3 Days In

This story is by RoCour Lynn and was part of our 2024 Spring Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.

Monday: Interactions 

“I can’t stand rentals! It’s the people that drive them you know?? Or like, what they leave behind. You never know what might happen when you get the keys. A bum door jam….. One slacking window wiper!” 

J’s texts expand on my screen like water over glass. Slow at first, then all encompassing. As I read them the words multiply. Short sentences spaced at irregular intervals. 

She’s marking herself. She’s marking each mile from Washington to Indiana. She’s coming to visit me and can’t wait. I’m not sure where I fit in this interaction. Part of me can wait. Part of me is waiting and waiting, this part is separate though. Not connected to J at all, so I don’t tell her about it. 

I scroll up to her last message. She should be here anytime. I’ve known this for hours now yet my hair remains, a knotted damp twist on top of me. My knuckles hurt because they are naked and tired. My weight lifting gloves are on the table next to the window where C is working, he’s chipping off the old paint on the house to make space for a new coat. The wood smells nice but the noise is constant like a drill near a cave. C knows this annoys me, so he doesn’t remind me to grab the gloves on my way out to the garage. 

What C doesn’t know is that the projects are piling up and it’s changing the house. Stripping it bare. The house is stripping him too. Taking the weight off his body. Taking the force of his mind, so that his face looks strained and hollowed. A delicate shell compressed by the ocean. Watching this process for months, a year, another. It’s rearranging me in a way I can’t understand. I’m lifting weights over my head to keep myself from looking around me too long. To keep myself calm. To keep my words from spilling out of me on the page. To keep us together. C tells me to wait. Wait a little longer. 

Two hours later a dark red Nissan pulls into the gravel drive. J swings the driver side open and exhales my name. Her eyes scan every mangled oak branch along the walking path before she meets mine and tangles me in a damp embrace. The dense humidity affecting her body reminds me of our home up north. She smells like it. A smokey pine pitch. Time has marked the corners of her eyes slightly, so that her smile looks long, her cheeks full. She leans back, as C offers to carry her bags inside. She clasps his stained hands without hesitation. I wonder how long her fearlessness will last. I crave it, that feeling, I can’t remember my last interactions with it. 

Tuesday: Dinner 

Today is stranger. It’s stranger than my initial response. Like my body giving water back to the ocean, ignoring the holes opening wider and wider underneath me. 

Like seeing J on her cot this morning. She’s stretched out completely, her arms and legs extending to their wholeness, a natural morning stretch after hours of lying still. A physical good morning. Separating an alive body from an unliving one. 

What’s strange is I can’t tell my body apart. 

So I walk into the room carefully, trying to keep my feet on the level spots of the floor that don’t squeak. She beckons me in with a bend of two fingers. She points to a smaller luggage tucked into the corner away from the others and tells me to open it. It’s full of crystals. She twists around on the cot springs, each aching from the weight of her body, she smiles soft, and explains the rocks. Most of them she found during her visit in Texas. With each new shape in my hand her eyes light up, she recalls the hiking trails. Her sister giving her a separate case to carry them in because J likes order with her simplicity. It’s that known fact between us that binds us, from accidental friends to two people trying to fill in the holes of life with anything that seems familiar. 

What’s stranger about today is I’ve been showing J around the house and she’s acting like it’s natural. Like it’s hers. Like she’s been here for years. She’s acting like me, or really me before waiting. It’s like talking to a stranger.

Like when we’re preparing for dinner, and I’m telling her the process. 

We keep the cooler downstairs because we don’t have a fridge.The humidity clumps everything together upstairs. J  nods and places her cooler ceremoniously next to ours like marking her space in a sacred burial ground. She arranges her items needed for dinner on top so she can reach them with ease. I haven’t checked inside ours because C does the cooking usually, J offers to cook tonight. 

She’s standing in the kitchen dicing jalapenos into salsa. A box fan props the back door open and the warm stream of breeze cools our bare feet. She’s dipping salsa on a spoon and then into my mouth. The heat of it almost distracts my senses.The urgency remains. It keeps me rooted to the counter at an awkward angle, not too close to the plates or the vegetables, it keeps my knee shaking over the other.  I’m alert to the need to move, but unable to move as naturally as she does. We watch two mosquito eaters toe tap against the back door. One is struggling to keep up with the other. 

Wednesday: Crossroads 

 

Patoka lake fans around us like ivy glass. Bathwater, slightly warm with a hint of cool. J cuts through the water, breaking the surface in two breaths, her outline a faint mass against the muddy green. I keep my feet planted firm to the shallow end, and welcome the gentle bends from the waves. The chilled breath of the air on my damp neck reminds me of the northern Spring back home. Chilled memories, the waters easier to see through. 

J swims another lap and then she appears in front of me under a mass of glossed red hair.

“How’s your writing class going? It’s your second one right? I’ve read some. It’s really good so far.” 

“Thank you. I’m glad it’s online, easier with our traveling. It’s a small class so I like that I get to see everyone more through how they write.” I say, not knowing what to really say. Truthfully the exercises are getting harder by the week. switching from poetry to fiction. I can tell a writer that poetry is beautiful but scary. The compression of form like a microscope strapped to my wrist. But to anyone else it’s just different kinds of lines. 

“He’s been trying to finish the house for a while.. We had an inspection a few weeks ago , we’ll need at least a new paint job, the deck and the roof needs work too, so C’s been doing that while we’re here in the warmer months. He wants to find help during our travels, see if anyone needs the work.” 

“What about you? Like it sounds like it could take a while right? If he’s working seasonal. I know that’s not something you do I mean.” 

“Work on these workshops, then maybe I can use that somewhere.” 

“Not here?” 

“Maybe.” Goosebumps sprout along the outlines of my arms making my skin sensitive, nerves electrified by water caught in the air. J’s tone is naturally light and curious, her eyes usually the same, are rooted to mine. 

Her presence in the house over a short time is zooming me in. Making me calm and irregular. Like walking with the broken breaths of a sprint. 

J checks google maps twice while we take the long way back. There’s a split in the road, we take the one that looks familiar but the trees are never reliable here. They grow when they grow, and when they grow they cover up every gap of space. We squint through them. We laugh some. We find the gravel drive back, C’s body ant like on the roof. He crawls near the window I glanced out of earlier that morning, while checking my mailbox on the screen. It was for a different story with a new notification. He is a new writer I hadn’t heard from yet, but read several times over class. Whoever he is, he writes in history, in lost fragments of time. His comment blinks in and out at the top of the screen: 

Great work! I’m curious, what if you take parts of your story and change the order? Swap the beginning with the middle? That could clear a new path for you.