LJ Idol Season 11: Week 31 - Open Topic
The Last Piece
“Put it on the ground.”
Her small frame belied a tacit might, the folds of her skirt and eyelids unmoving in the seconds beyond the demand until, after the space of the sounding and dying of an unseen dog’s shrill, doleful moan, her left foot evenly slid backwards, allowing her knee to meet the crackled asphalt with a stoic silence. She did not kneel in deference. As her weight lowered, she kept her head and torso ever lifted towards the man, her eyes fixed on the opaque gleam in the plastic eye holes of his gas mask. She would not bend at the waist-would not drop her gaze and attention to the floor, and in so doing give him a moment of unfettered authority over her. She was competence made palpable.
Her weathered knuckles unfurled a humble paper parcel onto the concrete, yielding no pause of doubt, nor remorse. She stood fluidly, the ease of so simple a thing made mystic by her apparent age. She waited.
“Walk twenty feet back.”
She did not. She countered, unblinking, “show it to me.”
The veiled shade of a man seemed to twitch in agitation, but acquiesced, stooping towards an oblong curiosity wrapped in matted bits of trash bags and muddied newspapers. He set to uncovering the thing, face and back turning in evident disregard to any threat the seemingly meager woman could represent to him.
She waited.
After some moments, the kayak was untangled from its patchwork shroud, the aggressive yellow of it too pristine, too manufactured a color when set against the mottled ruins and molding debris of what was once a serviceable city street. The man stood from stooping, grunted, and turned back toward the woman.
“Walk back.”
“Does it have a paddle?”
His hand disappeared behind the kayak, lifting a paddle to the height of his chest, and pointed its curved yellow tip to the woman.
“Does it have holes?”
The man grunted. “No.”
“Show me.”
He made some swearing noise that died in the nozzle of his gas mask, but nonetheless hoisted the kayak into his arms with a baleful exhale, then plodded off-kilter towards the maw of a sinkhole that years prior had burst up from porous limestone below the street, eventually pulling massive slabs of pavement and topsoil into its insistent embrace. The crateral sinkhole had since expanded without reserve; it was now brimming with a stew of tidal runoff and groundwater laced with sewage. The man brusquely dropped the kayak into the mire, then went about the inelegant process of inserting himself into the wobbling vessel. Eventually, he sat within; the kayak was undeterred by his weight, and gave no sign of slipping into the fetid waters, even after a full minute by the woman’s internal count.
“So?”, the man barked.
“It will do.”
“Walk back twenty feet.”
She walked backwards ten feet, toe to heel, never turning her back. He gave a great groan of exasperation, then wrangled himself out of the kayak and onto the ground. He approached in accusatory strides, bent, and snatched the parcel, untying its twine knot to find the expected stack of bills. He counted and recounted them, then called out to her.
“Do you have a gun?”
“No.”
“A knife?”
“No.”
A bitter laugh of disbelief and pity came from the clenched walls of his throat. “Lady, what’s stopping me from taking the money and the boat?”
Her pupils blazed a line of malice straight through the lenses of his mask as she lowered her own cloth one off of her nose and below her chin.
“You don’t want to see this face of mine when your time comes.”
They stood, unspeaking. Somewhere, the dog brayed.
He rolled his neck back, eye holes to the sickly sky. “It’s yours.” He turned to leave, but stopped after a step. “Can you even move it, grandma?”
“I’ll manage.”
She waited for him to leave, waited minutes after he left her field of vision, then took a step towards the sinkhole.
____________________________
The paddle slid in and out of the untouchable waters, bringing with it gritty layers of film and putrid sediment upon the yellow paint of its blades. She made a slow, gliding advance through what had been Flagler Street. The tops of the hulking skeletons of long-abandoned condominiums disappeared into an unending haze, stemming up from the oily waters like massive support beams to bear aloft the frothy ceiling of sky.
A jay called out, its question lingering unanswered on the wind. There are still birds, Charlotte, she told herself. There are still birds.
She thought back to her adolescence in Miami, driving through this street in a nearly busted Honda Civic with her brother in the passenger seat, yell-singing “O-Bla-Di O-Bla-Da” through the giddy heat of a summer day and swerving just a little in the lane. They would inevitably end up at the Mall of the Americas every Friday, inventing extravagant stories about the housewives pushing baby strollers around the food court while splitting an Auntie Ann pretzel. Then the classic double-feature maneuver at the AMC.
Maybe they weren’t living like the elites along the shoreline. But they were living.
The Miami of 2059 was irreconcilable with those memories.
As the years went on, and as the shoreline became less of a purchased lifestyle and more of a present threat, they saw more construction around their ragged neighborhood. Condos. Office buildings. Mansions. Originally, people like her family were pushed out and away from the beaches, leaving them inland and far from the glitz of the coast. Later, it became clear that the string of governors who erected the beach’s towering seawall had done so for public image and not for public safety. Scores of science advisors would warn that Miami’s porous bedrock rendered such a wall meaningless, but policy hinged upon public perception-not science. Before the shore fully finished its steady march around the wall and up through the ground itself, investors became afraid. There was an exodus of wealth from the sand to the land. And boy, how the family’s land was worth something again. Developers contacted their mother with a deal. It was a very attractive offer to the single mom: a tidy sum that she could never have fathomed, complete with a relocation package to a beautiful beach home with bay windows.
The rich wanted the higher ground, so they bought it.
.
