She passed through the house a final time. She had a clear understanding of what Helene would do; it was supposed to be a monster of a storm. But she couldn't find her phone charger, and it wasn't where it normally lived at the side of the bed.
Here was the exercise room—it wasn't really an exercise room, but it was where she had tried to reinvent herself after her husband broke several bones falling off a ladder. She had good arms and her knuckles, weary from punching shower tiles, were as smooth and hard as dominos.
The kitchen had been emptied of dry goods, and the cabinets left inexplicably open. Their son could not even be taught to close cabinet doors. If she confronted him about leaving the cabinet doors open, she knew just what he would say: "We're just coming back, we're going to put everything back inside them."
But we don't know if we're coming back. She might have said this in her sleep last night—her husband said she'd been talking to herself, swatting at something. She vaguely remembered dreams of the house taking on water.
"You're worrying a lot about something that's only hypothetical," he told her.
His breath was like hot acid.
Here was the living room: she looked under the coffee table for the charger. The television pointed vaguely in the direction of the couch, from which she could see the rest of the house. The kitchen of course, but also down the hall and into some of the bedrooms where her son had emptied his things, only taking the stuff he couldn't live without. He'd made a game of it: his favorite toys and some lightweight coloring books and crayons and still-packaged ballpoint pens for drawing. Her son told everyone he wanted to be an artist, but she didn’t know: sometimes he’d show her a picture of a car or horse or his favorite football player and she would cover her mouth, hold back a laugh. She mentioned this to her therapist one time, the fact that she felt incapable of being supportive of her son's ambitions.
Her husband had carried out some magazines with photographs of himself and his father posing with beagles, their tails pointed up in the air. He'd brought with him a hunting trophy, one of his firsts from his childhood, his CPAP machine that made him look like Gonzo, and a pack of cigarettes he'd kept in the bottom drawer next to some belts and dress socks he never wore. The cigarettes had belonged to his father and was the last pack his father ever bought before quitting smoking.
"Such a metaphor," he said all the time. "You know what I mean?"
The only things she carried with her were the rings on her fingers, a couple of ancient necklaces and family heirlooms (a jewelry repairing kit that had belonged to her mother, a doll's comb, a pair of wiry eyeglasses in a dense case). There was also a box of pictures in the attic too big to carry with her which she had meant to digitize some years ago. She carried a shoebox full of the important stuff; one was of her grandfather and aunt as children on a tricycle—him on the seat pedaling, her standing on the rear axles; a tree was behind them, crooked like crow's feet, but her grandfather and aunt are both laughing about something, and she had always thought this was the best picture she'd ever seen, and was simultaneously the only picture of her grandfather she had left. Everything else could go, if need be, except this one thing.
She checked the bedroom again for the phone charger and considered that maybe he had packed it in with his things and simply forgotten about it. He was prone to forgetting things. She had to hurry. She kept looking back as she walked down the hall towards the living room. She looked back and saw the doorbell box that looked like a log cabin, and the one wall sconce towards the end with the dead lizard curled inside; she looked into the kitchen one more time—she had done this all her life—whenever she left home she always felt like it was the last time she'd ever be there. She brushed her hip against her chair one more time—it had been reupholstered many years ago by her father and was deflating again. Years of asses in a single chair.
They were in the car now, pulling out of the driveway. She had a headache. She kept grabbing her head and groaning. He was about to tell her it's the barometric pressure causing her pain.
"The barometric pressure," he said to her, gripping the steering wheel.
"Ah ha!" she said, startling even herself, because she knew how to read his mind—she knew what he was all about, with his knowing everything, with his sense of the weather, with his understanding of fuel injection systems, with his repository of information about sports-related injuries and World War II MRE collectibles—she reached back and squeezed their son's ankle, saw the house one more time and nearly died.
2
Rainwater came into the car. They lifted their feet. The wind had chopped the car so bad that they had to pull under a bridge, and now, he said, only to her as quiet as possible, they were totally fucked. The wind had chopped so hard that the wipers bent, and it had become impossible to drive anyway. They had barely made it out of town.
