Velvet Summer
By Calla Smith
The story rocked the small town. One Christmas, the son of the elderly couple that lived on the corner had gotten drunk and shot his girlfriend with a shotgun over some argument. Everyone had learned about it in a matter of hours, and the Petersons had immediately put the house up for sale.
I was away from home when it happened, but when I got back shortly after, I drove past the old farmhouse. It was dark and forbidding, like a warning on the open fields. Although, when I thought about it, it always had been. I could still remember riding past the house on my way home from school, stopping to find shade in the large branches of the oak tree, making myself comfortable in the bed of sharp orange leaves, and savoring the crisp air of the early fall. Soaking in the sun and the protection offered by being alone those final moments before setting foot in my house, where my siblings always seemed to take up the space that should have been mine, while my father sat out on the porch with a beer waiting for my mother to get home from work. Home, where I would climb the tree in the front yard and hide in branches in the velvety summer evenings.
But on that trip back home, the house was different. Everyone was there, but we were no longer vying for attention. And my father had long stopped waiting for my mother to come back.
He was now nothing more than an old shell of a man, starting to hunch over as he walked, skin tough and deeply tanned by so many years of working the earth in his large straw had that was now hung with the coats in the mudroom. I could feel the tiredness with every blink of his eyes. I could feel the exhaustion creeping into the old house, the floorboards so worn down they didn’t even squeak as I made myself a cup of warm milk in the early morning. Anything to try and go back to sleep. Anything to try and get through the day.
I heard that the Peterson boy had been arrested already, and he had confessed. He was facing what would probably be the rest of his life in prison. He would have always ended up like that anyway. He hadn’t been able to escape from the small one-street town, and the dust slowly creeping up on us after so many years of drought. I wondered if this was, somehow, his escape from the sorrow of the land.
As I sat with my father, watching the sunrise in the early mornings of my visit, he squeezed my hand and told me that he always remembered his early coffees with me before heading out to work the land. And I nodded and said I remembered those days, too, and turned before he could see the tears in my eyes as I thought back to when I would pack lunches for my younger sister before school. Tried not to remember the sparkle in her eyes or the energy in her laugh. I couldn’t let myself.
My older siblings had all left home by the time my mother drove up in her old rusty Volvo and packed all her things without saying a word. She didn’t need to say anything. We already knew it was the night’s silence, the muffled world waiting for us on winter mornings. She needed something else and couldn’t stop herself from finding it anymore. So, it was just the three of us –my father, sister, and I. And that was enough for those years. I was born in that silence my mother abhorred; I belonged to it. Our house was finally quiet without so much noise and distraction.
The calm had left my sister without the overpowering need to get away, though, and she never had. Now, she never would.
On the day of the funeral, I stood next to my father, silently trying to hold him up through the tears running down my face. The rest of my siblings were somber as well. My sister had always been our baby. We had all known that she could have taken on the world if she had wanted. But that was no longer going to happen. She had met the Peterson boy, and now it was too late.
I stayed with my father for a few more weeks until he could at least go about his quiet routine. But when I drove out of town and past the ghost house on the corner, I knew I would never come back again.
THE END
Author Bio: Calla Smith grew up with a love of words and languages. She immigrated to Argentina in 2019 and has been enthusiastically exploring Buenos Aires since then. She has self-published her collection of short stories “What Doesn’t Kill You,” and her work has also appeared in Immigration Diaries and Bright Flash Literary Review.