The Order of Things
Timothy Dodd
The Order of Things
The screen door slammed behind him, cutting off his mother at “sick of the rain.” She didn’t hear him leave and repeated that he better take that job at the plant before someone else did. But he left her talking to air, for he was uneasy each time he saw the eyesore on the river, its pipes and fumes, its cold intricate maze of metal.
The rain weakened to a drizzle and fog licked the hills surrounding the hollow. She would say the roof couldn’t take this kind of water, but with winter around the corner there was no time to fix it even if they scraped together the funds. And he envisioned the nearby lake, the layer of ice that protected the carp as they swam dreamily at the bottom during winter. When the cold arrived, he’d have it to himself and could think what it might be like to live down there with them under the ice.
Keep raining, he thought, not wanting to mow the lawn. Mother complained he took too long, stopped too often to hush the motor since he’d rather listen for the pileated’s hammering. He walked around to the back of the house, through the yard to the creek, and looked up into the soaked hills. Call it their greed or honest survival, but was it that slow death of owning the land and giving commands that he resisted?
He searched for the source of the echoes in the trees— trees with roots holding on to the hills at sharp angles like the many families he knew. When he found the bright red cap swinging, working in the rain, he admired the humorous force of the bird’s pecking. And when it flew away, as always, he felt a strange satisfaction in viewing its departure.
But after it was gone and he turned back to the house, he saw a lifelessness hovering, a lifelessness that could do no more than awake for a little time to creep over the place in search of something. And he heard his mother’s dusky voice twisting through the leafless trees again, wanting as well, wanting something that would crawl on through the hollows for ages.
Timothy Dodd is from Mink Shoals, WV. He is the author of short story collections Fissures, and Other Stories (Bottom Dog Press), Men in Midnight Bloom (Cowboy Jamboree Press), and Mortality Birds (Southernmost Books, with Steve Lambert), as well as poetry collections Modern Ancient (High Window Press) and Vital Decay (Cajun Mutt Press). His stories have appeared in Yemassee, Broad River Review, and Anthology of Appalachian Writers; his poetry in Crab Creek Review, Roanoke Review, Crannog, and elsewhere. His website is timothybdodd.wordpress.com.