The local library won’t charge fines anymore for overdue items. The pressure is off. I can take my honeyed time with books I treasure, and the ones that deserve a second look, even the ones that make me want to slap them shut. I can let them pile up, reshuffle, dust them off, and return when I’m good and ready.
If only all aspects of life were like that, I think as I pull the garbage toter out into our dark alley. If only it were all open-ended. The future would be a saunter. Then I pull some more.
When fridge shelves appear bare without prior notice, so much I can see crumbs from last month’s bread, I panic. A smattering of shriveled lacinato kale. Here and there, a tidbit of dried cheddar clinging to open space. A sneaky bill smushed into the back of the mailbox, discovered at the eleventh hour. Incessant calls from the clinic when a test needs to be run, and run again, and a follow-up appointment scheduled to pursue flowcharts paths of patient compliance. All those, I want to postpone them, definitively and definitely indefinitely when I’m just not feeling it. I rustle up nonlinear increments of time when I can dig toes into mossy carpets or rich soil and not feel like my head is crumbling as it spins out of orbit.
When I hear my firstborn laugh at whatever shenanigans our pocket-sized rescue mutt just cooked up, that’s when I feel in the fold, suspended. And that fluff dog, the way its eyes glaze over when it peers up and rests its chin on the back of my hand without asking permission? For a lifelong minute? That’s time suspended. And this kid, the way it expels bubbles of 19-year young laughter? Bright echoes of toddlerhood? Indefinite snippets.
When I’m busy-making in the kitchen, never enough fingers or minutes for all the dishes, all the sorting, cleaning, cooking and scraping, I stop and look up. Across the window feeder with the special mix, I lock eyes with house sparrows and black-capped chickadees. Become them. Fluttering levitation: gravity rejected. Full belly and crisp chirps, for what in another world might be a minute. But not in mine.
When I wrap myself in stories, the kind that settle around hips and shoulders, offer a bean-shaped pillow for my neck and a stuffed cylindrical one for the back of my knees – the kind of story that acts as food and water and parent to boot – that’s when I undulate. Gratitude for a page or two of story comes in waves. Fantastic droplets hang, suspended by gravity and yet not.
So I’m baffled when the black squirrel, hungrily brazen, or brazenly hungry, charges our yard and sends songbirds into flight, then dangles, upside down, from the most convenient branch and feasts on a squishy apple or a retrieved walnut. What a head rush. How I, then, mix roasted pumpkin seeds with dark chocolate chips in a green medicine cap, repeatedly and more frequently as the afternoon gallops on. I tell myself this is to nourish what needs nourishing, namely the craving critter inside of me. On repeat. It’s enlightening how such things repeat.
My grandma and my mom would say, simultaneously but split at the existential seam by space and time, Oh, how do I look forward to my bed! before tucking themselves in beneath billowing goose comforters. Every night, now, when I’ve slipped on plucky socks and carried my plain water and not-so-plain novel up the stairs, I quietly whisper, Oh, how do I look forward to my bed before diving beneath the blue-treed quilt. I pilfer words when time isn’t looking.
Never mind that one night, I dream we go on vacation and leave two bunnies in too-tall window sills without food or water. I briefly wake to what I think is the smell of excrement, and when I doze back into this brooding nightmare, one of them laps up pressed kibble, but the other one’s lower jaw retracts so much from dehydration that its visage freezes mid-scream, with teeth gleaming like scythes, desperately trying to eat. Scrabbling. Unable. I’d like to say I whip up sleepy fairy dust and fix the sweet bunny into forgetful, forgiving, fluffy aliveness. I’d like to.
Then, I’m glad I wake up for good and go digging for my childhood’s stuffed bunny: ratty brown fur, lustrous eyes, and the black nose about to fall off (again, or still, I’m not sure the thread by which it hangs was knotted by my mom in a time when time existed). It smells of dust, and of attic blankets. Of well-loved books. A little bit of grass and bird food. Of snippets and giggles, for sure of those.
Some giggles materialize when you hold hands and saunter through the neighborhood and pretend the last scans didn’t show spots that, for all you knew, could have been ladybugs fighting over aphids or ink splotches smeared across the perfect poem. But, oh the giggles, and surely also the sideways glances you used to sneak before leaping under a blanket together, or when library books were due or else dues happened but you read them to each other anyway until the very last word. Back when just the little stuff ruled and you thought of time and place as concrete. Then you learned. Snippets.
If time were definitive, it would command reverence, wouldn’t it?
–
Alina Zollfrank from (former) East Germany loathes wildfire smoke and writes in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in Last Leaves, Thimble, The Braided Way, Wordgathering, Feral, Two Thirds North, Red Ogre Review, Nude Bruce Review, October Hill Magazine, Psaltery & Lyre, Pulse, Invisible City, and others.
© 2024, Alina Zollfrank
Halfway Down the Stairs 