He kept muttering under his breath: "We shouldn't have packed so much stuff. We spent too long packing."
He always blamed her for things like this. If they had been running late, it would have been her fault somehow. Sometimes, she figured, it had been her fault. There was nothing wrong with admitting it. But it's not like they could go without the things they'd packed. God knows what could have happened to them, what they would lose if they weren't careful.
Pumpkins had been left out on the porch. They came to mind, for some reason, a family of pumpkins.
The kid sat quietly in the back. He didn't talk much when he was nervous. Water up to his knees almost—he'd lifted his legs up and put them on the seat. His shoulders seemed to withdraw into his chest. He played a game on her phone. She figured she should take the phone back from him and save the battery power in case they needed it later.
Maybe we should just drive slow, she said. We can't stay under here.
There's nowhere to go, he said. He gripped the steering wheel like he was already driving.
She held the box full of photographs above her head. The dashboard—for whatever economical reason—had been designed with a slant to it, and she was worried that if she put the box up there it would just slide off into the water. The pictures were all she had of her family. She kept telling herself this; her family was somehow in this box. Her memory was a piece of shit, and she'd had trouble with remembering things lately, she guessed like someone with dementia, especially people's faces. She had opened the box earlier and looked at the top picture—her grandfather and aunt on a tricycle—and she'd moved it to the middle of the stack of old pictures. Maybe doing this would protect it a little more from getting wet.
"Put your arms down," he said.
"I'm holding this box up."
"You're making me nervous," he said.
Water bubbled. Wasn't clear why it was bubbling. It began to froth, the bubbles a sort of yellow color. Outside the car, the water was almost up to the window, but it seemed to be draining from under the bridge faster than it collected. She shivered. Her legs were getting tired sitting like this; she hurt. She'd not sat with her legs crossed like this in what, twenty-five years? Since she was little, sitting on the floor in a classroom, watching a VHS tape? Since these people in this box were still alive, milling around in the field on a tractor?
A duck was up on the embankment under the bridge. She figured they should go out there. It would mean getting out of the car, possibly getting swept away.
Her husband kept his eyes closed. In the backseat the boy was crying. But he always cried. She'd stopped feeling sympathy for him recently. She'd talked to her therapist about it. Sometimes a schoolteacher would call them and talk about his disassociation in class, the little things that would set him off, and eventually it just hit her that he'd never get any better. She wasn't a psychologist, she wanted to scream.
Her arms grew weaker. She had to force herself to push the box against the ceiling of the car; it was momentarily comforting. The water continued to bubble; it touched her crotch. She shivered. Her husband had just resigned to putting his legs down in it.
She cracked open the box one last time, took a peak at the top picture, a black and white photograph of a woman standing in front of a cabin, a big fat dog standing next to her in the rocks. She didn't even know who the woman was or how she was related to her.
She dug through the pictures for the one with her grandfather on the trycycle. She wanted to look at him one more time. It was somewhere here, but she couldn't find it. The pictures were sticking together already; maybe it had stuck to the back of one she'd already passed through.
"I think we're going under," he said.
"We're not going under. We have several feet left. We're fine."
"I think we're going under," he said. "I'm cold."
She put the box on the dashboard. Her arms were exhausted. The box slid down into the water. There was a momentary relief. She felt it jostle around her feet. She'd also resigned herself to the water. In the backseat, the boy had curled himself in the middle of the car. He'd taken his seatbelt off and everything. "Just sit back there and be still," she said. "Put your seatbelt on. Try to go to sleep," she said.
