Story © Alias Foxx 2002

Bill’s Catering Services of Minneapolis was not the best job Martha’s had since September when she waltzed into the local temp agency with that fake smile and grace that’s been put away for about as long as the business suit she’s kept in her closet since her Uncle Ted’s funeral. That old bastard, she thought as she seemingly simultaneously opened the door to her apartment and slid off her purse and jacket, letting them fall over the brown easy chair that eternally watched the blank television screen, waiting for her to come home and throw junk mail and clothes on it. Solomon rubbed against her leg, and she leant down to brush a hand across the tiger-striped cat at her ankle as she thought of her Uncle’s "endless supply of money" that he never spent - and she didn’t get a dime out of it; what else was a rich uncle for? No one knew how much the old bastard had stashed away, and probably no one but Aunt Judy knew what happened to it. At least he got a pricey coffin to keep the earth away from him in the end. She wondered about that as she threw a Banquet TV dinner into the microwave – Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, from the earth and back again, yet nicely protected from the elements and worms, how’s that for a perfect cycle? She laughed at this, leaning against the counter, the sound of the microwave and refrigerator humming at her in stereo.

Tuesday night and nothing on the tube. Even when she could afford cable, with nearly fifteen times as many options as any average European home, she could never find anything decent. But it didn’t matter; it was background buzz all the same, something that happened while she ate her Salisbury steak and peas and something stiff and bubbly that claimed to be potatoes.

Tossing away the black plastic tray, she cursed Ted once again. "Probably clutching hundreds in that airtight box as you rot away while I’m still up here struggling for pennies. You old bastard – Probably don’t even know my name." She hit the lights and headed for the bathroom.

The nightly ritual was Martha’s meditation. Therapeutic in its steady order – Soaking in cloudy-hot bath water, wrapping up in a dry bathrobe and towel, sitting before her vanity mirror, applying the soothing green cream from the giant vat her mother gave her the Christmas before, propping herself up in bed with four pillows behind her back, reading, fixing the pillows, turning off the light and then –

Sleep.

But sleep did not come so easily, which is usually not a big problem, in fact laying in stress and worry was an unwritten step in the ritual that fit itself in between turning off the light and sleeping. That’s alright, she let herself know once, meditation is more for listening to everything than blocking it all out. This time, however, it was not the company of worrying that kept Martha awake; there was a sound somewhere in the apartment. She lay still and tried to focus on the sound, if it was to repeat itself. She waited, her eyes open in the dark. The moonlight was dim, and she couldn’t see a thing except for a diagonal blade of light on the opposite wall.

It wasn’t just in the apartment, she noted; it was in the bedroom. Somewhere over by the closet. She waited again, not yet being able to peg out what it could be. As the sound dissipated into her memory and her ears filled once again with the ticking of the clock and the subtle nighttime noises outside her open window (and her thoughts, let’s not forget those). The mysterious sound soon became a figment of her imagination, and nothing about it seemed at all to be –

She shook off her fears as quickly as any thirty-two year-old might and nearly laughed at herself for being so childish. She leaned up in her bed and looked in the direction of the noise. "Sol! Cut it out!"

After a sigh and a few minutes, Martha was finally asleep.

Lunch, the next day, Martha sat cross-legged in an office chair, slowly swiveling as her foot twisted casually on the floor. She was poking at the last few pieces of chicken in her foil take-out tray as she listened passively to the girls, who tried to accept the "temp girl" in a poorly excusable sort of way. It seemed Debbie had a run in with a gopher in her backyard.

"I didn’t know what it was. It looked like a big old ugly rat."

"You should get an exterminator or it will tear up your yard." Lisa was the one with this handy little tidbit.

"Where do you live, Deb?" Virginia squinted over a mug with the words "No. 1 Sec!" stenciled around it. Her face, Martha thought, looked as if the mug was filled with paint thinner instead of the morning’s brew.

"Over there in Mountain Heights." She pointed behind her back as if it was across the hallway where the computers whirred and fax machines squawked. "Jim got a tip from the architect and he cut us a low rate."

"Oh, well, I live in Beachview Villas." Virginia retorted. "We’ve never had any problems with rats or anything like that." Martha wondered what the Minneapolis oceanic view was like this time of year (and for that matter, how the mountains were as well) and twitched her head in a light shake to cast it off. Lisa must have noticed it, because Martha was the next up to bat.

"Where do you live, Mary?"

"Oh, me? Kingston Terrace."

