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ASTRONAUT HOUSE

A Short Story by Kyle Chezum

I’M PROPPED AGAINST the headboard with three pillows behind me, sitting up in the dark.  It is just after one in the morning.  I’ve been checking the time by the analog clock on the far wall.  Our digital clocks are dead.  The fridge is dead.  Everything is dead.  The power went out around two in the afternoon.

Cora is lying on her stomach with her head down over the side of the bed, looking at something on the floor.  She has a cup of water down there.

“Try to think about something else,” I say.  “It’ll come on when it comes on.”

She says nothing, but I hear her breathe in the darkness.  She moves her hand on the quilt.  The quilt is yellow and stitched with rustic squares of brown and green.  When you look at it from far away, it looks like a vine.

“I think you’ll feel better if we turn on a flashlight or something,” I say.

“I’ll feel worse,” she says.  She says it with her chin set against the edge of the bed.

“Okay,” I say.  It’s useless.  She feels how she feels.  My arguments, my deductions and conjectures, are irrelevant.  “Okay.”

I sit back and listen.  I can’t hear the wind anymore, but things are still moving.  Branches claw back and forth on the walls, the eaves.  I feel a knot in my neck from sitting up, and I try to rub it out.

Cora moves her hand on the quilt, hard, like she’s trying to hold on to something.

#

Cora is afraid of the dark.  I knew about this going in, and we got married anyway.  I agreed to the rituals.  The bedroom light must stay on, and I must stay awake, until she has fallen asleep.  It’s a syllogism—if either of the premises is unmet, the conclusion cannot follow.

I can get some good reading done during this interval, I’ve found.  Sometimes I grade papers.  But part of me is concerned that we’ve been married five short months and I’m already reading myself to sleep most nights.  This, I think, is unhealthy.

“It says something about us,” I told her.  This was a month or so after our wedding.

She was pacing in the room, rubbing her face.  She does this sometimes to make herself feel sleepy.  She stopped and looked at me.  “What does it say?”

“We’re not close enough, maybe,” I said.  “Or we don’t do things together.  Maybe we don’t have sex enough.”

“You think it says that?”

I shrugged.  I said nothing.

She stared at the carpet.  “I thought—I thought we did it a lot.”

“No, no, I think we do,” I said.  I felt like I had to talk fast, like I had broken something on accident and had to explain my actions.  “We do.  I guess I just mean, if I told someone about all this, they would think—”

“Oh,” she said.  “They would assume.”

“Yes.”

“In that case,” she said, “we shouldn’t tell anyone.”  She grinned.

That was her solution.  Simple.  And who would I tell, anyway?  I sat back and wondered why I felt the way I did.

She was wearing one of my shirts.  It was big on her.  I hadn’t thought my clothes were that big.  She pulled the collar away from herself and peered inside.  “I can see the floor,” she said.

“You’re wide awake.”

She laughed.  She looked at me.  “I’m sorry.”

“No, that’s fine,” I said.  I adjusted my stack of pillows and rubbed my eyes.  “It’s not like we don’t have all night.”

#

I’m not sure what to do for her with the lights out.  I sit for a while and listen to the trees outside.  Cora lies beside me, tucked away in her own space, keeping to herself.  I think she must be working things back and forth in her mind.  She’s very thin.  She doesn’t need much room.

I reach across the bed and run my hand along her back.  She stiffens.

“Is that you?” she says.

“Yes,” I say, though it’s a strange thing to ask.  There is no one else here.  “We should probably have some ice cream.  I just thought of it.”

She doesn’t move.  “Oh.”  Silence.  “I guess I would like some in here.”

I get up and go to the kitchen for the ice cream.  I have to feel my way along the walls.  Our house is huge in the darkness.  Each step gets me half the distance it should, and I figure this is my body’s natural reaction.  But the whole way I feel like I’m going nowhere, like I should be further than I am.

I get some bowls down and open the freezer and scoop two helpings of vanilla ice cream.  Then I take them back to the bedroom.

Cora lifts her head when I come in.  “Is that you?” she says.

“It’s me,” I say.  I put the bowl in her hands, and she flinches as she collects the weight of it.

“I love you,” she says.

“I love you, too,” I say.  But I don’t get back into bed.  I stand at the window, a rectangle of dark gray set in the wall.  I stand there and peer through the blinds and try to catch a glimpse of anything moving.

#

Our headboard is a section of picket fence from Cora’s grandfather’s homestead in eastern Canada.  It’s not something you can lean against.  When I sit up waiting for her to fall asleep, I fill the gaps with pillows.

