Eternity RPC Board
“We should go soon.”
It was the third time Harlan had insisted, and the third time her girlfriend had ignored her.
“We will,” Tamara promised.
Underfoot, the tired floorboards moaned their protest. Tamara remembered when her father had installed the flooring, tired of hearing her grandmother complaining about the ugly pea soup color of the carpets that had come included with the house every time she’d visited. She could still remember the smell of the dusty old carpeting as it was ripped up, and of the electric hot wood as her father’s circular saw ate with acute precision through the interlocking white oak planks. He was an accountant, not a handyman, but he’d done a job good enough to earn his mother’s approval, and Tamara had liked how the living room echoed with the new floors installed.
Choosing each step carefully, methodically, she placed one shoe gingerly toe-first, allowing her heel to glide down behind it until her weight was fully shifted. When it held, she repeated with the next foot. Carefully, carefully….
“Seriously, Tam,” Harlan whined still from the doorway. Despite Tamara’s insistence, Harlan had not taken a single step into the house, and so Tamara felt it only just that she meet Harlan’s demands with the same unyielding ignorance. “Mom’s going to freak if she wakes up and the car’s not there.”
“Let her freak, then,” Tamara laughed, casting an unconcerned glance back over her shoulder to the petite girl with the strawberry blonde bob. “Just come up with something. Tell her you left something over at my place and you had to go get it.”
“It’s not the reason why I took it that she’d care about, you know.”
There.
Frozen in time, in midstep, Tamara stopped and crouched down, easing first one of her backpack’s straps off her shoulder, and then the other. She sat the olive drab canvas bag in front of her and tugged at the zipper.
Harlan still had her learner’s permit. Whether she’d gone to her girlfriend’s house or to a crack den, it wouldn’t have made any difference without her mom or someone else eighteen years or older in the passenger seat with her. And Harlan was a good girl; this wasn’t like her. She was the kind of straight-As, honor club, community service kid that would self-flagellate over her own mistakes more than anyone else would even consider, and the kind of person who crumpled under the weight of parental disappointment. This was, objectively, the worst thing she'd ever done.
“Look,” Tamara began calmly, as if trying not to startle away a fawn, “Why not just, like….” She paused, thinking. “Just go around the corner and get us some coffee and cinnamon rolls from Marie’s. You like those, right? Those really fucking huge cinnamon rolls with the pecans?” She was foraging through her bag, her attention not on her girlfriend’s distraught, and not noticing her look of abject consternation. “And it’ll take your mind off of being a total grand larcenist.” Harlan blanched whiter with dread.
Not that Tamara noticed.
There was a camera in the young woman’s hands, one of the really good ones that had cost an entire middle schooling and half of a high schooling’s worth of allowance. The kind that had taken her an entire summer of experimentation with ISO and shutter speed and white balance settings to understand. The kind that made her hands feel naked and hungering without it in them. As much as Harlan, and maybe even more if truth be told of the fickle nature of high school sweethearts, that camera was Tamara’s treasure. A truer love she’d never known.
She raised it to her eye and lined up her target in her sights: the remains of a staircase banister, the pineapple-shaped wooden finial rising from the spiral volute sitting atop charred spindles that resembled charcoal sketches.
Tamara had lamented the weird pineapple-thing when they’d first moved into the home; how dare it have the gall to interrupt a railing otherwise perfectly fit for sliding down? Her father had explained that hand railings were, in fact, for hands, not butts, and that she would do well to keep that in mind.
It was hardly a pineapple, now. Rather the blackened remains of a dilapidated Easter egg, tilted and sooty. Above it, the shambles of what appeared to have once been an entire second story had caved in.
Click. The camera blinked its eye and remembered the image.
“I guess,” Harlan whimpered. She knew better than to interrupt Tamara when she’d found her subject and had waited until her girlfriend had brought the camera away from her face. She was that kind of straight-As, honor club, community service kid, after all. “I mean, I do like those sticky buns.”
