The Eiffel Tower
She is beams of rod and steal stacked
exactly just so and engineered just right, just in time for the world’s
celebration.
She calls to rent house. She schedules
Aunt to pick her up and drive her to Dunsmuir. She packs field guides and a
copy of “Orchids for Dummies,” and refills a 90-day supply of Xanax, intending
to stretch it out over the next year.
She makes plans and arrangements in order
to house-sit for her aunt and uncle and visit the hotel and drink coffee and
mist orchids and pray to Mary in a dry skirt.
She makes toast. Eats.
Prays.
She stares at the ceiling.
It could be a Tuesday or a Wednesday
afternoon as Abigail lays on her bed for the last time, looking up at the
ceiling, thinking about secrets. In her mind, there are all these untold
stories that floated up and embedded themselves into the crevices at top of a
room. She lay there, deciphering codes and clues out of grooves and lines, dips
and peaks, of the plaster. And as night fell, her deepest and most dreaded time
of day, certain sparkles came into view in the valleys of contusions –
lighthouses or cities seen from afar. They all meant something. And each night
for the past six months, she toiled in her silent way, attempting to crack the
stories she never heard.
It could be minutes or hours or days that
she is here, on this bed she would soon leave, and most likely it was all
three. When the heart breaks there are all these little things that spill out
from the shards—memories and words and white ceiling flakes. And stars. And
secrets. She will leave this room – this house – never knowing what the stories
were. Science dictates emotion to a certain extent and because this is so,
Abigail is of the opinion that her heart as an organ should be mended by now.
But it isn’t and she had deduced the reason down to one simple cause: the
ceilings.
Eventually by morning, which will be a
Friday or Saturday, her back is as sore as her heart and all the pretend
topographical maps she traces are made and it is time to leave.
Abigail stands, blows a kiss into the room,
shuts the door, and walks downstairs where she stands, staring at the mirrors
stacked backwards against the wall.
Abigail is not the Eiffel Tower. She is a
Jenga game played too long, stacked too high, with a player about to take the
one piece out holding the tower upright.
