Fugue 20 - Fall 2000 (No. 20)

"His wish," the woman says.

"I couldn 't torch no one," Theresa says, "even a man."

"It's funny, though," the woman says, " he wanted to be spread in the snow up above timberline. You know, he wanted to join the snowmelt or some nonsense, drip into the river valley where he used to go fishing. Last wishes."

Theresa thinks for a moment she might half-like this crone, with her loneliness and her rituals past. But then the woman laughs to herself, and with her head tilting toward the roof as if to curse this former man, she stops laughing and looks as ifshe'djust had some sickened vision, smjJing gums like plucked pink roots. Theresa sees white bristles in the crone's gaped nose, across her upper lip, needling from her chin.

"So that dumbshit cat can crash the jar to bits," Theresa says.

"The urn's empty-" ''No," the woman says.

"He's in the snow," Theresa says, "it's what you jest said."

"He's not," she says, "that's it. He's still in there." And she is laughing, again.

"Last wishes," Theresa says, "my ass."

Crazy-betrayal-bitch.

Theresa is slumped in her chair in the dark and listening to the woman's perpetual wheeze. She cannot sleep sitting up like this with a blanket too short and wrongly wrapped, but the woman wheezes in it, sleep, from her chair right there-pillow in her lap, gaped pink mouth, bathrobe split around her body, sleeping. And the cat asleep above.

Theresa is in the dark and thinking about her money. All that money, and unsleeping in a damned chair. She waits and waits for the hum of some stranger's car on the road outside. She is ready to spring away and get elsewhere help, but none comes, and none she's sure will. She might have stacked her bricks of cash on the hood of her broken car, some greedy monument to some wrathful god, and not a body would know its existence out in the silence.

She tries to sleep. She tries. She feels a nightmare coming. filii #21