David Nahm - Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

In her office, a gap in the old window whistled with cold gusts and she listened, trying to understand what it was whispering.

She pulled the chain on the light, casting bolts of darkness across the room. The blood ran in her. She stood at the window, and the softly lit parking lot danced in vague patterns. The trees were rattling and there was nothing in Heaven or Hell that could change that.

The slap of her shoes across the wet parking lot. The roar of rain waking her at some point in the well of night. A sound in the hall — her mother? Her father? The old creature with long claws she used to threaten Jacob with to make him settle down and let her sleep? The girl, having slipped out and crossed the cemetery? And then dawn.

Her first summer job, the pool snack bar. The little room was filled with the scent of searing meat in swirling spires and the buzz of black flies busying themselves along the grease-grimed screen. Drinks bubbled in styrofoam cups and ice melted on tongues and napes. Leah caught sight of Jacob out of the corner of her eye, running across the hot cement, yelling with the other boys, still five. She stopped, looked back, but it was only some other child, ruddy and wet and keening for his mother because he fell down and had cherries on his knees. Her heart raced. She glared at him and hoped he hurt.

That evening, she heard her mother in the hall and pretended to be asleep.

That summer, the summer when she was sixteen, Leah Shepherd made a friend, a girl visiting her grandparents in Crow Station for the summer, lying out by the pool as Leah sweated in the small room, swatting flies and giving golfers watered down sweet tea.

At night, a thin cacophony of the dark rustles in through the windows. Sheets of cloud pass across the illuminated night sky and make the dim light in the room shift. The dark bloom of night sounds. She called and they talked on the telephone. One weekend, they drove to Cave City to see Kentucky’s oldest wax museum. On the side of the roads were shacks with card tables of geodes for their consideration. In the 3D Haunted Maze, they clung together and minnowed. In the grass beyond the crumbling parking lot sat a discarded sink with green blades growing in its white bowl. They sat next to it as the sun set. The girl drove a Rabbit with ripped seats and a cassette caught in the player, the wheels ever whining. A sudden downpour caught them. An evening purple amongst monuments. The girl didn’t know Jacob or Leah or her family. They didn’t talk about anything important. Leah listened to the girl tell stories about her home in Pennsylvania. An evening darting in the pooling shadows of faraway firs. In the distance, the girl’s house flickered where her mother and father and sisters slept. She looked at the girl and the pooling shadows and the long purple stains cast by statues in security lights. Plastic flowers foxtrot in the wind. Silk petals rub and rasp.

The screen displayed a gray and black image, dimly lit and impenetrable for a moment, a complex harmony of flickering shadow resisting resolution into anything specific until her eyes were able to decipher the shapes into something meaningful. Static like mist along low grass, along blacktop, black fading into black, the back of the school, a long brick wall, dusty windows, a short cement step and an alcove for a door, dark with security light pooling around. The television makes only one sound, the soft hum of light. Nothing for a moment, then light rising against the wall, the wall washing out, and then cutting off, a car arriving just out of the frame and then two figures slowly, idly approaching the alcove, sitting on the cement step, half in and half out of the darkness…it is summer, the summer passed, the girls, the two pairs of legs in jeans cut off at the knee and pegged, the loose t-shirts, one with hair pulled back in a ponytail, the other with hair cropped short, it is days before one would move away with her sisters, a warm summer night, a night still hot no matter how dark, it is summer and them sitting in and out of the dark, moving further back in the alcove, into the dark, but never disappearing, it is summer and in oceans children call names and cough water and in woods they mark trees to return home and at night they move silent through backyards, leaping from shadow to shadow, seeking to be shadows, nothing more, the parts of the Earth cut from the dominion of light, it is summer and the girls move in to each other, blending and joining, moving hands out of sight, only the tangle of tones of gray, the film silent and gray and black and jittering and then stopped.

At the funeral. “Listen, now is the time. Now we invest. I know you have some money saved up. Listen, listen, I will provide the labor. Listen, do you want a drink? Listen, just a sip? We can buy. We can buy and then reinvest. Listen, do you want some of this or not?” A gallery of chins. A swell of coughing voices. The preacher begins to preach and gets it all wrong.

Pouring out sugar and salt and crying for more soda. “Underneath mountains are giants buried long before any of us were even thought about in God’s mind. If you took to mind to move a big hunk of water with your two palms pushed outward—” Children like paper falling.

She watched gutters, toothed with ice or bearded with leaves in flame. And the yellow grass of the yard that she watched her mother mow. She watched the viaduct. Names bloomed underneath and faded with the years. A cut of sky, the gray and blue.

There was a playground on the side of the old elementary school that was never used, but the swings swung in the shade of still maples. She watched the windows. Can you hear the howling? The perfect place to perch on a summer night and not be seen.

She walked all over town, watching her own warped self reflected in the windows of the empty department stores. In Constitution Square, two men held hands forever as the circles of governors watch. The log cabins stood empty, their wood walls tattooed with names by knives. There was a walled garden behind the apothecary.

The Shakers built two houses in one house. Two houses to keep the boys and girls apart. Two houses to divide the bodies to enrich the spirit. And work. And toil. And bodies given to the enthusiasm of true spirit. A divided room for dances. All the old hymns that she now sung. And the grass grew and grew and here she found old Easter eggs still hidden in the half of the closet that had been Jacob’s.

The girl calls and they fight. Over what? Nothing that either could reckon. The next day, the girl didn’t call and Leah walked to her grandparents’ house and she found the girl on the deck, reading and they sat uncomfortably for a while and then half-forgot what they were fighting about and went for a drive around the country, but didn’t say much of anything at all. The only friend she’d made. The girl’s sisters were bright shadows like older siblings always are.

Derrick Green asked her what high school was like and she said, “I can’t remember.”

The house abandoned at the far end of the field. They approach on foot by starlight, skirting lowing blobs. Word was the house was haunted. Of course it would be. How could it not? Collapsing porch. Empty and slumping. A rotting tooth from some other time. A fine old home at the end of a long lane that must have been owned by a wealthy family but which now sat empty, slipping to seed at the far end of a cow pasture.

A piano in an empty salon and nothing else. Broken glass glittered in the beams of small flashlights. Light steps on worn wooden floor. All silent but their breathing and heart-beating. Written on the walls were the names of bands no one remembered and loves long since lost, fallen to some ruin. Nothing but tears on a car’s seat covers.