Please welcome Andrew Siegrist, whose arresting new story appears in Issue Ten and Archive. Both publications are out now. Tomorrow, we wrap up the digital edition of Issue Ten with a new essay from Mike Nagel. The magazine is on tour!
Providence
by Andrew Siegrist
It keeps me awake, the sound of the hibiscus thumping the window. Rain against the glass. In the lightning, I see the color of red petals. I hold my breath and count three Mississippi. I know my father is leaving again and I hear the thunder. He tries to creep past my door but he’s already in his boots. The hibiscus sounds like the palm of a hand. I wait until I can’t hear his footsteps and I get out of bed.
He’s kneeling by the front door popping the hinge pins loose. He carries the door out into the yard, leaves it there in the grass. My mother is on the porch yanking string lights from the banister rails. A tape player on the porch step. Neither of them speaks. In a few days, the grass beneath the door will yellow.
I hear the hinge pins jangle in his pocket as he walks back into the house. Past my mother and the tape player. Past the noise of the small plastic lights scraping the porch boards as she drags them and they’re still shining. My father sees me in the hall. He looks back at the empty place where the door should have been and we’re both waiting for my mother to come through holding fistfuls of light
He puts his hands together like a prayer but the thunder comes again and the rain blows and puddles on the floor.
“I can’t sleep,” I say. “Something’s bumping the window.”
He comes and picks me up. His boots are loud across the hardwood. I feel the damp on his collar against my cheek. Over his shoulder, I watch my mother drop the string lights.
He lays me back in bed and opens the window. He looks out at the hibiscus bloom that was thumping the glass. Whoever planted it must have known it would be beautiful but they couldn’t have imagined it would keep me awake or that my father would leave in the rain and take the hinge pins with him.
He reaches out the window and plucks the bloom from the bush. He picks off a petal and throws the rest back into the dark. The petal is wet and he sticks it to the wall beside my bed.
“It’ll dry and won’t stay,” he says. “But you’ll be asleep. You won’t see it fall.”
My mother is at the door when he stands. He walks by her and she follows.
“This is how you’re leaving?” she says in a whisper loud enough to hear.
Lightning flashes but I don’t count the quiet before the thunder.
The light in the hallway stretches into my room. When my mother steps in she’s holding a candle and a wicker basket filled with porcelain birds. Owls and sparrows. Salt-shaker birds small enough to hold in the palm of a hand.
“Your father came into some work,” she says. “Last minute.”
She strikes a match and shows me the pattern of a finch’s wing in candlelight. I touch the small holes on the birds’ heads.
She says he’s going to Rhode Island to redesign turbines for an aerospace engineer. She says it’s good money.
“He’ll be back for Christmas,” she says.
And she says it again, like a promise.
I think about the red hibiscus and how it sounded like something so much heavier thumping against the glass. She says he’ll bring home a model plane and let me paint the propellers any color I want.
“And I can tie it to the ceiling fan?” I say. “Let it fly around the room.”
She arranges the birds across the sill and I ask her to keep the window open. If the storm goes all night, the rain will fill those salt-shaker birds and whatever is still inside will ruin. But then, full of water, they’d be heavy enough not to blow over in the wind while my father is leaving for Rhode Island.
“Try and sleep,” she says.
The red hibiscus petal is still stuck to the wall and my mother turns each bird so they are all facing the same direction. I know that sometime in the night she’ll sneak back in and watch me sleep and touch each bird. I know she’ll shut the window.
In the morning, I look out at the front door lying wet in the grass. From another room the sound of my mother pulling a milk crate of cassette tapes across the floor. She has each tape labeled with the name and date of a storm. Something she’s done since before I was born. Whenever the weather starts to change, she takes out the tape player with the red pinky button and feeds a blank cassette into the deck. I’ve listened to them all and I’ve never heard her voice in the background. Just the rain. Branches breaking. Wind against a wet sheet. Thunder.
She says all storms sound different and she likes to listen to them with headphones turned all the way up. My father would talk about the tapes if my father were here. He remembers things she doesn’t tell me, like the color of her toenails when they were young and the ocean broke over a stone wall and they watched a license plate eddy where the sidewalk was before.
I raise the window and can’t believe the other blooms in the bush held together through the storm. Every petal where it’s supposed to be.
I find my mother in her closet with headphones on rearranging my father’s shirts on the hanging rod. The milk crate and tape player on the floor behind her. She doesn’t turn until I click off the cassette.
“You’re awake,” she says.
She hangs the headphones from the rod between my father’s suit jackets.
“Can I listen?” I say.
She ejects the tape. The label on the cassette is blank.
“Not this one,” she says.
She lifts the milk crate. I sort through it until I find one dated the year I was born. Heat Lightning, 1986.
“That one?” she says.
“That one,” I say.
I take the tape player and she leaves the headphones hanging in the closet. She finds a spool of yellow thread in a box on her dresser and follows me to my room. The floor is wet beneath the window but the birds are still there facing the same direction. She takes each one and unstoppers the bottom. She empties the water and the salt. There is less inside of them than I imagined. She threads a length of yellow string through the head holes of an owl and ties a knot at the end. She hangs the owl from a blade of the ceiling fan and begins again on another bird.
She holds the birds as if she’s afraid the weight of her hands might break their bodies. She dampens the end of the thread on the bed of her tongue. She whispers.
I load the cassette into the deck. The birds hang from the fan and when my mother pulls the chain, they begin to fly. I press play. There is nothing at all to hear. Only the cassette spools spinning.
“Heat lightning,” my mother says.
We watch shadows move across the walls. We listen to the static hum of the blank tape. We reach out and almost touch the bodies of the passing birds.
My mother turns off the fan and the owls and the sparrows and finches slow. The salt shakers clatter together. I think of my father alone on a small bed fitting wings to a model plane. An open door. Rain gathering in the gravel parking lot of a motel. Somewhere outside of Providence.
ANDREW SIEGRIST lives with his wife and daughters in Nashville, Tennessee. His debut collection of stories is We Imagined It Was Rain.
