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1. College Girl
Her entire family was on the way home with a Christmas tree strapped to the roof of the station wagon when they were hit head-on by a semi and killed instantly. She was on a study-abroad in New Zealand, and looking outside at the budding flowers, she felt such a sense of disconnect that she almost dropped the phone. The words seemed to be floating around the room and evaporating like mist rather than inserting themselves into her ear or mind. A woman from the international program helped her book a ticket back to Colorado. She flew back in time, toward the previous day, as the sun rose higher and higher in the sky. One of her uncles picked her up from the airport. He kept trying to pat her hand on the drive back to the house, but she didn’t speak, just looked out the window at the snow blanketing the roadsides. Just inside the front door, her little brother’s shoes were still lined up on a rack, and the scent in the house had turned dry and unfamiliar, and the words from the telephone call belatedly gathered themselves together and slammed into her all at once. 2. College Dropout She moved into her aunt and uncle’s guest room and got a job at a diner nearby. There was something about her sense of disintegration, or dislocation, that gave her an otherworldly, distracted quality that the men there seemed to like. They flirted with her, trying to interest her in their stories. She didn’t care, though, where they had been the previous weekend, or who they had been in the past. None of it mattered. If she finished pouring the coffee halfway through a man’s sentence, she just wandered off, not bothering to ask if he needed anything else. In her early twenties, she took her parents’ savings and some of the money from the sale of the house and got her own place. It was small and on the outskirts of town, where at night she could look out her back window and see the stars. She drank too much and started to fall asleep anywhere, like a cat. She woke on the floor or in the bathtub, not remembering how she had gotten there in the first place. 3. Part-Time Lecturer Eventually, she pulled herself together and went back to school. Once she got in, it seemed like she couldn’t find her way out again, and she ended up joining the faculty in women’s and gender studies. There were dark circles under her eyes, and she had a habit of looking down at herself, at the skin of her hands or arms, as if she didn’t recognize them. She seemed haunted, and the undergraduate girls in her poetry seminars and feminist theory classes practically swooned over her. Every night for years, she dreamed that she was at a Christmas tree farm with her family. They were wandering through the woods with an axe in her father’s hand, his arms still muscular under a checked flannel shirt. She was trailing behind, following their footsteps in the snow. On the periphery, she could see the pink and lavender flowers from New Zealand, the coastline in the distance, a place she could only conjure up from the photographs in the brochures. Her parents had told her that they were sorry, but the cost was too high. The snow crunched underfoot, vapor in the air. Sunlight flashed as the blade of the axe met bark. Her mother paid cash for the last tree they would ever choose together. They all piled into the station wagon. She was sitting in the back seat, her hair tied back in a ponytail, her fingernails chewed to rags. The sun rose higher and higher in the sky. One of her parents turned on the radio. There was some unremarkable chitchat from the front seat. Someone laughed. They were driving toward certain death, or possibly life, she could never tell, what with the icy road winding in front of them and the vibrant flowers of a perpetual springtime shining out from the side-view mirrors. CLOCKHOUSE Volume Thirteen
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