sudden fiction: AFTERNOON IN THE VALLEY

I dreamt of my grandmother again last night. Swollen ankles bulging out of threadbare pink slippers, feet pressed into faded brown carpet. Armchair bent to a scoliosis curve at the back, springs shot underneath, cigarette smoldering at stained fingertips. The curtains are drawn; up against the window the Central Valley heat presses its palms, torching the glass; the room is dark and cool and illuminated with Johnny Carson glow. The ceiling scalds in its familiar spot above the armchair, the same spot from which cigarette smoke has risen like a departing spirit for the last twenty-seven years. Her watery blue eyes blink and adjust, Johnny Carson tells a joke and everybody guffaws. A cough rattles in her chest, she bends over and hacks into her upturned palms and worries that the pain she feels near her left shoulder might spell some bad news. Outside the lemons have dropped off the tree and lie in a fallen halo on the ground like a shed petticoat, burning black in the sun. Crows congregated on the rooftop watch the lemons rot and split like open sores. The brown grass lies flattened in the yard, the lawn balding in many places. A blight spreads from the sidewalk to the driveway, moving south, threatening to uproot what’s left of the grass. The mailbox door hangs open in the afternoon drone, far-off airplanes and the lazy buzz of a lawnmower, the single sharp retort of a bell on a child’s bike as he flies down the empty street. The porch swing sags on the ground where the right half dropped off the chain, the wood smashed, splintered and grey. She shifts in her armchair, which squeals under her weight. Fleshy down of the throat, arteries thick with paste, flesh upon flesh upon flesh upon bone. Bones brittle, but cushioned beneath many pounds of aging fat. A wreath of sweat crowns her short, coarse mass of grey curls. Blue eyes blink, blinding blue eyes blink. She blinks hard to see Johnny Carson, who is interviewing Gregory Peck. Old Gregory Peck, old Gregory who was once young. She is startled to see him like that, beard of white, scheming black arched eyebrows that lend a certain cunning to his kind, aged face. She feels sick looking at old Gregory Peck, old Gregory who hobbled painfully onto the stage where old Johnny Carson was waiting. Everybody old, everybody white, everybody bent. Bent chair back, shot springs. Stiff fingers with an arthritis ache. She looks up at the kitchen, fixing on getting herself another Diet Coke. Her swollen heart thunders in her chest just thinking about the movement, the difficulty of locomotion, the pain of getting up. Every time she tries to stand she worries that her heart might seize up, so great is the effort. She breaks into a sweat thinking about the act of raising herself out of the chair, the terrible squeezing that she feels in her chest when she has to heave herself up, the acute ache that shoots through her engorged limbs when she labors to move from a sitting position. The sweat stands out on the back of her neck, the soft folds of her throat, dapples her forehead. The cigarette burns to ash in the ashtray. She lifts herself laboriously, slowly, electric shocks rippling through her from her agonized heart, working furiously, she pushes herself up, she stands, her knees crack under the strain, she grips her wooden cane with her oversized fingers. Slowly she shuffles into the kitchen, toward the cheerfully humming refrigerator. The faucet heads, electrical kitchen appliances, metal handles of cabinets, silverware in its drawer all sit silently and reflect, spotless, cold. The light comes yellow through the buttercup shade drawn over the kitchen window. The countertops white, clean, lifeless. She grips the refrigerator door, breathing hard. From the living room comes the laughter of the Johnny Carson crowd followed by thunderous applause, ringing out like a practiced choir hymnal ringing loud in the eves of the high cathedral.