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•••
Jane sat beside her mother listening to the radio. The dull sounds of the grim storyteller reciting a tale a woman named Annabel Lee made Jane feel sleepy.
Yvonne was cleaning something in the kitchen, Jane's father sat in his chair with a paper in hand and a mug in the other. Jane picked at a loose thread on the couch that seemed to fall apart more and more every day. Her eyes followed to the window and she looked ahead at the beautiful pink sky. She gave a small smile at the dusk and thought about the day to come. She would be visiting her uncle and her grandpa at the shop, as she did every week. She always looked forward to those days. The faint smell of bread drew Jane from the living room to the kitchen where Yvonne bent over to close the oven. Jane took a seat in the high chair at the island with her head in her hands.
"What's wrong child?" Jane snapped out of her trace at the comforting voice of Yvonne. She let out a small sigh and sat up straight in her chair out of common courtesy to address the woman.
"I don't know." This much was true. All her life Jane had an empty feeling that surrounded her like a shadow clouded a dimly lit room. The lingering feeling would follow the young girl until the void filled in the oddest of places.
"Well, I was just about to start on some meatloaf. How would you like to help me out with that?" Jane offered Yvonne a small smile.
"I would love to," Jane began to remove herself from her chair when she heard a strange whoosh noise.
"What was that?" She asked Yvonne. Yvonne smiled with a shrugged.
"It must have been the A/C." Jane gave her a look, not believing her completely.
"I've never heard it make that noise before," she muttered under her breath. Yvonne shrugged without a thought, taking out a pan from the hook.
"Here, why don't you go and ask your parents if they would like anything to drink."
•••••
Jane didn't sleep that night. There was something strange about the noise. The more the thought about it, the more she realized that noise had plagued her existence. At the auto shop, when she was at the house, everywhere. Sure, the A/C was a reasonable explanation for hearing it once. Maybe twice, but not for the number of times she had heard it. Come to think of it, there were a lot of strange occurrences that Jane waved off. The strangest being the smell of burning paper, which often happened after the sound. Jane thought of all the possibilities of what and why these things were happening. She could be imagining it, there could be a secret organization or maybe aliens like in that new movie Earth V.S. the Flying Saucers.
Despite the endless theories she could play off of Jane grew bored with all the imagining and 'what if's. Squinting her eyes she was able to make out the time. 2:57. Jane rolled her eyes and through her head on her pillow. Being a Monday, she knew she would be struggling in school to stay awake tomorrow. Now, it was well into the morning. She couldn't be bothered. She lay in bed for a couple more minutes before throwing her blanket off of her body and getting a drink of water.
When Jane hit the floor of the first level she heard a small clatter coming from the kitchen. Jane froze, not knowing what to do, she played with the end of her nightgown as she waited for another noise. When it didn't come, she made her way into the kitchen, to her surprise, her father sat at the table with a bowl of cereal. Jane stopped herself again but when her father made no move to do anything she went to the cabinet and grabbed a bowl and a spoon. Pouring some cereal and then some milk from the bottle she took a spot across from her father.
She took note of these moments with him, when the tension wasn't so thick it wouldn't be cut with a knife. These moments were rare and she cherished every second of them, even though they were mostly spent sitting in silence. Despite their strange relationship, they understood each other. Jane knew that what her father went through was difficult and that he was trying his best. Alan knew that his daughter tried not to be awkward around him and that sometime's there wasn't anything to talk about. They never had a meaningful conversation; only ones that lasted a few seconds. It didn't matter to Jane, though. They understood each other, the mutual understanding that life was hard and not the way you wanted it to go. So the pair sat in silence, eating cereal together at four in the morning.
