Like Mill Water
A completed 43,000 word novella composed of 54 short stories and narrative fragments, in
which the lives and memories of several characters converge upon a convenience store robbery in a small fictional
town in western Massachusetts. Currently seeking publication. Sample sections below.
1
She took short steps and made slow progress along the sidewalk. Overlooking the main road was a small common with a few benches, and Lucia headed for one, frowned and sat. There was no one around, just a few cars passing through, a few birds moving on. Across the street was the Lovely Lady Salon, and she tried to see through the windows, wondering who was having her hair done so early on a Saturday. She couldn't really tell-no one she knew, anyway. Next to her on the common was a massive chestnut tree with coppery leaves. Her son used to collect the nuts with the other boys, "For nothing, just to have," he would say, although she knew they meant to throw them at some other boys across town.
She sighed and spread her legs a bit and leaned back against the wooden slats. She missed her mother and wanted badly to call her. Her mother had died, in Portugal, several years ago, but because of the distance Lucia missed her as if she were still alive, and sometimes even believed this was the case until she remembered that it wasn't. Her husband had often complained about how expensive the phone calls were. He hadn't meant anything by it, though, just worried about money. He was home now, probably reading the paper in his bathrobe. Her son would still be in bed, or maybe he would have slipped out early, before she could get home. She stood up with a groan and started off again. You spend fifteen years, Lucia thought. A slop of brown and black leaves ringed all the storm drains. The sky was like pillow stuffing. You spend fifteen years.
20
"Hi there," he said as his last step dropped.
"Hi," John replied. The whites of the stranger's eyes weren't white but a color barely different from that of his skin. His pupils were nail-heads driven through pleats of flesh. A heavy red started in his nose and chin and thinned across the rest of his intricately grooved face. His beard was short and thick and dark, like burnt gristle at the bottom of an old frying pan, and he wore a knitted wool cap that half-hid his ears.
"Nice morning." These words sounded somehow like a casual threat. The man arched his back and raised his face to see John as squarely in the eye as could be managed. Even from his advantage of height and hygiene John felt powerfully intimidated by him, felt the same fear he had felt at seeing boys fighting after school once, truly fighting, knuckling each other in the head.
They held each other's gaze. The man seemed to contain John entirely, the way a wolf might contain a dog, and much more than a dog.
35
The library was a small converted church of orangey-brown brick, with a steeply peaked roof and an addition stuck on one side. She climbed the front steps, pushed open the heavy doors and felt the warmth on her face, breathed it in, spicy with binding glue and old women.
Two librarians were busy behind the counter, one with an electric typewriter and one with an open drawer of salmon-pink cards soft as old dollar bills. Another younger librarian sorted books on a trolley. As Magda entered, the women looked up and smiled the way old women smile at something which tells them that things are as they should be. Magda came by the library a couple times a week at least, mostly to read women's magazines, or sometimes National Geographic. She also read skinny novels aimed at pre-teens and flipped through the one outdated medical textbook available. If she had any important homework she might do that, saving the rest for morning. Often she just sat cradling whatever book she'd picked up and thinking about her parents, or examining the rafters and the single piece of original stained glass, a disc-shape high in the crook of one end of the chapel in which a few dark figures gathered. Black Latin like the crackle of a glaze ringed the image.
She chose an old copy of Woman's Day and took it to one of three orange armchairs, sinking into the chair as far as its stiff, cold vinyl would allow. A ceiling fan moved air gently around the room.
The magazine's cover story was a guide to putting together healthy packed lunches for kids, and as Magda read the article she realized how poor her own lunches had been. Her mother had never, for instance, packed little garden salads into Tupperware containers with cherry tomatoes and cubed cukes. Another article told her nothing she didn't already know about menopause. Another warned of nightmare vacations to Cancun. She examined every jewellery ad, all the beautiful hands with perfect nails and soft knuckles. The final pages were full of offers for cruises and fat-burning pills. She draped the magazine over an arm of the chair, pushed and squeaked herself deeper into the vinyl, looked around the empty chapel and didn't want to go home yet. The house might still be empty. She hated arriving and having to turn on all the lights herself.
