You sit with your knees together, looking at the grimy corner where the walls meet, wait for the ringing in your ears to stop. You listen to the sounds behind you, trying to imagine what everyone is doing. Your family is dressing, eating breakfast, moving chairs around. Your Pa is slurping coffee at the kitchen table. Your Ma is at the sink, clinking plates and cups in the soapy water.
You know she is looking out the window, you can picture it. She hums when she does the dishes, usually. Not this morning, because Pa has been angry, and it gets on his last feckin’ nerve when she hums.
“Jaysus, Noreen, pick a feckin’ tune and stick wid it, for Crissake.” he says. If she picked one, she’s humming it in her head.
You look down at the floor and see a spiderweb filling the space there, cluttered with dust bits and the pieces of insects that have been left from other breakfasts. You see the web flutter, see the spider tiptoe out onto the white lace to read the menu.
Your Ma gave you a piece of toast, just before, and you put it in your pocket. You can feel it against your leg there, a little reassurance. You wished for a little jam, maybe, but there’s none in the larder, none coming soon.
You watch the spider for a moment longer, tempted to crush it with your toe, but you take pity on it, maybe the only pity in the room, other than what your Ma can muster for you sitting there in the corner. Except you know she’s not saving it for you when she can easily use it herself.
When your Pa cuffed you in the head it made you see stars, and then see nothing at all. When you sat up, everything was fuzzy and you had this ringing in your ears. Now you can see clearly. You can see the corner, the paint the color of jaundice, the crack in the plaster, the dirt stuffed into the creases. The spider, who is more optimistic than you. But the ringing in your ears is still there; it is the theme music to this life.
You will wait until he’s off to his shift at the shop. That’s a good eight hours, plus a stop at the pub after. Money for a pint, but not for jam. He wouldn’t be home until dark. He’d never go looking for you in the dark.
You can already see the road outside of the edge of the village, leading into the hills. Somewhere beyond that is another village, and somewhere, you can’t picture it because you don’t know it, there is a city. You know that wherever that is there is a chance for you.
You hear the things being gathered and your sisters tittering and whispering, trying to get out the door to school without bringing attention to themselves. Himself is already up and moving to the door, you know he has his lunch pail, his helmet hooked on his hip.
You hate that you will leave your Ma with all of this, but you know she’d leave it with you in a heartbeat. She would go and not look back. She knows the bible, that thing about Lot’s wife. No pillar of salt, oor Ma.
The house is quieter now, you listen to the people walking by on the row outside, some kids calling to each other, some men off to work, laughing, trading forgettable words just to fill the silent morning.
You watch the spider inspecting the corner. It dances across the triangle it created, the world it wove. So much cleaner than the filthy intersection of plaster and wood that it spans. You barely know what to do with this thought, how this mindless arachnid can make a better life than the complex specie it shares the space with.
The back door opens and your Ma steps out to slop the dishwater into the backyard, and the door slams behind her and rattles loosely in the jamb. If she could feel the courage you have been saving up, she would run now. But you can’t share it with her because you’ve none to spare.
You stand up from the low stool your Pa told you to sit on until he gets home. You can feel the ache in your legs from crouching there, and in your shoulders from where he clubbed you with whatever was handy last night. The ringing in your ears is still there.
You reach under the bed and pull out your rucksack, feel the weight of the few things you own, wedged in there with the bits of food you’ve saved. You can feel the toast still in your pocket, and it all gives you a sense of autonomy, of freedom.
You move quickly and silently across the wide wooden planks to the front door of the one room you all share, and you pull the latch and swing it in. You can hear your Ma at the back stoop, not willing to come back into the sour smell, the filth, the clutter. Bless her.
You slip into the damp morning and pull the door behind you, hear the latch click home, sealing you into your choice. You pull on your cap and sling the rucksack over one shoulder, and run up the path, onto the row, feel the hardpacked dirt against your feet as you push the world behind you in quick steps.
You run until you reach the road and turn away from the village, sure in the image of where you will go. You run up the hill, past hedges, past low walls, past gardens, past small houses you’ve never seen.
The trees step back from the road and show you the charcoal sky, indifferent clouds, the faintest line of color on the horizon. Somewhere else the sun is already starting a day. You run up the road toward that light, the ringing in your ears wiped away by the sound of your breath, of the wind around you.
Your eyes are watering in the cool morning, watching the world rush at you. The images of the room and your family are leaking across your cheeks, leaving you as you left them. The last memory you have of the morning is the empty web. And you run.
Comments