At the Seams

Chapter 2: Day 1 - 8:17 am

Chapter 2: Day 1 - 8:17 am

Sam walks slowly down the street, smiling and waving at neighbors despite his cramping right calf, an infernal rock wedged between his bone and skin. He takes it easy on that leg, trying not to baby it too much. A little stretching never hurt a cramp. He had been making moon-eyes at Julia Parker, the television producer who lives four houses down and who had also been out, maintaining her high-powered beauty. Sam is an unflappably one woman man, would never even speak to Julia, but he does enjoy watching her maintain. Just as he had passed her, his calf, angry at his lack of warm-up, had seized and thrown him to the concrete sidewalk. Julia had paused in her jog long enough to inquire about his health, then ran on without a backward look when he waved. He really had been fine, not even a scratch, could have worked out the cramp and kept going, albeit slowly. His pride had cramped worse than his calf, so he called it quits for the day.

He had only run about a mile before his embarrassing waltz with Julia Parker, so it takes him little time to return home. He picks up the newspaper in the yard and moseys to the mailbox. When they first moved in five years ago, Mary, a horror movie fanatic, painted "the Crazies" on the mailbox in scrawling black block print. "It'll be great," she said with an impish smile and dancing eyes, "the neighbors will all be leery of us, and then we turn out to be swell people. That will really make them talk. Like, what might we have buried in our cellar? That's funny, right?" While Sam hadn’t found the joke as funny as Mary did, she had admired her work with bright, childlike eyes, her intense pleasure making him giddy with adoration. He touches the letters she so painstakingly applied, half a decade past now, smiling as memories from all those years lightly kiss his consciousness. He opens the mailbox, the rusty hinges shrieking, and grabs the envelopes and other clutter. He hopes, in a warm, distracted way, that Mary might be up for a mid-morning tussle after their coffee and cardamom. Cramp be damned.

Sam walks toward the front door, expecting Mary to open it wide and greet him with a steaming mug. She will lean one shoulder against the doorjamb, crossing one foot in front of the other. Mary is no stick by any stretch of the imagination—small but soft where it counts, as he likes to think of her. Mary enjoys her body, loves it in an unconscious way. The swell of her hips and butt never stop her from wearing the little satin pajama shorts and tiny tank tops when she meets him at the front door, as she will do today. She will nestle his cup of revitalizing brew into her shoulder so, when he takes the cup, Sam can brush the lovely swell of her breast. She’ll lean in—shampoo and skin and smoke from the cigarettes she thinks she sneaks an intoxicating perfume, her chestnut hair and cocoa eyes soft and inviting—and kiss him, murmuring that she loves his stink. Lost in these certainties that had occurred every day, save for three, in the five years they had shared this house, Sam nearly collides with the still-closed front door when he encounters it. No Mary, no coffee cuddled against a warm breast, no perfume or kisses. Just the front door.

Sam stares blankly at the cheerful blue wood for a few seconds before stepping back to reach for the old-fashioned brass doorknob. As he grasps it, he realizes he has done so few times during his time in this house. Mary, who works from home, nearly always greets him with an open door. He had teased her once that she was bored, sitting around all day waiting for him to arrive. She had rolled her eyes far enough to creep him out and said, "Oh, yes, Alejandro, I but pine when you are away. Please. It's not my fault I can smell you from the sidewalk."

Sam prepares to turn the knob to enter his home and finds that he can't. An odd and terrifying certitude settles over him. If he opens this door, rather than wait for Mary to do it, he will find that his home has been replaced with the belly of the earth, spiraling rocks and halls of the long-dead, like Trading Spaces in the Twilight Zone. Fright, not fear or panic but an insane case of the heebs, drops over Sam like a cold shadow. He suddenly and urgently needs to pee and decides that dignity trumps delusion. "Besides," he reasons calmly to himself, "the only way to prove myself wrong is to go inside." Mary, mistress of her own fear, bride of the macabre, would open the door for sheer thrills. Sam can certainly do it to save his pants and his self-respect.