Night (an excerpt)

How many nights did she sit, tumbler finger-wrapped, pupils wide to catch whatever faint light the lone streetlamp filtered through the flat's dingey windows?

The circular wooden table was drenched in a faded, tidy gingham. She knew which floorboards squeaked, where to step silently when she pushed back to rise before falling to dent the already-slumping mattress.

For now, just her fingers moved. She slipped knuckles round the rim like hands on a clock: a day passed, a year, an eon, while the seconds ticked off between arriving home exhausted to tumble into bed, and tomorrow returning early.

Squeaks sometimes escaped, like a kitten or pup or three boys rumbling. Unbidden her left hand reached up, touched her temple and the locks cupping her ear: she remembered running hair, flowing hair, short bristles or longer bangs, each belonging to a pair of shorts and skinned knees and shy lips.

The girls slept.  She could hear their even breathing – no simulacrum of slumber, fake inhales and exaggerated exhales - but the steady rhythm of chests rising automatically. Would she dream of flying tonight? Of sitting beneath the orange tree guarding the edge of that orchard? Or would whistles and klaxons blare, and the dirt rise up to coat the street like an angry wave of soldiers?

An eon ended, and Jean raised the whiskey to her dry lips, sipped, swallowed, and placed the empty on the cloth. Tomorrow she’d clean it. As she rose she changed her mind and took the glass to the sink, swirling cold water with fingertips then placing it on the rack. Her toothbrush was there, somewhere, but she ignored it.  The board creaked when she stepped but not loudly enough to stir her daughters. She glided through the doorway, slipping off her dress all of a piece with removing her shoes, absently draping it over the chairback, before carefully removing her hose; they ran so easily.

The thin blanket swallowed her as best it could. Another night and her sons slept in a dorm fifty miles distant.  Her heart floated out the window, covered in moonlight and rain and swam against the night current to brush the brows of her non-orphan sons who lived among orphans; if only they knew to feel their mother’s touch enough to murmur but not wake with its brush.

She wondered, do any of those lost boys remember the silk of their mother’s hands?