Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [105]
She looked down, was half covered over with a big black coat; she guessed it was Mister’s coat and pushed it over onto Bliss; she was warm enough since she’d slept in all of her clothes except for her plaid pile-lined coat. Her sisters had done the same. Shern had even slept in her gloves. She still had one on; the other she had stuffed into the pocket of the big black coat that had been their blanket. Victoria noticed the incongruity of the purple knitted glove peeking from the pocket of the oversized man’s wool coat.
Gray air poured in through the tall windows and the skylight, and now Victoria could see the room absent the shadows that had been everywhere in here last night, riding up and down the ceiling and the walls whenever Mister moved around the room with that candle flickering under the frosted glass globe. The makeshift coffee table in front of the couch where they’d slept was just that, two crates with a slab of wood on top, not the child-sized coffin, as it appeared to Victoria last night after her sisters had fallen asleep and she was wide-awake staring around the room, afraid to go to sleep, afraid some horrible tragedy would happen to them if she allowed herself to close her eyes on the room. The two overstuffed armchairs catty-corner to the couch were only chairs, not attack dogs waiting for a cue from Mister, the six odd-shaped cannon against the wall were actually their boots, taken off at Mister’s persuasion so that they wouldn’t catch pneumonia sleeping in fur-lined leather boots. Even Mister looked less threatening to Victoria under the gray daylight as he ambled into the room still wearing the orange and gray flannel shirt he’d worn the night before; he carried a small pot in one hand, three bowls in the other.
“Ah, you’re up, huh, middle one. Just in time for a bowl of hot cereal. Yeah. You like hot cereal?” He lined the bowls up quietly on the purple and gold scarved table and spooned up smooth clumps of Cream of Wheat into the three bowls.
“Yeah, glad you gals came by and graced my little home here. Not a bad home, I must say, cool in the summer ’cause the ceilings so high, warm in the winter thanks to my potbelly stove over there.”
He spoke softly, slowly. Surrounded with so much silence down here, he knew the power of a human voice. A steady tone of voice could sop up fear like a sponge, no matter what words were being spoken, just the connections of somebody’s breaths shaped and formed through their vocal cords, mixing with another’s ears going from the brain eventually to the heart, to calm it. So he kept his voice hushed and low; he let his words run together but in an unhurried way like a continuous, languishing hum.
“Nice amenities down here too,” he went on. “Running water, yeah. City didn’t shut the water off after the place reverted to them, too expensive to bleed the pipes in this old huge factory, so my man, Real Estate John, asked me to come in once a week and let the water run in the winter so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. I did him one better. I run it every day. Moved on in here and found this to be my best home yet. And I’ve lived in some good places, let me tell you. Yeah.”
Victoria didn’t say anything except for a whispered “Is that so?” Now that they’d lived through the night, Victoria was irritated, a strange thing for the usually understanding, compliant, peacemaking middle sister. But the sore on her leg was itching, and she had to go to the bathroom, and she was sorry she’d allowed her sisters to talk her away from Mae’s.
Mister opened miniature packets of granulated sugar and sprinkled the sugar over the cereal. The sugar sparkled under the early gray air falling in through the skylight and gave the sugar a pinkish hue. He went back into the other room and returned shortly with a container of powder and a glass of water. “I don’t think I want any,” Victoria said, as she watched the smoke rising off the cereal and realized that she was in fact hungry. But to gobble