Grounded

Perspectives Magazine/January 2023

Fifty years ago the boy died here within my boarded bones. Fifty years before that I was hammered together in this spot against my will. 

Gill Jordan, a construction man from a construction family, one with sallow skin, sunken eyes, and a pronounced limp, built me high on this hill overlooking the Rhode Island sea-a gift for his understandably reluctant bride, Rebecca.

The summer after the marriage, she gave birth here, tended by the island midwife. But as it often happened then, Rebecca died in childbirth. Soon after, Gill drove nails into my already wind worn skin and crossed to the mainland for good.

I have never been happy here. I sense the unwelcoming soil beneath me. I wince at the relentless wind, sag beneath the snows of winter, the slanting rains of spring and summer. 

Over time, a new owner came, loosening the boards nailed across my openings, adding indoor plumbing and a modern kitchen, loading me with the burden of pipe and wire. Thus began my new life as a rented vacation home. A stream of bickering couples, teething babies, and sullen teenagers pounded my floors, pushed against my walls. The dogs, tied to the tree, yelped from the side yard. The cats padded around the furniture, pressed into wooden legs, hoping for a lap, sensing my discomfort. Every kind of unhappiness flourished within me. I sighed each time the suitcases landed on my porch, followed by the skeleton key jiggling in my lock. 

Ultimately, the fresh faced boy came, unrolled his kite, and sent it into the sky. The mother coated chicken in flour and salt and pepper, fried it crisp in oil. A blueberry pie, a store-bought surprise from the father, awaited them on the counter. 

That last night, the mother laughed, watching the murmuring box in the corner while the fresh faced boy and the father worked a puzzle. I held their content like a foreign substance, a pocket of air tight in the cold cellar of my gut. 

My spine, the woeful staircase, Gill’s folly, was too narrow, too steep, preposterous Rebecca had said. 

I knew from the start things would end this way, yet grief rattled my windows, peeled and shredded my grey paint. The fresh faced boy, in socks, talking about something or other, carrying a toy boat, slipped on my preposterous steps. The mother, having heard the emergency of sounds-rumbling and bumping and a thud followed by terrible silence-dropped her kitchen scrub brush and ran to find her son broken, ended on my scarred planks. 

So, I am boarded and bound again, infested and infiltrated by mice and moth. Vines grow up from the receding ground, fingers moving up to choke. The ocean rises, promising to sweep in, break me to bits, releasing me out to sea.