Day of the Grasshopper
By Jason Boling
This is who brought me into the world. Her water-blue eyes floating in her head with her mouth down and her face is on me but her eyes are cornered to the TV with Pat Sajak and Vanna White, and she lights another too-long Salem menthol and I button my jacket and leave her sitting in her robe and I walk out under a perfect photograph sky and the screen door clatters itself shut behind me with a sound like I was never born.
And outside there’s a charcoal smell in the air. The couple living across the street set up a scene around their outdoor grill. Every night in the summer. Living room chairs, a lamp with an extension cord. A little table. They move their lives outside. He lights the coals and fans the flames while she arranges the furniture and pillows, nervous and attentive, getting everything just right. This happens nearly every evening from May to the end of September. They cook their hot dogs and burgers and the smoke creeps and meanders around the neighborhood like a vagrant oblivious to how stoned he looks asking you for a dollar. I’ve never talked to them.
I start the car and drive away and this front-yard scene disappears in the rearview mirror fast.
The phone is already ringing as I unlock the door. I drop my keys in the bowl and the room smells like cigarettes and I pick up the receiver and she’s already saying,
“I keep having this dream where I’m in the medicine cabinet, shaking out pills, and then later I’m mixing them in a cup…feeling how to turn and slip the capsules apart. Touch them to my tongue and they begin to melt. Crushing the hard ones. Blue and orange and everything. And he’s so little and I’m spooning it to him and he’s just swallowing it and then I go to drink the rest but it’s all gone and I keep wiping his mouth but the white stuff won’t stop coming and coming and the cup is for sure empty and the pills are all gone too and there’s nothing left to crush and after that Julian disappears for a while. Isn’t that weird?”
Over the phone you can hear the size of the house. The big windows and the light inside. You can hear the bunk beds in the back and kitchen noise. The others milling around creating a wash of sound so subliminal, you only notice it when it stops.
“You know what it was like?” she says.
I dig in my pockets for nothing and shrug as if she can see me.
“It’s like the size of the sky.”
“What is?”
“Nothing. I don’t know,” she says. “You’re the only one I could ever talk to.”
Off receiver she says,
“Okay. Fine. I’m done. Listen. I have to go—” And the line goes dead and I light a cigarette and turn on the radio and the kitchen faucet is dripping and there’s a pile of dishes in the sink and I haven’t even touched them.
* * *
I knew it was her tapping on my window. Asleep I knew it. I was dreaming all different combinations of war, cigarettes, and babies. First the tapping was a soft summer rain, then movie theater popcorn spilling in the seats, and then the crickets were trying to open the window, and then I knew it was her and I opened my eyes, alive again in the dark.
I slid out of bed, flipped on the light, and dressed quickly, promising myself I wouldn’t ask how she managed to get away.
She was turned to the side watching the street when I opened the door.
“Go for a ride?” she said. “I’m starving.”
* * *
The skin at the end of her fingers was red and her nails were chew-short and rolling and tapping on the table. The café was bright and empty except for a corner of women in identical green scrubs who had the same dark hair and stirred their coffee with tinkling spoons and never said a word. She ordered coffee with pie and the waitress looked at her clothes and then at me and I nodded and she walked away satisfied that when the check came, there wouldn’t be any kind of problem.
“It’s just I can’t keep my screws tight anymore,” she said, wet-eyed, lighting another cigarette and blowing out smoke, pushing her hair behind her ears. And seeing her fingers move, I became a bright-blue bird, flittering just above the trees, squinting in the sun, quick and flashing like a dime in a stream, and I knew all about the seasons of the wind and the terror of the cold and I could choke on the beauty of it, and with a flourish of her hands she said, “They’re falling out everywhere.”
* * *
We drove out to the state line and parked in the gravel to watch the pump jacks run. Barbed wire stretched away, snagging the trash, and the plastic bags snapped and hummed in the wind like prayer flags. Pipe flares above the derricks burned and crayon-oranged the sky so much that the weight of it fell and settled down around us and I felt like we must have been made and thrown into a forgotten pile by some bored adolescent god.
“When do you have to go?”
“Tomorrow,” she said and flipped her cigarette and it arced to the ground like ashes to ashes. “Therapist and the judge got together and decided they’ve had enough.”
“No way around it?”
She shook her head.
“How long?”
“Long as they say.”
* * *
And I think of her right now, back in town, sucked into her recliner. A tumble of pill bottles on the table. The forever-blue light of the TV. The couple across the street have finished their alfresco dinner and they’re drinking beer and talking and watching the headlights pass on the street with their glassy bovine eyes.
Our brains have convinced us that comfort is more precious than freedom.
Our hearts have hidden the fact that grief is the price we pay for love.
* * *
She slid off the hood and brought out two more beers. High golden thunderheads backlit in the dawn far away. We drank for a while in human silence. Just the wind. The whole world was moving away and we just sat there getting smaller and smaller. She lit two cigarettes, handed one to me, and put the pack away somewhere. A trace of wet on the filter from her lips.
“I’ll tell Mother you’re coming to get some things and you can take him home.”
“Take who home?” I said. The cicadas in the mesquite were falling off and going quiet one by one.
“Julian. My mother won’t take care of him while I’m gone. She won’t even look at him. I’ll tell her you’re coming and he can go home with you.”
