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eleanor no. 33 Crickets. Eleanor wakes to the sound of them, thin and reedy in the warm summer evening. She lays still, taking in the blush of darkness that hangs in the room. The lace curtains are radiant for a brief moment, captured in the fading light. For a moment she does not understand: this is not her bed, it is too old, it sags, there is a spring and it is uncomfortable. But she gathers her thoughts and shuffles them into some sort of order — the warm flush of perhaps too much wine; the dry rasp of stiff meadow grass; the leaping of grasshoppers; chasing them with Harold; the slow walk back to the little wooden house, fingers tangled, a beautiful orange morning. In the dark she grins, remembering the day that led her to collapse, exhausted, on this strange bed, and she turns over to smile at Harold beside her, but he is not there. She sits up and listens for the sound of him moving around in another room. All she hears is the creak of the house, old wood contracting. Then she hears a squeal of hinges, clipped and bright, and realizes that Harold must be on the porch swing. “Harold?” she calls. The swing squeaks again, but Harold doesn’t answer her. She climbs out of bed and into her slippers — the lake house has floors of raw wood, and every morning since they arrived she’s given herself splinters; Harold tells her to stop shuffling, but she can’t change the way she has walked for twenty-five years — and goes out onto the porch. She is saying his name when she opens the screen door, but stops when a stray cat leaps out of the porch swing, sending the swing jangling on its chain. She cannot find Harold anywhere. She wanders around the porch in her slippers. The wood is slick beneath her steps, grown damp in the evening mist, and she slips a little as she goes around the corner of the house. The porch circles the house and she follows. The cat peers at her from around the exterior front wall as she completes her loop. She has been watching the fields around the house, and the woods, and listens as the cicadas harmonize with the crickets, a sustained thrum beneath the cricket song. Inside again she puts a heavy iron skillet on the old cookstove and turns on the flame. She arranges two plates on the little table, sets some coffee to brewing, takes down a pair of cups. Breaks eggs into a bowl, forks them until they are silky, scrambles them on the hot iron. She makes scrambled egg sandwiches and sits to eat hers. Harold has still not come home, and she eats the sandwich slowly without turning on a light. When she finishes eating, she stares as his plate in the pale evening dusk. She takes it and her coffee and sits on the porch in the swing and watches the dark deepen above the trees. The stars surface in the ocean of sky. The moon is a fat yellow raft tethered to the horizon. Not a cloud in sight, and neither is he, though his pickup sits unattended in the drive, still muddy from the long trek through the woods to the old house. She eats his sandwich and when it is gone, she stretches out in the swing and studies the porch rafters, spiderwebs strung about like thick old cotton, kept company by the adobe nests of the mud daubers. A pair of fireflies wink across the yard and out of sight. The screen door bumps easy in the soft night wind. Eleanor sleeps, and when she wakes it is still dark, and he is still away. She puts him away from her thoughts, and sleeps again.
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