wide flat lands

Eleanor was sleeping in the porch swing when Harold came home from work. He stood on the steps and watched the swing sway easily, not with the wind but with her breath, which came in long, slow, deep draws and rushes. He watched for a moment, and then walked past her and into the house. She was beautiful when she slept, he thought, but more and more it was all she did. He had grown tired of it weeks ago. He waited impatiently for the ebb in their life together to pass.

She woke as dusk fell, the sky draining of color like water in a sluice, fragments of stars like fools gold in the grit left behind. The smell of burning was on the air, and she sat up slowly and looked through the kitchen window behind her head. Harold was there, standing at the stove, staring into the distance while a skillet of bacon popped and smoked. She said his name three times before he moved, but it wasn't because he heard her. He snatched his hand back from the handle of the skillet, reacting so quickly to the sting of hot grease that the skillet came with his fingers, and dropped hard to the linoleum, scattering bacon and spraying patterns of grease across the floor. "Shit," he said, but his heart wasn't in it. He turned off the burner, looked at the mess at his feet, and while he contemplated it, he disappeared again.

Eleanor floated through the doorway, landed beside him. She touched his neck and he started, and saw her beside him. "Shit," he said again. "Spatter, I guess." They looked down at the grease and the heavy iron skillet, and she said, "I wonder if it will all just melt through the floor."

He sighed, and turned to retrieve the dish towel that hung from the oven door.

"Soak it in cold water," Eleanor said to him, and his shoulders slumped a little more, as if her every word was another weight on his back. But he went to the sink and ran a cold tap, and drenched and wrung out the towel. He dropped to his knees and carefully righted the skillet and plucked the stiff strips of bacon from the floor and dropped them back into the pan.

Eleanor stood beside him. His head reached her mid-thigh even as he stooped, and she ran her fingers through his still neatly-combed hair, disrupting the seamlike part, creating havoc. He dragged the towel over the floor, and she said, "Where did you go just now?"

He didn't answer until he had finished scrubbing the linoleum. He picked up the skillet and with a flick of his wrist tossed the bacon into the trash can. With his back to her, he wrung the towel under hot water, and he said, "I don't know what you mean."

"You weren't here," she said. "Just a minute ago. You were ... I don't know, you weren't anywhere." She came up behind him again, circled him with her arms, pressed her cheek against his back. "What were you thinking about?"

He didn't want to answer. She could feel it in the set of his shoulders, the tightness there. Sometimes he reminded her of Jack when he was silent, but not when he was silent like this. Jack didn't volunteer much, but he never withdrew; Harold guarded himself against her, as if he worried that, once she'd slipped through his defenses, she might plant a bomb in his core, instead of warm and comfort him. She often watched him sleep and wondered about this. Maybe it would be better, for both of them, if she left now, before she discovered just how unreachable he might always be, and why.

When he spoke, his voice was flat. "Maybe I'm like that all the time," he said, the dull hum of his deep voice rumbling inside of him, against the place where her cheek rested. "Maybe I am, and maybe you just don't know because you're always asleep."

The last words came out in a rush, and he suddenly broke from her grasp and left the room. She exhaled slowly. From the back of the house came the soft click of his office door closing. He wasn't a man to slam doors. She'd give him that, at least. And he was right: she did sleep an awful lot lately. But how to explain to him that, landlocked here in the midwest, with nothing around but wide plains and scrub brush and small, undistinguished buildings all around her, sleep was the closest she could come to the ocean, and of course to all that came with the ocean: to that sensation of flight, to that intense awareness. To the hope that one day that catch in the back of her mind might release and give sound to that damned fleeting voice, even just once more.

But maybe he was right. The one thing she'd recognized when she stepped off of the Greyhound and then into the passenger seat of Harold's red International was that, more than anyplace she'd ever been, this country was one that urged you, with its unremarkableness and reluctant familiarity, to forget. She worried she might; this was why she tried, in the only way she knew how, even harder to hold on.