Jac Jemc - A Different Bed Every Time

When everything had been clipped and ripped and unhinged, Pippa took Benji’s hand and hauled him outside. She pushed a shovel into his grip and took one for herself. She pointed to the northwest corner of the yard and she took the southeast. They began digging a diagonal trench through the garden, ruining a full lawn that had taken years to even out because of the heavy shade. It was a generous break from the particulate air of the indoors. Pippa tore off her white mask and Benji did the same.

Questions quickly entered each of their minds, but they replaced them with the work of calculating exactly how many more minutes would pass before this epoch would end. Only several feet of space kept them from the moment they would meet in the center of the yard and spade would clang against spade. They both knew the real work of this decision would come with phone calls and cups of coffee and the hard task of making others understand. Small pools of pity and misunderstanding and alliance would gather between family and friends. Pippa and Benji had only small pockets of fear: elegance, rationality, indecency, skepticism, and forgiveness.

Above them, in a tree, large now but once so small one or the other of them (who could remember?) had been able to carry it with a single hand, a crow sat cawing and searching the branches for life.

With just inches between them, Benji dug in one more time and Pippa met his effort. Breathing hard, perspiration everywhere, they looked behind them at the line that had been drawn and one final thought arrived to their minds at the same time: there is no specified distance between being alone and around.

When Pewit was a child, his parents told her about the wild Scissortail monster who would decide what her afterlife would be. Pewit had been poring over the Roman heroes of her mother’s heritage and the Greek monsters of his father’s. Pewit imagined himself away from her parents, in the world of these myths, where things were always and never what they seemed. Pewit’s parents saw the way he believed everything was possible and made up a new monster, one that Pewit had not already read about, one that Pewit might think still existed, one that had not yet been conquered by a myth and a hero. They told Pewit about its barbed-wire limbs and its chalk-white nipples. Pewit lived in fear of the Scissortail Beast for a long time, imagined the way it would divide him, the way the Scissortail, with a few quick cuts, could make Pewit one thing, rather than another. How the Scissortail could take away Pewit’s bothness. Pewit was tired of only being something when compared to another. Pewit wanted to be the same thing no matter what she was standing next to. Pewit wanted to untitle himself. One afternoon Pewit found a duck in the barn tangled in some unwound fencing wire, dead from fright or exhaustion. On the wall above the duck was a drawing of the Scissortail, just as Pewit had imagined it — its arms raised menacingly. The image of the Scissortail lorded over this trapped dead duck. Pewit was not afraid, though. Pewit had known someone had been crawling into his imagination for weeks now. She looked behind her to see if that person was watching her. Pewit knew if he thought his own thoughts, he would come out fine. Pewit didn’t have it figured out but liked it that way. Pewit had been snagging on herself. He had confusions that were more certain than he would admit. Pewit was not one or the other. Pewit would not die and go to just one place. Pewit knew she would be everywhere at once and that the white noise of feeling every sensation at one time would make it feel like she was nowhere at all, and that would feel like home. Pewit pitied the Scissortail for its one-sidedness. The Scissortail had been an invention to make Pewit behave. To show how well he knew what was the right thing to do, Pewit reached his small arms carefully into the barbed wire and extracted the duck, cautious not to puncture its unfeeling body but scarring himself. Pewit brought it into her mother to prepare for dinner. Then Pewit walked calmly to the bathroom, lined up the antiseptic, the band-aids and his arms, and did the careful work of making sure every bit of herself remained intact.

Before they took him in, he’d made a ritual of pressing his ear to the side of the upright piano as his mother played until she’d warn him away.

Now, in the dark of the night, lit with red blinks and glowing screens and the light from the hall, he watches his parents sleep in the chair and the cot beside him, and he is not old enough to think, “How serious could it be?” He waves his hands, trying to vanish them like he saw in the magic show. He imagines walking out of this place on a tightrope and emerging on the other side of the wall to much applause. When the sun appears in his window at five a.m., he flourishes his palms again. He wonders at how fine he feels.

The father falls for the dark wood laminate, telling people it’s a fine room they’re living out of these days. The child tinkers with the blood in the tubing when his parents are preoccupied with the doctor. He can make the deep red stop and start with just a pinch. His imagination shapes itself based on his surroundings; he dreams himself a nurse, a doctor. Even when he imagines blaring on a trumpet, he is holding the nebulizer, blowing sour notes sweet. His IV becomes the ripcord on this parachute as he envisions telling his coach, “Maybe we should turn back,” before jumping toward the center of the earth. His childhood is possessed by this place. Tangles of days swirl back and forth and none of the family can recognize the present, but they resolve to smile: sad smiles and weary smiles and mesmerized smiles when the doctor brings news that says, “Improvement has come in the form of staying the same.”

Each night abounds with the invisible impossible. What if the child fell from bed and none of the alarms laughed their cruel laugh? The parents bring in a radio to keep the child’s ears filled with the same piano mazurkas and polkas he loved, but the child misses the vibrations, the small violences of the hammers dancing on the wires just inches from his face.

The parents’ wingspans grow smaller. Their car hasn’t been touched in days.

“That noisy sun. Tell it to shut up,” the boy says in the afternoon, his eyes squinting, and the parents squelch their scolding and close the blinds. They miss the way the light warms their core and mourn the cacophony of life outside the window, but they keep telling themselves, “It is not the skin of our teeth.”

The child mouths gibberish much of the afternoon, drifting into a kind of stupor, anesthetic shooing or beckoning. The mother reads to the child even after he has fallen asleep: “A fox remembers easily.” She pauses on this, stranded.

The children who are well enough put on a play. It takes weeks to prepare. It makes the father’s tears ceiling within his eyes each time he thinks of it. The parents take their son to see it, but the play is about a garden, and the garden is just off-stage. It drives the mother into a fit by the end of the show, knowing that off-stage there is no garden at all. She tells the director, “I would have folded colored tissue. I would have pinched together fabric scraps so these children could have had a real garden.” Some of the kids overhear her and look around, confused. They do not know what might have been.

Grandmother visits and she is full of laughter and soft to hug. Grandmother gives charming warnings for the future and the parents look away, convinced of what is not to come. They hold the point of view of each visitor in their mouths until it becomes soggy and they spit it out. They have come to vie for the insoluble. They have made up a new way to survive knowing what they know. They no longer hesitate or whisper or experience anticipation. They used to shimmer with restlessness, and now they blink largo.