EILIDH JENNESS
S
Baited
he bought the cottage for a few thousand dollars after her third husband complacently smoked himself to the yellowing color of a perch’s underbelly and died. She uses the word “cottage” to describe a rusting box of sheet metal in a small trailer park near the lake because “cottage” has a sweeter, more refined taste than the truth. Her marriage immensely improved the day his breathing halted; the arguments settled and her fantasies flourished without reality’s disturbing contribution. Free and alone, she imagines herself a passionate widowed passenger living in a boxcar on one of his miniature train tracks that encircled the back room of their old brick house on Main. She isn’t aware that she has a ticket all the way to where she began. Every morning, she rises early, poaches an egg, completes a crossword puzzle, and walks her dog Max to the beach, racing the minute hand to eight and slowing down if she gets too far ahead out of fairness. She is now a queen, nobly striding on swollen knees through the neighborhood of ugly families and retirees without retirement funds with her overweight companion prancing alongside her on a purple leash. Even if it were allowed, she wouldn’t consider taking Max off of his lead. He’d leave her estranged the way her human children did, too proud to listen to her counsel or maintain her ideals. Reflecting in the puddles on the pavement, the wrinkled lines across her face look like someone has tried scratching her out of a picture with a quarter. On their routine walk, she carries a shovel to the beach and covers the previous night’s washed up rotting fish with gravel and sand, a gravedigger at dawn. She shuffles across the rocks, concealing the corpses from the living. She combs the beach for sea glass to add to her collection: blue glass is a lucky find, brown beer bottle glass she throws back. When she returns to the cottage, she prepares a special lunch for one, watches an hour long soap opera, and reads one calculated seventh of the library book she checked out on Saturday. Max naps and eats one cup of the dog food she determined he likes the best, despite it being the only brand he’s ever tried. On Sundays, she watches the news on CBS and knits herself socks, talking to the newscaster about the people who have died and judging the quality of the lives that had been ripped from them by jealous lovers and natural disasters. She’d like to go to church but she doesn’t own a hat. The days fluidly merge together and she takes pleasure in the mundane mass of time she calls contentment. The dog needs to escape. When the toy boats on the water finally come back to shore and the lights in the windows go out, he hears others howling of wild lands beyond the wire gate. He saw a field once, though he can’t remember if the vast green space belongs in a memory or dream or commercial on the screen. Does it matter? He’s licked his tennis ball smooth. This Thursday morning sounds like gunfire against the cottage’s flimsy walls. Her aching knuckles tremor with each ricocheted rain drop. Max is gone from the hairy indentation he spent the last ten years hollowing out in the blankets she knit him. The screen door is unlatched. The woman inspects every square foot of the mobile home before collapsing on the faux wooden floor she installed alone. He should be waiting for her in the heap of blankets now, at 7:20a.m., waiting for her to come attach a leash to his collar and take him to the beach. The tension of his absence fills the
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