Eleanor snapped the Kit Kat bar in two. She placed one half on the side of her white tea setting. The other half she handed to her husband Mitchell, who sat across from her at the rectangular kitchen table. The lights in their small house were on and the kitchen was warm. Fragile curls of snow drifted past the window above the sink.
Eleanor watched the flakes as she lifted the cup to her lips and blew on her tea. The steam twirled in the air. She replaced the cup on its disk and peered into the little whirlpool, the swirl mirrored in her blue eyes.
“I can’t help feeling that something’s wrong,” she said.
Mitchell took a bite of his half of the Kit Kat bar. Contentment blanked his eyes. He chewed slowly, solemnly, as though he would eat nothing more that day. The skin of his throat pulled against the top button of his brown flannel shirt.
Eleanor looked at him.
“You agree that it’s odd?”
Mitchell swallowed and took a cautious sip from his cup, the tremor in his hand agitating the glossy surface of the liquid. He set the cup down, raised his eyes to Eleanor, and shrugged. His green-flecked irises asked mercy of her.
Eleanor raised her eyebrows and upturned her palm in prompting.
He cleared his throat.
“I think Vera’s fine. It’s only a few days after Christmas. Her letter’s probably just delayed. The paper said all the postal workers over there are on strike.”
He nibbled at the corner of his candy bar.
“Thatcher ended the strike in November. Like you don’t keep up with the news,” she said to him flatly.
He shrugged again.
“I’m sure the letter will come soon. There’s no use in worrying, Ellie.”
“Vera was always punctual,” Eleanor stated. “Every holiday prior to last year her letter arrived at least a week before the 25th. Then last year it came on Christmas Eve and now, no letter at all?” She shook her head. “No. I’m worried about her.”
She broke one of the segments from her Kit Kat and reluctantly placed it on her tongue.
“I suppose she never had that phone put in.”
“Oh, Mitch, don’t be daft. That was a bluff to placate me.”
She let the chocolate melt and then chewed it. But it tasted of sweet ash.
Mitchell leaned back in his chair and gripped the edge of the table. He turned his head and looked through the sliding glass door that led from the kitchen to the deck above the driveway. A layer of snow peeked above the sash.
She read his stirrings.
“Say what you’re thinking.”
He inhaled and his teeth scraped his bottom lip. His middle and index fingers tapped the table, as though he was calculating the risk of his words.
“People do grow apart, Ellie.”
“Not us.”
“All I’m saying is that it wouldn’t be unnatural. There’s an ocean separating you. You’ve seen each other once in the last 50 years.”
She scoffed.
“That’s nothing more than a question of money. It says nothing about our friendship.”
Mitchell was quiet for a moment. The steam from the two teacups lilted in the stillness of the kitchen. He bowed his head slightly and fanned out his hands.
“Of course. That doesn’t mean it’s not difficult to stay—”
“We made it through the bombings together!” she cried. Her eyes narrowed at him. “While you and your fellow Yanks spent the Blitz in a bunker making maps, Vera and I were trying to save people even as the Germans hit the hospitals. That’s not a bond that just goes away.”
“I’m not questioning your bond.”
“Then what are you questioning? I was godmother to her little Maeve before the poor child died, for God’s sake.”
“I’m—”
He looked into her half-squinted blue eyes.
“Nothing. I’m just saying nonsense.”
He hurried the remainder of his Kit Kat into his mouth.
Eleanor lugged her elbows onto the table. She studied her gnawed candy bar with aversion. She picked it up and placed it on Mitchell’s plate.
Outside the sky had darkened. The flakes, more shadow than snow, rushed past the window like ragged wanderers seeking a glimpse of warmth and light.
“I hate that I can’t talk to her. To not hear from her own mouth what’s going on. Being in the dark is torture.”
The short, quick flicks of her pupils tracing the flakes halted. Her mind went to cobwebbed places. To Joey, her older brother who went east to Australia when she went west to America with Mitchell after their mother died at the war’s end, the two of them fleeing their birth home in opposite directions like errant sparks in the night. She never saw him again once they parted, but the pain of their separation, her dislocation in a new country, were eased by the knowledge that worlds away he was up to the same tricks: tailoring, boxing, and gambling his earnings at the track and losing most of them like the kind fool he was. It had been a cherished comfort for decades, until an envelope arrived from a woman claiming to be his widow. Telling her that for more than twenty-five years, all while Eleanor went on believing, never doubting, that he lived, Joey had been a collection of bones entombed in the parched, red earth.
She stood up. She pushed her chair in and went rigidly to the sliding door.
Mitchell watched her with the second Kit Kat paused before his mouth.
“Ellie?”
She reached into the galley closet between the fridge and the sliding door and pulled out her long, maroon polyester coat. She wrapped herself in it and took a knitted scarf, hat, and mittens from the coat’s deep pockets. She fitted her feet into her winter boots. Her movements were deliberate but brittle, as though any disruption would undo her progress.
She faced him. Only her eyes, nose, and mouth showed between the hat and the scarf.
“I’m just going to check the mail. I could use a walk down the lane anyway. All this worrying,” she shook her head. “Some fresh air will sort me out.”
Mitchell eyed her with concern.
“I’ll come with you. You’ll hardly be able to see out there.”
He pushed his chair out and began to rise.
“No, love.”
Her words froze him. He squatted awkwardly above the seat, his right hand flat on the table. Several crumbs from their supper tumbled from his shirt.
“I’ll be fine. I want to see the snow.” She grabbed the handle of the slider and flipped open the lock. “You stay. I’ll be back in a flash.”