And I knew there must be a reason for doing this, but it’s buried so deep and far away, I couldn’t find it if I tried.
She poured the rest of her beer into the scrub by the road. “It’s just for a while. Till I get back.”
The birds were slowly coming alive and trying their luck in the sky one more time and I could find no reason at all to fight anything ever again.
“We should go. If they find out I’m gone, I might never come back at all,” she said.
* * *
Some of the others were in front of the house when I dropped her off. Milling around in uniforms like hers. The cruel ill-fit of an orderly or an inmate. Some were raking leaves or bundling bags of trash, all of them scratching at their bracelets and stretching in the dawn.
I stopped two houses down and across the street.
“I’ll call when I get there,” she said. “If they let me.”
Her eyes were as green and far away as Venus. She stared at me for a moment like I was a piece of a dream that chipped and fell off somewhere along the way.
“And you promise to watch over him?”
“Promise,” I said. “Try to call.”
A few of the others raised their hands from their work as she cut straight across the lawn and went into the house and disappeared like forest-fire ashes floating to the ground.
If you hold very still, your heartbeat is strong enough to move you.
You can almost hear it.
But it’s nothing that holy.
It’s just a reminder that you’re close to home. Wherever you are.
* * *
They strapped her in the first seat available. Driver’s side. The bus pulled away from the house like buses are always pulling away from everywhere.
And sitting on the bus, rocking with the road and the noise all around her, eyes closed, in her mind she began to drift and she witnessed them come in a sky-blackening plague and they did eat all the fruit and trees of the land and when finished, they fell upon the earth in a final darkness that put out the candles and any hope of everlasting love forever amen.
They never let her call.
* * *
Her mother answered the door, folding her arms with two fingers out in a way that stood her cigarette up like a flagpole. Her mouth was down at the corners like a leather tool made tough by being worked.
“She left a note,” she said. “It’s back here.”
The hall was lined with family photos in frames hanging crooked and many of them with broken glass spiderwebbed across their fronts. The bathroom doorframe splintered at the latch and the knob hanging loose and a faint smell like kerosene or gas was being covered up with something like fabric softener sprayed or poured in the corners.
“It just got to be where I couldn’t do it anymore,” she said.
The door at the end of the hall was locked from the outside. She lifted the handle a little and unlocked it with a key.
“Sometimes,” she said, “everything you got just isn’t enough.”
* * *
Her room was cool and empty except for a thin table, a stripped bed, and a large bird cage covered in a sheet with a yellow duck print. It sat in the corner with a gravity that bent the floor so everything rolled and circled toward it. It sat alone. A talisman. A warning of a terrible peace that had finally come.
* * *
I could have said,
Come now, and we’ll explore the forbidden treeline together.
Flying the same tattered flags
Like ghosts let out of a rotten room.
I could have just kept driving.
At any moment, any of us could just keep driving.
But we never do.
* * *
Pulling back the sheet, the grasshopper was made of papier mâché and the size of a shih tzu, moth-eaten and bleached on one side like it had been left in a sunny window. Dusty and sad like an old state-fair prize. God knows where she got it. Twisted wires where it was missing a leg and one eye had been replaced with something that looked like a dyed Easter egg. Its half-folded wings were made of crepe paper wrinkled in a way that they might have once been made to move. As if they held all its magic, the antenna were intact, thick as chopsticks and bent forever in an expression of confused surprise.
I loaded it into the back seat more carefully than I thought I would and checked it in the mirror a few times, half hoping it would do or say something. But true to the customs of the world, it never made a sound.
* * *
The couple across the street are gone but the grill and the chairs and the lamp are still standing in the yard. I hadn’t noticed the rug under the table; it’s there too. A scene as still and quiet as an old painting where the artist tried to get the perspective just close enough to fool you.
“I brought you something,” I say, and she turns her face but not her eyes.
The toddler cup I found for her has a no-spill top that fits her glass, but she still dribbles her wine. Not as bad as before, but still. The stain on her robe has taken on a fractal pattern. The crusty edges like waves sloughing back from some full-color nebulae in National Geographic.
I napkin her chin and neck.
“Oh baby, thank you.”
She says this every time.
“What time is Pat Sajak on?”
She says,
“Put Pat Sajak on.”
The TV shadows jump and strobe and the room is warm with wine and a low blue stratus layer of cigarette smoke. Her heavy recliner creaks a bit as she leans over and thumps her cigarette and recrosses her legs.
I always tell her I’m going to see some friends.
I tell her I’ll be in before eleven and Pat Sajak is back after commercials.
THE END
Author Bio: Jason Boling is a member of the Writers’ League of Texas and dreams of a world where cowards are shamed, art is rewarded, and jobs are optional. He writes short fiction and poetry using the pen name Jon Fotch. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Avalon Literary Review, Avatar Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, BoomerLitMag, Brushfire Literature & Arts Journal, Carbon Culture Review, Caveat Lector, The Conglomerate, Courtship of Winds, Evening Street Review, Euphony Journal, Flights, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Hungry Chimera, Literally Stories, The Meadow, Menda City Review, moonShine Review, Mudlark, Queen’s Quarterly, riverSedge: A Journal of Art and Literature, Scoundrel Time, SLAB, Umbrella Factory Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Waving Hands Review, and Whistling Shade.