The Lamplighter From his bedroom he can hear the Bullfrogs moan. He can feel the breeze that blows the cold air across the creek and he can see the mist as it gathers there. It rolls out and covers the shoreline and all at once everything is equal, lost to the whiteness. There is comfort in that. The sky hangs dark and low above it all and there is comfort in that too. He finds himself sitting here almost every night now, waiting for the lights on what must be the opposite shore. They are late tonight and he feels impatient. But he is calm. They will come. One orange flicker at first… then another and so on until the distant trees become dim outlines like thin hanging ornaments in the night. Shifting his seat in the window sill he wipes the fog of his breath from the glass and looks on. What if tonight is different? What if tonight he must go to sleep without them? Could he? But wait… yes. There they were. A deep breath and all is well again. His eyes leave the outside and find the bed in the corner of the room. Sleep will come easy tonight. The next day he wakes in a cold shiver as a draft makes its way through the second story of the house. Getting out of bed he walks again to the window and takes new survey of the land outside. Just as the day before there is little land to speak of. There is mostly just the fat snaking body of the creek hurrying past. He looks down at the enormity of it, frothing and churning a deep brown and knows that the view from the other side of the house is the same. When the rains started the skinny two story home had been safe from harm, built on a hilltop in the center of the canyon. He had decided to wait it out, but it continued for days. Long and pounding sheets fell from the sky over and again until the valley around him began to fill and the short hill beneath his home was all but swallowed by the once fertile stream. It had left only the house and ten feet of hilltop. The power had gone before the water had even begun to rise and to think of it now it seemed so far away. The phones had gone with the power and there were no batteries in the radio. He looked curiously at the lifeless objects of his past. There were so many. Three television sets showing dark mirror screens, two cordless phones, a microwave in the kitchen, DVD players, a radio… on and on as he made the short trip downstairs. He went to the back of the kitchen and pulled open the pantry door. The food there was scarce, it had been nearly three weeks and soon there would be nothing left. He had stretched it as far as he was able, but the line between discipline and starvation grew thin. The first week he had gone through every cupboard in the kitchen gathering anything edible and packing three of the five pantry shelves full. He had survived on cheese and lunch meat for a few days, but it began to spoil. He had gone outside, hesitated and then threw it hard from the front doorway and watched the creek swallow up the rest. Later, he had scattered the few remaining cans, jars and pouches across the five empty shelves. Each time he cracked the door open he measured the growing spaces in between. In the beginning, he would go outside each day. He would walk around the house tracing the waters edge and look out across it all. He would sometimes slip off a shoe and go to the most inviting spot along the shore. The water rushed on all sides, slowing only slightly just beyond the front door. He would submerge his foot, stepping onto the sandbar and yank it back dripping like an ice cube. The water must have been washed down from somewhere high in the mountains, ice and snow and rain collapsing into this tiny creek vein. He looked out day after day, holding up a nearly dead cell phone for signal and scanning the high canyon walls all around. Where were they? Where were the planes or helicopters? Had they all been swallowed up too? Now, he spent his hours sitting in the living room, the front door and windows at his back. The wooden floorboards were unforgiving and his hips ached with their stiffness as he sat. The blue of the wallpaper had begun to dull, sucking the gray light of the windows and peeling at the corners. The man had no pictures, but stared just as well. The days drew on like a watched pot. The clocks had all been electric and so the man had no way of keeping the time. He had gone out one of the days before and drawn a circle on the tiny beach with a stick and then hammered the stick into the center with the heel of his shoe. The drab gray of the sky left nothing for shadows though and there were no hours to be had. He began to think of the years he had spent here. Nearly fifty now. So many things had changed. He looked around the room again at the clutter of things past. He had tried to keep up, to move alongside the new world, the technological future. Somehow it felt like it had never been real, like it was all just a game. And he thought of how rediculous he must have looked walking down the street with the little flip phone stuck against his ear, nearly lost in the silvering black of his hair. He turned around and looked out one of the windows at the choppy water. He was tired. He wouldn’t sleep though, he couldn’t sleep. He had stopped looking to the horizon for the shadow of rescue and he knew that he would not be able to hear much of anything over the screaming currents, but he would see the lights. He would wait and they would come to him. The day was still with him. The walls began to feel empty even of their blue and he could stand their company no more. Getting to his feet, he turned and faced the door. He could feel the difference in himself since the beginning. The sway that started in his legs and rippled through his torso, the slump in his shoulders like a