The Old Well

It’s a late summer day, now. Spiders die and are carried off, and the sun is stirred by breezes from the south, and the oak leaves begin to look downward, tired and bleached. The squirrels know no statelier or longer days than these here, and run through the afternoon accompanied by mournful robins whose feathers are always a little duller each passing year. 

And yet the window does not change; it never does. Through it she can see the old well, the rounded limestones flaked with age and the ever-present steam rising from wherein the water burns. She wrote before it, the place which led to some dark cavern of unnatural water; she clacked away and talked to herself and tried to keep her eyes from the darkness she knew was sort of burbling below her, hovering below the whole house. It was the only well in the county which burned and which was not good to drink. Theirs was the only useless well, and it was something of which, no matter how desperate, she could never bring herself to write.

He came home happy, and she had to remind herself it wasn’t him, it was the sun. He was filmed over with sweat though he did not work outside, and he did not kiss her; he never did anymore. 

It only had to be two pages (two flawless pages). – He had not understood her passion for what she did when they first came together, and she did not believe he ever would. It was not his way. It was his way to wash her mug in the evening – for her, she hoped, and not for the tidy house. She told him it only had to be two pages. It was about old magic and witches and the line of Cain. It was for The New Yorker. She worked, and he worked, and the well burned, and somehow one of them remembered to take the chicken out of the cooker and shred it and douse it in sauce and put it on plates and put the plates on the table and clean them up after. The dishwater smelled of limestone and sulfur when the city water bill was too high the month before and when it did they each dreamed of New York in autumn, each in their own ways. The well liked to wait its time, anyway. It was of the old tradition of dark places and had no worry of the city water-line; the well was strong when it needed to be, and had waited a long time before. It took delight in waiting.

She told him of what she was writing – Saxon witches, honor and death, the darkness and enchantment that thrummed through the middle millennium. She told him that losing this enchantment, as their century had, made life safer and sadder and more boring, and he stirred his dumplings in a circle in his bowl, nodding at the table. She said that it was more natural to fear spirits and the dark than it was to have a screen in our faces all the time – she said that to see if he was listening, but he pulled a dumpling to his mouth and chewed it and swallowed it and smiled at her. Instead, she stacked their bowls and let him wash them and looked out the darkened window, wondering if this theory of an enchanted world was right or not. Should she be afraid? Was it better to fear? 

She felt more alone now than she had in months before, because her eyesight was failing and the world yards away was growing blurry and untouchable as the two typewritten pages in front of her grew clearer and more perfect. She did not recognize people any longer, and in fact she saw few people to recognize anyway; she went out less and less, preferring to sit on the warm stoop on the south side of the house, facing the well, and sit in the sun and think about coyotes and katydids and New York. There was a difference, now, between what consisted of her and what consisted of the world and the earth and everything she once believed she came from. The loam and the squirrel-kits and the purple-streaked sky had once been her (remember, O man, that thou art dust) and now she wasn’t that. 

And he – ah, he, who was quiet when he came home and stirred the tomato soup that she had not made, and told her to keep writing even when it was hopeless, and yet did not read what she had written. She had once dreamed about and written poetry about having a lover, and had found him, and he was not her lover. He, too, was something in between – not earth, not her, but like the burning water. 

She forgot to look him in the eyes, and didn’t see the darkness grow. At one in the afternoon when her eyes were hazy, she wiped her face with warm water from the sink and smelled the limestone until she went to bed. In bed, she didn’t hear him and didn’t see him, and as the nightjars cooed and the owl sang, watched the dim light outside their window grow and shrink. The clock was quietly red: it was the hour after midnight. 

She was glad, for the first time in a while, that he was there with her, for she could fall asleep with his warm hand in hers, and she did, trying to forget the condemning red clock and hoping she would not dream.

Tonight, when she slept, she dreamed. This was new and increasingly worse. He often dreamed, and would wake her with his laughter or his sobs, and then they were awake together, and this was bearable. This time, however, she awoke trembling with fear, unprotected, the blankets thrown off, his hand gone from hers, and from the window she could hear a hissing, a burbling, a kind of throttling, frog-like muffled shriek. Eyes wide, hands cold, she turned to him, but he lay as if held fast by something not-him, and not-her, and she reached for him but could not find him. 

She held her breath and released it, and again until her hands were not so cold and she could calmly sit up, pull the blankets back, and lie silently watching the impassive ceiling cast in the red-clock light. For a while this worked, and then she wondered where the owls and nightjars had gone. Their familiar sound had been replaced with that eerie burbling. 

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord, she began, but was stopped short by a crack outside the window. Her eyes went wide and she felt a silver film over her eyes; not her and nothing familiar. She stood into the darkness, into the cold, let the cold move up from the palms of her feet on the floor into her ankles, calves, joints, up to her shoulders. 

She turned and walked into the dark kitchen, lit only by the blue light from the stove. She didn’t know that the stove had a blue light at all, but turned it off on her way to the door. 

Outside, the air was still. It did not move and was neither warm nor cool. To the west was town, and the neighbors, and the water line, and the store she bought chicken from on Sunday afternoons. She turned the other way, toward the well, and heard a hissing grow as she approached. 

She sat on the rim of the well where it was warm and almost comforting, and the only sensation she could hear and feel was the sound and warmth of the well. Gladly, she lay back, and let her fingers drift toward the water, closed her eyes and listened to the sound, felt the stones on her back and the steam rising to meet her.