Two Stories by Janice Obuchowski

I: Halcyon

I grew up in Mountain Lake, Minnesota, just a smudge of a prairie town with very little to recommend it, but which—to its credit—has a name with a sensible origin story.  One of the first settlers, seeing a large island rising from the lake, thought the landmass resembled a mountain.  Demerits for creativity but points for honesty.

My home now, in Hapswell, Connecticut, is 7 Halcyon Ave., near the intersection of Calliope and Socrates Drive.  This is the realm of taupe: taupe with brown trim, taupe with white trim.  Ecru with mushroom, beige with linen.  My wife calls the spectrum J-Crew spring. We moved here in our late 20s, when Hannah was pregnant with our son, Paul.  I can’t believe we had him so young.  I was only 10 years removed from the prairie.

Now I’m 44, not yet inured to taupe, nor ready to return to the literalism of Mountain Lake.  At first, I claimed a street named Halcyon—implying better days were behind us—was a bad omen.  Hannah said nonsense, it was just the developers trying to pick Greek words they thought sounded fancy.

This fall, Paul is off to college.  And just now, in the kitchen, Hannah told me she’s in love with another man.  She sat clutching a mug, eyes cast down.  She asked for a divorce.  She’s right to ask.  It’s been some time since we’ve paid enough attention to each other. Now I’m sitting on our lawn, thinking what to do, where to go.

It’s evening.  The streetlamps provide measured light, and the lawns are littered with children’s sports equipment.  Crab apple trees are just beyond their glory, so delicate white and plum blossoms are scattered in the grass or pooled curbside.  In the halogen-pocked dark, they’re either ashen or like smoke.

I clutch a fistful of grass.  Joke’s on those developers of yore, because after Paul was born, I looked up halcyon’s meaning and discovered something beautiful.

Halcyon is Greek for a kingfisher—halkuōn. And the phrase halcyon days comes from the fourteen days of tranquil weather that occurred when halcyons were breeding.  The birds—and something in me still lifts at this—bred in nests floating at sea.  Gentle waves, no wind. “Hals” means sea and “kuōn” means conceiving.  Thus the original meaning was not happiness behind us, but—between more sustained periods of strife—a small calm interlude.  It makes me think how, even as I debate sleeping out here, wrecking myself with the night’s damp, I might find placid waters yet.  I’ll come upon them.  I’ll give them a name.

II: Love

Something—a muffled crash, a thump—and then the pierce of a woman’s cry. We both raised our heads, but the bedroom was dark, our shades dimmed.  Then nothing.  The hour was murkily early, and those sounds improbable, so I turned over and Therese’s breathing slowed, the flutter of her eyelids becoming still.

Then a window breaking, glass shattering, and a door slamming, practically exploding off its hinges.  And, distinctly now, no mistaking it, a woman’s wail—a high siren, a dying bird.  Then it stopped.

Therese went to the window, drawing the shades.  Pale light crept in, washing the room in the white of elm trees and cloudy sky.  She said she’d go make coffee and I, still sleep shrouded, rose to get the paper.

Outside, the grass was edged wet with dew and our neighbor, Linda Frasier, sat sobbing on her lawn.  She wore a mauve bathrobe, had her hands wrapped around her knees.  I stood in my driveway in my flannel pajama bottoms and a white t-shirt stained at the underarms.

“Linda!” I called out in a falsely genial way.

She raised her head, and tugged her bathrobe more tightly closed as I walked over.  She stared as if I weren’t real. As if I were a ghost, the whole landscape ghostly, and I was interrupting whatever pressing and real thing lay behind her eyes.

Our neighbors, Linda and Frank Frasier.  When they first moved in a few years ago, Therese had meant to invite them over, but we were always in a rush during the work days and then were always trying to make the most of our weekends.  I sat down next to her.

“Do you want to come inside?” I said.  “Therese is making coffee.”

“Your wife is lovely.”  Drawing her hand into a fist, she started gnawing it.

Then I saw behind her: the living room window was fractured, broken glass still clinging to a few frames.  And on her lawn, a piano bench, its crimson cushion facing us, its legs in the air.  Well, it wasn’t a body.  How had I missed this?

Linda watched me look.  “He doesn’t love me. I told him he did, and he told me he didn’t.  And I said, ‘How could you not love me?’”  She hiccupped.  “I don’t mean I’m so loveable he must love me, I just mean, how could he not love me?”

“Linda,” I said.  “Come have some coffee.”

“I said, ‘What about the last seven years?  You love me.’ He said, ‘I don’t.’  He picked up the piano bench and threw it out the window.”  She stared at her knees.

I put a tentative hand on her shoulder, and finally she looked at me and saw another person next to her.  I could see her seeing,  pinning her hopes on me, her eyes like flowers, blooming with wanting answers.  I wondered what she knew about me, if she knew how little help I could be in the end.

Janice Obuchowski‘s fiction has twice received Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize anthologies—in 2017 and 2019—and has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions online, LitHub, and elsewhere.  She earned her MFA from UC Irvine and served as a fiction editor for the New England Review.