She looked up again to the stained glass, which was now nearly black, the figures more like pine trees in a winter midnight. Wind blew audibly beyond the window and mixed with the slushy sounds of traffic. Magda wondered if she could see snow against the glass. There was a kind of motion. The ceiling fan oscillated side to side from some unevenness of the blades.
A man entered from the side room, older than her though not old. Immediately Magda's eyes went to his hair, which was messy but flat on top, a sort of nest. Three or four days of stubble grew across his cheeks and far down his neck.
She picked her magazine back up and watched across the top of the page as the man wandered around the room, slowly, as if he could barely remember where he was. He set a worn leather briefcase down into a chair not very far from Magda's and put his finger to a row of books, scanning the numbers. When he came close Magda stared hard at the magazine, reading nothing. He pulled a few books from a shelf and moved his briefcase aside to take a seat. One by one he examined the books and set them aside. His eyes rolled around the shelves.
He stood up and carried the books — four books, held like a single piece of timber in his hand — back to the shelf and then fetched the younger librarian. This woman wore pale slacks and an oversized pink sweater, and her hair ended precisely above the shoulders. She might have been thirty. She seemed to take up no space at all. Despite the absolute quiet of the room Magda couldn't make out what they were saying; the man whispered and the woman whispered to match him. He let the librarian show him to another shelf full of reference books. She slid a volume smoothly from its place and handed it to him, and it looked like she held on a moment longer than was necessary. The man crowded her like a mountain crowding a town.
"Thank you," he said.
The librarian turned and left. Magda watched the man more boldly as he took his seat and examined the volume. His right ankle rested on his left knee so his right kneecap stuck out tight against the pant leg, making him look bony and unathletic. He drew two fingers from his cheek to his chin where they met his thumb; Magda could hear the sandpapery scratch. She thought he must be finished with college, though she was never good at guessing ages beyond her own. He wore a single ring with a fat emblem, like a graduation ring. He was handsome without being what she would call cute, his nose jutting peculiarly, flat-fronted, like a curled finger which might uncurl with a good sneeze. He rubbed his chin again, turning to the book's index. She flipped a page without taking her narrowed eyes off his face, which pursed slowly as a single thing, from his forehead through his brow and the muscular buttress of his nose and on to the roseate swell of his lips. Three of his fingers were wedged at three different points in the volume, and he again consulted the index. The knuckles and back of that hand looked pale and bloodless, and at the wrist began a crop of arcing blond hairs which grew thick before disappearing into his sleeve. Two hard globes of bone pushed out just beneath the skin of each wrist and an inch of white leg shined brightly between the sock and cuff of his propped right leg, also furred with blond hairs. She could hear his nostrils swallowing air.
He looked at her, and the moment their eyes met she thought to turn away and then did. Mortification lit a furnace in her cheeks and ears. She looked down to the page in front of her and read a few lines about angel food cake. When she looked back the man was reading again, his legs crossed the other way.
She slipped her coat on and walked quickly to the periodical rack, found a place for the Woman's Day, hurried past the librarians' desk where the younger one was rifling through her purse, and exited finally to the dim street. Above her and all around thick snowflakes fell, each giving back a little of the streetlamps' dead light.
The sidewalks were covered with footsteps pressed into the new snow, and a set would precede her own for a while before veering up a porch or disappearing into a car no longer parked.
The air grew darker as she turned onto her own street, really more an alley than a street. Tall chain link fencing separated the yards, and each yard had its junked thing, or its pile of junked things, covered by a canvas tarp. Her house was the last on the left before the street dead-ended on the backside of an old factory lot.
She found her mother boiling spaghetti and frozen peas in the kitchen and her father stretched on the living room couch, complaining about a cold and taking swings from a bottle of codeine. The air smelled of laundry piling up and cigarettes smoked in front of an open window. Her father licked gummy opiate from his lips and turned to look at her, his eyebrows slumped and shifting like a dog that doesn't know what to do or think.