To Hold

There is a terse knock. A maw of a fist with veins forced to the surface from the tension of the gesture, and knuckles as gears against the roughly hewn grain of the door. It knocks to be heard at the back of the house. It knocks to know if anyone is home at all. He knows there are little voices, he saw them some time ago. Who is home?

With hair hidden underneath a rag and tied in a rough knot at the nape of her neck, a bent woman with hands in mop water raises an eyebrow and then her head. She can see the front door from her askew angle in the living room. Through the slice of her curtain, the man stands akimbo. He is impatient. Too much so for her taste. Is it not he who has come to her door? His fist raises in demand again. Well then. 

She pads efficiently to the back room. She counts heads as she starts swinging the door towards her.

“No no, keep playing. But stay very quiet.”

They hardly look up, which is exactly what she hopes for. The door is now closed. It is locked, actually.

so it begins 

She wipes her hands on her hips, she will answer. 

She opens the door enough to slip outside but not to let him see inside, though he cranes his neck to, and with the last of her fingers on the handle’s button, she sets the door to lock behind her as she crosses her threshold. The one she fears the bank will take. The uneven one she considered repairing until she discovered the light creeping through in the early morning made a dancing pattern across the floor, and she tenderly decided that such hidden treasures deserve protecting. 

He stands too close to the door, it is disrespectful. He has not come to ask, she thinks, and then she remembers she actually knew that already. This only confirms.

The man only shuffles back because she stands erect in front of him and closes the door firmly behind her. 

She will look at him but she will not let him into her eyes. She does not sing hello. She stands. Plain and peasant-like. Her nose, if you look carefully, is held closed. She does not want to breathe the air he has used. With her hip-dried hands cupping one another at the waist she stands expectantly. She looks up at this man who is now pretending to be soft, and she waits.

He has backed up because she has taken his space, that and he might give himself away if he lunges too quickly. But he is so close. The risk of being uncomfortable because of social decorum seems to fall away in the face of satisfaction. It is nearby, he knows. He must hold on just a little bit longer. It makes his mouth wet. So he swallows.

That swallow looks like a nervous gulp, he hopes. He is surprised he must interact with this droll thing before him. She stands so tall for one so short. A guardrail more than a wall. 

That swallow seems so awkward it catches him off-key. He tumbles internally but realizes this is to his advantage. Be bumbling. Be befuddled. Muddle your way through because you need inside help.

“I need help.”   “ma’am.”

“you do.”

It is by licking his lips that he swallows back what a bitch she is for not repeating that as a question. 

“I uh, boy I sure do.”

And long silence from this woman feels like a tear in the universe because there is nothing to fill it but his own collapsing thoughts about being so close to what he wants and the rapture of getting it but also so infuriated at being insulted by this thing who smells of sweat and children and who has no beauty and is useless. 

And so this man, demeaned to contend with and stand before uselessness, moves his jaw to the left so as to realign himself in the right. 

“you are sweating.”

“I am? I am! - I’ve been walking a long, a very long way and you know it’s just my, well my car’s broke down around the bend there -“

“the bend is not a long way.”

“Huh, well it sure SEEMED that way when I walked it!”

It is by looking at him without emotion that he knows she is present. She is not worried about responding or playing along. Undistracted by decorum. She is focused. Terrifyingly, calm. 

Hands plunge too far into pockets, knuckling hidden and sharp things, “I can see I’ve interrupted you but I need help.”

Before she walked out the door she had counted the knives in the kitchen and recalled the one out back awaiting sharpening above the reach of small, sticky hands. Next to the garden sheers. It was dull, but it was something. Although by the time she got there, by running after her he’d have run past the loose curls bobbing inside just at window height. That of course would be offering them on a platter. No. No moving.

And so while staring at him, waiting for him to realize she saw him, she counted the long months since her husband was carried across this same threshold. She knew the desolation of this isolated house could absorb things. It had eaten sobs and dreams already. What festering hell to consider that because of what someone else had decided in their heart, your life might now be among the swallowed too.

It’s so rude of this woman to make me wait like this but I will try again- 

“I just need some help. If I could use your phone I could call for help.”

“is that the truth?”

“Yes, Ma’am!” and rolls to the balls of his feet so his body is an exclamation point as he says it. 

“no, that is not the truth.”

“Excuse me?”

“i said that is not the truth.”

And it is then that the weak thing, the sniveling coward inside him who has spent years trying to get it together enough to make a move and now finally has and is so close it’s just right there why won’t you let me in — it is that mildewed creature who looks at this woman and hopes the fire of rage at being denied yet again by her will read like bewildered surprise in his eyes. He holds that look and dares not move, because suddenly it is possible it is he who is standing here, and not the man with the gears for fists and not the story he worked so hard to remember to tell about where he was for the afternoon. 

She says it slowly, “i said, that is not the truth. you seem to not wish to speak the truth.”

Those mop water hands open only wide enough to let the gravity of her accounting out, then cup one another again in finality:

“you are here to hunt.”

“No, I haven’t, have not. I only need - “

“that you try so much to hide it means you hunt to kill, no?”

