David Nahm - Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

One summer morning, Mr. Shepherd took Leah and Jacob for a walk to the school where he worked so that he could show them the human skeleton that was kept in a utility closet in the basement. Mr. Shepherd held Leah up so that she could touch its jaw, but Jacob, unable to even enter the room, sat in the stairwell alone with a pus on, half-heartedly moaning and begging to be taken home. “Don’t be a baby,” Mr. Shepherd called down the hall to his seven-year-old son. “This is really neat.” Jacob’s choice was utterly absurd to Leah — the dark stairwell was far more frightening than the skeleton in the closet. She chattered her teeth and listened to the sound clatter in her ears. Leah watched Jacob while Mr. Shepherd walked upstairs. They waited for a while, looking at the things on shelves, Jacob trying not to look at the skeleton in the corner, Leah taking his hand and telling him funny stories about the preserved biological specimens they found themselves among. A box of brachiopods and trilobites. They waited for their father for what felt like a very long time and then went looking for him, adventuring through the dark halls of the summer-emptied high school, imagining themselves characters in a forgotten folktale, left by their father in a cave of corpses, set free and seeking safety in a grim and dark castle. Distant howls and cries. They crept up the stairs toward a dim hallway and heard a voice, distant and low, and they knew that they’d found the horrific heart of the crumbling maze and would have to face the creature that writhed there. They peeked around the corner, to see what they could see. Their father was standing in the door of a classroom in a shaft of light, talking to someone unseen. When he saw his children down at the end of the hall, he got angry and asked them how long they’d been there.

On the way home, Jacob ran ahead of his father and sister, despite Mr. Shepherd’s barking. The boy ran down an embankment to the stream that followed the sidewalk through town. He was moving far too fast and tumbled into the shallow water, startling a paddling of ducks. The stream bent and bowed through town. Jacob yelped and flailed and Leah looked up at her father, but Mr. Shepherd just shrugged and said, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon has him now. There’s nothing we can do.” And he took his daughter’s hand and walked on home. Leah worried about Jacob the whole way, right up until he appeared on the doorstep, just after them, drenched and scowling.

That night, the pizza had mushrooms on it and Jacob began to cry because he was scared of mushrooms. He was scared of mushrooms because his father told him that mushrooms were man’s only natural predator. It had been a day of indignities.

At night, in the room they shared, Leah could make out a sliver of song, a muffled voice in mid-phrase, a lonesome love song fading as a car passed. Their room faced the street and the light from passing cars spilled in the corners. “Are you scared of anything?” Jacob asked and Leah said, “No.” Jacob leaned over and looked out of the window next to his bed and then said, “Not even the man in our yard?”

“There isn’t anyone in our yard.”

“Uh huh. I can see him. He’s in the shadows.” Later, Leah could hear Jacob snoring as she listened for the sound of the backdoor opening slowly, the pained creak like an old jaw.

The next day, while Mrs. Shepherd was ironing in the bedroom and Jacob was watching Emergency , Leah poured a small paper cup of water on his mattress and then promptly tattled on Jacob for wetting the bed. Unfortunately, Leah had failed to pour some on the crotch of his pajamas as well and she’d received the paddling instead from her mother while Jacob sashayed around the house. That night, while he was in the bath, she scratched the record about Zacchaeus that he liked to listen to while riding his rocking horse. A few hours later, when he put the record on the Fisher-Price player, it skipped, a voice singing wee wee wee wee wee endlessly and in the moment just before Jacob began to cry, as he registered that his favorite record was ruined, Leah felt a terrible twist of shame for what she’d done and she put her arms around her little brother and comforted him. Without a confession, she offered to give him her two favorite records— Monster Mash and The Mouse Factory —and he was overjoyed. I am a happy mouse and I ought to be . They were without a doubt the two best records in the house and now they were his. That night Jacob slept with them in his bed. We are happy kids.

One night, a summer night, thirty-some years later, Leah slept with the window open in her apartment, a window facing the parking lot and Leah woke to a woman’s scream. She rose in the light of streetlamps and looked out at the empty lot, at the distant trees, listened to the breeze, listened again for the voice, but if it had ever been there, it was gone, lost to the trees. Leah wondered if she should go out and see if someone was in danger, if there was something wrong, but not hearing anything else, she realized that it was just as likely a scream of joy and she went back to bed, but not before sitting at the open window in the dark for several minutes, listening.

Isolated, house-bound, no visitors, children barely sparing the time to call days after her birthday or before Christmas, the old woman slipped and fell down basement stairs. She kept a small workshop down in the basement where she made figurines for the children at church. Despite Leah’s pleading, the woman continued to slowly slump herself up and down the steep wooden steps into the pale fluorescent light in worn slippers on a daily basis. Until the day her ankles gave out on the third from top step. And then a week went by. All agreed it was terrible.

The way the woman passed made the house difficult to sell, much to the chagrin of the beneficiaries of the estate who would call and ask the executor when they would receive their share. “It isn’t that I care about the money. I just want some closure.” There had been several offers on the house, but they’d been rejected. “It isn’t the money. It was the house we grew up in and I know how much my father put into it and what it meant to him and what it means to us and what it should be worth and I don’t want to sell it until we find a buyer who appreciates what it means to us.” It wasn’t about the money.

The woman went to Leah’s church, and Leah, feeling sorry for the woman’s lonely life, her curved back and knuckles in gnarls like pallid roots, would visit on weekends, picking up groceries on the way, or on Sundays when it was her turn to take shut-in communion. There were several little old ladies that Leah had done this for over the years, old church ladies whose husbands had gone on, or women who’d never married, living on fixed incomes in small houses, women who would smile at her before their minds could remember who she was, if they ever did. They were just happy to see someone. Leah was happy to sit and not talk.

Leah put the groceries away and warned the woman about the basement steps. She called the woman after a severe storm and cleared the yard of broken branches. Leah listened to the woman talk about her children, off in other states with good jobs and lousy spouses and spoiled children. Beautiful, but spoiled. Leah smiled at her, held her hand, listened to the long day drain in the clock in the foyer and petted the woman’s poodle. The dog was missing an eye. It would fix that socket on Leah and no matter how much Leah wanted to turn away, she could not. The poor thing just wanted her to pay attention to it. Leah felt sad for the woman when the poor thing finally passed, though Leah was secretly relieved to be free of its gazing socket.

She spent many days like this, listening to the woman and petting the dog and watching the long light.