Jesus or a Vacuum by Laura Perkins
We’re a house always running out of bleach. Detergent, too, laundry and dish. Bar soap. Windex. There’s a list on the fridge that Mom is always rushing to, it’s bubbled and stiff from wet hands fumbling at the corner. She writes in scrawled pencil, letters jagged from the surface behind it. The list goes for pages and pages. Sometimes she doesn’t add new things but checks the items already listed, little sharp flags that run off the paper. Nothing gets crossed off.
“I’m tired,” Mom says so often it might as well be her name. She looks it—hair tied back but poorly, more escaping the rubber band than held in place. Her roots are gray and the ends a rusty brown that sticks to her forehead and temples, slick always with sweat. She pats herself off with the bottom part of her t-shirt, lifting to reveal the soft folds of her stomach, the horizontal scar there. If she isn’t moving she’s leaning, elbows against the counter she just made gleam. Her back hurts from bending, from living on her knees.
“Help me,” Mom says—never. No one fights her for the sponge, to be honest. We escape outside if we can or to friends’ houses where we can breathe without burning. No one comes to our house. Their eyes water. They breathe through their mouths. They sneeze. “I’ve never seen anything so clean,” they say, all of them. It is not a compliment.
“No shoes. Wipe your feet. Careful, careful! For Christ’s sake,” Mom says.
“Jesus save me,” she says, though she doesn’t believe in Jesus lately.
She believes in the vacuum. She loves to watch it, she makes all of us come out when it’s dumping time. She calls us from our rooms, alone untouched by her, but only because we lock the doors, pile chairs against it, and use our windows to leave. “Watch,” she says, and she shakes the contents in the trash. At first there was a pile of soft dark dust, but now there is hardly anything, a few spare brown hairs. “Isn’t that something? Imagine—that was under your feet. We walked on it all the time and didn’t know, not till now.”
At night she pulls our shoes into her lap and a bucket and cleans the bottoms. She runs her fingers through the treads to free the dirt. She soaks the rubber white as we sit on the couch, scrubbed clean and shivering like a yard dog after our baths. “Not in my house,” she says to the dirt. The bucket steams her face. The corner of her eyes shot with blood. She doesn’t sleep but wanders through the house. We hear her knocking around, the sound of spraying, her sighs. “So much dirt. Not here,” we hear her say. Sometimes she’s in our dreams, saying it.
Dad was in the ground hardly a day before she took to the closets and made piles of his things. They left in boxes and black trash bags, they left in the arms of people we didn’t know, strange men she found to give them to. “Take it. What do I need it for? No more clutter. Take it, take it.” When she’d cleaned all through the back of it not even a hanger was left. Then she took the carpet, ripping it up with her fingers. “No telling what’s underneath,” she said, the roll of it hefted over her shoulder.
In the morning we wake to some new missing thing—the kitchen chairs, our winter coats, the tennis rackets and baseball bats, the hamster cage, the hamster. They disappear in the night, we don’t know where they go. We learn to hoard things in our rooms. We steal away what we can’t bear to lose. Our hands become darting things, taking without thinking. Our rooms stink, moldy food deep under our beds, but she can’t get to it. Sometimes the doors shake but we don’t answer and soon she gives up. There’s always something she forgot. She races to the fridge, pencil in hand. The list is one that never gets shorter.
Laura Perkins is a writer living in Cheyenne, WY. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Bodega, Cutbank, Cagibi, The Chestnut Review, and elsewhere.