MINUTES by Zane Kotker
7:06
Waking, she finds her brain redoing an old line of A. E. Houseman’s: Now of my three score years and ten / seventy will not come again. People think she’s sixty. She feels fifty. But she’s seventy and time is short. Every minute must count. Every minute must be golden. Ten years left? Fifteen? So few! She’s solved that threat by dropping everything to minutes, millions of them. Now what to do with a cosmic phone card of unspent millions? Replace a lost pair of shears? Shop for grapefruit? It’s a tough job, turning hay into gold. She swings her legs to the cold floor and gets out of bed.
7:31
Naked after her shower, she flips her fingers through her hair and thinks of Karen who some decades ago came east with a travel kit containing heatable rollers. Beautiful Karen – her movie options, her style, her sensuality in cooking. Teach me, she’d said on one visit as Karen stood at the stove drinking wine and eating olives, stirring things. You have to taste it, Karen kept saying, taste it. They drank too much and Larry suggested they not open another bottle. Now Karen’s out there on the Pacific in her house over the San Andreas Fault being cared for by Walter. “How is it?” she asked Walter last time she telephoned. “It is,” he replied in four slow syllables, “unbearable.” Karen had picked up on an extension to announce, not for the first time, the birth of her grandchild. “What’s her name?” she’d asked Karen, unable to resist testing her. “Walter?” Karen had called out from room to room in her California house. “What’s her name? Our granddaughter’s name?”
She dries her glistening body, the breasts, the genitals. Her first lover appears in memory, naked in a tenement tub. She attended his funeral; friends read from his poems. One poem was about her. He must have written it that night after their last fight. Cancer, buried in Queens. And, of course, Larry, good Larry, buried in Brightside.
She creams her face and her hands that are so like her mother’s. “Your mother has beautiful hands,” her father said one summer night on a porch by a lake. “That’s why I married her.” A strange answer, opening the world of sexuality so gently. They were such good people. She bears them in her body, carries them in her genes, and wants so much to send them off into grandchildren. Friends as well as family, she carries them with her – all the dead whom she has loved. Stepping out of the bathroom, she takes them into the world.
7:49
One glance out her kitchen window and she sees before her the very thing she struggled to escape as a teenager: a leafy middle class street. More goes on inside a stone than ever happens in a heart, she’d told herself of such locales during the moroseness of adolescence. Well, plenty goes on inside her heart and she likes her street, in a different city now. She likes her house, too, is glad to retreat into its interior, to look out its windows at the cleverness of deciduous trees. They know what to do in winter – flee to the roots.
7:53
Oatmeal, raisins, walnuts, some bits of ginger, all hot from the micro: She picks up last night’s magazine pressed open to an article on her own river valley, an article explaining what will happen in the next thirty or forty years as the globe warms. Winters will be milder, less snow will fall, melting snow will run off sooner, pollution will increase in tributaries and in the river itself. The hotter summer will bring drier soil that will quickly absorb the run-off, causing the river itself to shrink to a quarter of its volume. Increasingly intense summer storms will wash more sediment and pollution into the river’s weakened stream. Some species that live in the watershed will be wiped out.
Humans?
The warming is the only thing that resigns her to not having grandchildren.
8:19
She rinses her cereal bowl and looks for her calendar. People’s Pantry at two. Christmas Concert at four. She’s careful to make a day plan because without one, she might stare straight into time as it passes. Until now she was always struggling for more of it, juggling husband, children, her job at the library’s First Call desk. Now, with time looping and sagging around her, she cannot remember what she wanted more of it for.
As she sits with her morning coffee, the most delicious lethargy comes over her. It begins somewhere on the right side of her head. She raises her coffee cup to the spot. The cup is hot against her palm and against her right temple. Maybe it’s the beginning of a stroke. She sits there and sees herself at the bottom of a grave stretched out in her winter coat. People are shoveling dirt on her. It lands on her lapels.
8:27
As she writes out her shopping list, the shortness of future blows in her face and behind her, too – a great wind rustling toward her buttocks. What do you want to do with these last minutes? I want. I want. More time? Not exactly. I want this time well spent. How?
9:10
At the front door she hesitates. Lately, she doesn’t like to leave her house. Since Larry died, she’s become more and more attached to these four walls as sacred space. Her house has become a person. In fact, it’s her Significant Other. Her lover. She glances back into the high-ceilinged living room, at the woodstove standing on its slate tiles, at the bookcase where her parents’ clock ticks. The clock pre-sents a face to her, its hands move in recognition of her. The clock is alive. She and the house are one; its walls are her skin. I’ll be back, she whispers. Just going shopping.
