• • •
When I get inside, though, the fire is roaring brightly, and my mother isn’t there. No one is there but me, with the empty space behind me. I lift the curtain and gaze out into the liquid blue unraveling of the evening, but Hip has already gone—disappeared—not a trace. There is a strange, dull glow to the east, from the sea; it undulates softly, rotates, like a net that has captured nothing.
Then there is a change, a slight but vertiginous disalignment, tilt of sky, horizon, shift of earth on axis; houses descending darkly down the hill, backs turned, the indifferent, whitewashed shrugs of our neighbors. Trembling of masts on the harbor. Shrug of sea as well, with the Emerald Isle upon it. Somewhere. A tremor that may or may not have traveled upward, from the river.
This is slight. Am I the only one who feels it? It is in me, perhaps. Movement, a lurching. Whether inside or outside, I can’t tell.
The lamps are lit, in the city. The shades are drawn.
The empty net undulates softly, greybluegreyblue, this is the phosphorescence of storm. Sleet becoming snow becoming wave. It is a white night, tonight.
And I am haunted.
Haunted, yes, certainly I am that.
Of what use is this fire to me. Given the room is empty.
I don’t understand how Hip does it. Disappearing like that.
The curtain falls. I let it. There’s nothing to see.
• • •
It is peculiar, this emptiness of the house. Harry Owen has lifted his beard out of his book and gone off somewhere, leaving this bright fire, the lamps lit, half-smoked cigar on the fender, prawns half eaten on a plate, this all speaks of hurry, the ship abandoned in haste. Or else have I slipped again in time, fallen out of whatever net Hip has been weaving, tumbled at a blink into a world of which I am the sole and lonely occupant? Upstairs does nothing to dispel this feeling or fear, it, too, is empty, the bed an unmade tangle, my mother’s things still strewn around because nobody has the heart to put them away, the cayman grinning through the armhole of her old corset, wicked, toothy snout where the pale, slender, seemingly translucent arm used to be. This cannot be real, certainly I have slipped through again, fallen unnoticed into a strange, soft space I cannot get a purchase on, which nobody will ever bother to lift me out of. The river throbbing through the floors, up into the soles of my feet, my chest, my throat.
Through the back window, though, I can see light in the shed, the orange glow outlining the door, and the smoke still rising thinly from the metal vent, though riverthrob occludes what might or might not be the warmer thrum and throb of the bellows.
My father is out there, that is what I think. My father is out there working.
But nor is this true. When I enter I find the stove lit, the lamp warm, my father gone. It is as in the house, the tools set down as if abruptly, small unfinished objects, half formed, ambiguous, bobbing in the crucible. So convinced am I that my father’s absence is only temporary that I wait there at the bench in the dark, cave-like space, my father’s space, listening to the hiss of the sleet against the walls and the strange, surreptitious rustlings within, as of small furred creatures making their way through my grandfather’s boxes, small, furtive gnawings and hungry peripatations, restless susurrus of warm bodies turning in tangled, acrid knots of dream, these going still, suddenly, at my approach.
• • •
My giantess’ footfall and large shadow portending an unknown danger.
Then moving on. Peaceful resumption of nibblings, gnawings, dreamings.
• • •
My grandfather’s boxes, never fully unpacked, do constitute a kind of forest, one that sways slightly, like a real forest, settles, seems to respire. Of course this is just the wind, entering through chinks and gaps and fissures. How many years have the boxes been here now? Many. There are traces of my mother’s gnawings, boxes she has opened and from which she has extracted bits and pieces of her patrimony, taking what interested her, leaving the rest for the mice.