The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories by Ethan Rutherford Read Free Book Online Page B

time-out. It is outside of time. They’ve whistled themselves to the bench, to regroup, tenderly, before suiting up again, and for now, it is just the two of them in this room. The doors are shut. No one is allowed in. It’s the end of summer, and they are looking, again, for that old equilibrium, attempting to make sense out of nonsense, and it comes out physically, robotically, without inflection, and it needs to be dubbed. The question that one friend is asking the other is, Where were you? Where were you when this was happening to me? And the answer, a fractured, proffered gift, is the first lie one has ever told the other, though it will take him years to figure that out. The answer is: Right here. I was in this basement, where I belong. I was always in this basement, and I will be in this basement the rest of my life, if that’s what you need from me.

john, for christmas
    O n the radio, they were calling it “snow-mageddon.” Joan had seen the storm on the news, as well, in a Doppler-radar swirl pulsing like a sick heart over the Cascade Mountains. The worst of it was supposed to hit tomorrow, midday, but already the snow had begun to fall in little eiderdown flakes, salting the bushes, promising cover. Her husband, Thomas, was upstairs. Earlier this morning he’d called weather prediction an inexact science. It comes, it goes, one never knows, he’d said. A little song. But this particular storm couldn’t arrive early. John—their son, the actor, the writer, the destructively depressed, self-proclaimed failure—was coming home for Christmas, driving up from Oregon with his girlfriend, and the thought of them stuck somewhere, the car they’d bought for him wedged in a snowdrift like a blunt splinter . . . It’d be on the evening news: the only people to freeze by the side of the road while everyone else got home safely, an accusation frosted on John’s features. Just like everything else, it would’ve been their fault.
    She picked up the telephone, thought better of it, and put it back in its cradle. He’d call if he was stuck. And then, most likely, ask for Thomas. He wasn’t interested, these days, in talking to her. She unloaded half of the plates from the dishwasher before realizing they were dirty. Then she loaded them back in, packed a scoop of soap into the door, and started the cycle. The gift cards they’d bought for John were under the tree, along with the requisite sweater and a pair of pajamas she knew he’d never wear. The house had to be prepared, but she’d already done most of the cleaning. Thomas had to deal with the sick alpaca, which he’d been putting off. Dinner would have to be orchestrated. Then, if there was time, she’d promised Sarah, the medical student who rented the garret apartment above their garage and who was not going home for the holiday (a catastrophic divorce, she’d told Joan, had made family more of an idea than anything else), that they’d move some wood over so she’d have enough to make it through the weekend. The garage was not attached, and stood fifty yards away from the house, obscured from view. Thomas would stack the wood when he got back. He would, Joan thought passingly, do anything for that girl. Sarah was, in her own awkward and plump and helpless way, appealing to men like him.
    So the waiting began. Through the kitchen window, Joan could see the alpacas standing dumbly near the fence; the snow was starting to catch in their fur, and their large, expressive eyes were glued on the horizon, as if they were collectively willing some ancient, alpaca Godhead to materialize. Zachary—she’d named him after he’d become sick—was on his haunches, fifty feet away from the herd. She had tried nursing him back to health, warming bottles and feeding him like a newborn, but if that had helped, it had helped only marginally. The local country vet—who Joan secretly suspected despised her for the way they kept their animals ( recreational was the word