9:15
She avoids the icy spots in the driveway and reaches her garage without a fall. A few months ago, her old blue car burst into the smoke of an electrical fire. That’s the closest a car can come to having a stroke. For a few days she considered living without a car, reducing her carbon footprint. But groceries? How bring them home? Without Larry to consult, she went to the used car place she’d heard was good and bought a white car. White as chalk. White as marshmallows. They said it would last twelve years. She’d be eighty-two. She handed over thirteen thousand dollars. With that much money as deposit, Larry and she had bought an entire house; now it took the same for a car.
Why has nobody bought it?
Because it’s white. They all want silver now.
9:21
Stopped at a red light, she can see down the street to the Richardson-style library where she worked for seventeen years, bringing people together. She found widows willing to take in teenaged mothers, lawn jobs for newly arrived Cambodians, secondhand cars for boys who worked at MacDonald’s. Then library funds withered, retirement packages appeared, and she took the bait. After all, Larry was about to retire. They could travel. Now Larry’s gone and she has her retirement money in low risk funds. Thankfully, it’s enough to live on. For what? Were she to appear at the library’s First Call desk asking for help – Widow Seeks New Life – her old self would have known where to call, what to do. Her new self does not.
9:36
The recently built Super Super is so big that she runs the length of a couple of the aisles to cut her shopping time. It’s good exercise with no fear of ice. Other people’s carts are piled with whole chickens, legs of lamb, shoulders of ham, with six-packs of soft drinks, bags full of still moving lobsters, green leaf, red leaf, potato chips, and giant cartons of ice cream. Her cart contains a small pre-roasted chicken, one melon on sale, one red pepper, one brown pear, and a single pink grapefruit. She isn’t doing her part for America. She passes a man with those little flags on his cart, the kind that go on the graves of veterans from World War 2, Korea, Vietnam, Storm, Shield. She tries to hold her breath on the nights when Jim Lehrer shows those beautiful dead twenty-year-olds, silently, one by one. Not breathing, it’s her tribute to them. She did march in one peace parade, the one before the invasion. Now it’s too late. All her president wants her to do is buy the bargain paper towels. And the 24-pack of toilet paper. These fill up her cart. Her cart doesn’t look so forlorn anymore. She is saving America.
10:17
The clerk at the check-out looks Indian from India; the elderly bagger seems only to hail from the land of trouble; the woman in front of her speaks Spanish; the two Asian women behind her raise high voices in what language? She scans the immediate area. There are no other WASPS in sight. Her ethnic has floundered and run to ground. She’s the enemy. Yet her WASP isn’t the world’s WASP. The world’s WASP lives in Connecticut with a pool and a wet bar. Her WASP drinks iced tea, works hard, tries to participate in democracy, and believes that the good might outweigh the bad if you would simply try again. What’s so bad about that?
10:21
She sees them waiting for pick-up. They’re sitting by the vending machines in a corner of the supermarket with their bags of groceries and their sparse, carefully arranged hair. Women in their eighties, half a dozen of them. Not talking to each other. Waiting for their van, the Samson’s Wood van, probably. They look impatient. Do they not have cars? Or is it licenses? Their eyes not good? Maybe they’ve had an accident. More likely, they can’t afford their car insurance. She hurries by. She has a car. She herself directs where she goes and when. She isn’t sitting and waiting as if she were traveling with a perpetual tour in Switzerland and someone holds up the bus searching for a lost sweater.
She speeds past them, careful to keep her gaze straight ahead.
10:48
“This way, young lady,” the gentleman shoe clerk says. Last week her dentist called her young lady. This will pinch a bit, young lady. She stands before an array of boots, furred, rubberized, high-heeled. She picks out a low-heeled pair and sits. The clerk straddles his footstool, unwraps the tall black boot, unzips it, waits. She takes off her all-terrain shoes, extends a slender foot in its black tights. “Nice foot,” he says. In the mirror she sees a quite attractive woman who doesn’t look all that old – except for the hair, of course, and the pouches and the lines when she smiles, if she smiles. The clerk zips her into the boot, concludes a now so rare flirtation, “No bunions.”