“Great!” Tamara chirped decisively, shuffling around in her deep crouch while scanning the room. Her eyes lighted on an overhead ceiling fan, its blades drooping sadly towards the ground and all three lightbulbs having long been shattered. Oily streaks of soot blackened the tatters of ceiling around the fan. The cool, damp breeze through the broken windows and missing patches of roofing made the chain pull sway lazily side-to-side.
Click. The camera remembered. The house creaked.
“I’m just….” Harlan had not heard picked up on the subtle closing argument dolloped onto Tamara’s interjection. Clearly not. “I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to leave you here. Alone. Maybe you can come with me to get them?”
Deeper into the scorched belly of the house, Tamara moved away from the nervous creature hunched to make herself tiny in the remains of the threshold.
“I’m going to get photos for this project,” Tamara announced, her voice sounding no annoyance with her girlfriend’s boundless caution, but that being only due to a well-practiced, completely fake coolness. The zipper pulls on her backpack jangled as she swung it back onto her shoulder. “You can do what you need to do.”
Besides, who checked their garage first thing in the morning after getting out of bed to make sure the car was still there? The average person would spend at least an hour by Tamara’s calculations showering, getting dressed, brushing their teeth and taking a piss. And then there would be the time spent brewing coffee and making getting a bowl of cereal or making some toast. Hell, it was Saturday; chances were that Harlan’s mom had nowhere to be and would just chill out in her jammies all day watching reality TV and cooking shows. The only thing that she would even notice would be the sound of the garage door opening, and that could easily be explained away with no more than an ounce of creativity.
Harlan switched from foot to foot. Tamara could hear the jangling of her charm bracelet as she did that nervous-fidget-thing with her hands. That quintessentially Harlan thing. She wasn’t going to leave by sheer force of guilt alone.
The living room had been the most eaten by flames. The fire department had confirmed that it had all started here. Probably a flyaway ember from the fireplace, they’d said. It happened. It happened, especially, that time of year, which made it all the more troubling. Their new apartment didn’t have a fireplace. Open flames weren’t allowed by management. Even the eyes on the stove were electric. Her dad had smiled at her with a certain burden of understanding. He always looked so tired back then.
Each of Tamara’s steps brought little plumes of ash rising up from the ground. They swirled around her feet and into the smoky air. Even with so many ulcerous pathways to the great outdoors burned through into roof, and after all this time, the house smelled acrid with smoke, and the air was a permanent milky gray.
Time felt frozen.
Despite the years, the ghost of Christmas Past still haunted this room. Melted plastic garland dripped from the brick mantle, and shattered bits of broken ornaments and baubles glinted with mirror red and glitter gold in a little patch of sunlight filtering in from above. Pine needles, not those from what had been their Christmas tree, but those from the skinny evergreens outside, littered the floor to refresh the festive look. Other intruders - spiderwebs and birds’ feathers and graffiti - had taken up residence, too, contrasted against the piles of coal-colored dust. Interlopers, but they could be ignored.
Click. Click. Click. The camera would remember as much about this day as Tamara did about that night. About how she’d first woken up for a glass of water, because she was just too warm for a December night. About the way her doorknob had been too hot to touch, and how the buttercream-yellow eggshell paint of her bedroom had wrenched itself eerily away from the sheetrock underneath like blistering skin. About feeling that the entire situation was a nightmare, and that crawling into bed and wrapping herself tighter in her comforter would make it stop.
About the noises - the roaring flames and the snapping support beams and her dad calling for her name and the sound of her door being kicked down. About her breathlessness and wheezing made her blood pound in her own ears, and the way her eyes had watered too much to see when she was passed out of the window into the bear-like arms of a man in breathing apparatus and reflective gear. About the screaming of a woman that she thought she heard, but hoped she hadn’t, but knew she had. About being told by her father in the back of an ambulance that it wasn’t her fault, and that her wanting the fireplace lit that night wasn’t her fault, and that accidents happened.
