Katey Schultz
In the Quiet It seemed she ought to vacuum first. In addition to a clean carpet, the woman needed just the right pillow, which she found in a corner of the couch. She settled onto the floor, legs crossed, hips angled slightly, thanks to the pillow. From her perch not a crumb could be seen across the floor. Yes, everything seemed just so. The woman exhaled and closed her eyes. She heard the ticking of the clock and the seven different calls of the wood thrush and she rubbed her shaved head two, three, four times. She'd always kept her hair short, and now she believed this could work in her favor as a meditator. She had the look. She also had a lump in her throat but she did not get up and drink water. Instead, she thought, and correctly, that at first it would be best to be very still and focus on her breath. The meditation would be like a lake, her mind like a raft, her breath a soft breeze, and come to think of it, hardly a ripple on the water's surface. But her mind ran marathons in her head and oh, she laughed—a little laugh. Then she hit her stride. Her mind was blank and she was blank and even her living room, where she had spent so many dollars on suede hassocks and mahogany end tables and a roll top TV/DVD cart, felt blank. She reached out, or at least she thought she reached out her hand, trying to grab at the blankness, but as soon as she did, it felt hollow. Her breath rushed back to her and she felt it move in and out across her parted lips. She resented the feeling because it brought her back into her body that she had been so ready to leave behind. For some reason, she thought then about the Tortoise and the Hare and other fables, probably because they had morals and she believed now that meditation ought to have a moral, too. As a young girl, no one read her these stories, for she lived in a busy household with many older siblings. So much older and so many, in fact, that she felt about the size a pea for most of her youth. Her family lived in a mansion and she had a bed and a beanbag in her room and a yappy dog. There were, of course, imaginary friends. But no time to meditate in that house, what with all the coming and going, the chores, and the way her brothers bore down on their electric guitars. And when the siblings went to big colleges, she felt a big hole where before there had been so much. No, she first heard fables as an adult, when she became a mother so many years ago and finally, felt larger than life because being a mother was the most important thing anyone could do. She used to bring her boy to story hour at the library and for years afterward she remembered the fables as though they'd been tattooed to her palms. She could feel them that much. Meditation was important too, trying as she was, to invoke the lake and the raft and the breath like the breeze that made no waves. She noticed a tickle down her spine, the kind that indicates a loss of feeling, even though what it felt like, actually, was a droplet of water slipping over each vertebra. Was she sinking? This worried her for a moment, but she realized that the loss of feeling was an empty fear because she'd never feel it. And she wondered, why weren't all fears self-defeating like this? When her boy left for college, the woman finally understood her own parents, but they'd been dead for years and she couldn't tell them this. This caused new fears and so the cycle went. Now she was really on to something. So much had been gained so many years ago from so many lovely stories. But where did it all lead? She wanted it back, that feeling of significance, of another person's life moored to her own. Her palms tingled, her legs tingled, she felt herself slip ever so slightly on the pillow but it could have been an earthquake the way it unhinged her. She could see the ripples now, the glassy surface of the lake splitting all around her and her breath held tight, like something waiting to burst and in her mind's eye she stood up on that raft, bent her knees poised for a dive, and leapt. Before she hit the surface of the water, the woman opened her eyes. The room felt much larger than when she first sat down. She lifted herself off the pillow and shook her body, bringing life back into her limbs. What a curious adventure! How fabulous to have realized so many things, the woman thought. I could do this all the time, I could do this every day. But the elation didn't last. And tomorrow there would be the harshness of her alarm at first light, the commute to work. After work there would be dinner, alone, and before bed, a string of boring sitcoms. The woman's thoughts jarred backward and forward between the bookends of her days. That night, she lay in bed and closed her eyes, begging to see the raft, the lake, and all its broken pieces. She took a deep breath and held it as long as she could. When she let it go, the moment was new and she could have been the same. But she wasn't. Katey Schultz is from Bakersville,
North Carolina and is currently the Writer-in-Residence at Interlochen
Arts Academy in Michigan. She
will spend 2010 on the road, travelling to various writing residencies
across the United States. She is the recipient of the Linda Flowers
Literary Prize for fiction and author of Lost Crossings, a collection
of contemplative essays. Learn more at:
http://katey.schultz.googlepages.com.
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