Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

She steps away from the headstone, looks down into Grandpa’s grave. Martin puts his arm on her shoulder and she can feel the expansion and contraction of his ribs with his breathing, and she looks up and can see the arteries snaking the great trunk of his neck like cables, beating with his heartbeat. They are the only two at the funeral. Mist comes through the lines of trees at the cemetery’s western edge. When the coffin has lowered, Turtle leans in and throws down the columbines she’d cut from the fence line and Martin looks at her and kneels carefully at the edge of the pit and casts down a handful of dirt and shakes his head and stands and takes her by the shoulder and they walk away together. Turtle cannot imagine Grandpa having a wife. He was always his own man, and Martin, too. She cannot imagine any women in the Alveston home except for herself. She wonders who these women were, what they were like. Virginia Alveston, she thinks, that’s a good name, a woman with a cast-iron heart. She thinks, this is a woman who mopped the floors and kept the house clean. I didn’t know who she was, and I’ve been eating off her plates.

Martin parks in the driveway and she gets out without a word and follows the path past the bathtub and through the orchard and finds Rosy again by the trailer. She is lying in the grass with her head on her paws, scratching sometimes at fleas, and Turtle sits down beside her and looks at the burned trailer and scratches under Rosy’s collar. Rosy raises her eyebrows to points, not lifting her head but watching Turtle affectionately, and finally she does raise her head and opens her mouth and lolls her tongue and smiles at the girl and Turtle says, “What are we going to do with you, Rosy, you old dog?”

Then the last day of school comes, and after the promotion ceremony Turtle gets off the bus at the bottom of her driveway. She finds Rosy asleep in the field by the hulk of the trailer. Nearby, ravens gather in the trees, cawing to each other and watching the dog. Turtle kneels beside Rosy, who kicks and jerks in her sleep and then lies still. Her breath seems very fast to Turtle, and Turtle puts a hand on her side and looks out into the trees. She does not have the heart to carry the dog back and does not have the heart to wake her, and heads back to the house alone, to find Martin’s truck gone. She walks through the empty living room and up to her room and sits down on her bed platform. She thinks, that old dog, she’ll be okay there, for now.

She waits out the evening. She rubs the instep of one foot with the arch of the other. Her flesh is dry and leathery, and when she arches her foot, the sole lays up in corrugations. The flesh has grain, like a pine knot, and there are holes in the callus like the holes along the tide line. She succumbs to the quiet and when she wakes, it is dark and he is still gone. He has come home every other evening of her life and she understands, instinctively, that she has been abandoned. She killed her grandpa with cowardice and self-obsession and now her father has left her for those same reasons. She sits with her back against the wall, chewing on her knuckles, listening to the house, listening to make sure of it, but she is sure. The breeze comes in through the open window and stirs the poison oak. Where the vines have stitched through the lintel, they are brown and knotted as blackbird feet. The wind eddies in the dark room where Turtle sits, shivering, afraid. She wants to rise and walk through the house, but she does not. She waits. Downstairs, the back door blows open and bangs against the side of the house. She can hear the alder leaves scuttling across the kitchen floor.

When Turtle was young and used to go on walks with her grandfather, she would ask him, “What is this?” and he would say, “You tell me what it is,” and she would tell him about it. She would run a stalk of wild oats through her hand, the twin seeds each with a nib and a long, bent, black whisker. They had a lovely dartlike shape to them, bellying before the nib, tapering above. The lower half of each seed was clothed in a soft, golden down, deeply evocative, light as the fur of bumblebees but lying smoothly to the belly of the seed. The long black awns were coarse to the touch. She liked the way the chaff shelled in her hand. He used to say, “When a sweetpea knows something’s name, she thinks she knows everything about it, and she stops looking at it. But there is nothing in a name, and to say you know a thing’s name is to say that you know nothing, less than nothing.” He liked to say, “Don’t ever think the name is the thing, because there is only the thing itself, and the names are just tricks, just tricks to help you remember them.” She thinks of the two of them, Turtle racing along, stopping and returning, as Grandpa labored through the grass and across the uneven ground. Only after she had her own way of telling him where it grew and what it was, then he would tell her about it, hulling it apart in his fingers, saying, “This, sweetpea, is the spikelet, and these the glumes, see how long they are? This is the awn. See how it’s corkscrewed below and bent above? You keep looking just that carefully. You keep on like that, looking as if you didn’t know, looking to find out what it is, really. That’s what keeps a sweetpea nice and quiet as she goes through the grass. You look at a thing to find out what’s there, sweetpea, always, always.” He was wrong about names, though. Or half wrong. They mean something. It meant something when he called her sweetpea. That meant the world to her.

She thinks, I should go get that dog. Then she thinks, let her be. She waits, and her waiting and her silence is discipline in the stead of real sorrow, and still she goes down into it, her cheek to the floor, breathing slowly, hours passing and each hour like the first, each breath like the last, watching the silverfish wander the linty cracks between the boards, some sensitivity that she has long kept in abeyance awakening within her, and she can feel it, that gathering of pain, but it plays with her a game of red light/green light, and when she looks at it, it is far away and unmoving, but when she suspends her mind, lying there on the floor and gazing across the boards but not thinking, then she can feel it grow closer until it is all through her, the sorrow replete in the unattended emptiness of her mind like wild radishes blooming in an empty lot. It has found whole parts of her that she did not know she had.

In the morning Turtle walks falteringly through the empty hallways and rooms on legs painful with their returning circulation. Her back aches from sitting. She stands in the living room, looks at the couches, the kitchen’s open door, the house silent, every object freighted with his presence. She goes out and leaves the door open behind her. The pines are tossing on the ridge and the apple trees in the orchard are quaking and the meadow grass is lying down in the gusts. She walks barefoot through the orchard and comes out into the clearing with the ashy trailer. The ravens have beaten out a place in the grass and Rosy is in the midst of them, back legs spread. When Turtle comes up to them, they caw and labor into the air ahead of her. They have been pulling the dog’s intestines out through her asshole. Her fur is matted and ugly and the corpse swarms with flies. Her eyes are gone. Turtle kneels in the grass, covering her mouth with her bunched-up shirt. The ravens watch from the trees. Turtle feels gutted herself. Rosy’s intestines are worm-colored ribbons drying in the sun.

That night, taking a can down from the cupboard, she finds a grass seed on the can top. She takes down cans covered in gobbets of newspaper insulation, their labels chewed off, stinking of piss. She stacks them on the counter. The nest is in the back corner of the cupboard. She washes the cans in the sink and opens one and sits spooning the beans straight from the can, miserable with hurt. She expects to hear the truck come up the drive at any moment, and each moment brings only the silence of the empty house. She waits in her bedroom, chin on her knees, hands wrapped around her shins, eyes closed. I want to die, she tells herself. I want to die.