SEASONAL ROADS by L. E. Kimball
Aissa watches as Niggy snatches a fly mid-air, rolls it between her tongue and the mottled-gray roof of her mouth. She drops it, lifeless and saliva-soaked, onto Norna’s dirty wide-planked flooring. The dog, a beagle-Lab mix, sits between the woodstove and a turn-of-the-century dry sink. Aissa has been sitting on a short stool off in the corner, an elbow propped on a pine work table, trying to keep slivers out of her backside. She examines an index finger the dog has just grazed with her teeth.
Soft mouth, my ass, Aissa thinks.
The dog is panting and dropping tiny beads of saliva onto the floor.
You’ll run out of that hot wetness, Aissa thinks. We’ll all run out eventually, and the cold dusty dryness will spread until there’s not enough heat or spit left to wet even the tiniest whistle. It’ll be over. Finis.
It’s hot here in her mother’s kitchen, mid-July. There is a propane operated refrigerator, a Kelvinator, and a working hand-pump in the cabin, added sometime before Norna moved here, August of 1978 – two years after Aissa graduated high school and a year after Norna left Aissa’s father because as Norna said, “They could think clearer each to their own.”
The room smells of Norna and of things rotting. Moldy pro-duce – eggs or cheese maybe? On top of the rot is the smell of sex. Sex dripping from the ceilings, coming up from the floorboards, but when Aissa looks she sees nothing but dried rosemary and thyme hanging from an overhead beam.
It has been two days now and all Aissa has accomplished is to shove a bowl of dry kibbles across the floor to the dog who hasn’t touched them. Aissa thinks about driving off, leaving the dog here alone for all eternity.
“Damn it, Nig, I don’t need this shit . . . come get in the damn car. You won’t feel a thing.”
Aissa pulls on the shredded yellow clothesline hanging from the dog’s neck, but she feels the dog’s teeth rake against her knuckles. Not enough to break the skin, but enough to let her know. Aissa puts her knuckles to her mouth, and tastes something sweet and slightly salty on her tongue. Chews for a minute, then fishes it out on her index finger. A tiny ant.
She hears the door slam on the Volvo, then sees the blonde head appear in the doorway: Jane, her ten-year-old daughter. Only it’s Norna’s face looking back at her. Short-cropped sandy colored hair. Eyes, elliptical, opaque, color blind. They remind Aissa of an Indian word she’d learned as a child. Giwideonanin: detour.
Though she hates it, another word comes to mind when she sees the child’s face: canine.
“Well?” Jane asks. They’d spent the night in Newberry, at the Zellar’s Inn where they’d eaten canned bean dip and tortilla chips for dinner, drank warm Pepsi. Jane had wanted sirloin. “Sirloin,” is the word she had used. Why not a filet? Aissa had wondered. Or maybe a huge hunk of prime rib. Strip steak? But no, it was sirloin.
After Jane had fallen asleep, Aissa dusted an entire bottle of J. Lohr Cabernet she’d offered the owner of Tom’s Mini-Mart and Bait Shop twenty-five bucks for. He’d planned to take it home himself, so she’d offered the big bucks in desperation. He’d agreed but she’d felt his eyes drop to her breasts and then farther still. She had tilted her head and followed his gaze until he finally looked up at her and at last held a pudgy, hairy paw out for her money, ten dollars more than the sticker price. She’d awakened at ten this morning, with the empty bottle pressed between her face and the too-hard pillow. Stomach, head, the effects of the wine alternate now in sick relay waves.
Jane heads for Niggy and before Aissa can move to stop her, the dog rushes to the girl. Jane crouches next to the dog, the girl’s head drops over the animal’s flanks, their bodies parallel, revealing, and it looks for all the world as if they are sniffing each other.
“Jane,” Aissa says. “Get away from her.”
“What for?” Jane asks. Aissa remembers a time they’d stayed with Norna years ago. Aissa had walked out one morning to find Norna and Jane (maybe five at the time) feeding a mangy looking stray. Male, small, tawny, it appeared part coyote. Jane was holding a piece of left-over stew in an outstretched hand. Her face held a rapt expression, the same atavistic expression it holds now.