11:14
Carrying groceries over the ice, she makes it to her back door and the small hall virtually blocked by her older son’s stuff: six big cardboard boxes and a wobbly wicker trunk. She herself has filled them with his childhood papers and mementos. He doesn’t sort them. He doesn’t get around to them. He doesn’t want them. They’ve been here two years. Well, he does live in Chicago. With a wife who doesn’t want children. Whenever they visit, she’s so glad to see him she forgets about the boxes. It wouldn’t take him long. Just to sort through. Throw most of it out. Get it down to one box, she’d be glad to keep one box. When she does mention this to him over the phone, he says: Throw it all out. She can’t bear to do that. They are his childhood. She wants him to want these things. He doesn’t want them.
She could, of course, move his boxes down into the cellar. But they’re too heavy for her. And the cellar is already a mess: dust, wanton asbestos, and occasional dampness drape themselves over her seven years of tax returns, a rusted bicycle, the kids’ vast stashes of Lego. If the past is in the cellar, the future must be in the attic. Nothing there. She’s cleaned that out. She puts the last grocery bag down on the kitchen table. Which bag has the rotisserie chicken in it?
12:19
The Wicked Widow’s Cookbook:
Chicken Leg
Preparation: Buy a rotisserie chicken. Don’t bother unpacking the groceries. Just find the chicken, saw off a leg, eat with salt and pepper.
Gourmet option: Cranberry relish.
Better living option: Napkin.
Health Tip: At the next meal, eat only greens.
Food for Thought: A bird in hand is better than not.
12:23
As she eats her chicken, the college radio station discusses the economy. The government is cooking the books! says a man in urgent tones. We’re actually bankrupt and printing more and more money with no backing at all! The dollar is falling. Inflation comes when the dollar drops. And foreigners stop buying our debt from us. Then we’ll be stuck. We won’t be able to pay off our own debt. Larry’s description was simpler: If you have no fish and no oranges, you want other people’s oranges. If you have fish and oranges, you get guns to protect them.
Domestic oil production peaked in 1971. Where we used to have gushers, we now have deeper lying oil fields and that means pumping it out at a greater cost. We already import two-thirds of the 21 million barrels we use per day. This requires entanglements and wars. Soon we’ll be fighting for water, as well as oil. The boomers are already filing for benefits. My advice? You’ve got a year or two to turn your lawn into a garden. To get your assets out of the market. To buy gold and silver. To stock your cellar with consumables.
How can she stock her cellar unless her son goes through those boxes? She turns the dial on the radio. It’s a good day on Wall Street, another voice assures her. The economy is in an upsurge.
12:59
She crumples the paper towel she has used as a plate, tosses it smooth and easy into the waste basket. Some of her friends don’t know what to do with the time that’s left either. Study Islam? Use LED light bulbs? Give up their cars? Get a full body scan? Buy long term health insurance – so obviously a racket? Pay out of pocket for a shingles shot? They settle on travel, film, plays, museums, the symphony, lectures. They eat culture. She doesn’t want to eat culture. Doesn’t want to stride forward through a cloud of it, swallowing culture, digesting culture, farting culture, shitting culture. She wants to pat dogs and look at the sparkle of sun on water.
1:21
The mail: two bills, three pleas for cash, a mailer from The Teaching Company, and a real letter. It’s from the state university. Maybe they are giving her a prize. She has won prizes before.
It’s a form letter. They’re inviting her to join a program to test the flexibility of aging muscles.
1:47
The People’s Pantry is located in a drafty building so she leaves her coat on as she walks through the room with tables holding the fresh apples, potatoes, squashes, turnips, and cabbages that nobody ever takes. These poor prefer canned food.
“Wow,” Brad, the cheerful supervisor, says. “Three of you. That’s great.” It isn’t great. It’s crowded. Brad sends the red-haired girl behind the shelves to load the bonus bags for customers with kids. The volunteer in the plaid shirt is named Matt and he claims one of the scales. She takes the other. Brad reminds them again that their clients are embarrassed at taking charity, should be greeted warmly, and offered choices. Choices will give them a sense of power. He turns to the room, calls out, “Number One! Number Two!”
“Hello, Henry!” she says to the whiskered man who is missing some teeth and who never talks. “Eggs or milk, Henry?” He nods and points, utters single syllables. “Tomato soup or corn stew?” She works through the list, dispatches him to the table laden with baked goods and breads from which he chooses a crushed apple pie and a twelve-pack of donuts. “Good to see you, Henry,” she says as she weighs his box out at twenty-one pounds.
