Ellen Block - The Language of Sand

Hands now free, Abigail switched on the flashlight. Nothing. She gave it a shake.

“I guess I should put batteries on the shopping list along with primer, rollers, sandpaper…”

She hunted through the shed for painting supplies. The brushes she found were rock hard, bristles petrified with paint. Another visit to Merle’s store was in order.

“Won’t that be a treat?”

Flashlight and logs gathered in her arms, Abigail kicked the shed door shut, leaving it unlocked.

“Time to start a fire.”

With the wood set on the log rack, the match ready and waiting, Abigail remembered she still had no kindling. Lottie’s brochure was buried somewhere in the mess, and she had no pad or paper except for the register in her checkbook and her checks. There was the newspaper article from under the mattress. Except Abigail didn’t feel right about burning it. The article had survived too many years to meet such a fate. Paper bags, which she had in abundance, were the best bet.

Fighting her trepidation, she struck the match. Abigail tried to stare down the flame but lost her nerve. She lobbed the matchstick into the fireplace, the flame caught on the bags, and the wood took.

“The first time is always the hardest,” she told herself.

Abigail was well aware, though, that any time she had to start a fire it would be hard on her. She shuddered at the cold as well as the thought that she might have to do this every day from here on in.

Since the fireplace had no screen, she stayed close, holding vigil at the hearth and contemplating the fact that the word fire was almost as ancient as what it signified. Its ancestry spanned the millennia. The Greeks baptized it pyr . In Old English, it was labeled fyr , in Old High German, fiur. Fire was elemental to life, hence to language. The fear of fire was equally elemental. Abigail’s fears had been justified. She had a right to them.

“Maybe you’ll get used to this,” she said. “Probably not.”

Night drew itself up along the shoreline as Abigail sorted through the boxes of books strewn across the living room floor. It was high time to find a home for them in the study upstairs. She doused the fire with a few mugs of water, then grabbed a box. The staircase sung a dissonant scale of screeches with every step.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you.”

The second floor was blindingly dark. Abigail hurried to switch on all the lights—the overhead fixture in the study, the bulb in the bathroom, and the lamp in the bedroom. Once they were lit, Abigail could breathe easier and concentrate on unpacking.

Several flights of stairs later, the study was filled to capacity. Boxes were piled on the desk, the cot, and the floor. Shelving the books was a project Abigail relished. Her packing process had been hasty, done without regard to order; hence, opening each package was like opening a gift. For her, the sprawl of bland brown boxes rivaled Christmas. As she organized, she allowed herself to read the first few pages of each book, tasting the story or sampling a morsel from a text. It was as if she were bumping into an acquaintance on the street—Abigail couldn’t simply pass them by.

She was a fraction of the way through the project when the growling in her stomach told her it was time to eat again. Despite the ample selection of groceries she’d bought to prepare herself a proper meal, such as chicken cutlets and rice and fresh green beans, Abigail had no inclination to cook. Because it would mean she would have to turn on the stove.

“I’m hungry. But I’m not that hungry.”

Instead, she made herself another sandwich, laid it on a paper towel, and took it to the study with her. She ate while thumbing through a Hemingway novel she’d found in her parents’ attic, a first edition of The Sun Also Rises that her father ran across at a garage sale and gave her as a present.

Time drained away as Abigail lost herself in the first chapter. The weight of the novel in her hand anchored her, the pages supple as suede. She had a clear vision of the day her father brought the book home. It was summer. She’d recently turned fourteen. She remembered lying on her stomach on their porch, reading that first chapter while the crickets hissed in the heat. Abigail could have sworn she felt the porch boards under her elbows and smelled the chlorine from their neighbor’s pool, though in reality she was wedged into the little desk in the study.

All of a sudden a thump came from above, reverberating through the house’s brick walls. Abigail jumped.

It was nothing. It was nothing. It was nothing.

The phrase repeated in her mind, syncopated with her breathing. She tried to stand. Her legs wouldn’t budge.

“Sitting is fine. Sitting is good. I’ll stay right—”

Another thump resounded through the house, this one more distinct. It was loud and hollow. Whatever was making the noise wasn’t solid.

The oil pail.

Abigail’s thoughts corkscrewed back to that morning, to climbing the spiral staircase, entering the lamp room, and accidentally kicking the tin pail. What had Merle said as she’d left his shop? He’d told her not to move it.

Except that was ridiculous. There was no ghost.

Rational thought couldn’t thaw Abigail from her position, frozen at the desk. She deliberated whether to go up to the lamp room and investigate or to leave it for tomorrow, when she had daylight on her side.

“It’s dark. You don’t have a flashlight. One false step on those stairs and…”

She preferred not to ruminate on what could come after and .

If the bedroom door had a lock, Abigail would have used it. She changed into her pajamas and considered climbing into bed and hiding under the covers, but she hadn’t brushed her teeth or removed her contacts.

“Forget brushing your teeth. Being scared beats oral hygiene hands down.”

She sprinted into the bathroom and plucked out her contacts in record time. When she slammed the bedroom door behind her, it sent a gust of air coursing through the room, setting the newspaper article on the nightstand aloft. The paper came to rest under the bed. Too tired, Abigail left it there. She pulled the quilt over her shoulders, thinking back to the nights when Justin awoke with bad dreams. She and Paul would comfort him, rub his head, kiss each cheek, and tell him that the kisses would keep the nightmares away.

He believed you.

Abigail had cherished that unconditional trust, the wholehearted faith only a child, her child, could bestow. It was an incomparable honor. And it was gone. This time, she didn’t bother stopping the tears when they came.

Amo, amare, amavi, amatus.

Oro, orare, oravi, oratus.

Wrapping her arms around herself to keep warm, Abigail hummed Latin verbs until they lulled her to sleep.

ha mar ti a(hä′ mäe tē′ə), n. See tragic flaw.[1890–95; < Gk: a fault, equiv. to hamart – (base of hamartánein to err) + – ia –IA]

Sunrise was different by the ocean. It came on fast and was impossible to ignore. Abigail groped the nightstand for her glasses so she could read her watch, which said it was after six. She felt harried, as if she’d overslept, but there was nothing pressing she needed to do, nothing that awaited her. Her arms ached from her cleaning rampage and when she rubbed them, she could feel the indentations left on her skin by the bedding. Deep valleys and ravines crisscrossed the flesh, a topographical map of where her dreams had taken her during the night.