Rachel Talbot: SO FAR IN THE DISTANCE • Cleaver Magazine

Flash by Rachel Talbot
SO FAR IN THE DISTANCE

A box turtle hits the cold fireplace at dawn. The rousing smack on the hearth calls Glenda from bed. No easy feat, tentative morning legs needing time to feel solid. Her knee cracks as if broken in two. But it’s just old limbs awakening to another day of discomfort.

The shell resembles a child’s combat helmet, domed and worn with pride in some backyard battle. The surface is the black of a stagnant pond with an abstract pattern of butter yellow lines like spilled bones. Out of one end, a neck and head emerge, no bigger than a thumb with eyes. Upon recognizing each other’s living presence, Glenda’s heart lurches, and the turtle’s head vanishes into her shell.

A mourning dove’s call breaks the silence, insistent and longing. A draft rouses Glenda’s cotton nightdress, tickling her veiny calves. It could have been an hour; it could have been a few minutes.

The turtle extends her head again. Her irises are a warm, ebony brown set inside the wrinkled bowl of her eye socket. Her throat pulses. Her saggy legs descend, each ending in a fringe of blunt claws.

Had the damper been left open? Even so, how could a turtle have climbed to the roof and into the chimney? A ray of morning sun catches a dull red mark on the turtle’s shell.

Then Glenda remembers.

Ben was six when he and his dad Harry found a turtle near the woodshed.

“I wanted to keep it,” Ben said at dinner.

Harry sliced his pork chop. “A house is no place for a turtle.”

“So, we marked it with paint. When we find it again, I’ll know it’s mine,” Ben said.

“Turtles can live a mighty long time.” Harry chewed like a lion. “That turtle’ll be out there mucking around long after me and your mom are six feet under.”

“What do you mean?” Ben asked.

“That turtle will outlive the two of us. So, when you’re a grown man and you see your handsome turtle, say hello for us.” Harry chuckled.

Ben spoke to his plate, a ripe teardrop spilling onto his flawless cheek.

“I don’t want you and Daddy to die.”

Glenda was quick to speak. “That’s a long time from now. So far in the distance, it’s a waste to spend a second longer thinking about it.”

“You have much more important things to think about,” Harry added. “Like your arithmetic and your letters. All that turtle will be doing is eating bugs and flattening the grass.”

Ben spoke as if in a trance. “You won’t be alive.”

Glenda could see it, the new awareness spreading to every part of her son’s body, changing each cell as it passed through him.

Now, Glenda bends to touch the dried paint on the turtle’s shell, aching not in her bones, but in someplace far deeper. The turtle watches Glenda with two unblinking eyes and Glenda watches back. Woman and turtle trapped in each other’s lonely gaze.

Glenda lowers herself to the ground and crawls forward so she can see up the chimney, at the postage stamp patch of morning sky, at the long-ago place from which the turtle has traveled.

The turtle belongs in the empty house after all, she thinks, and perhaps it is she who belongs outside, feeding on bugs, flattening the grass with my own ancient body, clearheaded and unencumbered by any awareness at all.

Rachel Talbot is a graduate of the MFA program at Stony Brook University. Her short fiction has been published in The Southern Humanities Review and her flash fiction has been published in Action, Spectacle. Her short story, “Wild Animals of Las Vegas,” was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.