Force Field
Fiction - short story
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The rickety plumbing in the house had caved under last winter’s frost. It got cold here; much colder than anywhere she had lived before. After the hurried flurry of the funeral, where no bells rang, no one had bothered to come back to the house to switch off the water or clean out the fridge. She found an old plastic bucket on the porch and filled it with leaves from the garden. She peed in the yard like her dogs and once a day she went out to dump the contents of the bucket in the woods across the river.
Every time she swept the living room floor, more wood splinters appeared from underneath the carpet or behind the furniture. Traces of a forced entry that had come too late. The blood-stained sofa was dragged outside where it sat next to the garden gate, the green velvet getting shiny and soggy. She sunk into it and stayed there until her underpants got drenched and the skin of her butt was covered in wet goosebumps. Before the rain washed it all away it was finally dragged to the skip. It felt weirdly empty without it.
The blood-stained sofa was dragged outside where it sat next to the garden gate, the green velvet getting shiny and soggy. She sunk into it and stayed there until her underpants got drenched and the skin of her butt was covered in wet goosebumps.
The wood stocked in the shed wouldn’t last a whole winter. Some of it had been chopped into exact burner-size chunks, neatly stacked against the wall at the far end of the shed. Other logs had only been cut to the right length with a chainsaw that was nowhere to be found. The logs had been casually thrown into the corner and looked like giant puzzle pieces that could be put back together again to form the perfect tree. Beech, she thought and wondered where the wood had come from, as the hills surrounding the village were covered in a dense pine forest. An old and rusty axe was stuck in the biggest log like a forgotten Excalibur for an uncrowned King. For a second or two she imagined trying to liberate it but seeing how deep it was lodged into the wood she just turned around and walked out of the shed.
With nothing to cut or chop with, she started collecting twigs and branches on her daily walks through the woods, building tiny stakes around the wood burner so they would dry. She had turned the straw beehives upside down, wedged them in between a few logs, and filled them up with pinecones. She had read somewhere they could be used as kindling. When she found cracked parts of a wooden fence stuffed underneath the porch, she spent days pulling the twisted metal wire and nails from the wood. Slowly the hard nugget in the pit of her stomach started to soften a little.
Sometimes she heard a faint whistling by the bedroom window. The ghost of Levente, or maybe just the wind rustling through the leafless plum trees. They looked painfully stark naked, and she let out a sigh of relief at first snowfall, welcoming a white blanket to cover it all. She needed cover. Sit like a lazy cat in the sun. It had been the advice of a tarot card reading fortune teller type at the Friday market, who smelled of a mix of incense and insanely strong coffee. Her own cats huddled like rugby players on top of the hot water bottle she kept wrapped in a moth-eaten woollen jumper she had found in one of the cupboards. She had expected to find rum or gin bottles, but instead all she saw were chipped plates, a Christmas mug and shelves stuffed with empty jars she knew had contained a variety of his mother’s homemade pickles and preserves. She couldn’t resist and when she stuck her nose in there was a whiff of something sweet or sour.
The solitude of her self-imposed confinement was supposed to give her solace. She couldn’t quite manage to be still and found herself odd jobs to do from the moment she woke up. She needed to keep warm, as every time she rested for too long, unless holding a cup of hot tea or cuddling one of her cats, the tips of her fingers would go numb. Whatever she did, she could never quite get her blood flowing enthusiastically enough to ward off the cold. Maybe she shouldn’t smoke. But every time she opened the hatch of the wood burner, a thick black waft made her eyes tear up. She would cough a little and think, tobacco can’t be worse than this. She thought of her grandfather, and the nicotine stain in his moustache, and how while he had laid upstairs in bed coughing up parts of the remaining half of his lungs, downstairs in the garden she had lit her first cigarette. Death had never scared her enough to embrace life fully, just its vices.
‘Watch out for the bears,’ he said, while taking her on a hike to his favourite place. ‘You shouldn’t be alone. Always be with someone you can outrun. So, the bear doesn’t catch you.’ She couldn’t outrun him, though she tried. Levente. The first time they made love he had slipped half a Molly into their kiss, and she took it. When his hand disappeared down the front of her thermal underwear, he whispered, ‘Is that ok’, and she let him, nodding yes. He switched off the light in the bedroom and for a little while they laid still on the narrow single bed. ‘You, beautiful, strange man,’ she said while taking off his shirt and stroking and kissing his chest. She squinted but couldn’t make out his tattoos in the dark and vowed that one day she would see him naked in the daylight. When she woke up the next morning, he wasn’t there. She still didn’t know him, but she knew every single hair on the back of his hand.
When she woke up the next morning, he wasn’t there. She still didn’t know him, but she knew every single hair on the back of his hand.
She flipped the mattress on the bed and left the bedroom windows wide open for two days, despite the cold, and slept in the living room in the armchair next to the wood burner. She brushed the cobwebs from the wall-mounted lights. They were fitted for three bulbs but contained only one each, shining slightly too bright, trying too hard as if to make up for the missing bulbs. In between the lights on the walls were the rectangular stains marked by a single nail. Who had taken the paintings? She felt her cheeks getting red, flushed with anger, at the thought of some distant relative, who wouldn’t give Levente the time of day when alive, coming in here after his death. She preferred to think the art had been squirreled away, like the tools from the shed, by some poor local. Closing her eyes, it was easy to conjure the image. A simple small black-and-white painting of a swirling road and a single tree. It was called “infinity”. With her eyes still closed, she wasn’t sure whether she wished to travel back in time or try to establish some psychic connection with whoever owned the painting now. She wanted it all back. Wanted him back.
