Vortex

Vortex

She does not remember arguments but stories to those arguments.

Adelaide believes God lives in the Sky, interwoven in the constellations of the stars. And heaven is beyond the stars, the blackness, and the galaxy. It makes her brain hurt to think about all that open space made up of atoms and molecules. She believes God’s kingdom floats high above the galaxy, and her telescope can’t find him.
The arguments started with a myth, and then became a story, passed on to become truth.
In her mind, God’s son is the big bright orb, known as the planet Sun. Adelaide likes to stare up at him with his perky smile, which she thinks is only for her, especially on days when her mother’s screams can be heard by all the neighbors. The neighbors all believe the mother is a bit demented, with her bright dyed red hair, and the eagle like shrieks that come from her painted ruby lips.
It’s pretended that all is right in the pink house. Two elm trees canopied over the front door in an arch, which is said to be a sign of good luck to those who believe in such things.
The only recourse for the neighbors is to shut their windows. Why meddle in others’ affairs? It’s better to be indifferent; it keeps for peaceful conversation and pleasant interactions as they pass each other on the sidewalk.
Adelaide never argues with her mother. Not even when she is made to cut the front lawn with a pair of blunt school scissors as a punishment for some crime that she has committed in her mother’s inflicted mind—sometimes it is simply her being too close in proximity to her mother.
Adelaide never questioned her mother’s reasoning for keeping her locked up in the depths of darkness, to make her skin so pale. Nor did she judge her mother’s habit of painting the front door of the house a different color each week. This week it’s green. Nor did she raise an eyebrow to her mother’s obsession with moving the couch every morning before she went to work in her garden.
Today the couch is facing the TV set, this evening it might be facing the front windows, and the next morning it could be up against the far wall. Where the living room couch might find itself all depends on her mother’s mood at a given point of the day.
This obsession on her mother’s part put Adelaide’s father in an early grave. He was always being asked by his wife to fix something around the house. But all he really wanted to do when he got home from work was to relax on the couch, read his paper and smoke his pipe.
Adelaide’s father made himself scarce by hiding in the attic. He’d creep across the joists moving far from the entrance and past the boxes, moving away from the shrieks and curses of his wife. While adjusting his position away from the glare of the attic window, he fell between the joists and through the crumbling ceiling, landing with a deadly thump on the same spot the couch used to be that very morning—that was until his wife moved it as Adelaide’s father was making his way up to the attic stairs. His early death, the mother said, was his own fault; he should have listened to her. She had told him that very morning to patch up the living room ceiling, but he hadn’t listened, and now he is dead.
After the funeral all remnants of him were bagged and sent away, and the mother went about finding someone to repair the hole in the ceiling. Adelaide remembers sitting on the floor where the couch used to be and staring up at the wide gap in the ceiling. All that was left of her father she remembers thinking were rays of dust particles that swirled around her. They resembled a constellation of sorts dancing in the light rays, on the wooden living room floor.
When her mother pedaled off to the farmers’ market the next morning on her pink striped bicycle, Adelaide skipped down to the five and dime around the corner. She bought herself a pair of black sunglasses to protect her innocent eyes from the sun. The cashier, a lady with silver grey hair, smiled affectionately at her as she took her crumpled dollar bills. She knows the girl and her odd mother. She watched as Adelaide skipped down the main road. There was nothing she can do to help her. Nothing at all—the girl, the silver-haired lady believed, was an amenable sort—she would survive.
She didn’t have the panic attacks like she did when she thought about God up in the blackness of the night sky when she lay out in the sun all day. Her mother never caught her doing this; she believed that the sun protected her even from her mother’s unpredictable nature. Adelaide felt no anger toward her mother. Her mother had given her the basic survival tools to continue on. She fed her gave her a bed to sleep in, and despite her screams and false accusations she never lifted a hand to her. Her mother, the girl sensed at a young age was not equipped with the nature to love any body but herself. It wasn’t Adelaide’s fault; it was genetic, bred into her mother. The voices, they made her that way, and Adelaide knows that it is better to stay out of her mother’s way than to argue over her mother’s oddness. It made things easier in the house, it made life more manageable.
**
At the core of the argument the truth would be found, but first she would have to go through the many layers of the story.

