It tastes like the mouth of a cave covered
by Evan James Sheldon
I am chasing a woodpecker by climbing up a blue spruce in my backyard when a pebble falls into my mouth. I’m trying to catch the bird as a way to hold an incessant sound, to feel the repetition rattle through me, but then the pebble distracts. I don’t take it out right away. I roll it around savoring the flavor, letting it clack against my teeth, and guessing at how it came to fall.
When I can’t come up with anything satisfactory, I go inside and find my father sitting at the kitchen table. He’s holding a pair of oversized scissors—the kind that children use—and cutting a folded piece of paper.
Are you making snowflakes? I ask.
No. It’s kind of like a Rorschach test, he says, unfolding the paper to reveal a tree. What do you see?
It’s nothing. It’s just a blob.
The inability to make connections is a sign of a dangerous mental state. Killers only see blobs too. Cannibals. Arsonists. Larcenists.
Do you know of any phenomena that might cause a pebble to fall from the sky?
He sets the paper and scissors down. Aren’t you going to ask me what I see?
I don’t tell him that he’s showed me the tree every day this week, that it doesn’t matter what image I say, he’ll tell me about my dangerous mental state, and when I ask what he sees, he’ll tell me about a waterfall he remembers from childhood, that he snuck behind it with his father and found a cave, and that they couldn’t see the bats, but they could hear them rustling above their heads in the dark; it was right before he lost his father, an accident they told him, but he’s always suspected foul play as his father was an excellent driver. I don’t say any of this because it’s not my place, it’s not what he needs. And I understand why I was trying to catch the woodpecker, though I might not ever understand how the pebble fell into my mouth, just like my father may not ever understand the consequence of the sound of bats he can’t see. Everything takes on significance as an ending approaches.
I move the pebble underneath my tongue and it reshapes the words I might speak.
What do you see? I ask.
Evan James Sheldon's work has appeared recently in the American Literary Review, the Cincinnati Review, and the Maine Review, among other journals. He is a senior editor for F(r)iction and the Editorial Director for Brink Literacy Project. You can find him online at www.evanjamessheldon.com.
