David Nahm - Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

Nighttime. The sound of thawing snow trickling through gutters. A newly purchased parcel of land in Bellevue Cemetery, the white seeping, but it would remain empty. Years had passed and Mr. Shepherd finally convinced his wife that it was necessary. For closure. But it would remain empty.

In bed, bedspread pulled up to their chins. They struggled to keep their collected warmth in the cold house. She had stopped crying. Eyes open, looking up at the black ceiling in the black room, watching the patterns of light cast by passing cars outside the bay window. Bands of white that shifted shape as they moved across the plaster.

This is how it was now, transmuted through some alchemical process into some new and degraded state. He wanted them to be over it and he felt a surge of anger at his wife’s continued grief, then blushed with shame. His arm twitched. The dog was by the front door, sitting, waiting. It whined in periodic bursts. They did not hear their daughter moving about upstairs.

All night, cars passed, engines humming. Cars passed and passed. Her mother tried to imagine what the drivers of those cars must be feeling. Probably nothing. They probably never felt like this. Everyone was rushing home to be with their families.

Before her husband returned home, Mrs. Shepherd pulled the photo album from the shelf and singed herself on it. A yellow field full of cows, heads lowered and lowing, blue band above jaw of green trees. A drum to collect rainwater is dark from head lowered to it, lapping dark water, jittering face looking up. A long wall, dry masonry, separated the field from the neighborhood and morning broke over the green jaw and night rolled up for sleep over the town. The baby boy in the woman’s arms pointing at trees and cows and trying to pat her hand on the surface of the water, cooing for more and more. The girl standing, gawking at lens.

She poured water into a clear plastic cup for her daughter. At night there is only the night and lagging in its midst a spill of stars, all of the stars that there ever were. Perhaps they do not have names. They are old waves that splash on her face and arms and legs. She bit her tongue after lashing at the girl. Bit till it bled.

The cows were gone, the field was empty, the tree had a disease of the bark. The fire went out. Then the garage door going up and she rushed, flushing to return the book to its place. For dinner: the rest of a box of penne and boneless chicken breast. There was nothing on television, but they watched nonetheless. “I like her voice.”

From the road, the sky now sighing into violet through smudged window, across acres of yellow grass now shaded to indigo, whose contours are only the differences in their darkness, a small orange light outlasted.

Leah’s mother’s voice is always with her.

“Well, no. I mean, yes, there are lots of objects, obviously, more than we know, but also, you know, the universe is mostly empty space. But that’s like all matter is mostly empty, you know, like we are made of molecules which are made of atoms which are made of electrons and protons and stuff which are made of subatomic particles like quarks and stuff and all that stuff, and atoms are mostly empty space around the electrons and protons and neutrons, but its all almost all empty space, you know. So when you think about it most stuff is empty and most of the universe is empty too just like that. So really there’s mostly nothing in the universe because even that stuff that there is, is mostly nothing anyway.”

Mr. Shepherd’s parents’ house was green, tucked in the back corner of the neighborhood. His father slept in the den, a dark wood-paneled room. Each morning he burned trash in the fireplace. Plastic, paper, and wood — the sick smell lingered all day. He smoked a pipe that filled the room with the sweet scent. There were shelves of mystery novels all throughout the house. The hardback dust jackets riddled with blood droplets and daggers. On one, the pale face of a young woman after her last exhalation. By Leah’s grandfather’s chair was an end table with an orange paperweight. Inside, the frozen body of a scorpion.

Unable to sleep, Leah got up and went to the window. A full moon and bright light seethed in the trees. Tree branches shattered moonlight. The neighbors’ daughter pushed open a window and crawled out, crossed the yard. A black figure but white leopard spots scattered across her. She disappeared into the line of trees in the back of the yard on the far side. Figures moved there, waiting. She waited for her to come back, but fell asleep there on the floor, head against the sill. That is where her brother found her the next morning. The sun was high and the house was full of the scent of bacon spitting in a skillet.

When Mrs. Shepherd visited her old college roommate, Leah had to sit on the back porch. In the living room where the women sat and drank tea and talked, there hung the stuffed head of a deer. Antlers reaching wide. Black eyes dulled by dust. Her mother talked to her old roommate about the old roommate’s divorce. “Bless,” her mother would say. She sipped sweet tea.

Leah sat on the back porch and waited, bored. It was summer. She scratched her bare legs and talked to herself. From behind the hedge, she saw two girls in white, peeking. She tried not to look directly at them, ashamed of her curiosity.

Later, at home in bed, she could hear the neighborhood children outside in the summer evening, screaming to one another. She never saw the two girls peeking around the hedge again, though maybe their voices were a part of the throng outside.

She told Jacob, “God created the world out of nothing: There was only God before. All there was was God and he made a void in himself large enough for the world. God wanted there to be something that was not-God. The ocean made the shore just so it could lap.”

Mrs. Shepherd looked into her daughter’s room and asked, “Who are you talking to?” Leah shrugged.

They feel warmth radiating. He stops, turns to her, about to speak for a moment the old rush, the old feeling passes through her, a swelling wave, just like when they first met, first dated, were first married, first learned each other’s bodies. He looks into her eyes in the dim light of the distant streetlamp. Faces mostly in shadow. She feels this for a moment, a flicker, and then it is gone and she feels nothing. And then, warm hum gone, more gone than she’d ever felt before. Only a hollow, a bell between hours, denuded of vibration.

Her face shows none of this as they stand there. He is unaware. His face is flushed and he leans in to kiss her and she puts her hand on his shoulder and lets him.

At home, they undress and slip into bed. He wriggles in the dark up against her body, whispers something blurry and drifts off. She stays awake for a long time after, but how long, she has no idea. The memory of her children, her girl and her boy, crowd back, and she is ashamed to have failed to keep them foremost in her mind, if even for an evening. This is all there will ever be. Her years learning to wriggle and learning to walk and her degrees and her promotions and summers at the beach and the children new in her arms. This is all that will ever be.

Rebecca Wilson slept with her sisters in the tall grass as their father shot at the stars and called out names at the tall trees closing around him. She remembered her sisters and she told William about sleeping in tall grass under a sky pregnant with little fires and how their father would wail and wail, how he would finally fall silent and stand in the door, a sliver of night fallen and snoring in the light of the kitchen. William put his arms around her to comfort her, but she pulled away. It was a long time before he learned that she did not like being touched when she was upset. After the children were born, something changed in Rebecca’s father and he stopped drinking. He lived alone on his farm and made an effort to get close to the one daughter that still lived in the state.