October Shift
Written with the prompt: secret colors
Climate change is jerking Marilee around. Day before yesterday it rained. Not hard, not steady, but enough to force her into her hooded barn coat and water proof hiking boots. Didn’t matter, she had no umbrella and felt damp and clammy all morning. Yesterday a transition, cloudy and pleasantly brisk. Today, sunny and 90 degrees. She spent all afternoon peeling off layers, forced to carry a tote bag filled with sweat on the bus ride home. What the heck, October?
Her lover Jamie is lanky guy who exudes a jittery energy. The days are getting shorter and he can’t stand it. He’s frantic to hold on to a little bit of light, and Marilee wants to hold on to him. He has eyes the color of chestnuts in sunlight, but in the lamplight of her bedroom his eyes are grayish green, as dark as Connemara marble.
He leaves at midnight and Marilee feels the energy shift. She lies in bed, sure that he has taken the back wall of her house with him. Now the wet branches of the maple tree will drop their yellow leaves on the kitchen table, invasive tendrils of ivy will creep into cupboard and drawers, that large white spider with its yellow striped belly will weave a story across the doorway that will trap her inside.
What are the secret colors blocking my escape? What mysteries are woven into your web, spider? I don’t know why you scare me but you do. If I summon my magpies, will you scurry away?
In the morning Marilee is awakened by the radio. She lies in bed listening to NPR’s Morning Edition. She slips back asleep, wandering through the labyrinthian halls of her elementary school, unable to find her students, unable to find her classroom, frantically searching as Steve Inskeep tells her there’s been another shooting, another half dozen children dead or dying. She is in the hospital with Leila Fadel, but now they are in the emergency room, and the hospice nurse tells her she might go call her family, ask her mother’s sister to come say goodbye, as it’s looking doubtful, but then Marilee rises up out of a salty slumber, as if she’d been snorkeling off a warm Hawaiian coast.
Adrenaline pumping, she turns off the news. She’s running late. She hates October before the return to standard time. It’s past seven and still dark. She flips on a harsh overhead light. The house is intact. She affirms she is safe.
She has her secrets. In the shower she slides a soapy hand over a puckery scar that runs from naval to pubic bone. It is the color of air flitting along her peach-colored belly. Their coupling is new. Has he noticed, have his fingers detected?
Her story is long, her road is not, much like her mother’s.
Photo by Christopher Stites on Unsplash
