Over Trembling Ground
“Traces 3” by Bruce Turk
It’s the crack of land separating from land that jolts the youngest daughter awake in the gray dawn. She watches the mud creep like a cat crouched and ready to pounce through the haze of rain at her window. Then her momma bursts into the room, tugs at her arm, says, “Get outta the house, now.”
First light finds her shivering barefoot in the road in frayed-bottom sweatpants and her brother’s oversized soccer t-shirt, being pelted by the steady rain. Her brother and sister huddle together as their momma wails to the same pitch as the fire trucks lining the road. There’s nothing anyone can do except watch the hillside ever so slowly knock the foundation out from under the house.
“All our photographs,” heaves her momma, smearing tears with the heels of her palms. “All your daddy’s things...”
The house shudders with her, shaking its timorous walls. The mud sloughs down the side yard and runs in rivulets down the driveway. A neighbor comes to shelter them with an umbrella, rubbing their momma’s shoulder, an attempt at comfort or maybe warmth, inadequate either way.
The youngest daughter watches, eyes careful.
***
A fund is scraped together to put them up in a motel for the night. The next day, in the pinprick light of early evening, the youngest daughter sneaks out of the diner where everyone pokes listlessly at club sandwiches and side salads, sips lukewarm Cokes. She walks the three-quarter mile back to the house without causing any stir. It was all arranged with her brother and sister beforehand, a shuttered conversation in the motel bathroom while their momma slept, that they’d start an argument about the sleeping arrangements to give the youngest the chance to slip away.
Her sister revealed the best way to get in undetected—climb the spindly arms of the crabapple tree and drop onto the porch roof, then shimmy open the window of the smallest bedroom. But now the landslide has knocked the house askew. The crabapple branches no longer hang right, and the roof juts out dangerously, tilted to the ground.
Instead, she uses the tree to drop lightly onto the front porch. The floorboards give an almighty groan beneath her small feet, but they hold. When she tries the front door, it’s unlocked. No one bothered to lock it behind them.
The house is silent as death without the usual sounds of the news on the television, the oldies station singing from the radio in the kitchen, footsteps pounding upstairs. Like she’s entered some forgotten tomb. Everything looks wrong with the fading light casting strange new shadows on the slanted floor.
When her daddy was still alive, he taught her how to walk in the woods, quietly so as not to give herself away. Toes first, slow and careful, then heel. She moves like she’s trying not to catch the attention of bears, startle watchful deer.
She considers the living room, balancing on a swaying floorboard. Her parents’ wedding portrait. The old dog’s leash. The blanket her grandmother crocheted before she was even born.
Toes, heel. A gust of wind makes the whole house moan and shiver. The firemen told her momma the house could collapse at any second. She waits, breathing evenly, poised on the balls of her feet, but the house quiets again. Still, she’s reminded that she can’t linger.
The landslide cut a crooked smile across the wall where the stairs hang, lunging drunkenly. The first step doesn’t give out beneath her light touch, and neither does the second. In her sister’s room, she takes her first-place gymnastics trophy from the sixth grade. From her brother’s, she takes the journal where he writes poetry he doesn’t share. In her momma’s bedroom, the walls lean in, as if trying to catch a whisper. She scurries for the tube of her momma’s favorite lipstick, deep pink and worn to a nub, and her daddy’s old denim shirt from the closet, which her momma still keeps even though there are holes in the elbows. In her own room, where the curtains hang askew, she takes the stuffed walrus she’s slept with every single night, excepting the night before. She pauses in the slanting hallway to tie her treasures in the shirt, listening. Then she slides back down the bannister, the way her brother and sister used to do when they were her age, timing each other to see who could make it to the bottom the fastest.
Something deep in the house cracks loose when she lands, and the room gives a great lurch; she latches onto the bannister and holds on, belly churning, until it all settles again. Her daddy’s voice thunders in her mind: toe, slow, heel, step careful. There’s no time for the wedding picture; for the fine china the color of cream, rimmed with gold; for the birth certificates in the brown envelope above the microwave; for the toothbrushes in the bathroom or the dishes in the sink or the milk in the fridge. There’s just time enough to steal her grandmother’s blanket from the back of the couch and drape it over her shoulders, a hero’s cape.
The house has shifted another foot forward, and it’s a drop to get from the porch to the mud-covered front yard. She jumps and the shock rattles up from the soles of her feet when she lands, but she’s made it. She doesn’t look back, can’t, as she makes her way back down the road in the direction of the diner, with nothing but the rising moon and the orange glow of the streetlights to light her way.
In the parking lot, her momma, frantic, collapses around her in relief, but doesn’t start crying those happy, wondrous tears until she recognizes the fabric of their daddy’s shirt.
about the author
Tara Fritz is a 2020 graduate of George Mason University’s Creative Writing MFA program, where she wrote strange little stories and served as Fiction Editor of So to Speak Journal. She now edits New Constellations Magazine, a literary journal for high schoolers, when she’s not at her day job. Her own work has most recently appeared in Southchild Lit, The Wondrous Real, and Fearsome Critters. She can be found at @taradoeswriting on Twitter.
about the artist
A professional actor and director, Bruce Turk has maintained a practice of visual art for over 35 years. He studied drawing at Northwestern University, was mentored by Yukio Nishinarita in Japan, and studied painting at the Art Students’ League of New York.