The Descent

At first, Anna had looked down every day to make sure that her house was still in sight, a single grain of sand in a seashore of brown shingle rooftops. It reassured her, as she left the earth; it served as a tangible reminder that her that life down there was more than just a dream. And when, eventually, when she lost sight of her particular grain of sand, she searched for another to comfort her and call her own, and then another, until the whole world filled up no more than the head of a pin and all of it was hers.

Now she had no fear as she fell back down to earth and her country, her town, her home gradually came back into view. She missed the feeling of the solid ground beneath her feet and she was no good to anyone up there, anyway. The air was thin and cool and gentledark; it let her down slowly, evenly, as if she were not dropping at all. Everything came back in pieces.

It was called the Ouroboros, for the snake that eats its tail, and it was said to be the longest train in the history of mankind.

When the people of Amaranth heard the Ouroboros would be coming through their very station, the entire town gathered eagerly to catch the first glimpse of steam curling over the horizon. The townspeople waved and cheered as the passengers leaned out the windows, grinning and flourishing hats and handkerchiefs at the swiftly passing countryside. Anna and the other children ran underfoot and alongside the train, leaping up to touch the outstretched fingers of the fine men and women on board. Endlesseternal strings of sausage links came off barbecues and the grandfathers’ pockets nevernotonce ran out of candies for the little ones. The air was thick with spices and sauces and heaping bowls of secret recipes, hinted at just enough so that the other mammas would try to match them but always, inevitably, be left scratching their heads at the missing ingredient.

As the days wore on and the train continued to pass and the dapper men and women continued to smile with their sinisterdelirious elegance from the windows, the townspeople began to drop away, abandoning the festivities one by one to return to their normal lives. The crowds were replaced by occasional packs of small children, fascinated by the neverending stream of pristine white gloves extended out to their tinysticky bare hands, and roaming gangs of adolescents, who threw stones and cans to try to break the passengers’ imperturbable elation. Loved ones and neighbors trapped on the other side of the tracks soon faded from memory until even the oldest grandmothers threw up their hands when the little ones pointed to the unfamiliar faces beside their own in family photographs. The joyful calls of the passengers were eventually swallowed by the clamor of the wheels over the train tracks, which in turn disappeared into the white noise of the town. Only on certain iridescent nights when the moon poured through Anna’s windows and the mice were settled quietly in the walls did the ghostly tremor of the train whistle haunt her wakeful dreams of sleepless nights.

She thought it was peculiar, the morning she woke up to find that her feet did not quite reach the floor. But nobody remarked on it, and she went about her business hoping the mysterious ailment would pass before anyone did. It was only after a month, when Anna hovered a good foot above the ground, that her husband mentioned anything about it at all.

It wasn’t a bother, in the beginning. Anna found she could clean corners and reach shelves that once loomed impossibly out of reach; the stepstool quite wasted away in the cellar for lack of use. Little Jack loved sitting high on Mamma’s shoulders, and uncomfortable stilettos and confining sneakers were relegated to the closet, as Anna found shoes to be rather unnecessary. It was only when she had to duck her head to get through the door and finally resorted to entering the house by way of the upstairs window, that she would admit that her condition was becoming a nuisance. Soon she hovered above the roof, like a guardian angel or saint watching over the home she could no longer enter. But all the time she had the distinct impression that it wasn’t she that was floating upward, but the earth that was giving way below.

A baby on her hip and the smell of raindamp pavement below. She could see from the rooftop: a bus stop, the neighbors’ front lawns and patios, a cat sprinting across the street, and a red-haired, cloudy-eyed boy bouncing a red rubber ball along the sidewalk. Anna removed a wooden clothespin from between her lips and held a blue apron up to the clothesline. A cool breeze sent a single ripple through the wethanging shirts and sheets, and beneath the apron’s notched white edging she saw the boy had disappeared. In his place now strode a man with gray eyes and red hair and a red rubber ball held firmly under one arm. How time passes these days! she shook her head and sighed and hugged her baby close.

It was funny what she remembered, what she didn’t. Had she ever before been forced to guess what images would be flashing through her head during the last moments of a great fall, she would have said a birthday, her graduation, her wedding, the birth of her child. But none of that came to mind as the clouds and mountaintops rose up around her shoulders, embracing her as they had once expelled her from their midst. She had felt somewhat offended, unwanted, those days and weeks and months ago, when the earth had spit her out like a cherry pit or watermelon seed. At least now it wanted her back.

It was the first summer that nobody died.