Cora thinks it’s funny.  I brought the pillows home one day from a bed and bath store downtown.  Cora was on the kitchen floor, cutting things out of construction paper for her kindergarten class.

“Look at you,” she said.  “You with all your pillows.  Like we’re rich.”

“I plan to retire with these pillows,” I said.  I set them inside the door.  They were still wrapped in their sterile plastic, like bedding for astronauts.  I didn’t like that I had bought them.

Cora laughed.  “I get it.  Retire.”

I sat beside her on the floor.  Sunlight from the window made a pool of heat around us.  She was cutting out black cloud shapes.  “What are these for?” I asked.

“It’s a science lesson,” she said.  “We’re making galaxies.”  She clipped another one and laid it with the others.  Fat swooshes of black paper.

“They look like clouds,” I said.

“You’re not a teacher,” she said.  But she was happy.  She was happy at that point.

I got to my feet and went to the window.  October was doing its thing outside, and across the street, someone was taking a mattress down off the top of a car.  I looked at the sky.  The moon hung like a dead bulb in the blue, like unfinished construction.

“Hey,” she said behind me.

I turned.  “Hmm?”

“We should get in bed.”

“Now?”

“Before it gets dark.”

I watched her.  She grinned.  She stood and started toward me, but a thought flashed across her face and she went the other way, to the bedroom.  I followed her.  Of course I did.  Who wouldn’t have?

Later that night, when we went to bed for real, she fell asleep fast.  Five minutes and she was out.  I barely got through three pages of Poe.  It was wonderful.

#

I’ve begun to worry about my back.  My spine.  I look at the future and I see myself sitting against our headboard every night for the rest of my life.  I think about all the ways this could damage my vertebrae, my plates and discs and whatever else in in there.

I see myself hunched over, my neck bent and bowed from too much reading alone.  Old before my time.  That’ll be me.

#

I finish my ice cream and stay at the window.  The clouds are gone from the section of sky between the maples outside and I can see stars.  One of them moves, too slow to be a plane.  A satellite, I think.  A lonely mechanism counting off long, rational sequences up in the cold, orbiting forever until it sinks and burns.  It flickers in the night.  I lick my ice cream spoon.  The satellite is lit.  It can still see the sun from up there.

I turn to Cora.  “Are you done?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says.

I take her bowl and return to the kitchen.  She stays there on the bed, frozen in place.  I can’t imagine what she’s feeling, trapped in the dark with the power dead.  I try to feel it, too.  I stop at the sink and put the dishes in.  I stand there and try to conjure up fear out of the shadows.  I stare at the wall above the sink.  I wait.

After a minute or so I rub my neck and rest my hands on the counter and inhale.  I smell soap and wood and hard water.  Familiar things.  I touch the faucet, the handles, the block with our knives in it.  I touch a mixing bowl left out on the counter.  A bag of flour.  The cord of the toaster.

In my mind I see Cora’s galaxy cutouts.  She had the kids draw stars on them, stars and planets and burning suns.  They all drew a sun, she said.  She didn’t tell them what to draw, but they all drew the sun anyway, and most of them drew the other planets too—as many as they knew.  Like space wasn’t space without all those things in it.

I open the cupboard above the sink and grab a flashlight.  I keep it turned off and head back to the bedroom.

Cora stirs atop our earthy vine quilt and looks at me.  “Honey?” she says.

“Right here,” I say.  “Come on.  Get up.”

“What?” she says.  “Why?”

“I have a flashlight,” I say.  “Come on.”

“A flashlight just makes it worse,” she says.  “You don’t understand.”

“No, I do understand.”  Again I feel I have to talk fast, like if I’m not careful I’ll shatter some delicate thing.  “I do understand.”

I click the button and the flashlight ignites.  A bright swath of light cuts the room in half.  I see Cora on the bed, her eyes wide and glistening.  I see the thin frame of her body under the t-shirt, her bare legs.  I want to go to her and run my hands from her feet up to her neck, skin the entire way, pushing warmth into every part of her.  But I won’t—not now.  I see the clock on the far wall.  Half past one.

“Come on,” I say.  “You’ll feel better.”

She gets to her feet, eyes darting into the corners and the dark hall behind me.  But she’s standing.  The shirt she’s wearing reaches halfway to her knees.  My clothes are huge, I guess.  Or she is very small.

This is fine.  We can start small.

I take her by the hand and lead her into the darkness.  I shine the flashlight onto the walls and the floor.  I move it slowly back and forth.  I pull her forward.

“This is our house,” I say.

END