“Because I said so . . . just stay away from her.”
Jane parks herself on a stool and Niggy resumes her place by the wood stove, head cocked. One black ear points upward, the other flops forward, an effect that gives Niggy a quizzical expression very like Norna’s.
Aisssa, what do you think of taxidermy?
Her mother would ask a question, then study Aissa’s face, fascinated with the flashes of thought she saw scattered there, the panic she’d see rising. The questions went on and on. But eventually they’d stop. Aissa’s face would turn blue, her blood would dam up, pressure would build in her ears until she thought her head would explode.
Breathe, for god’s sakes, Norna would shout then. There are no wrong answers.
Now, despite a few light sprinkles on the tin roof, the sun filters through the window to the west, illuminating Niggy’s head like those pictures you see of Christ, and Aissa has her first panic thought for the day: That Norna has taken over Niggy’s body for some karmic purpose known only to herself, and that Aissa’s purpose in life is soon to be revealed to her in some weird combination of Kantian logic and beagle-ese. Jane turns her fair head sideways to watch Aissa and both sets of eyes bore into her face. Norna’s eyes. Not only in each of their faces, but looking out from knotholes in the walls and floors, peeking out from the chinking between the logs. Concealed in the partially exposed floor joists, but originating from where? When, rather? Eons of time separate her from eyes like these.
Why write, Aissa? Why not be a bricklayer?
Seventeen then, she knew better than to debate with her mother the merits of bricklaying vs. journalism as a career choice. So Aissa had posed a question of her own instead. What do you think of Ted? Ted, who bounced when he walked, and had half-open eyes, as if he found a full view of life more than he could take. He and his buddies did hash and Quaaludes down by the trout pond, though Aissa didn’t. What did you think when you first met him? Norna had replied. The usual: answer a question with a question. Oh, I didn’t think, Mother. He made me feel sort of unbalanced, I think. What do you talk about? She’d asked. Well, mostly we discuss the size of my nipples. Then Norna’s frank humor: Kind of an inadequate discussion, eh?
Back then Aissa had had only the remotest feelings for Ted, certainly nothing you could describe as love, but she’d felt grateful to him. In part, she thinks now, because he was moderately good at sex for someone who seemed so egotistical, and in part because they had done it in the dirt at the side of the pond. It was less impulsive than it seemed; less out of character since Ted was really not a risk at all. And the sand had ground into her hair and she could feel the good, solid earth pulsing below her, him pulsing above. Despite her ambiguous feelings for him, it felt solid. She felt connected.
Now Aissa sees four dusty brown bottles of Guinness sitting on a primitive sideboard. As she grabs one she notices part of a five-cent postage stamp adhered to the battered surface of the pine cupboard. She scrapes at it for a moment with her thumb nail, then gives up, and wipes the bottle on the front of her faded I’m-a-Montessori-Parent T-shirt, then uses it to twist the top off. But it doesn’t twist. So she bangs it off on the edge of the work table. She sits down in the middle of the kitchen floor, leaning against the Kelvinator, where she can look more carefully into the dog’s yellow eyes. Jane kicks off her tennis shoes, leans back in the chair, eyes closed, head resting against the wall.
Well, Mother, Aissa thinks, this particular question, this dilemma has an answer. And you and I both know what it is, don’t we?
Do it then, she hears Norna’s voice in her head. I don’t blame you, go ahead and do it. You have good reason . . . only don’t be a chickenshit about it. Don’t leave it to some insipid veterinarian with the inevitable needle – so neat, isn’t it, so sterile?? – lose the distance, the voice said, don’t be a chickenshit.
That’s when she sees Norna’s .410 shotgun leaning against the corner of the living room, the shells in a silver box sitting on a window ledge above it.
Aissa pulls her eyes from the gun, looks at dog and child. She realizes she’s been like this for nearly two days, mostly catatonic, and Jane has been, characteristically, watching her. Aren’t you sick of waiting here? Aissa wants to scream at her. You’re ten years old . . . aren’t you bored as hell?
