Aches and Panes
An accusatory finger was pointed at the man in the doorway. The owner of the finger was a woman, furious, with tears streaked down her face. Running makeup went unheeded. The man was slowly backing out of the house, into the dusk. His arms were up in an apologetic gesture, his face pleading, his wife’s unforgiving. The woman brought her outstretched arm to her face, to wipe away the tears.
“You b*****d! How could you do this?” She waved her arms around the room and stamped her foot to the ground. “How could you do this?” She choked out, muffled from her hands covering her face. She took a few steps back towards a wall and slid down to crumple on the floor.
“It’s not- it’s not what it looks like!”
“Then what is it David, what is it?!” She looked up at him as he was slowly walking closer. “You expect me to believe you when you give me this garbage? It’s not what it looks like? I have news for you; it’s exactly what it looks like!” She screamed at him, her face scrunched up in anger. She buried her face in her hands again, until she heard footsteps coming closer and looked up. Her husband was walking towards her, looking truly pathetic.
“Jess, if you’re not going to be reasonable-“
“No goddamnit! I’m not going to be reasonable!” She shakily stood up, full of conviction nonetheless. “I want you out of my house! I don’t want filth in here!”
“You can’t just throw me out Jess! I live here too.”
“Yes I effing can David, and guess what? I am!” Jess turned from David, not trusting herself to face him, her love. Blindly, she stumbled into the kitchen and grasped onto the counter for support. Teardrops fell heavily onto the granite countertops. “I am, I am-”
No footsteps followed her. David stayed still in the other room, quiet, too. The only noise was that from the street outside the open door, and Jess’s heavy breathing. It stayed that way for a long while, until David finally moved.
“Jess?” He said quietly, daring to take a few steps to the kitchen.
“Just go, David!”
He turned around and walked out, frustrated. No goodbyes were exchanged, but for a slammed door. In a moment Jess took up one of the little jars on the counter top, a heavy glass thing, and took it to the front room. There was a window beside the door, through it she could see headlights of a car retreating from the driveway. A split second was all it took for Jess to fling the jar at the window, and through it. The shattering startled Jess out of the state she was in, brought her back to reality. David was gone, she didn’t know when he was coming back, or if. She had just told her husband, the one she promised to love until death did they part, the one who made her heart flutter and skin afire, the one she eloped for, to get out.
An hour and a dinner alone later, Jess was standing at the front door looking through the hole in the window. It was jagged and quite accurately at the center of the pane of glass. She followed the fractures splintering off from the hole with her eyes; they moved to no set path and were spread out nearly through the entire window. It was fully dark out, and the room was getting colder by the moment from the air coming in. Shards of glass littered the floor, dull and harmless looking in the incandescent light. Outside, no cars stopped at her house, Jess could see the headlights all passing her by.
Cold air rushed in to the house when she opened the door, it felt like it could start to snow any day. The leaves on the trees had long since given up their struggle and fallen, succumbed to the biter wind. The little jar lay on the grass a ways away from the house. She must have thrown it harder than she thought. It lay there, undamaged, though a few of the cinnamon sticks inside had broken and were crumbled at the bottom. After a look down the street Jess went back inside and to the kitchen. She replaced the jar on the counter, with her assortment of others. They were all neatly arranged, as was everything else in the room. Jess was admittedly a closet Martha Stewart fan, her house was full of storage knickknacks, and she swore by all of them.
Jess got a plastic bag and duct tape from under the sink and fixed the window up with it, as much as it could be fixed with a bag and tape. The slipshod covering billowed in and out with the wind. After a last look down the street, she decided to call it a night, a long one at that.
Two days later, David still wasn’t back. Jess had managed to get a window company to do a rush replacement of the broken one beside the door. She hated disarray in her house, as her kitchen could attest to. The window wasn’t cheap; she took the money out of her joint account with David. The workers had it installed within the morning, which was a relief for Jess, who was worried that David would come home while the workers were there and they would have to stand around awkwardly until it was done. Something neither she nor he would find in the least pleasant.
That night, David still wasn’t back. She fixed herself dinner at around 7, macaroni and cheese. There was no point in making a big meal for just her. She kept expecting the doorbell to ring, or even for the door to just open, and for David to walk back in and explain everything. He would apologize, and would understand why she had gotten so mad, he would hug her, and she would hug him back- and then they could both skip through a field of flipping daisies.
She pushed her empty bowl across the table and put her elbows up. Her hands cradled her head and she felt the now familiar pressure of tears behind her eyes. You drove him out and he’s not coming back, you’ll get old by yourself in the same place, becoming the little old spinster in the corner house. The one that everybody knows about but never talks to, they’ll all know that you drove your husband away. They’ll all know what a bad wife, what a bad person you are. They’ll all know, but they’ll never say a word.