“Hi, Grace,” she says to a blond woman, family of four. Grace wants pasta but only if there’s plain tomato sauce to go with it. Chili but only if it’s plain chili. “No plain chili, Grace. Just the kind with hot dogs in it.” Grace knuckles under, accepts the hot dogs. That’s all Grace is getting of power today.
Next comes a big man who speaks in an angry monotone, demanding this, pointing at that. Then a Hispanic woman whose daughter translates. The woman wants milk but how much milk is granted for a family of six? She turns to the quantity chart on the wall, pulls down her glasses, scans it unsuccessfully. “I’m slow,” she apologizes to the daughter. “That’s okay,” the daughter replies. “Take your time.”
Number Sixteen is a young man with matted hair, wilted shirt, and a blanket instead of a coat. He doesn’t want powdered soup because he has no hot water. He doesn’t want tuna because he has no can opener. She searches for ideas among the shelves: Ah! Beef soup in a paper carton – just add cold water. But no. He’s a vegetarian. He finally accepts a couple boxes of eight-grain cereal and a health candy bar. When he reaches the bread table, he stops moving. He stands there. He seems to be paying attention to something in the air around him. Is he seeing things? Does he hear voices? Finally, he picks up some whole grain rolls. “Thanks a lot,” he says. “You’ve been very patient and resourceful.” She thinks of his mother. If only she could call his mother, say “It’s okay. You can relax a little today. He’s alive.”
Number Thirty-One looks to be in her early thirties with a daughter of about nine, both neatly dressed. Their hair is not stringy; they have all their teeth; their breath is good. The young mother chooses the health cereal and declines tuna, explaining, “Too much mercury.” A baguette, a carrot cake. On the treat shelf Number Thirty-One spots a bag of coffee. “Is that beans or ground?” she asks. Then “Thanks, anyway. My grinder’s broken.” This pair she wants to take home with her, then chastises herself for not also wanting to take the silent, toothless Henry.
An obese woman arrives a minute before closing. “Oat Bran or Special K?” she asks, trying to shape a life toward health. “Oh, no, just give me the Sugar Pops.” As the sweetest and fattest of foods fill her box, the obese woman lights up. Her delight is contagious. The other two volunteers, idle now, join in serving this woman. The red-haired girl asks, “Did you see the donuts?” The volunteer in the plaid shirt says, “There are custards in the frig!” With an almost sexual excitement, the three of them pile on breads, pies, donuts, custards. Here is something they can do to better the world, to bring on happiness. From the treat shelf, the obese woman selects a prominent box of sugar and is ready to go when the three, whispering among themselves, call out. “Wait, Wait!” The red-haired girl secures an abandoned birthday cake – Happy 12th Birthday, Harold – and settles it on top of the sixty-pound box.
“Nice work,” Walter says.
4:11
Carrying candles, the college singers file to the front of the holly-draped church – young women in black clothes with red scarves, young men in black jackets with red handkerchiefs in their pockets. The conductor raises her right arm: Gaudeamus Omnes in Domino they sing, from the very early 17th century. The King James Bible is still being put together. The English ships bringing dissenters from the Church of England to the tall-treed shores on this side of the Atlantic haven’t left Plymouth or Bristol. Here where the white-steepled church stands, a tribe of long-faced farmers and fishers lived; they worshipped two gods – the god of order and the god of chance; in Jehovah of the Bible, the two forces merge.
Sopranos, altos, tenors, bases. When David heard that Absalom was slain, they sing so plaintively, these young women who have not yet borne a child, these young men who have not yet tried to get their Absaloms to mow the lawn. Would God I had died for thee, they sing it in the abstract. They do not know the steps of the police on the front porch, the phone call from the college president, the telegram from the war zone. O Absalom, my son!
If only she could feel the edge, just the edge, of what she’d known as a child – the sense that a great Creator loves her and the entire world. And to set things right, He’s turning Himself into a small baby and allowing Himself to be born on earth as His own Son and, while He’s down here, He’ll see how we’re all doing and show us the Way. Yet she can’t recapture that sense. Does she actually want to? Only if it were true. But it isn’t. It’s man-made. It’s anthropology. It’s comparative religion. So why isn’t that enough?
It’s not enough.