Look at him, whirring around in his head, thinking he is hiding that he has blood in the back of his throat. 

Should she move closer to him? To edge him back? No, that would make a sign of weakness. That is chest puffing and posturing, that is for men and the women who think they must be like them. The cliffs do not move. Let the forces break themselves where they meet me, I will stand. 

A sound thudded in the home. How curious that he looks at the wall around the door, as if he could have named that thud, as if he belongs there. How dare he look at my walls with questions in his mind, as though he has any right to know what moves inside my home. He has taken my home into his mind as I stand before him defending it. 

“you are aware the isolation means no one will hear when I skin you?” she makes a reference with the tip of her nose to the clearing and woods beyond the road. 

And his breathing all but stopped at that. 

“tell me, did you ever think what it might be like, to be the one they look for? no, because you were thinking only of what. you. wanted.”

And the mere thought of his arrogance, his disregard of her, reminded her of the man who killed her man, and the sagging body whose friends walked it across this threshold. Who thinks of the consequences? Who thinks of the make-do or work-around or the collateral damage when they only want what they want? Never these men, and now here is another one, with a more audacious lust, looking at her children through her walls and eating them alive in his mind. 

“you know I also hunt.”

His lips have become dry so he must lick them and smack his tongue before stuttering “no, ma’am, I did not.”

“yes, it’s very satisfying. don’t you think?”

“yyes.” Where was she going? Why hadn’t he hit her yet? She weighed less than him, he had pockets with teeth. Just do the thing alrea-

“when I hunt, I like to give a good head start. do you know what that means?… the last one made that same face.”

And by looking at him and imagining all the things they had all deserved and the women who would never get to see the justice of it and the boys who would be spared the growing up poisoned by them - and the men they might become if only these rotten ones could be gotten rid of - suddenly the thought of hearing him cry out for her to please dear god spare him seemed like a reason to lick her own lips.

Here is this uppity clod of a woman licking her lips at him, brazen little bitch. It repulses him. He forgets now about the children. His thoughts warp to his mother. She had a way with small boys. He could never remember any sounds although he knows he cried each time. He must have, and yet there is only the slinking, swamp of silence — and her hands here and there — and her empty, empty, happy face — and now, incensed at the indignity of being forced to recall his mother when he has come so close to devouring away his young screams with the escaping air of these lambs, now he breaks.

“I don’t need your fucking help you cow.”

“you don’t.”

“Don’t you tell me what I do and don’t need.”

The smile moved behind her lips and into her narrowing eyes, “i will tell you i won’t bother to bury you because you will not be missed”

She thought he hit her. Acrid spit creeps down her forehead. 

Seeing she is unmoved is what breaks him. How can he move past a mother if she is unmovable? There are other homes, there are other children. There would be Sunday, if nothing else. But she must not see she has burrowed in. He is impenetrable. No one gets in, you fucking hear me? No one gets in because I am strong like a fortress and she is lucky I just don’t deal with cunts who don’t know their place. 

“Fuck you, lady. I don’t need your help.”

He does not know what moves inside him. He cannot name it because he is split, both not and utterly himself at this moment. Who names the mountain when all they know is the earth has risen? And still—  when he looks back as he leaves and his pretending-to-be-calm crests the this-is-who-I-am levee inside him, as he sloppily grabs rocks and jumps, yelling and throwing — she stands. Nothing moves that bitch. I’ve never wanted to put my hands around a neck like this before but god the fucking potato deserves it.

…Composure can be the glue, you know. And glue of course is sticky and brittle in turns.

There is no wind. The air has stopped because time has. She can hear the car roar towards the highway — but what difference does that make when the house itself cannot be moved? He might always come back, and she knows plainly this space is now stained by the growl of a dark mass at the door.

It is his bubbling sliding spit that finally pushes her inside. No one sees that it is the most dignified she has ever moved. 

Red eyes bleary from soap, she quietly turns the key to the back room and finds undisturbed children speaking in their soft r’s and shaky s’s. 

She moves to check the curtained window then checks the lock on the front door. The mop water is still warm, but she doesn’t know that because she doesn’t return to it until the next day.

Her hand is adrift at the curtain’s edge. What strange inheritances we endure. Why is knowing what lurks so insufficient to stop it. If only I - someone - anyone - could cut the stomach out of the poor man, she thinks, sombered that the knife needed for such things is as out of reach as the root of his rot. It makes for a gnawing accounting of the world as she turns over the truth: I have sent it down the road and now someone else’s child will be eaten instead of mine. The unprotected babies lump in her throat.

Another thud, but this one followed by a wail. Soft r’s are now swelling sobs. She hurries to the little one. 

For nights afterwards she sleeps on the floor of their room with a foot propped against the bedroom door. In unseen ways, from then on she lives, standing, just outside that threshold. When from time to time she catches the precious dancing light across the floor, she rosaries thanks big enough for a whole childhood… thanks to the nameless law which holds that for daring to look a thing in the eye and call it by name, sometimes, you can manage to let only the light in.