Until we cannot scream anymore
by Sam Rockler
April 16, 2009 — Published in Pithy Tales
It is early afternoon, early spring, a warm day, and I am driving. Or Cara is—this detail, like everything else, is transitory. Cara is dressed in black pants, a black sweater. One straight, uninterrupted line that stretches from her toes up to her forehead. She becomes a fan blade, a ballerina. There are many things I didn’t mention to her then and should have.
We were going to a funeral. I can’t remember whose it was. Maybe it was my father’s, and maybe this is why she is driving, or maybe, or more likely, it is someone else’s. We are seventeen year old girls, alive, disaffected. She wraps herself in hysteria. I am quieter, sad, more together. We step out of the car.
There is a crowd. The energy is palpable. People always say that.
I don’t know where to sit. We’re holding hands. There is light flooding the room and it takes me somewhere else. We are talking about him, then. He loves ice cream, New York City, the Chesapeake Bay, summertime. I realize then that we are talking in the present tense, as if he is not dead: is. Wants, holds, keeps. He is not dead. Then I begin to really believe this and everything becomes absurd.
I cry without realizing that I’m doing it. My palms shake. Everyone looks like me. I look like everyone else. We are not at all different. I could be dead and they could be crying for me. He could be here instead, sitting beside Cara, whose mother bought us tissues this morning along with the groceries for the week. Milk, eggs, butter, bread, tissues. I can see the grocery list crumpled on the floor of the car now. Our mothers are beginning to let us go. They are accepting that we will begin to understand things, to learn all of the things that they protected us from when we were young. When before they would have kept us at home, or held our hands as we cried through the unimaginable sickness of loss, they buy us tissues. They separate themselves from our grief. It is what their mothers did, and what we will do to our daughters if we’re not careful. I see myself in thirty years, gazing out the window as my daughter begins to learn the things I will not know how to teach her.
A blind woman is playing the piano. I look around at all of the others as the music crescendos to a swell inside of me. All of the solid compounds of teardrops and heartbeats and fingertips that surround me, the quiet manifestations of the slow passage of time, the lifechambers of our insides: something has moved in me, pushed forth from screaming flesh and vocal bone. Everyone knows the secrets I’ve been keeping, or else nothing is a secret, or else nothing is real.
The service ends. There is a caravan of cars headed to the graveyard. Cara and I wait in her car, the air conditioning cooling the red from our cheeks. We will not follow the others to his gravesite. We will wait here, until the parking lot is cleared and the sky darkens, and then we will step from the car and scream until our throats are bloodied and raw. Until we cannot scream anymore.
I look from the sky to Cara, to tell her about this, but she has already begun, and strange sounds are escaping from where she has pressed her sweater sleeve to her mouth. This happens. Everywhere, this happens. And it keeps happening. And it will happen. And there is no escape and there is nothing else. And I want to say something but there’s nothing to say. So I push it back into the static air of the car, back into the sound of Cara not making any sounds, back into the sun that shines when it shouldn’t, back into the world that continues when it should stop, back into the lives of everyone moving when they should be still and let the emptiness fill them. It is not the emptiness that we are afraid of—it is the knowledge that once we were filled that instills in us now this fear of heights.
There was more. Somewhere. I’m sure.
Illustration by Megan Amoss.
Sam Rockler
I am seventeen years old, a matriculating student at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a negligible driver mourning the death of a car called the Avalanche. I can be found getting lost on highways across America and never remembering anything of consequence.
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