6:21
From the freezer she takes a carton of carrot soup, decants it, sticks it in the micro. While it heats, she studies yet again the outline of Al Qaeda’s master plan. Clipped from magazine – or was it book? – it’s been hanging on her refrigerator for a couple of years. Before you begin, study political science and everything else so you will govern well afterwards. Be ready with a full plan of allotting food and medical attention, courts and law. Get the United States to go to war with Iran. The Sunnis and the Shiites will join up together. Radical Islam will triumph. The sequence:
Phase 1, The Awakening: September 11, 2001.
Phase 2, 2001–2006: Iraq becomes recruiting ground for revolutionaries; Muslims donate money to replace what the USA takes or freezes.
Phase 3, 2007–2011: Focus on Syria and Turkey; begin to confront Israel.
Phase 4, 2012–2013: Arab regimes yield to radical Islam; attacks come against oil; USA overextends; electronic attack to destabilize USA economy; US dollar collapses; Islamic caliphate declared.
Phase 5, 2013–2016: USA withdraws from Middle East; Israel a sitting duck; Islam allies with China; Europe falls apart.
Phase 6, 2016–2020: the caliphate raises an Islamic Army, sons of Light fight sons of Dark, Allah rules the world.
The microwave pings and she retrieves her carrot soup.
6:41
She wants to call up somebody and talk about life. She wants to say that she has realized no one will love her as the center of his life again. This desire to telephone makes her wary. Usually it arrives on weekends or on those rare nights when she drinks too much. She hasn’t been drinking. Call! Don’t call! Now that no one else is in the house, she argues with herself.
6:45
Risen to manhood, her younger son seems to look upon her as if she isn’t entirely competent. Not the way he did as an adolescent – as if her very breathing could contaminate him. It’s in a tender way now, touching her on top of the head, taking a light hold of her elbow crossing the street. Driving her, if they chance to be in a car together. She dials his number. He never answers. Leave a message at the tone. Last time they spoke, she actually broke her silence and asked if he were planning to marry, have kids. It’s not like that anymore, Mom, he told her. Not like in your day.
No grandchildren? No small boy to bring Larry to life again? No small girl to bring her own mother back? Not to have grandchildren! It’s unnatural, like a heart transplant. The tone sounds. “Hi,” she says. “Everything’s fine. Your brother and Tacy will be coming in around ten on Christmas Eve. Let me know when you’re coming, okay?” She hangs up. To her kids, the cell phone is nature.
6:48
Since she’s gathered that she won’t be having grandchildren, she’s found herself drawn to the Neanderthals. They too went extinct. Of course, cutting world population in half could be the best thing for the species. Well, she’s doing her part. The Great Voice in the Sky asks who will die for the species and somehow, without even knowing it, her children have stepped forward to volunteer, taking her with them out of the river of life.
7:18
She lifts her coat from the hook in the mudroom and steps out, snapping on the porch light so as not to return to darkness. She walks under bare maples as she did last night when she went to the movies. When the lights went out at the theater she was suddenly liberated into somebody else’s life. But when the lights came back on, there it was again, her own life. She turns the corner at what everybody calls the French Catholic Church, passes the parish house where she took salsa lessons last year. Thirty people moving their hips under a banner that showed Jesus’ surprised face between two halves of a jaggedly split heart sewn in red felt. “Give it more juice,” urged the lithe little salsa teacher.
7:30
Light shines from the brick house where Linnie lives. Linnie’s on the ground floor, giving the upstairs over to a student at the massage school and a Women’s Studies major at the college. Their rent pays for her heating oil and property taxes, or did. This year it will cover only the heating oil.
“Hey! Come in!” Linnie’s hair is finally being allowed to go white. “We’re being stood.”
She gives up her coat, is ushered into a softly colored room. There’s a fire in the fireplace. There’s a bottle of wine and Linnie’s chocolate chip cookies. Suddenly she feels rescued from the shadowy palimpsest of a day spent with her own circling thoughts. “Stood? What’s up?”
“Rachel called, sore throat. Maxine, of course, is in the city as she said she’d be. Cara called this morning. Her son’s wife has gone into early labor. She’s flying to Washington as we speak. It’s just us. You and me and Chessa.”
In the living room, she finds Chessa sitting on the couch, a raw-boned woman straight out of Ethan Frome. With anticipation of further pleasures, she sinks into the chair close to the fire.
“Here’s to you,” Linnie says, pouring out a half glass of Burgundy.
Chessa raises her glass in salute.
This is living.
