—after Kathleen Norris' "Rain"


Before I moved to Washington, I didn't know how to start a fire or pit a cherry. I didn't hang a headlamp by the door for days when I would not see the light but still had mail to collect and trash to drag to the curb. I didn't fear a tree's fall nor harvest from its wreckage. I didn't haul wood from the backyard after dark, and I didn't know how some days there could be no before or after. So dark I couldn't remember anyone who knew me or if anyone had ever known me or if everything before Washington had been just a dream of light.

Before Washington, I did not keep an ax handy.

I did not know how fog could destroy a forest. Then lift like nothing, like a mood: fog as the mountain's mental illness. Fog as appropriate response to the weight of wet air when it meets its cold equivalent.

I didn't know how night rain could gush over mud-clogged gutters and drill cavities under the house. How walls could weep. How mold could intrude like age or tragedy, along sills and behind furniture and inside shoes I'd brought with me but hadn't worn since the hospital. How a leaky faucet could diagnose the symptoms of every hour.

Before I moved to Washington, I did not know the tricks a season could play. That photocell floodlights might never sense the dawn, might stay on all day and exhaust like stars. How after they're gone, I'd learn to keep the curtains drawn to avoid startling myself with my own startled reflection. How I might stop hauling garbage, or paying bills, or taking my medicine, or calling anyone. How I might watch the bulbs in every lamp extinguish and not feel moved to replace them.

And how, in that shrouded afterward, I might begin to see new things. Footprints the damp carpet holds for days. Condensation that rises like smeary speech bubbles: You field red, they say. You have two real eyes. I watch shadows bump independently along the floor, and I do not paint over them with light. The house drips and fogs, gray-day scarred, the door from here to there turned gauzy.  

Get up, the walls say. Look.

In Washington, I learn of light that's only accessible in the dark. I mean that I begin to see a glow from things I hadn't thought emitted anything. The wattage of a white sink. Tiny filaments in rotting fruit. The phosphorescence of every drip that passes from ceiling to floor. How an egg's switch can be flipped by cracking it into a bowl.

I must've wasted dozens of eggs searching for that siren, that flash or mirage I could not confirm existed anywhere else.

.

Kelly Magee is the author of the story collections BODY LANGUAGE, winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for fiction, and THE NEIGHBORHOOD. She lives in Washington state.





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