3
Water rushes down the ditch. The car is gone. She sits under the overpass, knees up to her chin. The ducks have returned; their feathers are matted, covered in something brown, and they're taking shelter with her here. The car rushed somewhere down that way. When she was little, she would see the homeless people curled under bridges like this. She is freezing now, wet. The ducks shake their feathers off. The water whips, creating a yellow-white froth. Ducks are the goofiest form of bird; their rounded beaks give them a cartoonish quality. They wag their tails like dogs and honk like chew toys. They curl up to her now in her moment of grief; they surround her. The cement is difficult, cracked, sharp, angular, spider-webbed, molded in thick patches, rotten, trash-littered. She no longer looks to the place where her car had been; she is bleeding somewhere, her forehead she thinks, from when she'd crawled out the window. She'd grabbed at the boy in one swift motion and hadn't reached far back enough to touch him. Her husband had remained buckled into the car; he'd been unable to decide on what to do with his seatbelt and finally had decided on leaving it buckled in, he said, just in case—he didn't live his whole life buckling his seatbelt just to take it off now. She remembers, for just a moment, the pumpkins, then the photograph she'd lost in the water. The whole shoebox of pictures from her family's childhood. They weren't important, they were just pictures, but her grandfather had kept the same smile when he became an adult, he showed his top teeth and covered his bottom teeth. There was a tree in the photograph; she thinks about the tree and wonders if it had been there when she was little. She fell out of a tree when she was that age—the age her grandfather had been with his sister in the photograph; a fettucine noodle of skin had ripped away from her palm, curled like a ribbon. She'd listened to the trains that went by her grandparents' house, they'd pick her up and take her down to the tracks and they'd watch the trains go by. And when her mother came to pick her up at the end of the day, she would scream until her face turned red. She wonders where their son had gotten his quietness; he reached for things softly, complained sometimes, but it was so hard to hear him speak. She didn't know ducks had such sharp talons. Her grandfather had been able to wiggle his ears and she had kept herself up one night, after seeing his ears moving like that on their own, trying to move her ears, and subsequently being unable to take her mind off the fact that she could feel her entire body; this came back from time to time, phantom sensations, via appendages that didn't exist, the feeling of wool against her neck that wasn't there, and the inability to move her ears, wag her nose. She made a list in her head of the things she had been unable to do: she had never been able to write cursive, or with her left hand, and she had never been able to develop a signature that was uniquely hers even though she tried; sometimes she'd waste an entire sheet of paper just writing her name down. She'd never been able to consistently hold onto anything she enjoyed. She had never met anyone famous. She went through an art phase that ended too early; she had tried embroidering but couldn't ever find a comfortable enough position to sit in because her back was always in intense pain. She was unable to do a lot of physical activities because of her muscle inflammation; she was chronically distressed as a result. She had been unable to take a break from work, had left a lot of her job swimming around in her brain late at night. She had been unable to sleep. She had been unable to handle the deaths of her mother and grandparents. She had not been able to read as fast as she would like. She had tried to learn the piano, but the spread of her fingers was too short, and she was unable to keep up with music on a mental level; she knew that it was possible, but she could not convince herself to go on, comprehend the amount of time it would take to perfect becoming a musician. Always something negative like this, she told herself. Here I am alive. She thought about the things she could do; she could carve a pumpkin, fix a piece of jewelry, hotwire a tractor, raise a child. The list was short but satisfying. She hasn't turned towards the water in a while. The ducks are all around her. They smell terrible. She tries to think of her grandfather again, his arms holding the handlebars of the tricycle, his sister holding his waste, standing on the rungs behind him. In her mind, it's the best picture she's ever seen. The ducks make a nest of her body.
Garrett Ashley lives in Opelika, Alabama. His debut story collection, Periphylla and Other Deep Ocean Attractions, was released in May 2024; his poetry collection, Habitats, is forthcoming at Loblolly Press. Stories have appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, Analog Science Fiction, and a number of university journals.
Also by Garrett Ashley on Fiction Attic…
This was a beautiful read. It shows the journey that our attachment with essentials and sentimental value belonging go through and evolve. The last thing we hold on to doesn’t stay still. First it’s a memory, then it becomes a lifeline while the ground moves, and only after surrender does it turn back into memory again.
https://substack.com/@mrjamesgreen 👋🙂