______________________________
When Charlotte reached her mother’s old house, the floating kayak hit the front door three feet up from its base. She peered into the water, and with a grimace swiveled her hips to drop her shins into the slosh. Shuddering at the feel of it, shuddering at the cold, she leaned forward, flipping the kayak as she stood waist-deep in things unmentionable. She tried the door knob, though it was locked, and doubted she could open it, regardless, with the force of the water pushing it shut. She sighed as she reached for the paddle, and with a twist of her ribcage and the shocking resultant force of torque from her small body, she brought the blade to bear upon the weary pane of a bay window. The shattering glass shards gasped in bell tones as they pierced the water’s surface and slipped through to the other side. After a moment, she slipped through as well.
It was not an ideal homecoming. The stench and taste of molding wallpaper, books, and polyester couches attacked the sinuses, the tongue, and the mucus of the eyeballs. Dislodged picture frames and dishes floated about, knocking her thighs. All the memories that could have occupied this physical space-awash.
Thank Truth that Mom died before the flood.
Oh, Mom...
Her objective was upstairs. She waded through the remnants of the living room to the staircase. The wooden steps at its base were a ruin of rot, but she managed to latch onto the banister and laboriously tiptoe to higher, drier steps. She palmed the banister throughout her ascent, the wood beneath shrieking in anguish and threat.
She found the second floor to be better preserved. In the hallway bathroom, a dry towel beckoned to her, thoughtfully hung on the rack, awaiting her need. She pulled off her shoes, socks, then her soiled, soaked skirt. She wrung out its bitter contents into the bathtub, and hung it on the shower rod. She turned the faucet to wash her hands, but laughed openly at her naive presumption when no water came. She took the towel and soothed her slick, gnarled legs, then wrapped it around her waist. .
She paused at the threshold at the end of the hall-her brother’s room.
She waited. The house lamented in whispers of need.
She sighed.
It’s time to do this.
She entered Ricky’s bedroom.
______________________________
It was all too easy to date Charlotte’s last phone call with Ricky. It happened in late August, after his birthday but before hers-that loving, illusory interval of time when the gap between them lessened. Even these decades later, she knew too well that it happened in 2020.
(She hovered by the bookshelf in the closet, thumbing the bulging discrepancies of spines, from thin plays and poetry collections to bloated graphic novels and photo reference books).
It had to have been 2020. It happened during that first outbreak year of the then-novel Coronavirus Disease 2019. Ricky had driven back to Miami in March to spend the quarantine supporting their mother, but Charlotte was stuck in New York, the first red zone in the states, and would have posed a threat of exposure to the both of them.
(She opened the chest at the foot of the bed, sifting through faded charcoal figure drawings, matted paintings, and a stack of black sketchbooks).
When he called her that August afternoon, his tone was buoyant, lilting upwards after months of conditioning for a new normal.
Hey, Char! You doing okay?
Yeah, most days. I even went berry-picking with friends yesterday.
(She rifled through a box of loose papers, finding unfinished stanzas of discarded poems, old tax returns, and worksheets from highschool Latin class).
Whoa, nice! Seems like you’re living it up!
Heh. Maybe. Laney made a pie and everything. Hey, how’s Mom?
(She crouched and looked under the bed, finding a volleyball, rollerblades, and a trash-bag full of junk).
In her happy place-at the big table doing a puzzle with a cat in her lap.
Awww, yay.
Hey, listen-can you do me a favor?
What’s that?
(She pulled open the drawers of the dresser, then peeked behind it).
Well, I’m working on this thing. Something I’m writing.
Oh?
Yeah. Would you take a look at it?
What?! Wow! You’ve never asked me to before…
(She skimmed the top of the desk).
I know, I know. It’s for this big writing thing I’m doing. Anyway, I really just want another opinion. I kind of love it and I kind of hate it.
Okay, yeah. Sure. Sure! Yeah, I’d love to.
Thanks, Char! I really appreciate it. I need your eyes and ears.
Ears?
Oh, it’s a song.
(She opened the top desk drawer and pulled out a hand-held voice recorder).
I’ll send it to you in a couple days, okay?
Okay!
Thanks again, Char! Love you.
Love you too, KyKy.
Ugh, let that one go, will you?
She stared at the dull plastic thing in her hands.
Ricky never sent the song. He died suddenly of a stroke, days after their call. He hadn’t displayed any symptoms of COVID-19, but he died anyway. Just died. For nothing. They wouldn’t understand until years later why, in the first year of outbreaks, there had been a rash of healthy young adults dying from severe strokes-the kind who typically befell victims with a median age of 74.
She stared and stared at the thing, chest unmoving.
When she learned that her childhood neighborhood had finally flooded, she knew she was out of time. She had been putting it off for decades. This last favor. This last conversation.
Her thumb pressed the power button, without her intent or consent. Shockingly, the tiny green screen lit up, its old-fashioned batteries holding some charge after all this time.
Her lungs ached. She pressed the play button.
A voice, unbidden:
It's a trick of the lightning,
lightening my load
She clutched her throat as it loosed a wail-a hoarse, splintering cry pressed out from the weight of 39 years. She turned it off.
“I can’t do it, KyKy. I can’t.”
She waited. There was no answer. No shift in the prickling dust-laden air. No angelic breeze.
“Come on, Charlotte..”
“Come on…”
“This one last thing.”
She restarted the recording.
It's a trick of the lightning
lightening my load.
It's too quick to be frightening,
no things told.
If I wait here
through a thousand more years,
will I be a sage
or a marigold?
It's a trick of the lighthouse
housing my first hope.
Is the beacon inside doused?
The day won't show.
If the night comes
past a millenium,
will light be unblocked
or the rocks below?
It's a trick of the lightness
nesting in my mind.
It's too thick to be slight lest
it subside.
If you find me
in eternity,
will we be unmoored
or enduring time?
Coarse fingertips softly pushing lips closed in the gasping quiet.
“I don’t know, Ricky.”
“I don’t know.”