About the days after when the neighbors and aunts and uncles brought tuna casseroles and overbaked brownies and gross fruit-studded Jell-o moulds, and how they dressed all in black and hugged her and told her sorry. About the Christmas presents they’d brought for her, even though it was already January and they hadn’t seen her in years and had no clue what she liked. About the speeches her mom’s sisters gave about how great of a person she was. About how white carnations had been her mom’s favorites, and about laying her mom’s favorite flowers on a piece of marble that bore her name.
About first feeling the need to document every moment following that day in photographs, good and bad alike, because her mom had been camera shy and claimed to be unphotogenic, and now Tamara couldn’t remember what she looked like when she scowled or whether it was her left cheek or right cheek that had the dimple when she laughed.
All snapshots in time. Some that had faded. Some that should have been burned up in the fire, but instead hung prominently over her mind’s hearth.
Outside, the wind stirred. A bright blue tarp that had been tossed over the corner of the roof that had been most destroyed flapped audibly, and the entire structure seemed to sway as if it could give way at any moment. For a building that reeked of fire, it was cold.
Tamara swallowed and looked back to Harlan.
“You know, um, I think I forgot to charge my battery, but I’ve got enough material anyway, so it’s fine. I can work with this.” Her smile faltered and uncovered her subtextual meaning. “Let’s get an extra cinnamon roll for your mom for the troubles, okay? We’ll fill up the tank on the way back. I have some allowance left over, so it’s fine.”
One day, she’d be ready. Ready to remember. One day, but not this day.
Harlan smiled that easygoing, scholastic smile and nodded quickly, already pulling away from the house and towards the car parked on the abandoned cul-de-sac curb. “Sounds good.”
--
More like joyless-ride for the trip home, am I right? It got kind of gloomy. My bad. Anyway, yeah: Eggshell paint, and eggshell-delicate floors, because burned houses are not structurally sound - get out of there, small lesbians! I think the other themes are more readily apparent. But in case anyone has no clue what I mean by pineapple finial, they exist.
It was the third time Harlan had insisted, and the third time her girlfriend had ignored her.
“We will,” Tamara promised.
Underfoot, the tired floorboards moaned their protest. Tamara remembered when her father had installed the flooring, tired of hearing her grandmother complaining about the ugly pea soup color of the carpets that had come included with the house every time she’d visited. She could still remember the smell of the dusty old carpeting as it was ripped up, and of the electric hot wood as her father’s circular saw ate with acute precision through the interlocking white oak planks. He was an accountant, not a handyman, but he’d done a job good enough to earn his mother’s approval, and Tamara had liked how the living room echoed with the new floors installed.
Choosing each step carefully, methodically, she placed one shoe gingerly toe-first, allowing her heel to glide down behind it until her weight was fully shifted. When it held, she repeated with the next foot. Carefully, carefully….
“Seriously, Tam,” Harlan whined still from the doorway. Despite Tamara’s insistence, Harlan had not taken a single step into the house, and so Tamara felt it only just that she meet Harlan’s demands with the same unyielding ignorance. “Mom’s going to freak if she wakes up and the car’s not there.”
“Let her freak, then,” Tamara laughed, casting an unconcerned glance back over her shoulder to the petite girl with the strawberry blonde bob. “Just come up with something. Tell her you left something over at my place and you had to go get it.”
“It’s not the reason why I took it that she’d care about, you know.”
There.
Frozen in time, in midstep, Tamara stopped and crouched down, easing first one of her backpack’s straps off her shoulder, and then the other. She sat the olive drab canvas bag in front of her and tugged at the zipper.
Harlan still had her learner’s permit. Whether she’d gone to her girlfriend’s house or to a crack den, it wouldn’t have made any difference without her mom or someone else eighteen years or older in the passenger seat with her. And Harlan was a good girl; this wasn’t like her. She was the kind of straight-As, honor club, community service kid that would self-flagellate over her own mistakes more than anyone else would even consider, and the kind of person who crumpled under the weight of parental disappointment. This was, objectively, the worst thing she'd ever done.
