He held up the phone so that only half of her mother’s face shown in the screen window. “Is this good?” he asked.
“Yes, it’s fine, Dad,” Melissa said. It was better than the hairline/ceiling view she got the last time they FaceTimed.
“How are you, Mom?” Melissa asked.
“Chris helps out when your Dad is working,” she said, smiling. “My eyes are always leaking though, they never did that before.”
Melissa studied the carved brow of worry in her mother’s forehead, arcing untweezed over a yellow eye. A blue disk in an ill cornea.
“How are you?” Melissa’s mother returned the question.
A moment lapsed and Melissa’s mother asked again.
“I’m fine Mom, thanks,” Melissa said. She turned the yellow eye around in her head. It seared into her brain, scanning over every fold of memory. It invaded her. It scared her.
Melissa tried to remember her mother’s face, the parts she wanted to, as she put the wrong arm into the sleeve of her denim shirt. She nearly backed into a neighbor and their dog while exiting the parking lot. Then she ran a red light on the way to school.
The wood shop plumed with sawdust from the adult student program’s cutting board projects, and the project of Melissa’s classmate, Jane, who had just begun work on a table. In the classroom, separated from the rest of the shop by large paned windows, Melissa acknowledged her teacher Reeve with a smile. He was polishing bowls with beeswax in assembly line fashion. Melissa set down her things on the work bench before heading out to the lathe. She passed the garage door opened halfway to pick up the slack of poor overhead ventilation and walked to the three standing horses in the back of the shop. She was glad her favorite horse, closest to the office, was unoccupied. The machines were all identical, but Melissa believed the office horse ran smoother than the other two. The humid air of outside drizzle swirled and lifted and pressed down with every table saw push, planer conveyer belt pull, and multi router spin. The air drifted around tired hands and sore backs standing and sanding.
The stock turned at Melissa, holding a four-by-eight inch cylinder of wood. It wound a spell around her brain as she gently skated the metal gouge along the outside of the spinning wood’s surface. The scent of pear dusted her lungs, making her cough every now and again. She was lulled by the subtle changes of shape. Lulled by the form emerging. She almost forgot about those yellow cirrhosis eyes.
Then it caught. The gouge not perfectly angled to the inside of the forming bowl lurched and leaped, raising the heartbeat in Melissa’s chest to the bottom of her throat. Melissa started again, guiding the metal gouge slowly from the outside in, and for a second time was lurched and leaped.
The air shifted. It was not the comforting pain reliever it was just a few moments ago, but instead heavy and stagnant. It was off, Melissa determined, so she began to release the half-turned bowl from the jaws of the headstock. She was disappointed that there was so much time left in the day, but it really wasn’t right to work when the air is off.
Melissa cleaned the wood shop snow off her denim skirt the best she could with brisk firm pats to the body. Her ears rang when she took off her ear muffs.
“Reeve!” A scream emerged from the floor. Jane was seated in a growing pool of her own blood. One hand cupped over her other. Reeve stood in the door frame of the classroom and dialed 911.
Melissa walked over to her classmate, studying the scene. She turned off the jointer. Four of Jane’s fingers were notably short. She was fascinated with what the inside of a hand looked like. There was red and white and that was pretty much it. She wanted to tell Jane how stumpy her fingers looked, but thought better of it, given how insensitive it might be in the height of the situation.
“There has been dismemberment,” Reeve recounted to the person over the phone. Reeve hung up and began digging through the shaving collection in the waste compartment of the machine. On his hands and knees, Reeve searched for small finger tops to be put on ice from a sea of wood similarly colored to Jane’s skin. The texture of wood shavings was akin to the texture of shredded, flapped skin.
A man in his fifties, from the adult program, walked past Jane on the ground to ask Reeve about the most effective glue up arrangement he should do for his new cutting board. “Read the room,” Reeve said.
The man retreated, somewhat wounded, and started to pack up his things.
Melissa, directed to find rags, stared at the floor-to-ceiling shelving system in Reeve’s office. Masterfully organized and completely uncodable to anyone other than Reeve, Melissa could feel herself fail the urgency of time, looking helplessly at the microscopic writing on the hundreds of small, black, plastic tubs towering above. Reeve swung around Melissa with an arm over her head and said, “Right here dummy,” with a smile.