They have been reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The fire crackles, the three women lean toward each other. She begins. “He reminds me of Toynbee with his Golden Mean. Remember Tolstoy?”
They do. They remember Tennyson and Lord Byron and the Peloponnesian Wars. They remember Amo, amas, amat, amamos, amantis, amant. Nobody cares about Latin anymore, not even the beautiful architecture of it. Hic, haec, hoc. Time to toss this stuff out. That time has come. That time in me thou mayest behold. But they don’t toss it. Because there are things a person wants to hold onto. Needs to carry close to the chest. Things that hold up walls, give structure to the contents of memory, allow you something to recite to yourself while having a root canal or receiving radiation. How they fear the loss of such things. The loss of such things threatens a terrible time ahead, a loose, chaotic time, a time they dread, a time when anything could take the dative.
8:56
It’s Chessa’s turn to suggest what they read next and she holds up three paperbacks: Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate: a Modern Denial of Human Nature; Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors; and Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. They vote for Kolbert.
They don’t read fiction. She wouldn’t be here if they read fiction. Fiction is private. It’s like sex. They read to fix the world. It, too, hasn’t much time left. It, too, doesn’t seem to know what to do with these last minutes.
9:00
“Do you find it harder to learn things now?” Linnie asks as the book discussion ends and she separates the logs in the fireplace to calm the flames. “I mean I’m visiting Paris next September and I’d like to get beyond the present tense in French but I don’t want to hire a tutor. It seems too hard, not worth it.”
“That’s how I feel about a vegetable garden,” she says. “I could have one. But I don’t want to do the work.”
Chessa pushes her long arms through her coat sleeves, takes the floor. “My cousin fell on the ice last week and the doctor – one of those twelve-year-old doctors – did a scan of her head. ‘You’re fine,’ the doctor told her. ‘All the scan shows is that your brain has shrunk.’ ‘Shrunk?’ my cousin says. ‘Yes,’ says the doctor. ‘As we age the brain pulls inward from its outer limits. Don’t worry. It’s natural.’”
9:26
Walking home on almost deserted streets, she feels the pleasure of the last hours begin to fade. Nothing really satisfies anymore. Everything fails, falls to the ground. Some gravity of age drains it away. Or is it because the things that happen to her these days don’t register so deep as earlier things? Maybe seventy years of memory takes all the space in her brain so that the new stuff can’t sink in.
9:40
She’s not tired but it’s too late to get the stove in the living room going. She sits on the couch wrapped in an afghan her mother made fifty years ago. She picks up one of the novels sitting on the coffee table: William Golding’s The Inheritors, published about the time her mother got to work on the afghan. She’s been weeding out her books and she’s up to G. She doesn’t open the Golding immediately. Suddenly she doesn’t want to go into another life – she wants someone to come into hers. Finally, she turns to page one: Lok was running as fast as he could. Good, these are the Neanderthals with whom she now identifies. His head was down and he carried his thorn bush horizontally for balance. . . .
11:00
She channel surfs the news and has a little flash of dream in which she’s a prisoner somewhere, some foreign place, not exactly Guantanamo, but somewhere quite uncomfortable and spare. She snaps off the TV and the living room light. She’s alone in a dark room. This is good. She’s reducing her carbon footprint; she’s joined the war for world peace. She walks slowly, balancing on uneven floorboards. One day this couch will be here, this afghan, and she won’t be here. The boys will come and sort everything out, at last. After that, just the windows and walls will remain.
11:22
She puts paste on the toothbrush, regards herself in the glass. She brushes her teeth without looking in the mirror again.
11:30
The ringing is in her left ear. It doesn’t ring all the time. Or rather she’s not aware of it all the time. It’s mostly in the quiet of night that it bothers her. Her mother complained of this very thing but what did it matter? She’d paid little attention. Such realities belonged to old women. Lying in bed with moonlight on her wall, she suddenly knows what she wants. It’s very clear. She wants something in the order of the Paleolithic band. Shaggy-headed, roaming for food together. By now she’d be the group seer. She wouldn’t have a car. Or car insurance. She’d read the stars in the sky for where the little group of twenty should camp and what seasons were coming up and how to treat diseases. People would honor her for it. If she had a ringing in her ear, she’d go to herself for the cure. She’d look out from her furred forehead and say: Honey, everything is going to be all right.
Zane Kotker is the author of Try to Remember (Random House). Her short stories have appeared in The Sun, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Summerset Review, Gargoyle, and Cimarron Review.