“Oh God.” Jess let her head sink to the table, her hands clasped above. A few tears fell onto the wood, beading on the polished surface. She tilted her head on the side, resting her cheek on the table. She could feel the cool wetness of her tears against her flushed skin. Her eyes were about to close when she saw a flash of light coming from the front room. She raised her head from the table, intrigued as to what caused the light. It happened again, just a quick flash. She got up and made her way to the front door. She looked through the newly replaced window and saw that it was merely a lightning storm. Rain was pelting down against the ground, though; the whole storm seemed awfully quiet. There had been no thunder after the lightning strikes that she saw. It could just be quite far away though, it’s be quiet if it was far away.
That thought was put out of her head almost instantly. A bolt of lightning struck right near her house, a small flame came up from the ground. There had been no noise. She involuntarily took a step back from the window, and then flung the door open wide.
Nothing. There was no singe mark on the ground, or even a storm at all. The night was still, hardly a wind blowing. Jess back stepped inside, through the door there was a view of a clear night, through the window a storm. What was this? Was it a trick window? Did those people give her a trick window? Who the hell would do something like that?
Jess looked through the glass again; she could see a heavy rainstorm, lightning penetrating the sky in the distance. There were no cars going past, though they were clearly audible, or a street at all for that matter. It was dark, but she should have been able to see by the street lamps. Jess reached up to the wall beside her and flicked on the outside light. Through the window the night was still dark.
She stepped back again, not knowing what to do. Was this how it started, going crazy? Was she going to see little green men in spaceships next? She walked back outside, ran, more like it, and looked through the window from the outside and saw her house. She saw her front room, the small table by the door, on it a bowl that held her car keys, and until recently held David’s. She saw the cream colored walls she hated; they had come with the house. It was all perfectly normal- which made the situation all the more strange.
Jess ran back inside, frenetically running her fingers through her hair. Her eyes weren’t looking at the window anymore; they were wildly streaking across the room searching for anything else out of order. Her house was fine on the inside, nothing different. She watched the scene through the window, trying to convince herself that it was just her eyes playing tricks on her. The more she looked at it, the more real it was. She was sure that she was crazy, it couldn’t be real. There was no way.
“Oh, God I’m crazy.” She moaned to the space around her, half expecting a reply. She paced the room, the door still open to prove that the window was wrong. A few laps of the room later, she stopped, and had a new glint of determination in her eyes. ‘I’ll call that damned window company, it’s obviously their fault, I mean, what kind of window has the wrong view?’ She ran to the kitchen and grabbed the phone off of the wall. The phonebook page she had ripped out was still on the table; she grabbed it and dialed the number for the window company.
Bring. Bring.
“I’m sorry, Best Windows is closed, please call again tomorrow-” Someone said after the first few rings. Jess recognized it as a human voice, not a machine, and said:
“No, I really can’t call again tomorrow, I have a problem-”
“We thank you for your business.”
“No! Just listen!”
“I’m sorry Ma’am, but we’re closing.” He appeared to not have heard the panic in Jess’s voice
“But the window you installed for me today, there’s something wrong with it.” She continued diligently.
He answered: “If there was a problem with the installation or an issue with the integrity of the product itself you may call back tomorrow on business hours to talk to the manager.” His disinterest was apparent.
“No, no. The window’s fine, but, it’s just wrong. You people obviously did something to it! When I look through it from one side I see the wrong view, but from the other it’s normal. There’s this storm-“
“Ma’am, here at Best windows we can assure all of our products are perfectly normal, and, as far as I can tell, it’s a clear night.”
“But, it’s, magic, or something! I swear to you, I’m telling the truth.”
“Seriously Lady, aren’t you a bit too old for prank calls?”
Click.
The phone dropped to the floor from Jess’s hand. So it wasn’t just her who thought she was crazy. She could now add that to her repertoire, crazy old spinster who lives in the corner house. Her feet seemed to carry her of their own accord back to the front room. She closed the door, the room now chilled. Through the window the thunder storm still raged, from the brief flashes of lightning she was able to make out more of the surroundings. It seemed to be rural, as the lack of lighting could attest to; a landscape of rolling hills was silhouetted by the flashes. She saw a tree right close to the window, a great hulking thing. Gnarled limbs twisted up into the cloud ridden sky, no leaves were on it just like the trees in the real world they had fallen to the ground and were being tossed around by the storm.