Jane was losing color. But there were now rags to contain the blood. After an entirely glacial wait for the ambulance she was lifted onto a stretcher and backed into the striped van with gray and yellow reflective markers, waiting with a second paramedic.
“They could not be salvaged,” Reeve said to the first paramedic. Reeve looked down at his steel tipped boots, like a mourner at a funeral. He had an aura of failure about him.
*
“I’m looking forward to seeing you for Thanksgiving in a couple of days,” Chris said over FaceTime.
“Didn’t you just hear what I said?” Melissa shifted on her feet.
“Listen, kid,” he said, “I don’t need any of this visual trauma right now with the mess that is going on here. I’ve seen blood too.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do with it?” Melissa asked.
“Why don’t you make a painting of it.” Chris seemed divided in his attention.
“Nobody wants to look at a bloodied hand.”
“What about making the sky red in one of those benign landscapes that you’ve been making?”
Melissa hated that Chris called the landscape benign.
“Wait, did you say you’ve seen blood too?” Melissa asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Chris.
Melissa could feel the yellow eyes roll around in her brain again. She knew Chris was talking about Mom.
“I’m looking forward to seeing you too,” Melissa said.
*
Melissa returned to school the following Monday and stopped in the entrance of the doorway. Jane was there, seated at the far corner workbench of the wood shop classroom.
Melissa sat at the far opposite workbench.
A meeting about safety was led by the chair of the wood shop department. Reeve’s eyes were bloodshot and strained from the respirator he had been wearing for a two-hour staining session before the meeting. His face was printed with compression lines and stress.
Jane was somehow buoyant. The post catastrophe glow. The confidence of endurance. When the chair opened the floor for others to voice their feelings Reeve and Melissa said nothing. The other classmates appeared unbothered and resumed working on their tables.
Melissa drew for most of the class, designing her table. She obsessed over the shape of the legs and the different pattern arrangements she could do with the chocolate brown walnut and cream maple.
A week later, Melissa stood on jittered legs next to the jointer to flatten the wood for her tabletop. A necessary step before the planer, she needed to guide the wood with the slippery yellow, L-shaped push stick over the teeth that stole Jane’s fingers.
She said, “You can go,” letting another classmate use the machine before her and then said, “No, you go,” again to another classmate.
Melissa retreated to the classroom and opened a new cardboard box of four 24-inch walnut spindles to be turned into legs. She walked to her horse and inserted the pins from the head and tailstock into each end of the first leg. She watched the metal gouge shave the corners of the block, rounding it into a long dowel. Melissa was safe here. Under the trance again of the lulling lathe. She stopped the spinning and grabbed the calipers to measure the shoulder and bead at the top of the leg.
“I can feel phantom pain,” Jane told Reeve. “I can feel shadowed strength of my hand. It’s unbearable to feel it and not have it exist in space.”
Melissa measured the girth of her new table leg longer to listen to more of Jane’s insight. “It’s invisible pain that people can see,” Jane said. “The absence is what they see. They will see my missing fingers and not know why they got that way. And they will never ask.”
Melissa’s mother’s hard life was defined by crow’s feet around her temples. The smile through leaking eyes. The jokes through debilitating pain. Melissa knew her own phantom pain was coming. The umbilical cord cut for a second and final time.
Melissa was not as strong as Jane. Melissa was not going to rebound and become an amazing woodworker in spite of tragedy. She was never going to make another table again. This table, the one she held in her mind right now, she would make quietly, to herself. She would care for each part of the process with reverence. The table would be well crafted and classic. It would not be bold enough to steal attention from the lamp that will sit upon it. It would not be the first thing the eyes are drawn to when entering a room.
But it would be an anchor. It would make the room complete. It would carry weight in its long fibers. It would lure people to sit next to it for its comforting appearance. It would be the chosen table to read at and have coffee in the morning. The dog will sit at its feet and the cat on its top. It will be the chosen passed down object that the kids will fight over. It will be unassuming and magnetic.
Learn more about Shannon on our Contributors’ Page.
The photo is an original painting by the author. More of her work can be found here.
- Him and the Dog (poem and artwork) by Shannon Castor - April 15, 2024
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