“Look,” Tamara began calmly, as if trying not to startle away a fawn, “Why not just, like….” She paused, thinking. “Just go around the corner and get us some coffee and cinnamon rolls from Marie’s. You like those, right? Those really fucking huge cinnamon rolls with the pecans?” She was foraging through her bag, her attention not on her girlfriend’s distraught, and not noticing her look of abject consternation. “And it’ll take your mind off of being a total grand larcenist.” Harlan blanched whiter with dread.
Not that Tamara noticed.
There was a camera in the young woman’s hands, one of the really good ones that had cost an entire middle schooling and half of a high schooling’s worth of allowance. The kind that had taken her an entire summer of experimentation with ISO and shutter speed and white balance settings to understand. The kind that made her hands feel naked and hungering without it in them. As much as Harlan, and maybe even more if truth be told of the fickle nature of high school sweethearts, that camera was Tamara’s treasure. A truer love she’d never known.
She raised it to her eye and lined up her target in her sights: the remains of a staircase banister, the pineapple-shaped wooden finial rising from the spiral volute sitting atop charred spindles that resembled charcoal sketches.
Tamara had lamented the weird pineapple-thing when they’d first moved into the home; how dare it have the gall to interrupt a railing otherwise perfectly fit for sliding down? Her father had explained that hand railings were, in fact, for hands, not butts, and that she would do well to keep that in mind.
It was hardly a pineapple, now. Rather the blackened remains of a dilapidated Easter egg, tilted and sooty. Above it, the shambles of what appeared to have once been an entire second story had caved in.
Click. The camera blinked its eye and remembered the image.
“I guess,” Harlan whimpered. She knew better than to interrupt Tamara when she’d found her subject and had waited until her girlfriend had brought the camera away from her face. She was that kind of straight-As, honor club, community service kid, after all. “I mean, I do like those sticky buns.”
“Great!” Tamara chirped decisively, shuffling around in her deep crouch while scanning the room. Her eyes lighted on an overhead ceiling fan, its blades drooping sadly towards the ground and all three lightbulbs having long been shattered. Oily streaks of soot blackened the tatters of ceiling around the fan. The cool, damp breeze through the broken windows and missing patches of roofing made the chain pull sway lazily side-to-side.
Click. The camera remembered. The house creaked.
“I’m just….” Harlan had not heard picked up on the subtle closing argument dolloped onto Tamara’s interjection. Clearly not. “I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to leave you here. Alone. Maybe you can come with me to get them?”
Deeper into the scorched belly of the house, Tamara moved away from the nervous creature hunched to make herself tiny in the remains of the threshold.
“I’m going to get photos for this project,” Tamara announced, her voice sounding no annoyance with her girlfriend’s boundless caution, but that being only due to a well-practiced, completely fake coolness. The zipper pulls on her backpack jangled as she swung it back onto her shoulder. “You can do what you need to do.”
Besides, who checked their garage first thing in the morning after getting out of bed to make sure the car was still there? The average person would spend at least an hour by Tamara’s calculations showering, getting dressed, brushing their teeth and taking a piss. And then there would be the time spent brewing coffee and making getting a bowl of cereal or making some toast. Hell, it was Saturday; chances were that Harlan’s mom had nowhere to be and would just chill out in her jammies all day watching reality TV and cooking shows. The only thing that she would even notice would be the sound of the garage door opening, and that could easily be explained away with no more than an ounce of creativity.
Harlan switched from foot to foot. Tamara could hear the jangling of her charm bracelet as she did that nervous-fidget-thing with her hands. That quintessentially Harlan thing. She wasn’t going to leave by sheer force of guilt alone.
The living room had been the most eaten by flames. The fire department had confirmed that it had all started here. Probably a flyaway ember from the fireplace, they’d said. It happened. It happened, especially, that time of year, which made it all the more troubling. Their new apartment didn’t have a fireplace. Open flames weren’t allowed by management. Even the eyes on the stove were electric. Her dad had smiled at her with a certain burden of understanding. He always looked so tired back then.