Though, how did she know that this scene was any more real than the one through her doorway? Because you can only see it from one side, of one single window, that’s how. Yes, that did seem to be a reasonable assumption. Jess jumped away from the window another time when a gust of wind blew a handful of leaves against the glass. They left dirty prints of themselves, streaking down to the ground of the window world.
This gave Jess an idea, she reached to the doorknob and turned it, opening the door just a crack. She snaked her hand around the doorframe and in front of the window, all the while staying, watching, inside. She didn’t know what to expect anymore, but certainly the situation was getting stranger. Her hand was clearly visible through the glass, and she could feel the wind and rain on her skin. It was the oddest thing, like she was watching a part of her inside a television, it was unsettling.
Jess quickly pulled her hand back inside and clutched it to her chest. Droplets of water glistened on her skin. She breathed in deeply and thought that maybe this was all just a dream. That she would wake up any moment and be looking out to a view of her front lawn, her perfectly normal, unassuming, front lawn. She took her fingers and pinched the skin of her forearm, hard. The wince could attest to what the result of the experiment was.
“s**t.” She moaned. No one was ever going to believe her, not if she showed them even. Jess wasn’t quite sure if she believed it herself yet. She put her back against the wall parallel to the window and slid down. She pulled her knees up close to her body and rested her chin on them, looking out the window with searching eyes. Jess’s life had been normal, every facet of it, before this. What was wrong with her? Why was her window of all things doing this? It had the wrong view for heavens sake!
She put her hands down beside her on the floor, feeling its assured thereness, making sure that suddenly she wouldn’t fall into an alternate house. The fingers of her right hand came across something, a small hard object. She brought it up to her face; it was a shard of glass that hadn’t been swept up. The light caught its broken edges and made it shine, one part of it having broken unevenly caused the light to fragment into the spectrum and splay itself against the far wall. It was a tiny spectacle, but Jess stared at it for a long while. A look was in her eyes when she turned her head back to the window, a look, along with the glistening beginnings of tears. The shard dropped from her hand.
She stood up quickly and walked into the kitchen. The first thing that caught her eye was the collection of jars on the countertop, sitting perfectly still, perfectly arranged. She went to the counter, breathing heavily, and swept up the jars. The cinnamon sticks, among everything else rattled noisily. She pulled them all tight to her chest; one of them fell to the floor with a dull thud, landing near her foot. Jess scurried out of its way and went back to face the window. She stood before it, determined as ever, took a few steps back and gauged her distance, and put the jars down.
Jess kept one in her hand, the cinnamon sticks. It was just a small thing, but nevertheless effective. Her arm went back with it, then forward in an instant. The glass pane shattered as she expected it to, shards raining down on to the floor along with, well, rain. Another jar was thrown in quick succession, this one containing rice. Another, then another followed. Jess looked positively mad, her face scrunched up in anger at each throw.
The window was gone by the time she was finished, there was merely a frame lined with jagged points left. Of course, the thing that more interested Jess was the place that could be seen through the frame. The place that wasn’t real, that couldn’t be real. The place that was there. She let her arm fall limply to her side, and didn’t bother to check her mouth, hanging agape as it was. She crossed the room to the window and put her hand on the doorknob beside it, but didn’t turn it. Instead, Jess reached through the window with one hand, felt the wind and rain, and took the other off of the doorknob to follow. She put her foot on the bottom of the window frame, not bothering about the edges that cut into her skin. Almost as if sleepwalking, she turned to the side and slid through the opening.
It was a tight fit, the glass cut into her arms. Beads of blood sprang up. She stepped down onto the wet grass, her bare foot sinking into the muddy ground. The rest of her body followed before her wits could, the sight was the same she had been seeing, except that now the whole panorama was before her. Hills went on as far as she could see in the darkness, on every side of her too. The clouds stretched further, the lightning illuminating them going far on into the distance. Wind and rain whipped into Jess’s face, she turned away from the sting and covered her face with her hand. She should have been facing her house at that time.
There was only one problem though- there was no house.
A phone rang, bring, bring, breaking the silence of the house. I kept ringing until it met the beep, signaling the caller to leave a message. The sound of a sigh came from it.
“Jess? Are you there? Come on, just- please, pick up.”
Silence
“I know I should have called earlier, don’t get me wrong. I just thought you needed some, you time, you know? To calm down. I’m on my way back, Jess? If you’re there, please, talk to me.” He gave an exasperated sigh. “Jess, there was no other woman, there never was, okay? You’re the only one for me, I married you, remember?” A pause. “I- I’ll be home in a bit. Jess? Please- just understand.”
