Right Where Mother Left It
Cabin, at the end of a weed-tangled dirt road. Bird feeder, crowned with crude metal sheeting, rusting. In the overgrown garden, giant white asparagus move like ghosts in the autumn dusk. Beneath the cabin, the crawlspace looms, dark as a fire pit.
The rain is steady, the grass on the pine-shadowed hill wet and slick. The red door creaks. She pokes her finger in the tongue-sized tear in screen.
She is here to clean out the cabin. Family doesn’t want to bother; they left it solely to her, in the will. She is determined to sell it. She will not get much for it. In its dilapidated state, whoever wants it will just raze it for land. And no one wants land in a population 17 that is snowed in from September 29 to May 5.
Inside the cabin, the smell of mothballs, wood. The kitchen linoleum peels up at the corners. Above her head, scratching: mice. They are in the walls; the sun porch settee has a pile of mouse crap in its center.
She enters the main room, where the lace curtains are like tattered wedding veils. The painted end table is knocked over. The old party-line phone’s handset is out of its cradle.
She calls out, “Hello?” to hear herself, company. She plucks a trash bag from the bright yellow box and shakes it open… the smell of plastic. She opens the cabinets… the smell of mildew. She throws out pots and pans, four plastic cups, yellow, orange, red, brown, one for each child, so Mother knew which cup was whose. She throws out disintegrating tubes of wax paper. Boxes of Frosted Flakes, unopened, twice their weight, she thinks, possibly with dead things.
She hears a noise, under the house. Thump. She stiffens. It can’t still be here. It has been over twenty years; it can’t still be here.
Thump. No. It is gone by now. Thinking otherwise is not rational.
She works into the night. She turns on the old gas lamp as it gets dark. There is the soft hish of it burning.
After midnight, she climbs into her sweatpants and mounts the loft stairs. She unlatches the upstairs window, letting in the sour smell of rotting crab apples, wet leaves, moss. The stream, swollen from the rains, roars, a miniature Niagara. She pulls back the sheets on the bed and slips between. She stares at the ceiling.
Thump.
In her peripheral vision, she sees them. Yellow eyes peering from the knot in the wall.
She hopes the knife is still on the nightstand, right where Mother left it.
