Amelia Gray - Threats

There had been no movement of the earth, no discernible change in pressure. An unknown explosion, and then broken glass. A few wineglasses belonging to Franny’s parents came away with hairline fractures, suggesting that the blast must have had a low epicenter.

Franny was convinced that someone had entered the house while David was painting the mailbox. She held his shoulder and told him that there had been an intruder, that the intruder had obviously entered through the front door and walked by Franny in the living room without her knowledge, a theory that made her feel as if the intruder had made actual physical contact with her, held her against a wall. She imagined the intruder was a small but powerful man who wore ski pants. The intruder would have stolen the ski pants from another home or perhaps a store, putting them on under his jeans and walking out, maybe even waving to the cashier, cavalier, his stocky legs insulated with stolen goods. Franny said that it was time to buy a security system. David considered the possibility of wiring the doors in the house and adding an electric current that could be broken and restored on a whim, by a machine. She talked about security cameras and motion detectors while he thought about the impartial entity observing them making love or eating breakfast.

She felt nervous about intruders even when they learned that the destruction had been caused by the water heater in the basement exploding, the percussive force directly below the kitchen having the same effect of balancing their glassware on a timpani and striking the instrument with a mallet. While David pulled glass from her feet, she spoke of intruders and security, and the exploded heater quietly flooded the basement ankle-deep with hot water. The man who came to replace the heater suggested that they hire a cleaning crew before more papers were ruined and walls damaged, but the expense was too great and David removed some of the water with a bucket before allowing the rest to more or less drain out the door in the den, where the foundation dipped low enough to allow some liquid exodus. The basement had too many problems to fix. The flood was another in a long line.

Meanwhile, Franny laid out plans, drawing diagrams of the house. It became clear that she had thought about it for a long while prior to the glass incident. David explained that any system was out of the budget and therefore out of the question, but for many months afterward she kept the plans on the bathroom counter. She had one image, of the full house layout, which she was particularly proud of. She had placed gold stars at the most likely points of entry, places where they could point cameras. She had the layout framed and hung it above the dresser in their bedroom.

THE PLYWOOD did not affix easily onto the space where the kitchen window had once been. The nails couldn’t puncture the siding. Upon closer inspection, David found a ribbon of steel wrapped around the window opening. Anchoring lag bolts were required, and the cordless drill. David found the items in the basement, which he needed a flashlight to explore, as the bulbs were all burned out or broken. He enjoyed a brief fantasy of walling up the basement entry with bricks, entombing the mess inside, but the water heater was down there, plus his father’s glass jelly jars full of miscellaneous screws and nails and lag bolts, which he brought to the surface and used to secure the plywood. Once it was up, he wrote I AM STILL HERE with the black spray paint, in letters visible from the street, for the benefit of anyone who might make the mistake to think otherwise. It felt good to cover the place where people might either observe or enter his home’s interior. He wondered if he had enough plywood to cover each of the windows.

SHELLY FOLDED the last of the clean clothes and placed the two stacks next to each other, the jeans and shirts delegated to separate sub-stacks, folded socks nestled like baby mice around their perimeter. She was the only one in the laundromat again, though a few humming machines suggested that people would come and go.

Her nephew had stopped by earlier with a new load of clothes that had been released from their duties as evidence. It seemed unfair to incinerate them, unfair to the clothes and their former owners, and Shelly requested that each load be brought to her. The shorts and slacks were blameless in her hands. She could rehabilitate them.

A faded burgundy polo shirt extended an inch above one of the folded sub-stacks, and she examined it, frowning, removing it from the stack and pulling it over her head. It made a tight fit over the pair of long-sleeved shirts she was wearing, plus the T-shirts underneath, one of which advertised a theme park she had seen once while walking a long way. She smoothed the collar and felt where the fabric had been torn at the seam.

After she put the polo on, the sub-stacks were perfect. Shelly took out a pocket level and balanced it on top. The bubble hesitated at the center, then settled. She descended from the footstool and walked around the folding table, examining it from all angles. “The line is so clean,” she said. Anyone would be pleased to see her achievement. She pulled a chair to the table and stood on it, taking in the aerial view, then plucked the level from the stack, placed it in her pocket, and smoothed the dimple it had made on the top shirt. It seemed as if the shirt had been created for the sole purpose of finding its way there, to the table, to become perfectly folded atop another shirt. It looked like a photograph of a stack of folded clothes, but Shelly knew she had created it from ordinary objects and an idea in her head, and the pleasure of that fact added to the moment.

She knew that only the passing of time would evolve her thoughts on the scene. Crossing the room, she leaned against the far wall and watched her perfect pile. Another woman with a laundry basket paused in front of it and nodded once. Shelly was filled with pride. But time passed, and sure enough, the feeling of perfection began to diminish. It seemed as if the hemline on a folded skirt was slightly askew, peeking out above the rest like a taller man in a lineup. She walked closer and saw the pills of cotton clinging to a sweatshirt. She nudged a pair of socks into order, but the whole thing still felt wrong. In one motion she gathered up the two stacks of clean clothes, turned to the nearest washing machine, and dumped them within. She dug into her pocket for quarters and reached for the soap.

COLD MORNINGS grew colder, and the plywood made a poor heat barrier over the kitchen window. It shuddered against the wind and grew damp at the edges. The heater would have worked itself to death, solely for the purpose of sinking warm air into the wooden window. Ants moved in branched lines up the walls toward the second floor. David stopped turning the heater on and went to bed wearing a wool cap.

One particularly cold morning, he got up while it was still dark and put on his ski jacket. He got back into bed, under Franny’s coat, feeling bundled, as if he was between a pair of sleeping bags, as if he was camping in his empty bedroom, feeling warm and confined.

The next morning, he brewed a pot of coffee and brought a cup of it to the garage. Marie was writing in a notebook at her desk and looked up to smile at him. It was as warm as a greenhouse inside the garage. David noticed the space heaters mounted on the walls, strung from the ceiling with electrical wire. Power strips lined the garage like rattraps. A massive ceramic-coil heater dominated Marie’s desk. The wasps clustered around David’s face in greeting.

“Good morning,” she said.

He set the mug down on her desk. “Who’s paying the electrical bill in this place?” he asked, covering his mouth with his hand as one of the insects came to investigate the source of moving air.