Four Falling Objects

It was so quiet here on top of this mountain in the middle of nowhere. Too quiet, if Ona was honest with herself. Sometimes the silence was enough to drive a person mad. And some days, like today, it was enough to make her long for the dirty city days of her past.

The city may have been noisy and filled with distractions. And Ona may even have thought of herself as unhappy at the time, but she never had trouble sleeping there. She’d lie down in the dark, close her eyes, and dream of a better future. A perfect future where there were no sirens and no noisy city traffic that went on all night, and before she knew it, sleep would come for her.

And she’d dream of a life that looked nearly exactly like the one she had now.

But that was then. Before she’d met Ian, fallen in love, and let him take her away to their beautiful little cabin at the top of this remote mountain in the middle of nowhere. Before she’d run out of problems to push back against.

Ona didn’t realize then that it was simply in her nature to be the keeper of wild emotions. Of course, she had an immense capacity to feel happy or hopeful. But there were angry days, too, and blue days that found her feeling melancholy for reasons she could never quite put a finger on. She used to think those emotions would go away if she ever found her mountaintop. But as it turned out, they were just a part of who she was, which they’d proven by following her here.

And that would have been one thing if Ian had any part of himself that was similar, but he didn’t.

Sometimes, Ona thought he was the most even-tempered man in the world. For instance, he was wonderfully patient with her, but in all the years she’d known him, she’d never seen him angry, never seen him in a bad mood. It made her feel bad. Self-conscious. Like a psychopath who couldn’t control herself.

Ona couldn’t tell Ian about the things that bothered and haunted her, because she was the kind of person who talked to be understood. And as much as he loved her, and as protected as he made her feel, he would never be able to understand her.

So instead, she pulled the prickliest of her difficult thoughts from her mind and found other things to do with them. She turned some of the more creative ones into stories, and poems, and paintings. A few went unfiltered into her journal.

And the ones Ona was left with after that went into the box.

*

Some mornings, Ona woke up happy to be alive and excited to start the day. On those days, the light in the room looked right, and her soul felt like it could spend the day properly folded inside her body.

But other mornings, the air felt electric, and Ona’s skin vibrated with the wrongness of it all. Those mornings, she desperately wanted to unzip her skin and leave it folded up on a chair so she could just be free and unfettered for a while.

And since that was an unfortunate impossibility, Ona would grab the box instead.

Like all the difficult things that came as part of the package with her, she kept the box hidden from Ian, shoved far back underneath her side of the bed where he’d never, ever think to look. But on difficult days, she would get up very early, long before Ian awoke.

And she’d quietly grab the box before walking out into the snow in her bare feet to stand at the edge of the cliff where their little cabin was located.

Today, Ona stood there in her white nightgown and the long, silver chain she’d forgotten to take off before bed the night before. She looked out into the distance, marveling at the sheer thoroughness of the silence, and then she lifted the carved lid of the box.

To anyone else, the objects in the box would be nothing but a sundry collection of junk and garbage. But to Ona, these were totems, symbols, and talismans. Each was important. Each was significant. And sooner or later, on one day or another, each would have to go.

Ona would dream of the day the box was finally empty, but she realized a long time ago that that day would never come. As quickly as she’d get rid of some of the objects, more would appear to take their places. So this early morning ritual was necessary, you see. It kept the contents of the box at a manageable level and the box itself from ever overflowing.

*

The first item. The chalk-white skull of a bird that had run out of songs to sing a long time ago. Ona did not know what kind of bird it was, as it had been long dead when she found it as a little girl. But the finding of it would be connected forever to the strange, silent, emotional death that had characterized her home as a little girl.

White like her mother’s skin that never saw the sun. Hard like her father’s expression any time the children of the house would make any noise whatsoever. Dead and ancient like the air in the hallway. Sightless like Ona when she’d look ahead to the future.

Ona took a long look at that skull and everything it represented. And then she threw it over the edge of the cliff into the precipice below. She waited… listened. Until she thought she heard a faint but definite crack on the rocks below. And that was the end of the bird skull.

*

The second item. A broken pocket watch that had belonged to her first love. That love had been so long ago, she only remembered his name the way you remember something someone said to you in a fading dream. And she didn’t remember his face at all.

What she did remember was what time it was when he suddenly decided he was ready to move on with his life – on into the east without Ona. Three o’clock in the morning, the hour of the wolf. Peak demon time. And she remembered the glass splinters in her chest at the sight of his emotionless face just before he walked out the door.

Later on, Ona had heard through the grapevine that he’d never found whatever it was he thought he was looking for.

He’d lived in a little stone house at the end of a dark, stone street. He’d spent his evenings sitting in a stone chair with nothing for company except for a little stone cat that never slept. Or at least that had been the case until his stone feet had taken him walking down the highway one day and straight into the path of the first Mack truck that came along.

The face of the watch was set in stone for that reason. The glass was broken, and the timekeeping mechanism was still and silent. But it still remembered three o’clock perfectly clearly. So over the edge of the cliff it went this morning, taking the time with it.

*

The third item. A smooth piece of milk-white glass she’d found on a beach one day long ago. This had been the beach that was always empty because it smelled like death. Ona logically knew it was because of all the seaweed that washed up on the shore there. But other people felt in their souls that it was more than that.

Maybe it was the ghost of that man who’d died out there in the bay years ago, the folk singer Ona’s parents had listened to now and again when she was a baby. Maybe it was the young married couple who had made the mistake of all mistakes and turned their backs on the ocean while they were there on honeymoon.

Or maybe it was just the way the moon always looked so big there and hung so low in the sky, low enough to whisper into the ears of lunatics. The milky white moon that looked so very like the cloudy piece of glass Ona held in her hand before tossing it nonchalantly into the abyss below.

*

The fourth item. The broken black satin heel from a shoe Ona had owned in another life. She had long ago lost the ability to wear sky-high stilettos, but she remembered this pair fondly. The way they’d helped her stand so tall and made her walk with such grace. The way the men had frozen in place before turning their heads to stare at her.

The fear in Ona’s heart the day one of those men did so much more than stare.

The helpless feeling she had when she couldn’t run as fast as she normally could because of how precarious those shoes had made her steps. The sickening crack of the heel as it broke unexpectedly, sent her tumbling to the ground, and ended that day for her on the lowest of all possible low notes.

Ona ran her thumb over the black satin and marveled at how soft and sleek it still felt, even all these years later and after all that had happened. Then she tossed it over the edge, too, to join the other objects at the bottom of the bottomless ravine.

But better those objects than Ona’s soft, perishable body with its bones and its beating heart.

*

And that felt like quite enough objects for today.

The air was still much too quiet, but it was no longer electric, and the strange itching that sometimes made Ona want to jump out of her skin was gone, too. For now. And with that, she headed back through the fluffy white snow and back into the warm, perfect cabin where her husband still slept.

Ian would be up soon, ready to start another day with his beloved wife by his side.

And by the time he awoke, Ona would be ready too, the box of objects pushed neatly back where it belonged, in the shadows underneath her side of the bed. She could forget about it again now. Until the next time she woke up to a morning when the light was all wrong.

But that was a worry for another day entirely.