Two in the afternoon now, Aissa opens the refrigerator, and is surprised to see everything looks fairly fresh – eggs, cheese, milk, broccoli, bacon. She sees a loaf of bread and several tomatoes on top of the fridge. No real mold yet. Just a silty gray beauty mark, on the top of one of the tomatoes. What, then, is causing that horrible smell? And then she sees it behind the refrigerator. Niggy has killed a chipmunk, no pardon moi, Aissa thinks, not a chipmunk but a baby squirrel. No doubt she’s been rolling in it. She grabs a hunk of newspaper and flings the animal through the open door into a tall patch of weeds.
Jane seems not to notice.
“Peanut butter,” Aissa says, seeing it behind the loaf of bread. “Make yourself a peanut butter sandwich.”
“Daddy wouldn’t like that,” Jane says, but the words are not a reprimand. No, Aissa thinks. Ben wouldn’t like that. He didn’t like peanut butter, basements, the outdoors, bookshelves, sweating for any reason, Aissa’s reporter job at the Lansing State Journal.
Jane makes and eats the sandwich while Aissa looks around. The cabin consists of two rooms, and little in the way of possessions, but Norna is omnipresent in the spareness, despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that she had always seemed fleeting. Not insubstantial, though, a fleetingness with the intrinsically terrible power of an idea.
There is a chest of drawers in the living / kitchen area and black and white Native American rugs on the floor. A similar rug hangs over an open pantry door where a few brown dishes are partially visible in two neat rows. The kitchen woodstove has been Norna’s only source of heat. And in the bedroom, next to the bed, is a pile of books. Aissa knows without looking who the authors will be: John Stuart Mill, Henry James, Freud, Darwin, Plato, Sartre, Heideg-ger. Heisenberg. Fiction or poetry is a possibility: Goethe, Chekhov. Rilke. No political books per se. Norna was political only when it overlapped with other areas of thought. She believed in capitalism only because it provided opportunity for the most rope. “Upon which people can hang themselves,” she’d say. It was all about the questions.
Other people had questions as well.
Why in the world would your father marry your mother after she lived for over a year in a wigwam on the edge of town? With that Indian?
Aissa had no idea why. He was impressed with Norna’s ass, she’d overheard him joke once. Not many women could live for a year in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in a wigwam without freezing it off.
Is it true your grandparents found your mother at the county dump beneath a pile of old newspapers?
Yes. Summer of 1915, John and Rona Ansgar, childless, found Aissa’s mother at the Luce County Dump beneath the Classified Section of the Newberry Gazette. At dawn. The bears had not even finished foraging. They named the child Norna, Norse for “fate,” and took her home. They never reported an abandoned child to authorities and Norna became famous for saying, “One might as well be in one dump as another.”
Through the years Aissa posed questions of her own. Why ever would you live in this god forsaken cabin when Daddy offered you the Inn and a perfectly good house?
Keep the Inn, Norna had told Aissa’s father at the time of the divorce.
And Aissa, he’d asked. Who keeps Aissa?
A man named Bert had once owned the fifty acres upon which Norna’s cabin stands. Norna had lived here since ’78, after Aissa had gone off to school, in return for some barn work. She milked cows, cut grass, hauled shit (and some said Bert’s ashes) in return for the use of the cabin. One spring when Aissa had made the pilgrimage in to check on her mother after the long winter, she’d caught Norna with someone she’d assumed to be Bert, though she had only gotten a glimpse of the man’s bare buttocks through the partially opened cabin doorway. She’d left and years later when she accused Norna of it, her mother had said matter-of-factly, “Actually, Bert was homosexual.”
Aissa could do nothing more than look at her dumbfounded.
“There were so many different guys coming and going up there,” Norna had said, “I used to tell him they reminded me of aggregate fruit. He found me very amusing.”
A gay bush pilot? Isn’t that what Norna said Bert had done once for a living?
At any rate, Bert died and left the cabin to Norna.
From the bedroom Aissa can see the white Volvo in the clearing. She’d left the driver’s door open, and along with the open cabin door, they seem to Aissa a particular omen. She walks through the kitchen, calls Niggy to come. Grabs her by the collar and gets the usual reaction.
“You call her,” she says to Jane. But Jane only smiles.
“She’s a good dog, Mom,” Jane says. “She doesn’t look sick to me.”