They couldn’t, of course. The cemetery was on the other side of the train tracks, completely inaccessible to departing souls on Anna’s end of the town. In fact, it was all anyone could do to contract even a passing cold. Old women who swore in the winter that they would have left this miserable life by the spring lay doll-like, crossarmed and preposterously stillbreathing in their beds. Doctors idly toyed with their stethoscopes as the deathly ill failed to die and asthmatics rapturously drew in unhindered breaths of richly pollinated air.

The skies responded to the disorder below with proper confusion. Throughout the month of June, fog choked the town. People stuck their heads out windows and squinted into the impenetrable mist settled motionless in their backyards, lodged between houses and barns like shimmering cotton, clusteredclinging to the crowns of the hills like a thick moss. They clucked and closed the shutters and went out to find the animals; Anna helped her father and brothers beat off the haze with tennis rackets and frying pans.

In July the sky was streaked with red and a light snow flurried above the streets. Once again, people stuck their heads out windows and squinted up at the glaring sun and scarlet clouds and frowned at the dustysnowy specks that swirled around their eyes. They clucked and closed the shutters and talked about the old days when there was sun and there was snow but never both at one time and did you just see those clouds out there and wasn’t that just something and what was the world coming to anyway?

Nearly home again. Her forehead bumped gently against the cool windowpane as she gazed intently into her own reflection, vaporousethereal against the dark forms and illuminated trees passing on the other side of the glass. The air was fresher here and the car seemed to go just a little bit faster in anticipation of the familiar mailboxes and peach trees of its own street and the gentle slope of its very own driveway.

Anna spent days beating back the snaking stalks and bouquets of flowers that exploded through the walls of the attic. She saw how cleverly the vines had worked, their tentacles having felt out the narrow cracks and crevices in the windowpanes and roofing and burst through them like fingers searching for a gap in a seam. She hacked through the matted tangle of creepers and blossoms, removing orchids that had sprouted from the mouths of ancient chests, azaleas nestled among the spines of decaying books, the heads of snap dragons and forget-me-nots that peaked slyly out from behind decrepit stacks of magazines and picture frames.

But she soon found her efforts to clear the forest of neglect had been wasted; it seemed that at some point during the years of its abandonment, the attic had claimed her family’s memories for its own and hoarded them secret from her gaze. Smiling faces in photographs fell away between her fingertips, disintegrating into piles of sepia-toned dust; mechanical toys from her grandfather’s travels collapsed into useless piles of cranks and gears. Crisp-edged love letters crumbled at her touch; the bracelets she remembered gleaming from her great grandmother’s wrists dulled to ash as she turned them over in the palms of her hands.

It was two weeks before she finally sat back on her knees and surrendered the attic forever to the undergrowth.

The world was returning to her more quickly now; she could feel the tug of gravity on her legs and arms and the first pangs of fear flashed green before her eyes. She had forgotten the heaviness of her body, its dead weight. She had forgotten the solidity of the earth, the hard angles, the cold surfaces. Panic crawled up her spine as she saw the precise place where she would land.

There was not quite an ocean by the town of Amaranth.

The townspeople could hear the crests of its waves breaking against the shore and smell it in salty licks on the summer wind, but no trace of the sea glimmered on any horizon. Once, when Anna was a child, the town sent out a party of men in search of their elusive ocean, but after climbing every hill and mountain and crossing every field and empty space that surrounded Amaranth, the intrepid explorers did not unearth so much as a trickle of water in any direction. Later, when she was grown, on days when the unseen waves thrashed against the unseen rocks and the brackish scent of salt and sun block overpowered even the magnolias, Anna would turn off the vacuum or wipe the flour from her hands and step out to the patio to bask in the glorious light of sanddollarseafoam reveries.

Empty wine glasses littered the room, winking iridescent from every table and countertop. Solitary forks and knives lay abandoned in unexpected nooks and crannies; napkins were strewn about in varying states of crumple and fold. Stacks of half-scraped bowls of hummus teetered by the sink next to platters boasting wilted lettuce leaves and cookie crumbs. Anna looked around at those that remained, the last few guests, the closest friends, exulting in the mess, their faces red from pleasure and wine and their fingers curled precariously around the delicate stems of idle champagne glasses. In bed hours ago, the children had fallen asleep to the gentle hum of hushed voices emanating from the kitchen, their dreams punctuated by intermittent bursts of laughter ringing through the halls.

She let out a small cry as she hurtled closer and closer toward her end, her final resting place—on the back of the great snake that slithered between the two halves of Amaranth, forever pushing forward, forever devouring its own tail.

The boy gazed up with his clear blue eyes from the seat of his lemon yellow tricycle and watched her with puzzlement, his mother, this woman who was not moving and yet somehow drifting away.

The Ouroboros.