The chain of coincidences that had led her here had very little to do with convscious decisions or clearly identified desires. She had been drifting. Wanting him felt very matter-of-fact, inevitable. A decision made for her by some higher power, a Karmic debt to be paid, or just a cruel joke of the cosmos. Although their conversations weren’t superficial, she never dug deeper. After he had stood her up for New Year’s Eve, she had sent him a short message, that merely said ‘You suck.’ Followed by ordering him to never show up at her place unannounced again. A reply came at around four in the morning. Two messages. ‘Alrighty then,’ and ‘Take care, and may God bless your hair.’ It had made her laugh. Weeks went by without seeing him, until one Saturday morning she bumped into him at the local shop. She had traipsed through the ankle-deep snow, to get some fresh air and buy her staples. Bread, banana’s, beers, sausages, and crisps. Levente stood underneath the terrace heater with one of his drinking buddies. Going in she had ignored him, but on her way out she said hello. He looked at her a bit sheepishly and then asked her if she wanted a beer. Until then she had never joined in his day drinking, but this time, at barely eleven in the morning, she did. It was cold and she could feel her nose started to run. Feeling a bit embarrassed she was digging in her pocket for a tissue when Levente wiped the snot from her nose with his bare hand. It had made her feel silly, like a little girl, and safe at the same time. And she thought of how he would never avert his eyes when she had to pee on one of their hikes and he would just carry on talking as she pulled her pants down and squatted in front of him.
‘What does it mean?’ she asked. He had told her once, the name of his dog, but she had honestly forgotten. ‘Testicles,’ he mumbled from underneath the duvet. She couldn’t help but laugh at his adolescent joke. ‘Union through passion’. He said it with his eyes closed and a relaxed smile, which she had learned would fade as he woke and make way for the cold and angry mask that would stay fixed on his face until he had his first drink. Realising there was no point in asking anymore who or what his dog was named after, she got up from the bed to start her day. Levente wouldn’t join until late afternoon, where usually he would sneak up behind her while she was in the kitchen preparing dinner, grab her breasts, and bury his head deep into her neck. ‘Union from passion,’ he said again, ‘I came up with that from sleep,’ and he seemed proud to have remembered.
He had carried his pain around like the armour of a noble knight. ‘Can I be cured?’ he had asked her once, when one of his panic attacks was finally subsiding. For one blissful summer, they shared the beautiful illusion of getting sober. She wanted to be the June Carter to his Johnny Cash but found herself in way over her head. Levente had gone too far down the rabbit hole to find his way back, no matter how many signposts she put up. The inner workings of their minds were so alike, the way they made love and moved around in the same space, they became so entangled they forgot. Whenever they clashed on a misdirected projection or unexpressed and unfulfilled expectations, the separation was excruciating, as they realised you can’t make homes out of people if you don’t even belong to yourself. A shockwave went through them as if an umbilical cord was cut and they didn’t know how to draw that first breath on their own.
Whenever they clashed on a misdirected projection or unexpressed and unfulfilled expectations, the separation was excruciating, as they realised you can’t make homes out of people if you don’t even belong to yourself. A shockwave went through them as if an umbilical cord was cut and they didn’t know how to draw that first breath on their own.
She thought he would be coming inside and waited for him while poking the fire. When she went back outside, she expected he had left but instead she found him standing in the garden staring up into the night sky. Completely still he looked like a statue of a stargazer. He seemed annoyed when he became aware of her presence. ‘What?!’ he said, his harsh tone stretching out the two meters between them to the maximum distance. ‘Just wondering where you were,’ she said calmly trying to fill the void with her voice. ‘In my skin,’ he replied. It would have sounded rooted if he didn’t look like the last man on earth who wanted to inhabit his body.
The frost lingered, and she started feeling frozen inside. Frozen in time. Memories lingered like the smells in the jars. Every day she was hoping to find something that reminded her of her, but it seemed she had been meticulously erased. Instead, she found herself surrounded by Levente-shaped holes, like the dent in the upside-down mattress. Her sense of self got lost in her longing for the nothingness of before. The time she had spent pretending he was still here, waiting for her to come back, had now turned on her as she tried to occupy his space without him. She had said goodbye to a closed casket and when the priest was singing his hymns, she had pictured Levente talking in his sleep in a language she didn’t understand.
The aching passion they once had for each other faded into rare moments of lazy and feeble fumbling that never led to anything satisfactory. When alcohol was no longer enough to feed his hungry ghosts, Levente started getting high. After the last time they had sex, he sat in the bathtub and cried like a child. She closed the lit of the toilet and sat down on it. ‘Would you like me to wash your back?’ she asked him. Leaning forward and holding on to his ankles he said, ‘If the day ever comes that I say no to that question, feel free to get the gun from that cupboard.’ No longer lovers, the intimacy they shared was impossible to define. The way she couldn’t explain why a Pollock made her feel like she was falling into the universe or why a Fleetwood Mac song made her feel like she had no skin. It wasn’t like brother and sister, or mother and son, but he was family. As if the same blood ran through their veins.
‘Would you like me to wash your back?’ she asked him. Leaning forward and holding on to his ankles he said, ‘If the day ever comes that I say no to that question, feel free to get the gun from that cupboard.’
When spring finally came it caught her off guard. She wasn’t ready for a change in seasons and the sudden burst of the soft green leaves left her feeling unsettled. Hearing the river pick up speed, fed by the melting snow from the mountains, she started feeling rushed. Even after she had the plumbing fixed, she only used the toilet in the bathroom, and sat with her back to the bath. She brushed her teeth at the kitchen sink and continued washing herself with a washcloth and water from the enamel bowl that she put on top of the wood burner that was no longer burning.