When Aissa picks up the shotgun, she’s surprised at how much lighter it feels than she remembers. She pushes the safety, breaks open the chamber to find the gun unloaded, but ready – as all guns are ready.
It’s nine o’clock p.m. and Aissa is again sitting in the middle of Norna’s kitchen floor, the loaded gun propped between her legs. She drinks her third Guinness, which only makes her feel heavy. Ben, a dentist, would not approve, because he said carbonated beverages rot your teeth. Even sparkling water does, he’d say, and especially if you are a sipper. So Aissa has been deliberately sipping, holding the warm yeasty brew in her mouth ten seconds before she swallows. But it’s tough to get drunk at this rate, so she has developed a pattern of gulping two huge swallows in rapid succession, sipping every third, swishing the beer around inside her mouth as if she is about to gargle. This accomplishes all her goals, and she feels the beer form a nice head on each tooth like foaming peroxide. Imagines Ben having to pull the rotting things out of her head, dropping them one at a time into the clear rinsing glass he saves for his more distinguished patients.
Aissa finds great satisfaction in the feeling.
But Aissa had married Ben for those hands, warmed by the competence she could see in them. An if / then kind of guy, Ben provided the order she’d needed. But lately, Aissa began watching not Ben’s hands, but his legs, skinny, with fine silky black hairs that embraced ankles too delicate, narrow feet upon which he wore the inevitable tan medical shoes or if not them, the brown loafers with the tassels. Yes, Aissa thinks, each of her teeth will make clear tinkling sounds like musical notes as they drop into the glass. Like the crystal wind chimes Ben had hung outside their kitchen window despite Aissa’s protestation that she hated them. Aissa knew there had been women. Receptionists, nurses. She’s not sure how many.
There’s no such thing as a mistake, Norna had said to her a year or so after her wedding.
Aissa can see the Volvo from her spot on the floor and imagines the battery is probably dead, since the door is still standing open, the light dim like a candlelit vigil. Niggy is still watching her, but the dog’s head seems to turn every so often to Norna’s gun. Go ahead, she seems to be saying. You don’t have the nerve.
Jane, who has been outside sitting by the river, returns now, her short blonde hair curling in crimps around her perspiring face. She sees it in the child’s face as well:
You don’t have the nerve.
“The blue-winged olives are coming off,” Jane says. How does Jane know about insect hatches? Aissa wonders. Norna must have taught her.
Jane moves over next to Niggy. Aissa sees not Jane, but Norna standing at the stove many years ago, smells the woodsmoke and the corn stew. Remembers Sam Gabow sitting at the kitchen work table in silence. Why are Indians so silent? Aissa wonders. Who the hell was he, Mother? Was he that Indian? The one in the wigwam? And the reply now in her head, How many Indians do you think I have, dear? Norna had offered Aissa chilled Popov on the rocks this particular day, with a twist of lime. Sam, however, had rolled a joint, which made the air in the room sweet and thick and hazy. While the big Indian had moved about the kitchen that day, Aissa imagined Sam’s body on top of Norna’s frail one. When had it become so frail? Then Aissa remembers black nights, white flesh, Sam’s voice floating through the darkness. The morning smell of Norna’s coffee boiling in the enamel pot, the eggshells dropped in to settle the grounds, that wonderful smell that makes Aissa ache now. All of it mixed with images of her father’s manicured hands, which she somehow can never picture running over Norna’s white flesh in the way Sam’s must have. (Your father visited often before he died, stayed here with me, Norna told her, toward the end. He had?? Aissa had never known that . . . was there something familiar about those buttocks she’d seen?) Sam anointing himself with oil that smelled like cedar. A large sea shell filled with burning sage and herbs, another smell very like pot. Sam blowing tobacco smoke from his enormous lungs all over Norna’s body. Sam dancing, banging a tambourine and Aissa expecting him to chant. Why didn’t he chant? And then he did. A soft, intermittent sound that vibrates even now inside her head. He had turned Norna’s wrists upward, had blown smoke onto them. You’ll need to take tobacco and food from your own portion and make an offering, he had told her.
Offerings are what they are, though, Aissa thinks. Just offerings.