Each of Tamara’s steps brought little plumes of ash rising up from the ground. They swirled around her feet and into the smoky air. Even with so many ulcerous pathways to the great outdoors burned through into roof, and after all this time, the house smelled acrid with smoke, and the air was a permanent milky gray.
Time felt frozen.
Despite the years, the ghost of Christmas Past still haunted this room. Melted plastic garland dripped from the brick mantle, and shattered bits of broken ornaments and baubles glinted with mirror red and glitter gold in a little patch of sunlight filtering in from above. Pine needles, not those from what had been their Christmas tree, but those from the skinny evergreens outside, littered the floor to refresh the festive look. Other intruders - spiderwebs and birds’ feathers and graffiti - had taken up residence, too, contrasted against the piles of coal-colored dust. Interlopers, but they could be ignored.
Click. Click. Click. The camera would remember as much about this day as Tamara did about that night. About how she’d first woken up for a glass of water, because she was just too warm for a December night. About the way her doorknob had been too hot to touch, and how the buttercream-yellow eggshell paint of her bedroom had wrenched itself eerily away from the sheetrock underneath like blistering skin. About feeling that the entire situation was a nightmare, and that crawling into bed and wrapping herself tighter in her comforter would make it stop.
About the noises - the roaring flames and the snapping support beams and her dad calling for her name and the sound of her door being kicked down. About her breathlessness and wheezing made her blood pound in her own ears, and the way her eyes had watered too much to see when she was passed out of the window into the bear-like arms of a man in breathing apparatus and reflective gear. About the screaming of a woman that she thought she heard, but hoped she hadn’t, but knew she had. About being told by her father in the back of an ambulance that it wasn’t her fault, and that her wanting the fireplace lit that night wasn’t her fault, and that accidents happened.
About the days after when the neighbors and aunts and uncles brought tuna casseroles and overbaked brownies and gross fruit-studded Jell-o moulds, and how they dressed all in black and hugged her and told her sorry. About the Christmas presents they’d brought for her, even though it was already January and they hadn’t seen her in years and had no clue what she liked. About the speeches her mom’s sisters gave about how great of a person she was. About how white carnations had been her mom’s favorites, and about laying her mom’s favorite flowers on a piece of marble that bore her name.
About first feeling the need to document every moment following that day in photographs, good and bad alike, because her mom had been camera shy and claimed to be unphotogenic, and now Tamara couldn’t remember what she looked like when she scowled or whether it was her left cheek or right cheek that had the dimple when she laughed.
All snapshots in time. Some that had faded. Some that should have been burned up in the fire, but instead hung prominently over her mind’s hearth.
Outside, the wind stirred. A bright blue tarp that had been tossed over the corner of the roof that had been most destroyed flapped audibly, and the entire structure seemed to sway as if it could give way at any moment. For a building that reeked of fire, it was cold.
Tamara swallowed and looked back to Harlan.
“You know, um, I think I forgot to charge my battery, but I’ve got enough material anyway, so it’s fine. I can work with this.” Her smile faltered and uncovered her subtextual meaning. “Let’s get an extra cinnamon roll for your mom for the troubles, okay? We’ll fill up the tank on the way back. I have some allowance left over, so it’s fine.”
One day, she’d be ready. Ready to remember. One day, but not this day.
Harlan smiled that easygoing, scholastic smile and nodded quickly, already pulling away from the house and towards the car parked on the abandoned cul-de-sac curb. “Sounds good.”
--
More like joyless-ride for the trip home, am I right? It got kind of gloomy. My bad. Anyway, yeah: Eggshell paint, and eggshell-delicate floors, because burned houses are not structurally sound - get out of there, small lesbians! I think the other themes are more readily apparent. But in case anyone has no clue what I mean by pineapple finial, they exist.