Unending Nora

Chapter 7

Julie Shigekuni 51 Chapter 7 As Nora made her way through the dark house stopping to examine each object, she believed she might finally understand what Reverend Nakatani had preached her whole life about the Kingdom of Heaven: modest, but overwhelming all the same.The low table in the front room, the fire truck and ladder underneath, these items, all of which she’d seen before, now defied her contemplation of them, and so, before touching anything or coming to conclusions, she made it a point to revisit each room. Stacked high in the kitchen sink were plates and cups, thick rings of debris showing where liquid had evaporated. He had, from the looks of it, been gone for quite some time. He had not left much behind in the cupboards and refrigerator: three eggs, a stiff tortilla, and half a jar of strawberry jam. She was hungry, but she did not eat. At least not that first night. To compensate for her uninvited entry into Joaquin’s house, she gave careful consideration to each move she made. And while it was true that her presence in the house fell out of line with her beliefs as a Christian, the other truth was that her moral nature had taken a degenerative twist long before this act of breaking and entering. Standing in the laundry room with a handful of shirts pressed under her nose, she found a thrill beyond any she’d ever known. She felt alive in Joaquin’s house, viewing from the inside the place where she would live in happiness. She felt his presence in Unending Nora 52 her stomach; breathed his scent into her lungs; let the colors play behind her eyes before exhaling, and moved up and down the hall circling each room like a cat until she felt certain she’d seen enough of everything to understand that the house contained more than would be needed for a life together. It was excess that finally caused her to act. With only Joaquin and her there would be no need for more than two of anything, and this fact became most apparent in the kitchen where stacks of unmatched dishes littered the countertops and cupboards. Brown palm frond patterns , yellow daisies, two green ivy (a motif, perhaps, but not really) plates, and an ornate gold design on white. She would have chosen the daisies, emblem of a happy, carefree life, or the gold pattern, but the white was irreparably stained. Only the ivy made a set of two, and so she set the others aside. To her delight she was able to match two of everything: bowls, dishes, glasses, flatware. Everything, except for coffee mugs, of which there were four, and none of them the same. She shifted the contents of the sink to get a better look, hoping that perhaps a matching one hid there, and when she did not find it resolved that if Joaquin and she were forced to live without mugs, they at least had glasses. Gathering the dirty dishes from the sink, she began piling them into a used grocery sack and, when she’d filled the first bag, tied the plastic into a neat knot. Regret begged her to reconsider, but the knot proved impossible to undo, and in the process of her fumbling with the bag, a dish fell from the counter and shattered at her feet—the yellow daisy pattern broken in three parts where the stems connected to the flowers. Three uneven pieces might have been glued back together, but around them the tiny shards meant trouble. For an instant, guilt far out of proportion to the worth of the dish overwhelmed her. Standing in Joaquin’s kitchen, she responded to the unmistakable sound of something shattering that would never be put back together again. With consideration to her life with Joaquin, she spared exactly what they’d need, and fearless of the consequences should a neighbor report the clatter to the police, she began Julie Shigekuni 53 smashing everything Joaquin and she would not need. Shards of dishes and glass cut into her fingers, and her eyes teared even as the destruction continued. But no one came. In the end, she collected the dish shards into a single plastic sack, double lined. She took her time setting the house exactly so, in ways that would be both pleasant and comfortable in the long...