Jane leans forward now to hug the dog and Aissa can see down her shirt, the flatness of her chest, only it isn’t Jane’s chest but Norna’s flatness. It was early days in medicine in 1968, and Aissa remembers the wreckage, the angry ragged streaks of scar tissue, as if someone had tried to scoop a pebble off Norna’s rib cage with a machete.
And Aissa remembers again that stray dog Jane and Norna had fed back then. How Aissa had protested to Norna with the expected concern that the dog might be rabid. She had felt uneasy for reasons more than the menace of the dog, but nothing like how she’d felt two days later when a bigger, black male stray had shown up in the clearing and the dog fight had started in earnest. Norna and Jane had watched from the porch, Aissa from the doorway, as the bigger, blacker dog, obviously part shepherd, ripped at the bowels of the smaller mongrel, whose dying yelps echoed through the ravine. It happened in a surprisingly short time. The blood and saliva mixed in the black dirt and stuck to the sides of the smaller dog so that it appeared coated in chocolate and the sweet, cloying smell of death assaulted her nostrils. Aissa didn’t see much more of the fight, didn’t watch or even really hear the smaller dog’s last raspy breaths because she was watching Jane’s face. And Norna’s. The calm acceptance, the lack of moral judgment. She watched them watch the battle, the two of them, with nearly no expression on their faces. This had terrified Aissa, but more than that, it had excluded her.
And then she remembered the day Jane was born:
Aissa had watched as her mother had bent her head over the child’s naked form in what looked at first to be that lip / belly thing, where adults blow loud air farts in order to make a child laugh. Watched the child’s foot move in reaction to the tickling. Aissa, high on morphine, had gotten the impression Norna was cleaning the child with her tongue, rough cleansing motions removing afterbirth and bringing pink life to the child’s pale skin. An image that has never left her. She might have dismissed the thought as a dream or drug-induced memory, but as time went on, she could see how alike they were. She’d watched as Jane slept, feet churning, like a dog running in its sleep.
Aissa looks at the acceptance on her daughter’s face now.
“Don’t you miss her, Jane?” Aissa asks now. “She was your grandmother.”
“Maybe we can live here,” Jane says in answer. “You know, when you leave Daddy.”
Aissa feels her heart stop. “Whatever makes you say that, Jane . . . I’m not leaving your father.” Jane’s face holds the same lack of judgment Aissa saw there during the dog fight, the same maddening acceptance of all things natural, with no need to change life the way Aissa always wanted to. Aissa is heartsick with the thought of her failure, and not willing – at least not yet – to acknowledge it. Where was Jane’s pain? Where was her confusion, the confusion and pain most children experience? She has a moment of thinking it doesn’t exist, then feels even more resentment when the notion strikes her that it’s being hidden from her like someone keeping a secret, hoarding a prize.
Like Norna used to do.
It’s stopped raining. Steam rises around the Volvo, making it look like it’s sitting on a swirling cloud mass. It’s nearly dark, and since Aissa can’t find a candle anywhere, she digs a large red flashlight out of the back of the Volvo, props it angrily on one of the empty Guinness bottles in the doorway. The beam illuminates Niggy’s head sporadically, the dog weaving side to side to avoid it, the effect like bad spotlighting in a child’s play.
This dog is holding me hostage. Just like Norna did, Aissa thinks. She has the wild notion that there is only one thing that will free her of them both.
Aissa touches the stock of the gun, knows there will be no time to aim, to sight down the barrel. Niggy is too smart for that. The moment she raises the weapon, the dog will certainly lunge for her. Right now the gun is resting against the side of her leg, her hand running up and down the length of the cold steel, and even that has caused the animal to rise warily to a sitting position. Aissa props the gun for a moment, grabs a length of clothesline, manages to get it through Niggy’s make-shift collar without getting bitten, and ties the end around the leg of the woodstove.
“Where did that clothesline come from, Mom?” Jane asks. “I never saw it on Niggy before.”
“It was always there. You weren’t here all that much.”
But the child is right. Norna would never have put the collar on the dog.
“No,” Jane said. “She grew it herself.”
