By
Hillsman Heath
My uncle is a professor of Mark Twain, here in rural Ohio at a small private college. They have lots of money, the college, but are also always in need of more. Most people don’t notice me; that’s been true for a long time. Lately it’s so true that it’s more accurate to say no one ever sees me, at all. The light is really beautiful here. Pretty much any time of day. What the light coats shows it off to great advantage, so it’s a circular situation, a mutual admiration society between the landscape and the light. The landscape includes old campus buildings, buildings of stone and stained glass, of rubbed wood and brass, of burgundy carpets whose careful holding of your sound makes you feel sacred as you walk through your educational experience. The landscape includes trees, trees, and more trees, gentle slopes, remains of shacks moist with age and hosting sacredness with carpets of their own in ruby green. There’s dryness too, depending on your time of year – fields scraped and glaring whiteyellow, bugs, and the beds of tiny creeks. Houses, of professors, other college employees and farmers, also catch and play in the light, houses and farms and metal farm equipment. My uncle lives in a three bedroom house about ten minutes walk from the main street in town. The house does have a porch, on two sides, front and school-facing. The bedrooms are all upstairs, and downstairs gets the late afternoon light I love. The living room with its fireplace (unlit), olive green rug with a few deep red and white intricacies, and wooden furniture.
Yesterday, a girl saw me.
She was walking from the direction of school past our house. She stopped walking as her head whipped, tracking me. I almost fell.
She was older than I am, probably a student, although there is this one visiting professor who is so young, with beautiful long blond hair – poetry, her subject – so, who knows. But I’d say she’s a student. It’s cold time of year so she was wearing the dark wool navy coat and had her hands deep in the pockets. She looked sad.
Sometimes I leave my room, and go into the fields across the road. It’s different now. But it’s nice to be in what I usually see out the window. Plus I remember.
But so now there’s this sad girl in her heavy coat, who can see me. It needs some thought, some planning. Though thought does make up most of my day, and maybe this different occurrence is an opportunity for something different than thought.
The screen door just slammed. Uncle Jack’s shrugged off his leather jacket and draped it on the shoulders of the chair. It’s like his purse, that jacket. The inside pocket houses his wallet, the top zip pocket his chapstick, and the small snap pocket keeps change for a payphone. He knows from experience that you could spend all day searching and never find a payphone that works, due to cell phones. But he has change anyway, just in case.
Now he’s in the kitchen – well, except I just felt the screen door slam again.
There’s a glow, a golden light gentling in with steady power around my window. This window looks towards those fields.
He’s standing with the girl. They aren’t looking at the house. She just laughed. She doesn’t look cold. She just jumped and stomped her feet back and forth a few times. Her boots are huge, fake fur lined vinyl clodhoppers, wide with criss cross laces. I’ve worn those kind before. Heavy.
It’s her shoulders, and her head being up. She’s like a different person. I wonder how people see me. Even though they don’t. I wonder when they have what they saw. Looks like they’re coming inside. Nope. Oh, yes okay, now they’ve both disappeared, there’s the screen door. Laughter, both of them. The wall paper up here is so flat and pretty and old fashioned. It’s a pale, sage green, muted, with tiny flowers clustered here and there, sort of in circles or wreathes. Pale pinks, or pale something – lavender maybe. Lighter than the muted green background. Actually white with some purple edges. This wall paper comes up to trim painted smooth white, and of course the door’s the same smooth white. The window frames. Double hung windows. I can smell fire, from the fireplace, the strangely tiled fireplace. The tiles are bumpy and smooth. They are coated somehow, glazed, enameled, that’s the word, enameled. They’re right about four inches by four inches each.
I wish I could be close, be in it be connected! How can I do it, how can I do it? I seem to float over to the tidily made single bed, white quilted bedspread on as snug as a doll’s or a museum display. I lie down and sleep, feeling like I’m on fire and inside myself screaming to get out. If someone were looking at me they could see the fire I feel in my cheeks.