Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [33]
She stood at the kitchen table, refusing to sit. She burned more calories standing. Already, her body was chilled, her skin springing into goose flesh. She looked down at her hands and noted the strange bluish color. This was something new. Just like the lightheaded feeling when she stood up quickly. She wrote her schedule in small letters, numbering each task, listing the amount of time for each one. The cubes of egg white looked like granite blocks on her plate. She lined them up in grids, a small pile for each direction, north, south, east, and west. After she finished her calculus, she could eat the northern pile. After finishing the calc, she let one pile of cubes plunk dangerously into her belly. She waited an hour before eating the next pile and by then she was done with her chemistry and well into rewriting her history notes. She loved the way her schoolwork looked in the late hours of the night, each pile of work lined up perfectly straight. When she wrote, she used a precisely sharpened pencil, so that errors could be erased, and rubbed clean. By the time she was done with her homework, the books were lined up on the Formica counter, ready to be stuffed in her book bag early Monday morning. Two piles of egg cubes were left, and because her belly did not feel expanded, she pierced the rest with one tine of the fork, careful not to touch her teeth. This last group of creamy cubes had to wait on her tongue, pressing them to the roof of her mouth. The cubes had to compress into flat compliance, then of their own will, they dissolved, traveling the long journey over the rough backside of the tongue, down where throat muscles must squeeze and push and escort the flecks of egg to the unwelcome cavern of the stomach. She knew she had to wait, uneasy, and that she had to count to one hundred several times because she promised to eat, to let the cubes stay in her body. The dog, who labored in determination to come down the stairs to be with her, positioned his black body at her feet. His body glowed with warmth and she placed her feet under the blanket of his belly.
Chapter 9
“Dear, do you want to kill something?” asked Tess.
“No. I want to learn archery, feel the Zen of centering, pulling the bow, then the release,” said Rocky.
The dog stood up and with the barest limp, repositioned between the women and the door. Tess winced, as she always did when she saw the dog limp. She squeezed her shoulders up to her ears, then released them with a shuddering sigh and shook herself.
“There is something oddly perverse about you wanting to learn about bows and arrows after this dog was nearly killed by a fool shooting him.”
“I know, but I can’t stop thinking about it,” said Rocky. “You would think I would be repulsed by the idea of archery, but I’m not. I don’t want the dog to know. I mean I won’t do it around him. I won’t even keep the stuff here. I’ll go over to the mainland. I looked up some places.”
“Why don’t you take up Tai Chi or Qi Gong. Why must you allow yourself to be pulled to something so hard and straight, and without mercy?”
Tess was helping Rocky winterize her cottage. They hung plastic on the windows in the living room and her bedroom. Rocky plugged in her hair dryer and aimed it at the plastic that was attached to the window frame with double-stick tape. All the fold marks from the packaging remained. She aimed the hair dryer slowly up and down, making a path from top to bottom following the directions on the cardboard insert.
“Oh, that noise!” said Tess, putting her hands over her ears. “It’s bright green and disagreeable. That hair dryer must be as old as I am. I’ll be outside until you finish.”
Rocky kept shrink wrapping her windows and paused for a moment wondering what it would be like to be Tess and have sharp noises be green, see the days of the week as big cubes that each hold their own niche in space. When Tess learned that Rocky was interested, she let her know more and more of her synesthete world. Tess didn’t hide it from people, but she didn’t elaborate unless she knew someone was truly