“What are you talking about, Jane?” Aissa feels the irritation rise like a heavy fog within her chest. As Aissa backs her way to the door and reaches for the shotgun, Niggy sits more erect than ever, her body taut. Jane moves away from the dog and stands next to Aissa calmly.
Why do you keep Jane away from me, Aissa? Norna had asked. And then she had talked: I saw my mother once, she said. Not Rona, my real mother. She’d married and had another daughter a few years younger than I was. When I got there I saw them both hanging laundry in the backyard of a small white house. I watched for a while and then I left. Because I couldn’t for the life of me see what clothelines or dumps had to do with me.
Inscrutable, inaccessible, indefinable. Even at the end. That’s what her mother had always been to her. She had excluded Aissa even from her death.
Death is beside the point, Norna had said at the end.
And Aissa had kept Jane away from Norna. At least she’d tried to.
Aissa hears the cell phone ringing in the Volvo, a sound she is sure will break her heart before she can stop it. She’s amazed it’s ringing since she can only get a fleeting signal out here and usually further up the hill. It can only be Ben. God, she is sick of that sound, of cell phones and sirens and car phones and road noise of any kind. Sick of bells ringing and toes tapping and lips smacking. Mostly she is sick of teeth and everything to do with them. Just when she’s about to start screeching, the phone stops ringing.
She turns back to the gun. Opens the breach, checks the shells she knows are there. The chambers smell like oil. One chamber always misfires, something she remembers from the skeet lessons Norna had forced upon her as a child; she can’t remember which chamber. She remembers, though, how you have to be deadly accurate with this gun because Norna, who rarely missed, always kept the barrels choked down tightly, the concentration of pellets enabling a quick, humane kill. Which meant the gun operated more like a rifle than a shotgun.
Aissa shoves the barrel down and hears the sound of metal joining metal, the safety closing automatically, a sound that for the first time sounds surprisingly familiar to her. The gun’s ready, of course. But Aissa is not. Shit! Shit! Not yet, so she props the gun and walks down the pathway to look at the river.
Jane starts to walk with her, then stops halfway as if someone has called her name from inside the dusty, dilapidated old structure. Aissa sees a shovel sticking out of the back of her mother’s horrible green Scout and can feel what the splintered handle would feel like against Norna’s palm. She is suddenly fascinated with the shape and texture of her own hands so like Norna’s, and there is a sudden impulse to dig, but she keeps walking, making her way down until she sees the sign at the edge of the road:
SEASONAL ROAD.
Instead of the flatness she expects, the inevitable feeling of inertia, she is aware of covering ground, achieving elevation, then losing it, descending into the subtle depths of terrain.
If Norna’s soul had a topography, she thinks, this would be it.
It would contain high places where you could see all the way to Lake Superior, and unfathomable depths where the trees obscured the sky. It would contain things so beautiful there would be no words to describe them: giant red and white pines, graceful trillium, wild leeks and gingerroot, and if you listened you would be sure to hear a heartbeat, the wind in the trees, the rhythm of the teeming wild. But, like this logging-ravaged landscape, it would be a scarred beauty, terrible and desolate. Sometimes Aissa knew she’d die of the desolation; a dehydration that seemed to originate from Norna, but came from inside herself, too.
It was the dryness that scared her.
Yes, Aissa thinks, the topography would be remote, private, yet oddly accessible for someone with tracking skills, someone with a sure foot under them.
Someone else.
Aissa sits by the river, throwing pebbles into the brown murkiness.
Anything rising? Her mother’s voice comes to her from someplace distant, someplace she hasn’t visited for a long time. If at all. It seems to come from inside her. Another thought. Was it her mother who had been inaccessible or was it she herself? Suddenly she feels she can describe her mother – in all her indescribable-ness – in ways she can’t begin to describe herself. Shit, she thinks, I’ve eluded myself for years.
Aissa can feel the impending fall.
And not just fall, but past it. She can see how Norna’s cabin will look come winter, snow piled on the tin roof, footprints made by rushing feet (Jane’s feet?) on the way to the frigid outhouse, the cedar tree Norna always said was an Indian medicine tree, hanging expectantly over the river. Aissa can see Jane’s face at the end of the long two-track. Or is it her mother’s face? As if Aissa has followed time down the seasonal road.
