David Nahm - Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

Was something in the house? Her skin prickled, responding to the slightest fluctuation in pressure, a sensitive flame. The skin on the nape of her neck felt warm. The house spoke the sounds that old houses speak: that too-heavy creak on the stair, that groan of door hinge, that rough breath. But no sound came that she could discern from the clutter of sound that comprised the silence of the night.

The smell of machines, of paper and printer ribbon. The men wandered off to waste the day talking about that boy who’d gone missing to anyone who would listen to them. “It just ain’t like it used to be. Can’t trust none. You see how some of those people are. How they dress. How they talk. Just sad.” Lower lips lined with the black shards of the last dip.

In the kitchen, her mother standing over the sink crying in the darkness qualified only by drapes of light from the streetlamp just outside the window. It licked away a few traces of night with hazy warmth. The room was black everywhere save slivers of pale pink-yellow.

Mrs. Shepherd took to reading a verse of the Bible every day and made it as far as Psalm 27. Mr. Shepherd came home from work, ate dinner, put Leah to bed and quietly went back to work. Her mother’s mouth moved silently. Her father kept the door to his library closed. The leaves were to turn brilliant colors but it rained and washed them away. Silly birds with a mind for games. And then winter and spring and summer. She did not hear her father come home. Her father went away on a business trip for a few weeks. When he came home, he gave her a stuffed dog. Leah tossed it in the closet. She was too old for such things.

Voices straining to stay unheard. The night sky erupted and the whole house smelled like running water. She sat up and in the passing bright shadows saw her children reading from a book on the floor, turning the pages in the dark. A voice outside, echoing in the street, echoing off houses. The house was quiet. The ground swallowed the rain and was dry again.

Dusty school windows with slants of light. Had anyone seen any faint light moving between the stones and the obelisks? Could even they hear the singing, a faint melody she did not know? The teacher called her name, told her to go to the principal’s office where she was excused from school for the rest of the week, the boy suspended. The singing followed her home.

There were birds in the school. Brown-black bodies. Swoop and swirl around the halls, darting high to the exposed beams of the student commons, shitting on anything they could get their shit on. The children would cheer. Small voices and the beating of wings. The custodian would chase them up and down the school with brooms and yardsticks, hollering and whooping, quickly out of breath. Sometimes a dead bird would appear on the floor, a feathered comma in the middle of the gray marbled tile. The children would scream.

The bathrooms were always cold and when in there alone, you could hear soft voices being carried at odd angles from some other place.

“And then judge said, Ma’am do you realize that you are facing felony abduction charges? And then I said, Whatever, it’s my birthday. I mean it should be attempted murder. When you are holding someone down and they can’t breathe. And something like illegal possession of personal property. I finally got my coat back. See, she likes that Mike’s Hard Lemonade. We just sat in the car at the end of the parking lot, it was raining, and we sat and listened to the radio and once she was drunk enough, I took her back to her mother.”

Leah kept her eye on the windows of the classrooms on the third floor, the ones no longer used, with orange shades drawn, pale, sun-faded eyelids. She watched for slight movement, a tremble, a twitch, a face looking down.

Leah kept her eye on the street, on passing cars that slowed. Listened for the sound of idling engines. Vans parked discreetly around corners. Men sitting in shade, leaned back, eyes closed. A man in thick glasses with a bald head glistening in morning light watched her come in from the parking lot of the gas station across from the school and Leah was crying as the boys and girls on the swings dared one another to leap off and fly as high as they could. She went shopping with her mother and a man with a thin gray beard touched her head and told Mrs. Shepherd that Leah would be a real heartbreaker one day. A man in the back of the movie theater watched her walk with her father toward the exit as the credits rolled. When would the car stop, the door open, the arms reach out, the voice speaking calmly: Your mother is sick. Your father is hurt. They asked me to bring you to see them. Come, come, come. The school offered a program on identifying the danger of strange people. Those that are overfriendly. Those that are threatening. Those who claim to know your parents. Pictures of boys and girls who trusted and disappeared into nothing, never to be seen again. The man who presented the program stopped Leah in the hall and crouched down and said, “You wouldn’t ever talk to a stranger, would you?” He smiled and wet his lips with his tongue. And the stories she read in the books she checked out from the public library: children lost in the mists on the moors, hounds the size of horses carrying babies away, a man rushing to confront a noise in an unused room only to return with his hair turned white and his eyes empty and dead. Perhaps there weren’t vampires and werewolves and creatures in the lake, but there was something. Leah knew that.

Leah kept her eye on the empty white sky and on a girl’s dirty sneakers that hung over the side of the slide, talking to someone else, ignoring Leah completely, they all ignored her at first. A calamity of floral scent from the flowering vines on the fence nearby, the names of which she would never know, trembled. They ignored her at first and then a boy with hair that curled at the nape of his neck hooted at her in the hall. He said, “I’d run away too if I was your brother. I wouldn’t want to be the brother of no fat lezzie.” And the boys around him howled. They all cackled and clapped and there were girls in pristine Tretorns by lockers covering the grins and the boy said, “You know he’s dead. You know that, right? He’s probably dead somewhere. Probably covered in maggots, crawling all in and out of his mouth and eye.” And then he ran over to her as she stood stricken on the wide tile of the hallway and put his arm around her, “Don’t cry, baby. It will be okay. I heard he’s haunting the third floor girls’ bathroom now. You can see him every time you take a shit.” And everyone in the hall died, just absolutely died, and Leah shook and her skin boiled with blood.

On the playground the girls in the bright shoes talked on the slide. “Do you ever think about it? About being dead? About going to heaven or hell? About being trapped, forever, inside a house? A ghost? Do you wonder what it would be like to be forever but to not be alive? That would be terrible, wouldn’t it? I mean, to have to be in the school forever? Or to have to live in your house forever and to have to watch your parents cry every night and to have to watch them get old and die and to see new people move in and not care about you or even know you lived there and have to watch people go to the bathroom and sleep together and they can’t hear you and it never ends? And what if the house burns down? What happens to you? Do you get to go to heaven then or do you have to haunt an empty lot forever and ever? Haunt a gravel pit? Haunt a grassy path? Haunt a parking lot? That doesn’t seem right. I’ve never heard of a ghost in a parking lot or in a park. I know you think about it. I know you think about him and wonder where he is. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know. Wait, listen, wait. Do you ever think—”