Lisa momentarily looked as if she were applying contact lenses without the use of her fingers. "Oh, dear, no…. Kingston? I could never live in an apartment." She looked at the others when she said this, and a couple nods in her direction boosted her esteem in the subject. She looked back at Martha. "Do you know how many people have lived in there before you?" She raised her brow and shook her head. "I wouldn’t begin to imagine the things that could have happened if I lived in an apartment. All those dirty people there before me."

Debbie nodded in Martha’s direction and added quietly, "You can’t get a good atmosphere in an apartment."

The No. 1 Sec! stepped in eagerly. "Yeah, I heard that emotions and things like that, that they get all trapped in the walls, you know? My brother-in-law moved into a house up in Harris and all the people there before him, well, I guess they never took the wallpaper off - just layered it all on top the rest. Well, he had to strip it of course, and he could have sworn with each layer he heard different voices coming through…real faint-like."

Lisa shook her head, her golden-dyed curls swaying like ribbons around a maypole. "That’s just crazy. There’s plenty of things that could’ve been. People outside, a radio playing…of course, I never put much stock into anything that comes from George anyway."

"It comes from the same idea though," Debbie stated. "What I was saying is that a house, or a place someone lives, there’s gonna be a lot of emotions. You know, like if you have a favorite place, it has that good feeling around it, but if someone gets angry or sad or something, that hangs around…trapped in the walls. That’s why I like having fresh homes – I like to start with a clean slate, you know?"

Looking at her watch, Lisa put in another word (as she always seemed to do, Martha noticed). "Well, either way, apartments just won’t cut it for me."

"When is this day ever going to end? I can’t wait until I can get home and slip into the whirlpool. And, you know-"

Martha got up and threw her plate away. She headed back to the office as it was nearing the end of the break, and she couldn’t stand hearing the snooty blabberings of her current co-workers any longer.

Barbecue Ribs. Ribs? Martha wondered where the ribs were and threw the tray into her microwave, set the time and looked at the cobweb clusters in the corners of her kitchen, the dingy spots of unknown spilt food between the tiles of the floor, scattered dry cat food near the trash can. I really need to clean up in here sometime.

Ah well, she thought, maybe tomorrow. Martha vacantly watched some man in a dark blue suit talk about plants for a while before getting up and throwing her sauce-ridden tray into the trash and beginning her nightly ritual.

One hot bath (not too long now), dry and warm robe and towel, the soothing green cream (must remember to restock), nails looking decent (temporary reprieve), and back to the old bed and book, and as always with that…

Sleep.

Ah, but Martha missed a step; then again it was an unwritten step – involuntary – happened whether or not she forgot. The thoughts rolled in and an image of her standing before her Uncle Ted’s grave, there in the rain with all her family gathered under a red canopy – a dream before sleep.

And let us remember Theodore Grant as who he was to us all: A caring father, a loving husband, a good friend, and someone to always cheer us up when we were down… The hired pastor who knew nothing of the man he was laying to rest carried on and on, doing his best for the closure of a man’s entire life to his loved ones. Do not dwell on the sadness and the tears that fell as he struggled each day. But how could she forget? Martha saw him there a few times – withering and blabbering about years long lost, and lost he was…lost within those years. He wasn’t in that bed more than half the time – he was in 1964, running his old shop and telling his wife to call up Kevin and remind him to open up the store in the morning because it was the day Gerald Phillips was coming in (Gerald Phillips whose liver blew up to a soggy and scarred toughness, that somewhat resembled a stillborn child, back in ’89 - couldn’t even get the old man to the hospital before he turned cold and passed after a brutal series of groans and gnashing teeth) – or in 1976, asking how Gary’s softball team was doing (his wife half wanted to tell Teddy that they’re all unhappily married with children that don’t want to see them anymore and that Gary is a pile of ashes on a mantle somewhere in Cincinnati). Yeah, she remembered – Martha remembered his sunken eyes, glazed with the visions of a different world – a world where strange dogs rested on his bed and angels would visit him and talk about old times. No matter how much that preacher told them that day, no matter how much she’d like to remember Ted with a smile, she’d never truly be able to get it out of her mind’s eye – how he lost so much weight that he was nothing but an incapacitated stick that the nurses would visit whenever they had to, just feeding him those little pills day in and day out, knowing they couldn’t do a thing – knowing he was already dead. And they pay people for that…how odd. Martha felt the pull of an odd laugh tug at the corners of her mouth, and then something snatched it away.

Martha felt her heart stop beating and didn’t take a breath for quite some time. She pulled herself up sideways, propping herself up at an angle in the bed - looking at the closet. The moon was at a different spot this time, and that wedge of light almost made it to the closet, but it stopped at the threshold. "Sol?"

