Amelia Gray: Threats

Regardless, it made no sense to leave the house, whatever hour it was. He tried to rationalize his way back into bed with the fact that he could rest underneath Franny’s coat, which smelled strongly of a wet rock, though the scent surely had already mixed and diluted on the bed with David’s own scents from the previous days. It seemed important to take a shower, or sleep and wait for the sun. The coffee brewed and dripped, and he thought about drinking it in the shower or pouring it into a pouch so he could have it while lying in bed. The temptations occurred as he blew the steam from his first cup.

In the days when he would get up early and go to work, he took his coffee to enjoy in the shower, a wet warm surrounded by warm wet. Sometimes he sat down on the tiled floor, his back against the shower’s glass door. Drops of water would splash the surface of the coffee. It had been a secret pleasure.

David missed the smell of sanitized dental tools mingling with coffee. He would have his hygienist come in an hour before him each day and prepare the place, laying the clean tools out on metal trays at each station, covering each tray with a sanitized plastic bib. The smell was of new metal and smooth plastic, the opposite of the ground teeth and dry socket rot that would drift through the office throughout the day.

He had enjoyed his peaceful half hour before patients arrived. The front desk assistant would put on the easy-listening station and David walked through his office, sipping coffee from a thermos and observing each room, enjoying its spotless smell. Sometimes he sat in the examination chair and visualized himself as one of his own patients. He reclined the chair fully and saw the patterns within the ceiling tile. He listened in on the receptionist talking to one of the hygienists about college football.

It was hard to admit that those days were over, but it was hard to admit that any days were over, that the days themselves didn’t stretch like pulled taffy and sag to the floor.

He wiped a layer of dust from the old coffeemaker. The machine had been a wedding gift and was the type with a removable top portion for easy cleaning. When David was dumping the filter in the trash, he saw a piece of paper taped on the back of the reservoir. The paper was half the size of an index card and featured typewritten words:

YOUR FATE IS SEALED WITH GLUE I HAVE BOILED IN A VAT. I SLOPPED IT ON AN ENVELOPE AND MAILED IT TO YOUR MOTHER’S WOMB.

David pulled the taped card off the coffeemaker and turned it over. The card bore no other marks, besides a lightened patch on the upper edge where the Scotch tape made contact with the paper. The card seemed old enough to have been sold with the appliance, but its condition could also have been attributed to resting on the hot surface. The edges of the card were crisp, without even a rounded darkening suggesting that they had been used to excavate underneath a fingernail.

David thought about calling the police, but then he imagined handing them the piece of paper, explaining that he had found it while making coffee. He decided that such a discovery would be best dealt with privately. Likely the threat had been stuck on by whoever gave them the gift, as a joke or not as a joke, but still beyond David’s concern years after the fact. He could not begin to think about the number of things that were truly beyond his concern, the hundreds of thousands of things.

The house was a void. Its dark hallway beckoned. Curtains in the living room stood like sentry ghosts. Each room featured an obvious kind of silence that suggested invisible occupants holding their collective breath. He folded the tape over on the card and pressed the adhesive to the paper surface. He placed the card facedown on the counter, put his glove back on, and opened the door.

SNOW MELTED through the seams in David’s thin shoes and soaked ice water into Franny’s socks and between his toes. When he walked down the driveway, he saw that Franny’s car was gone from its usual spot in front of the garage. Someone had taken it and left behind an expanse of gravel and murk in the middle of the snow. He walked down the hill and toward the main road. A runner nodded as he passed, wearing what looked like a full wet suit under shorts.

Walking, David thought of himself as a dotted arc on a map of the world, dropping a plumb line toward some sandy beach. He imagined moving south as a tired crow might fly, over woods, stopping to rest on power lines overlooking gas stations. If David were a crow, he would stay away from trees, preferring man-made structures. He would be a friendly kind of crow, brave enough to communicate with other crows. They could hop around a dish of warm water. The snow would melt to a filthy slush around the Mason-Dixon Line and give way to the clean, sun-drenched variety of winter he imagined was general in Florida. He would be a crow on the sand. His warmer downy feathers would molt and float away as he flew.

The streets were empty, save for a few late-night or early-morning runners and the rare sweep of headlights. He saw dead leaves on the trees for what felt like the first time, though of course he had seen dead leaves in the past. He tried to think. The leaves were speckled with wilt. They hung from the trees like leather pelts.

The laundromat was the only occupied place. Its lights cast a men’s-room shade of yellow over the street. David went into the warm room and took a seat by the door. He remembered that very laundromat from his childhood. Once a year, his mother would take down all the curtains and bundle them up and spend the afternoon watching them spin in the industrial-size washing machines. His sister was there for a few trips, quiet in her stroller, reaching for David’s outstretched finger with the arm that wasn’t tucked inside her corduroy coveralls. The laundromat was the same as it had always been. The brand of detergent stocked in the automatic dispenser had changed, but the dispenser itself remained original to the space. The old pinball machine remained, wherein the silver balls had been tasked with escaping a haunted house.

Eight carts had been lined up against a wall of dryers, their wheels locked. The carts were filled with laundry. Another person was working on them, a woman, older than David by a wide margin and wearing enough layers of earth-toned clothing that the edges of her body were unclear. All of the carts seemed to belong to her. There was a small child curled up in one of them, sleeping. The woman took a sweater out of one basket and pulled it on over the two sweaters she already wore. She didn’t look at David, and their silence became an energy. He removed his shoes and socks and padded barefoot to a dryer. He put them in the machine. “Warming up,” he said.

Her face was like a loaf of bread. “Back already,” she said.

“What’s that?”

She walked across the line of spinning dryers, peering into each. Opening one, she dug in, pulled out a pair of socks, and tossed them to David. MARLON was stitched into the fabric of the sock’s cuff. “Welcome home,” she said.

He put the socks on. They were warm. “What’s your name?”

She extracted a T-shirt from under the child’s bare feet in the cart and tossed it into a washing machine. “Shelly.”

“Who’s Marlon?”

Clearing her throat, she folded a sweater and moved it to another basket. She rolled a basket to the side, slipped around it, and leaned toward him, plucking a piece of lint from his blue and ivory ski jacket. “Marlon’s not around,” she said, tucking the lint in her breast pocket and returning to her folding task. The shirts she worked on seemed generally mismatched to one another, like she had cleared a clearance rack at the Catholic ladies’ thrift store down the street. As she folded a long-sleeved shirt, David saw that it was slashed down the breast in a vertical line starting from under the collar and terminating five inches lower.