He did not give his name. A young woman living alone moved back home and claimed the baby had no daddy.

In the waiting area someone laughs and spills sweet tea on the monthly financial reports. Her granddaughter has called and is getting married.

Clients, in their best clothes and with children, smile politely and chomp Starlight mints. Joy is no cause for the cessation of work.

The boy wouldn’t hold still. His mother begged him, “Jesse, Jesse, honey, please hold still, I need to talk to this woman, please, Jesse.”

Leah turned to the boy, smiling, and asked him, “Would you like a book to read? We have some books.” The boy shook his head and wriggled. His mother said, “You like to read don’t you? Jesse?” The boy stopped moving and looked at Leah. She asked, “Where do you go to school?” He looked at his mother and she said, “Tell the nice lady where you go.” The boy didn’t say anything. He was slumped down in the chair so far that his back and head were on the seat. The woman sighed and said, “He goes to Toliver.” Edna L. Toliver Elementary School was Crow Station’s oldest school. “That’s where I went to school when I was your age,” Leah said to the boy, leaning toward him, smiling. He was a cute boy, she thought. A round head and plump face and quick grin. “Do you want the woman to get you a book to read?” his mother asked again and the boy said, “No, I don’t want to read.” Leah gave him an exaggerated look of mock shock and said, “You don’t like to read? But reading is so much fun and Toliver has such a great library full of cool books about mythology and detectives and castles.” The boy stopped moving and said, “I don’t like it.” His mother took his arm gently and said, “Honey, please, the nice woman—” and Leah said, “Why don’t you like it?” She remembered the orange carpet and the high windows that ran along most of the front wall that looked out on the town. “I don’t like it because there’s a ghost up there.” Leah looked at him and didn’t say anything and the woman said, “Jesse, honey, what did I tell you about that. Jesse, honey, please,” and Leah asked, “A ghost?” and the boy said, “There’s a ghost of a boy and everyone said they seen him. I haven’t but I am scared to. This one girl said that when she goes up there he looks at her from the hallway and another girl said he tried to touch her hand.” The woman said, “Jesse, that’s it, how many times do I have to tell you—”