More Than This
Shift/August 2023
His mother did not approve of peeing near the house, so he made sure to do it with the dilapidated structure out of sight. Flashes of the night before poked into his thoughts as he relaxed into the steady stream of piss. Finished, he approached the shack, startled and saddened by its smokeless chimney. In the yard, the wood pile, the picnic table, the sittin’ chairs as his mother called them, all appeared as they had always been. Their clothes hung on the line, flapped in the breeze like pinned birds desperate to break free.
He held his back tight against the wall outside her first floor bedroom. He inhaled to gather the necessary courage, turned to peer inside. There she was - as he had left her - on her side, mouth and eyes half open. Dead.
“George, start the fire. George sweep the floors. George, get the water.” Her voice, always commanding him, telling him what was next. “The cold is setting in, we must stock up,” she’d say. “The harvest time is here, we must pick everything!” Dutifully, unrelentingly, he did as her voice instructed.
Inside, he froze at her work table. His soft weeping eclipsed by torrents of tears, great gulps and sobs. His shoulders caved, his arms locked, crossed before his stomach as he bent, wailed into the silence of the house.
Finally, he approached the settled body, snipped a lock of grey hair, slipped it in his pocket. He closed his eyes, placed both hands on the corpse, pushed it onto a blanket spread on the floor. He dragged the body out, rolled it into a hole dug by the water pump. Shovel by shovel, he covered the body, his mother. He knew no prayers, so he said none.
***
The schedule. He must get back on it.
Midday. His mother would be disgusted by his laziness. He must make lunch. He hadn’t had much besides berries and water for days. A powerful hunger churned in his gut.
There was still enough meat from the smoke house, still the tea mixtures they made from their own herbs. He checked the half-full sugar jar, the bread box with its two stale loaves. He still had some of the bread his mother baked, now rock hard, but edible. He’d have to look for her recipes. He’d seen her make bread, but wasn’t sure how she made sugar. Had she told him it had something to do with sand? She’d spun it out of sand? She added honey to sand? He’d read books about the sea with sand beaches. There was no ocean here, no sand. Is sand edible? The memories and questions blurred in his dull mind. If his mother were alive she’d explain it, like she had before, and it would make sense. He was certain of this. He believed she was some kind of witch, a powerful sorceress, like Merlin in the King Arthur stories.
He boiled water on the fire, made his tea. He set the table, resisted the habit of setting her place.
“These things matter, they do. Civilized living.”
It occurred to him that his mother spoke to him almost entirely in adages, words of advice, words to live by. Although, she’d forgotten something important, maybe the most important thing: how he’d live alone, without her. He pushed back the onslaught of tears. He sat down, stared at the utensil poised above the sugar bowl. Afternoon sunlight filtered through the window, shimmered on the silver spoon. One of his many chores was to polish the silver. The thought broke through, a log busting through a dam. Once the hole was opened, he tried in vain to push the question back, but it flooded his mind, overtook: Where’d we get this spoon?
***
By the end of summer, he grew tired of the schedule, of everything. He missed his mother. The loneliness ached relentlessly, starting at his feet and rising to his head.
“I’m all you need!”
“Well, I ain’t got you, Ma!” he shouted, throwing a glass canning jar against the wall.
“Wasteful!”
Self-consciously, he tried speaking to the squirrels, but it felt wrong befriending creatures he killed and ate. He began seeing shadows lurking behind the trees, inside the barn, even in his bedroom at night. First, he burned extra candles to keep his room lit, then he decided to sleep beside the front door sitting up, holding his knife. He revisited a long dead question: Where did he come from? Where did his mother come from? Did they have any other family? He read and reread Robinson Crusoe-his mother’s favorite book. He longed to see a footprint in the dirt of the yard, dreamed of a Friday coming to save him. No such luck. He held a jagged piece of glass in a shaking hand to his neck. He begged his mother’s spirit to give him the courage to dig into his flesh, allow his troubled insides to pour out on the kitchen floor, but she did not comply. He heard only silence, and the steady thump of her beliefs playing in his head.
“Who’s going to clean up the mess, George, when you’ve gone and killed yourself?”
What if she wasn’t really dead? he thought. He went to the spot marked by the round stone he’d placed. He pushed it away and dug with urgency. The weather grew colder and colder. He needed to find her before the ground hardened. He dug, sweat seeping through his shirt. Finally her rotting corpse appeared in front of him. Joy and relief bubbled up from his core. He jumped into the hole and picked her up. She broke into pieces in his arms, dissolved back into the dirt. He swept the specks of her off his neck, his chest. The anger he’d been holding in for months came out in shouting. He retched beside the open hole. He thought of all the questions that had come to the surface of his mind, all the questions with no answers.
“You. Are. Nothin’. But. A. Liar,” he said. He threw the compost heap on top of the body-moldy onion skins and apple cores. He tossed the stone marker in the hole too, smashing his mother’s skull.
***
The next day, he rose up out of bed, ignored his breakfast, left the house an untidy mess, and walked with purpose to the edge of the Okay Places and passed deliberately into the Off Limits. He brought only his knife and some smoked meat, stuffed in the pocket of his winter coat. He marched forward across the frosty leaves and made his way deep into the forest. He followed the stream, walking for what seemed like hours. He grew tired and cold and hungry. He stopped to piss and take a drink of icy water, gnaw on some of the meat. He continued with only the slightest regret for embarking on such a pointless journey. Part of him hoped it’d quench his desire for death. He half expected to collapse onto the cold ground, fall asleep, freeze to death, melt into the dirt. So far, he saw nothing out of the ordinary in the Off Limits, the same squirrels and chipmunks and trees and leaves that inhabited the Okay Places.
Summoning his last bits of energy, he stalked the edges of a house, noting a wide dirt path leading up to one side. Pushing the door open without effort, he stepped inside the shadowy space. Crate-filled shelves surrounded him. He climbed a ladder and began prying them open, finding supplies of every kind - sugar and flour and clothing and even the little lemon birthday candies his mother gifted him each year. He couldn’t open his eyes wide enough to absorb it all. He turned around in wonder. Reaching for a lantern on the shelf he jostled a protruding side lever. He gasped as it flickered and lit, without a flame. George stood in the brightened room, gaping.
***
For years afterward, George spoke of a sister he never met. He told strangers encountered on the streets or the camp where he lived, “I’ve got a sister. I’ve got a likeness of her on paper. She’ll be here soon,” his voice echoing in the darkness, the smell of dead fish rising up from littered water. He searched in the river’s current for a glimpse of her brown curls, welcoming eyes. Most of the time, he only caught reflections of his own rippling beard and long tendrils of hair. On bad days, his mother’s stern expression emerged, her watery mouth moving, forming orders, rules he could no longer hear. Again and again, George turned away from the river that led to the woods of his first home, the one he had with his mother. Again and again, George walked up the bank to the safety of the home he found later, the tent under the bridge.
