The Iron

(copyright 1993-2008 by John E. Simpson)

Alice’s eyes fluttered open once, twice, three-four times. In the half-instant before she fully awoke, a blurry certainty stumbled into her mind that she had seen — well, something.

She could not put a name to it: no shadowy, ski-masked human figure by her bedside or fleeing out the window; no bogeyman in the closet. But there had been something, damn it, some thing, some compact physical presence just off to one side of the bed, a concrete precipitate of her sleeping mind.

She switched on the reading lamp affixed to the headboard. Hoisted herself into sitting position. Looked around the bedroom.

Gray, cloudy-summer morning light filtered in through the bedroom window as if to placate her with little fragments of reassuring ordinariness:

Here, said the morning light. Here is your bureau, and all the little doo-dads cluttering up its top. The loose change, the jumble of unmatched and mismatched earrings, the box of facial tissues, the picture of Pete and you at the guest house in the mountains. The coffee mug, patinaed inside with a hardened tan goo from over a week ago. And here, the nightstand, the pile of books on the floor, the bed, the comforter, and over there your dumb old hot-raspberry furry slippers and an armchair and a floor lamp and a wastebasket jammed to the brim with glossy Sunday newspaper ads and balled-up tissues, and on the walls familiar framed prints and a mirror. All real, and you remember all this, right?

Nothing new, the morning light said; nothing unexpected. See? No mysterious Somethings. Go back to sleep.

Alice did close her eyes for an instant. She licked her lips and swallowed, and then opened her eyes again, silenced the now-shrieking alarm, and swung her feet out of bed.

Her sleep and waking had been screwy and disjointed all summer, whenever Pete was out of town on one of his frequent days-long business trips. Always a late-night glass of wine to help her sleep, always an early-morning pre-alarm awakening. This sense of disquiet, now: that was new. But it evidently had nothing to do with anything here in the bedroom.

Nor with anything in the kitchen. And its source wasn’t to be found in the morning newspaper, either, chockablock as it was with only the usual accounts of disasters variously natural, economic, political, and technological. She turned to the comics page and peeked at her horoscope, down there (as always) in the lower left corner. Sometimes it teased her with a provocative forecast. Not today, though. Nothing today but bland ambiguities: “Your cycle,” it said, “indicates a willingness to take charge. Domestic concerns central. Sunny side up!”

So no: there was nothing anywhere at all as far as she could tell, around her or even within herself – nowhere anything to validate her sense of something about to happen. Yet the feeling persisted: the world seemed to want to speak, and not just to plain-old “say” but to utter something, an oracular pronouncement stuck for now on the tip of its tongue.

“I really must be cracking up,” she said, aloud. Then she shrugged, stood up from the table, and got on with her morning.

—

“Know what the problem is, right?” said Coreen, the library’s all-knowing summer intern, that afternoon. “You’re bored. Always happens to me like that. Get to thinking I’ll die if something don’t happen to me soon, next thing I know I’m convinced something really is gonna happen.” She popped her gum and keyed into the library’s computer the bar code from the new book Alice had handed her. “That’s how us women’s minds work.” Cynical, worldly-wise, and a little too glib, for all her fifteen years.

Maybe that was the problem. This was, after all, the first summer in over two decades of teaching that Alice hadn’t worked, really worked. She and Pete didn’t need the money, of course, now that the twins had been off living on their own for over two years in the city. And Alice had wanted a change from the year-round grind of getting spiffed up in the morning just to stand up all day, at school for nine months and in Lowell’s department store during the summer. The volunteer work here in the town library this summer, this was heaven: she wasn’t expected till noon, and because she was unpacking and shelving books and moving bookshelves from one aisle to the next she was not expected to “dress up.”

But maybe Coreen was right; maybe she was bored.

She sighed, and handed Coreen another book. “That’s probably it. Maybe I need a boyfriend. You have a spare?”

“Ha!” Coreen barked, but looked at Alice from the corners of her unsmiling eyes.

But no, Alice didn’t really think she was bored. Maybe she just missed Pete, and when he got home tomorrow night the feeling would evaporate. Maybe that was it.

She tested the pieces of that possibility against a template of anticipation. Pete. Tomorrow night. Walking in, jet-lagged and smog-cranky, sorting through the mail; drinking a quick brandy; asleep in bed before Alice was even out of the bathroom. Not exactly a film clip from a romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and (God knew) Meg Ryan.

Nope; that wasn’t it either. Nothing in that picture said to her, That’s it, that’s the source of your mystery. That picture provided not a fix, but a statement of the problem. Whatever the world might be on the brink of uttering, it wasn’t that – the world had been saying that for years. On the other hand no more likely candidates stepped forth, so it would just have to do: she simply missed Pete, missed his smile when he first saw her every morning, his easy laughter over the phone on his daily commute home from the office.

She took her uneasy sense of portent, of sunshine or storm or sudden breeze abrew in the heavens, and placed it out of sight in a back corner of her mind. Life was complicated enough just dealing with reality.

—

So it was that that evening, in the thin little sliver of a dark moonless summer night between the last morsel of her microwaved dinner and the first nudge of an inkling that it was time to get ready for bed, as she stood at the downstairs powder-room sink rinsing her face with cold water – so it was that she was quite unprepared when she first saw, out of the corner of her eye, outside the powder-room window, the iron.

[Continue: Read “The Iron” (60KB PDF)]