tree bending to the wind. He set his eyes out upon everything, upon nothing. How long could he bend? How far? The soft blue of his pupils began to waver as he stared over the cresting surface of the thing all around him and he felt the water stir there too. Clearing his throat he blinked it all away and turned back to the house. It stood unchanged, the front door open. He looked to his left at a pile of scattered wood from the days before, bits of trim and large chunks of siding that he had ripped from different places around the house where they were loose. There had been no way to lash it all together and he was sure now that it wouldn’t have floated if there were. The wood was too dense and heavy, a product of times long since past, times when there was a difference between a house and a home. The house looked darker inside after being so long out in the light. The peeling blue paper of the walls showed a dark yellow from its cracks like a dozen spidery moons. He ignored the protest from his thinning legs and forced himself to climb the stairs once again. His room had no paper on the walls and the green paint there gave no offense. The seat in the window looked very empty from the doorway, but the night had not yet come and he could not sit. He looked around the tiny bedroom at the things stacked and lying all over. He wanted to pick up each one and examine it, but walked instead with his hands clasped behind his back like a man in a gallery. The adjoining bathroom was a constant lure as he had been using the old cast iron tub to hold his drinking water for some time now. The pipes would give wails and vibration if he turned on a spout, but the water was not there. There was a tall stainless steel cooking cauldron beside the tub that he would use to fetch and boil water to fill it with. In the beginning he had made the trip daily, plunging the pot into the body of the thing outside and then using a single match from his carton to burn broken furniture in the fireplace. He would set the huge pot in the flames and then carry it boiling to the bathroom up the stairs. He stood now looking over it. It was nearly empty, he had not filled it in days. Picking up the cauldron he began to walk back down the many stairs again and out the front door. Looking for a place where the water seemed to be moving faster, he lifted the pot by the lip and the bottom and dunked it in. He nearly lost his grip and felt the bucket pull away with the force of it, but clamped down and pulled it back out half full. The half would do. He lifted the thing by its stumpy black handles surprised by the weight of it. He carried it to the fire place and set it down. A wooden kitchen chair sat to one side, possibly the last one he couldn’t remember. Turning the chair on its side he stomped on the legs, breaking them off one by one and then working on the body of it until it was a splintered pile. It burned well and the water boiled quickly. The added weight of the water was nearly too much, even half full now. The stairs were like a gauntlet and as he bent low over the tub the steam from it burned his face. He made the trip a dozen times at least and though each pot seemed to hold a little less the tub was slowly filling. Rain had started to come down again while he had been making his trips. He had hardly noticed at first, the sprinkles came and went all the time, but as the gray above him began at last to lose the light the rain came harder. The man didn’t stop filling his bucket though. He walked and filled and walked back again. When his clothes soaked through and he could feel them rubbing him at the creases of his body he took them off. The bucket felt heavier with each trip despite the growing closeness of the dark water and the night. Emptying the load again, kneeling now beside the great tub he could see that it was slightly over half full and no more steam came from the thin, tan mixture. He was tired. Leaning his skinny arms over the lip of the bucket and letting his pale, wet body stretch across the cold tiles of the floor he rested. He did not sleep though, he could not sleep. When a reserve of strength had come back to him he used the bucket for balance and pushed himself up to a crouch. Then, grabbing hold again he stood and lifted the thing to his hips. He carried it out of the room and to the top of the stairs and stopped. Smoke filled the whole room that had been downstairs and he could hardly see anything at all. He thought that his fire had run out of control while he rested, but then he saw it. A ripple of movement below the smoke somewhere and then another. Rolling swells of dark brown water had put out the flames. Already the waves lapped at the feet of his stairs. Backing into the room he shut the door softly. It was black in the room and the dark seemed to amplify the sound coming from below. He went to the seat at the window and looked out. There was only dark. Picking up his tiny light he struck a match from the bedside drawer and lit the candle inside. The room glowed orange and the outside black was hidden by his own sudden reflection off of the glass. He stared at himself for a long moment and then ran his fingers across his cheek bones feeling the skin there like rice paper. His eyes and cheeks were sunken and he could see the shadowy outline of the ribs coming through his chest. Thick mats of silver hair hung from his jaws. He tried to look out again, but there was nothing. Still holding the light he turned and walked back to the bathroom. He pulled open the mirror above the sink there and took out a small pair of grooming scissors from inside. Setting his lamp at the edge of the sink he began to trim the hair down into a neat gray beard.
Copyright © 2007 Chris Michael Taylor |