She keeps laughing until suddenly, she is crying. Did all mothers know the vampiric trick of draining self-worth from their children with a look? Things with her mother had been easier when she was a child, when the weight of expectations hadn’t had time to accrue. How long do you have to wait after your mother has died before you can laugh again? Anna laughs, great ocean waves of sound, then feels the guilt settle on her, even without her mother there to provide it. It is so like her mother to clutter up her house with pamphlets on being tidy. Due to a typo, the pamphlet suggests that everyone prepare for their own inevitable sheep. Death is translated as the dark valley, the unknown void. The title is more fun than the interior, which suggests that it’s polite for the elderly to donate their possessions as they near the end of their lifetimes, so that their kids won’t have to wade through mountains of things. She finds a pamphlet titled “Swedish Death Cleaning.” Intrigued, she moves a stack of atlases and sits to read. The kitchen alone contains all manner of spoons and pots and gadgets that have one specific task, like slicing an avocado. Her mother’s house is filled with stuff, brimming with a surfeit of light cotton dresses, mountains of mystery novels, at least fourteen packs of cards. But now, at 47, was she the caterpillar, or the butterfly, or perhaps some version of both? Do we become different people all throughout our lives, again and again? Like a caterpillar metamorphosing. Inchoate.Īm I really the same person I was at seven? she thinks.
The patterns of thought are clearly her own, although more ragged and unformed. The journal has entries about her birthday and a bike ride down the block, but no mention of her parents’ divorce. It’s strange to see her life through child eyes. Three days before, while cleaning out her mother’s house, Anna comes across her own journal.
This isn’t the sort of warning she needs - the warning that comes too late. This statement makes her laugh, a great rolling sound she didn’t know was hidden in her body. Next to her ear, the man says, “You’ll want to be careful.” Sometimes, difficult things.” He steps a little closer to avoid a woman who wants to peek into Anna’s room. “Nothing different from what I usually find. “Yesterday, I hiked all day and tried the last door only.” You could try every door until you get tired.” He pulls a hair out of his short beard. “You’ll want to have a strategy.” He points to a beige door. The skein of thread is now in her satchel, wound tight, along with a pair of scraggly mittens and a kitchen device that is only good for coring apples, this detritus of her life that she isn’t even sure how she acquired. The thread led her to this room, where she slept, pulled into quiet unconsciousness, pulled back by footsteps in the hall.
#Robin miles narrator cracked#
The night before, she came upon a tangle of threads in the entrance and followed the one that smelled like cinnamon, the scent like a tangible fragment of her childhood, the kitchen with the cracked red phone, her mother’s famous cinnamon cookies. “Which room are you looking for?” he asks.Īnna shrugs. One stops to examine her room, a man with a trim beard and thick glasses. In the morning, searchers glide by, crowding through the hallway, meshing into each other and apart again. She sleeps, dreamless, hearing the ocean trembling against the shore.
#Robin miles narrator windows#
Dusk seeps in through windows thick with salt lines. Outside, the wrens muck about in shallow water. Anna is grateful to lie on the bed in the cool house where there are no expectations, no labyrinthine thoughts to swallow her in the night.
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