Before he could respond she was out the door. It slid shut behind her.
He vaulted up as fast as his old joints allowed and hustled to the glass. The reflection of the kitchen’s interior fogged his view. He pressed his face to the pane and curled his hands around his eyes in the way of binoculars.
There was half a foot of snow on the deck. Boot prints led from the door to the stairs. A swipe of motion at their base flitted like a bat and Eleanor was gone from view.
The kitchen was silent and the snow fell silently outside. Mitchell’s hand fidgeted on the door handle, uncertain of its course.
Eleanor stepped through the snow with her arms out at her sides for balance. The ancient copper beech tree opposite the cottage towered into the dimming sky. The woods abutting their acre hulked in dull shades of white, black, and grey. Only the gold-glowing windows of the house spoke of warmth. She pulled her scarf tighter and walked on.
The treads of her boots bit into the light powder as she plodded down their lane toward the neighborhood road. There was no sound save the scrunch of her footsteps. She squinted through the veil of snow in search of the mailbox at the end of the lane, but it hid in the storm’s distortions of distance and depth. She trudged on, wheezing the dry air into her bewildered lungs, toward where she trusted the mailbox would be.
In the monotony of her strides she thought warily of Vera. There was the weekend of normalcy they stole on the rim of a continent consumed by war, when they sallied along the promenade at Morecambe on the Irish Sea. The hazy air was spiced by brine and fried fish. They attracted the steely eyes of dockworkers and shipbuilders; laughed at the gulls and children caterwauling down on the beach where saltwater pools glowed on the sand as giant coins. Vera’s new white handbag, given to her by some hopeless suitor, swung proudly on her elbow. The two of them strutted, indomitable nurses with the world at their heel, even as the warplanes roared and dropped their payloads of fire on England.
As the memories rewound and played Eleanor could not help but giggle like it was 1941, like they were there in that dangerous and thrilling springtime again. She saw herself and Vera on the fourth floor of a makeshift civilian hospital in Manchester at the Blitz’s height. The high, awful whine of incoming munitions pealed across the city, the brick and steel quaking beneath their feet. The two of them, alone, scrambled about a commandeered office to prepare it for triage: clearing paths for stretchers, hauling in armfuls of gauze and morphine and surgical tools. All the while they chattered to each other in deliberate defiance of the bombs that could erase them in one impact.
A deafening crash outside the windows knocked Eleanor to the floor. Supplies crashed down around her and she crawled under a chair and knotted her arms above her head, clamped her eyelids shut. The building shook and swayed with a pained groan. Out in the street the air raid siren wailed over the ambulance horns.
Eleanor opened her eyes.
“Vera?”
She crabbed out from beneath the chair. She pulled herself onto her feet, paying no mind to the ache in her hip where she had hit the floor, and scanned the office.
Vera was not there.
“Vera!” she screamed.
“Ellie…”
Vera rose from behind the barrier of desks. Her cheeks, the folds of her collar, and the white fabric of her uniform were all stained red. Her hair was wet and matted and red drips slunk down her forehead.
Her horror-stricken eyes found Eleanor.
“I’m dying!”
Eleanor clambered over the desks. Vera shivered and moaned as Eleanor frantically combed through her hair for a wound.
“Ellie, is it awful?” Vera whimpered.
Eleanor frowned. She peered over Vera’s shoulder at the ground. Among the debris she saw a broken vial. She sniffed Vera’s hair.
Eleanor spat out her breath and belly-laughed like a madwoman.
Vera pulled her head back and widened her eyes.
“What is it?!”
Sobs of laughter shook Eleanor’s frame.
“It’s iodine!”
Vera blinked into Eleanor’s face. She drew her fingers across her forehead and brought them to her nostrils. The dread ebbed from her eyes at the pungent odor of antiseptic.
“I—Iodine. Oh, Lord!”
The two of them tumbled as one to the floor, every muscle relaxing like melting pads of butter, their stomachs gripped by pangs of beatific laughter. They forgot, or denied, for a moment the world in flames. Without one another the fear might have been crippling. But together it was all one terrible excitement.
The joyous tears were hot on Eleanor’s freezing cheeks. She forgot the chill that had snaked up her spine when she thought about Joey; she was awash in her and Vera’s aliveness. She wiped her eyes and could see the mailbox ahead of her. A fresh sense that it harbored the annual letter, vindication of their bond’s invulnerability to time, entropy, and death, propelled her forward.
A muffled cry rose from behind her, just audible in the nocturne of snow and darkness. She twisted around. Mitchell called to her from the deck. His crooked torso leaned over the railing, his hands cupped around his mouth.
“Ellie! Come in!”
There was something frantic and protective in his voice. She watched him in the deck’s vestibule of light, then turned back towards the road and trudged on to the mailbox.
At its front she pulled the scarf down from her chin. She panted. Exhaustion seared in her legs. Her gloved hand rose from her side and grasped the tongue of the mailbox door. She pulled. Snow sloughed off the mailbox’s top.
The door resisted, glued shut by the cold. And as her hand strained harder, Eleanor realized that she was hoping the door would not give. That she might have one more night on earth with Vera still alive, with her world, her illusion, intact. Far down the dark lane the outline of Mitchell’s figure shuffled towards her, the snow still falling, burying the land like fallout.
The seal broke and the door jarred open with a creak. It was a creak of no weight, of emptiness as answer.
Colby Galliher’s short fiction has been published in Inscape Magazine, Ginosko Literary Journal, Inlandia Literary Journal, Action, Spectacle, and elsewhere. More information about his work is available at colbygalliher.com.
Euphony Journal 