Never when she was a little girl would her mother let her go to the sea. Her mother feared the sand, and the seawater, but mostly she feared the crowds of people that gathered at the beach shores.
Now without her mother’s trepidations shadowing over her, Adelaide stretches out on the sandy beach letting the sun rays warm her. She thinks about how immense the sea is and how the sea takes over most of the earth. Again the same feelings of panic washes over her as when she thinks about God up in the black sky, she doesn’t like thinking about what lurks beneath the waters. The ocean waters are like the night sky—open space, but with creatures that could swallow her whole. Plus, the rush of the tide could sweep her away into the vastness of the ocean’s core. Yet, still she is wants to see the bottom of the ocean so like when she was a child, she skips to the five and dime store and buys a pair of goggles and a plastic snorkel.
The silver grey haired woman is long dead by now. The new cashier is a young man around her age who gives her a weak smile. He feels sorry for her, a girl/ woman who skips around like a child, and giggles to herself. He had known her as a child, and with a group of his schoolyard friends had thrown rocks at her. He had made her cry by telling her that she was just like her mother. But as he takes her money, and then gives her back her change, Adelaide only smiles at him remembering nothing of his misconceived actions toward her when she was a child; her only thought as she steps out into the sunlight is that he has soft hands.
Adelaide with her slender hips, and a robust chest, puts on her newly acquired gear, and gingerly steps into the ocean’s water. She wades out a few feet past the tide, and peers down into the murky water. To her disappointment, she sees nothing special, but sand and snails. Yet, she likes the feel of the water around her ankles; she likes the smell of the sea, and the clapping of the sea gull’s wings above her. But mostly, she likes the feel of nothingness around her, and she feels safe: A sense of buoyancy takes over her; invading her soul allowing her for the first time to lose herself in an abyss of solitude. A great sigh escapes her lips, and finally after debating her future she wades out of the shallow waters, and walks home.
The Truth is found in the story.

She stops looking through her telescope at the night sky, and she stops using her goggles to peer at the ocean’s depths. No alarming shrieks coming out of the house walls, no startling knocks on her bedroom door, and gone are the thumps and bumps that haunted her while she slept. The house is finally still.
The woman that Adelaide has become starts digging in the cool black earth behind her house. She found a spade shaped shovel in the basement. It has bits of rust around the edges from years of disuse. The garden too has been neglected. Adelaide is not blessed with a green thumb like her mother. In fact, she has allowed the garden to become a forest of abandonment were she runs wild with her two large black dogs. Vines and trees have become one, and the assortments of flowers are left to survive by natural selection. The once plush green lawn is now a den of weeds that go past her tiny waist. She’d seen her dogs dig holes in the tulip beds, her mother’s pride and joy when she was alive, but now they are home to her dogs who bask in them on hot summer days. Why couldn’t she do the same? So she digs herself a six foot hole, and lays down in it. It’s cool and smells of decaying leaves, and other such matter like earth worms and bugs. She feels at ease in her hole, the coolness of the earth’s walls easing the pandemonium that takes place daily in her head.
She peers up at the sun without her black sunglasses on, and lets its rays warm her. She lets her mind wander to what it would be like to swim along the ocean’s floor, and fly through the galaxy, and what lay beyond all that open space. She doesn’t feel that tingle of panic take hold of her like before when she thinks of things she can’t see. She closes her eyes for a minute and breaths in more deeply the damp scent of the earth around her, and when she opens her eyes she sees that her two dogs are watching over her, she feels safe. And before she falls fast asleep she thinks that tonight she will pull out her telescope from the back of her closet, and view the moon, and be comforted by how it smiles down on her, and think of all that vastness far out in the black sky, and she only a sum, of a part, of a molecule, to all its greatness.