3. A Man Rings Twice

Before the layoffs, there was nothing that worried Gertrude Sands.

Wind down the hill. 'Twas nothing.

Hail through the sky. Nothing.

Fire about the chapel. Nothing.

But now she shook as she ate her oatmeal, looking out her window in indecision. The grass was green, tinged with yellow. The skies were blue, sprawling in clouds. And the door was ever closed, like the house was not meant to be entered or exited. She grabbed her watch, and slapped it around her wrist, striding to the front door, oatmeal left partial.

This was no way to spend her morning. No way to spend her days. She was still young and still mobile -- so she should start acting like it!

A knock rattled the door, and the woman stopped mid-step.

"Yes?" she asked, after an unsure pause. "Who is it?"

She heard laughter outside the door, but was too afraid to open it. She summoned her stomach voice. "Who is it? Say something if you hear me!"

A thud bristled against the door. Gertrude jumped and stumbled behind a wall. She watched as a shadow moved past the peephole and, finally, followed with an exchange of words -- a marvelous, strange, peculiar subset of words and diction, spoken as if through a megaphone and electric modulator simultaneously. A jumble, that through her perking ears sounded like so.

"Have you ever considered the fall of a wabbagoobadook, Miss Sands? You empty the storage and harangue the kind but effervescent as the skin of a sabre in moonlight to moonlight to lamp-fall to arid tundra, you trickle down the back of an imaginary lamppost and realize, I see because you see what I don't. You see what I don't because I see you, that you see yourself in me. Every atom found in me is in you you YOU.

"Perhaps in time the clock will wind, the shores will cease, the flounders will appropriate and the given will give and the received will receive with extremities remiss, or timidly in bliss, or tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk'd! Perhaps you will find within your body the roman and the clef, the shake and the hum, and give in to expulsion, incursion, recursion, and fits!

"But only in and not out and there not without.

"That, Miss Sands, is why the house is alone, the doorbell rings once.

And you sit like a lion on its food, **** from rotta-rot-rot!"

"No!"

"Yes!"

"NO!"

Huh?

A flash overtook her, and suddenly she wasn't at home. She was...

Right there.

pick!

Plucked with her very finger, the adolescent guest circles the stem of a daisy, and smiles.

How many flowers did they have? The world, that is. Many flowers. Tens and tens of flowers.

She was all she had. She was just a girl. But flowers -- there were so many of them. And so many alike, and so many different, and so many many flowers.

"I think I like... violets."

She liked violets,

she thought.

Stepping away from the door, the woman's clothes pooled at the carpet. Her eyes flustered at the beating fan. Lost and swirling and carnally inept, Gertrude flew into the chimney. The ash a sheet across her body. The gargle slurped. The bubbles crackled. Fst, fst, fst. Womp womp womp.

Hair tossed over her shoulder like 1999. Grabbing herself. Pulling her skin. Squeezing her armpits. Gertrude laid spittle on the scaffolds. Her vagina hungered after her deft fingers. Stooping, and harrumphing, Mediterranean parcel in a bed of nail.

Hoo, she breathed. Hah, to each lung, and again. And repeat. Until the noon became night, and night day, after day after day after day: partial oatmeal, hunkered silverware on a squiggly cracked plate, creaky chair legs, slumped and tapering over the dust of angels by a window, a window stolid, translucent, with nothing but an outside of blah-blahs and GLACKs, that never lent favors, that never said different things, that never gave life, that never knew how to please or to bestow pleasure, only calcify, and subpoena, to discard consolation, to pin to the intersection of wall in a crowded diner and lean close, as if to hear you needed to drive your gaze into the other's soul and shatter it with a ringing whisper.

After the layoffs,

"Hagh,"

I remembered the old woman at the house,

"Eurgh,"

and missed her. A lot. She always liked smelling me.

"HNNNGG!"

Ginger white spilled out of Gertrude's pores, excavating her vagina. Through the ceiling it seeped, thick and creamy. A boy on a bicycle whizzed past the widow's house, past a wooden sign that spelled out the name of a town, the one he was departing. Neither eye veered its way. It was dusty and old and never maintained anyway.

"Crap," as firmly and staunchly as he could, he pumped each pedal, around and around again, eyes blinking out dry specks. "Crap, crap, crarp, cap, cruahp!"