She began to breathe slowly and quietly, her heart pounding empty.

As rational as her mind has always been, in several fragments of possibilities, Martha thought through whatever came to her. And these are the dead man’s brains…

A shriek she soon realized as her own cut through the dark room, seeming to catch onto that wedge of pale bluish moonlight and flowing right to the closet like a wisp of smoke exhaled from a smoker’s lips. She stilled herself and gazed wide-eyed as she noticed the closet was open. Her shoulders dropped in slight relaxation. I left the door open, she thought, the wind must be catching my dresses and making them rub against each other. Yes, that was what it sounded like – fabric.

Martha breathed.

And once again found sleep.

The next morning, as she reached for the daily outfit (simple black today), Martha noticed the closet door was indeed left open. She smiled, shook her head, and slid the dress from the white plastic hanger.

The morning ritual wasn’t as much a ritual as the nightly version; it was more of a scatterbrained memory game, but Solomon never let her forget when he was hungry (unless of course she couldn’t comprehend his tenacious mewing).

The day went by, and the lunch conversation was about as drab as the sandwich Martha happened to pick up at the cafeteria. The tuna salad was more like something some city street worker scraped up – like the remains of a poorly-made newsletter after a big storm.

She was hoping, as Debbie was openly wondering if she should get a manicure by the end of the week, that Grace from the temp. agency would call her soon, even if she did only have a factory position opening "until better work comes along". Her eyes were heavy and her head swayed as if she was going under some sort of trance when she noticed the girls getting up and heading out of the breakroom. A slight shot of adrenaline coursed through her, and with that she made it for the rest of the day.

Leopold and Market: The Longest Light in Northern Minneapolis. For ergonomical reasons, Martha could have been swatted with a stick as she drummed her fingers on the perforated false-leather wheel, hunched down so much that her eyes barely peeked over the dashboard. From the left and to the right and back again as if her eyes were the typewritten text of a speed addict, she saw cars lined up on all sides. The lights all seemed to be red, and the only things that moved were the fidgety "drivers" that surrounded her.

It was a familiar voice, and it sounded a lot like her father’s – a lot like it, but not quite. It was Ted.

Her eyes became scrupulous, wondering…had she lost it?

The air around her was peaceful, but Ted was no longer there. Now there was nothing but the sound of the honking cars and the feel of worthless anticipation. She saw now the people, angered that they couldn’t get to the next stoplight, and then to their homes where they would eat meaningless meals and spend a few reckless hours with families they didn’t appreciate in houses they were trapped in, for which they worked jobs they hated.

I always wanted to go West. Martha’s eyes raised in consideration, and she had to laugh as the lights turned green.

Tonight was a chicken nugget night, and Martha sprayed out Bullseye barbecue in the rounded black corner where the crumbs gathered. She didn’t bother to turn on the television; instead she watched Solomon play with a tailless pink mouse with felt ears.

Let’s see, what was it? Hot bath, robe, towel, cream…oh, yes…close the closet door this time. Martha nodded as if making a physical checkmark over the white closet doors.

She gave the book a pass and curled up in the warm bed. No moonlight this night, and the air was oddly still. She smiled a lot more, and yet she did not really know why (not always a need for reasons). It wouldn’t be a bad idea to…

Curiosity had been triggered enough, and Martha had enough courage at the moment to scream a burglar out of her home with the added fright of her green face. She reached over and switched on the light by her bed and glared in the direction of the noise. But the glare receded and somewhat relaxed, slowly but steadily turning into a shocked, quite terrified expression.

She stared helplessly into the closet, through the wide open doors. It seemed physically impossible to be seeing what she saw. There would have to be a hole in the ceiling at the corner of her wardrobe – it seemed as though in that corner, nothing was the same at all: No clothes hung down, no bar reached to the catch on the wall, and no shelf stretched over the gap. What she could clearly see were the eyes. Vacant and dead. On occasions they would look into her eyes as the body swung slowly – the body of a young girl with long unkempt, most likely dirty, hair. Hair that was straight and just as dead as her stare. She wore an old, faded nightgown with little blue and pink flowers stitched into the dusty white cloth. Her skin was shaded a soft but deep blue over a rough and thick twist of rope.

As if put on hold, her mind finished her thought for her. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get out of here. No, probably not a bad idea at all. But Martha was frozen. The corpse of the girl had not stopped her slight sway, but her eyes seemed to be stuck completely on Martha’s own eyes.

Gray.

Cold.

Dead.