It isn’t about the bumps in the road, she can hear Norna say.
Aissa has run out of time. She makes her way back. Jane, still halfway between cabin and river. She smiles again as Aissa passes her on the way back to the cabin.
Aissa picks up the shotgun and moves a few feet into the kitchen. Jane is standing behind her now, ten paces off to her left, and makes no move to stop her. Why the hell not, Aissa wonders? Why the hell not? As she pushes the safety off, she realizes Ben’s phone has begun ringing again. And so she whirls to her right, lines up a bead on the cell phone which is sitting on the burgundy car seat. Feels the urge to blast the thing into kingdom come, the car along with it. The cool stock is comforting against her cheek, the trigger cold and silky beneath her index finger. She feels Jane’s eyes on her. Niggy has begun to whine at last and she isn’t sure anymore whether the ringing is outside or inside her head. But it keeps on. All she has to do, she imagines, is turn and line up that same bead against the side of Niggy’s head. When it’s done, she thinks, when it’s all over, I can simply slide into the Volvo and drive away. I won’t even have to bury the damn dog, or so much as clean up the splattered brains and floating hair. And Jane, she thinks irritably, won’t even require a fucking explanation.
The ringing of the cell phone keeps on.
You don’t have the nerve.
Aissa turns her body slowly forty-five degrees. Another ten and she knows the dog’s head will appear within her sights. She hasn’t yet heard the low growl she knows is a surety, but she does hear her mother’s words in her head, you don’t have the nerve, and when the dog’s head appears, Aissa’s finger pulls back on the trigger –
But it’s the barrel that doesn’t fire and she hears the dull click inside her head like an accusation.
Just as she had predicted, the dog lunges.
Then the gun goes off, and Aissa feels the explosion inside her own head. The years of being cut off, left out, emotionally excluded, exploding along with it. But it isn’t her emotions that are making this mess. Niggy’s head has exploded as well. Bits of flesh and blood splash about the room exactly as Aissa had envisioned they would.
She looks up and sees Jane still standing in the open door.
Then it all slows down. Aissa waits for it. Patient. Waits for the sense of freedom she has been expecting, the sense that she’s finally taken her life into her own hands, the feeling that she’s finally in charge. Has finally done what had to be done. Once. Or at least she expects to feel horror at what’s she’s done. And she does. But not for the reason she expects. Something is wrong and Aissa finally realizes what it is: The blood is not coming from Niggy’s head; in fact, Niggy is not even lying in the expected heap on the floor. She is whining softly, leaning into the clothesline, straining against the rope and the clothesline, which is still wrapped around her neck. Saliva drips out of her mouth with as much profusion as the blood. And Aissa sees she’s failed once again. The bullet has not exploded Niggy’s head afterall, but instead has entered her shoulder in a downward trajectory, and it appears, has missed even her chest; Norna would never have missed.
Jane is still standing motionless at the door.
“Oh my God,” Aissa says.
“Shoot her again, Mom,” Jane says, her tone flat like stagnant water in Aissa’s head.
Aissa knows she should reload and shoot again, that she really has no choice now but to do that. But all at once Aissa has no intention of shooting the dog again. Jane reaches for the gun, but Aissa pulls it away, throws it across the room. Some madness takes over and she rushes to the dog, drops to her knees and pulls the dog to her chest, knowing full well Niggy, who has never liked her in the best of circumstances, will do nothing less than rip her throat out.
Aissa doesn’t care. She’s ready. Rip it out, she thinks. Rip it out.
But Niggy does nothing of the sort. She’s dazed, possibly from the effect of the lunge, the clothesline cutting off her air and collapsing her windpipe, or maybe it’s from the loss of blood. But when Aissa pulls the dog toward her, Niggy drops onto her lap and the blood, like Norna’s disapproval, runs across her chest and down her bare legs. She looks up and Jane looks her right in the eyes, tilts her head side ways like Niggy, like Norna. Aissa raises her hands to her neck and checks, half expecting to feel ragged clothesline embedded in the crevices, but no. No clothesline.
There is something there, though. Aissa is sure of it.
Something imperceptible.
L. E. Kimball’s short stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Washington Square, Lynx Eye, and Orchid.