The Bones Inside Your Skin

22 JAMES O’BRIEN THE BONES INSIDE YOUR SKIN T hey received the shut-off notice that evening. It could have been any letter but for the red stamp on the front. He had returned from work in their Pontiac sedan and climbed the short steps to their triplex apartment and set his bag against the wall and hooked his coat to a hanger in the closet. Then he sat. She sat across from him with the envelope in her hands. The television glared black behind her. He could smell potatoes cooking in the kitchen. She pushed the envelope across the vinyl card table tacked in flecks of desiccated food. Her hands looked older than they were. Lined and dry. Delicate. Those of an old woman. He imagined the bones inside were hollow as a bird’s. He’d never told her that. He looked at the envelope and flipped it over so he could not see the red stamp and closed his eyes. He could still see her hunched outline imprinted on his eyelids. He thought. He said, Okay. She said, No. No it’s not. He shrugged. He said, Okay. It’s not. What’re we going to do about it. What we can. I’m not going on state aid. Lots of people are on it. Blacks are on it. He looked away. The walls seemed quite white. They had painted them some months ago when they had money. When rain fell he could still smell the paint. He said, Don’t say that. It’s true. You know it’s true. She held up her forearm. She said, Does this look black to you. He shook his head. That’s why we aren’t going on state aid. They sat there in the yellow half-light looking to the tabletop . The potatoes smelled like they were crisping. She stood up. She walked to the kitchen door. She turned back. She stood behind him and raised her delicate hand. She held it there above 23 O’Brien his head as though considering a benediction. Then she lay her hand against his skull and ran her fingers back through his hair. It felt like warm water. He thought he heard her sigh. She walked off. He had gotten used to the bills. They had been arriving for some time. Months maybe. A year since they cut the cable. He didn’t miss the television but he worried about missing the heat. The cold was coming fast. A wet hybrid of the Great Lakes and the Chesapeake. It froze inside your lungs. Then you got pneumonia or the flu and you had to miss work. That meant missing pay. Paying for doctors. But the damp was worse. The damp got you to your bones and when it got to your bones it never left. You just got colder and colder and at first you shivered and woke sweating in the nights and then you did nothing at all. You stopped caring. You adjusted. You had to. But without heat this winter would be worse even than that. He’d once seen a toilet iced over and frozen pipe to rim. Somebody had shit on the ice and that had frozen too. Flakes of ice starlike on each turd. He did not want to live like that. She would not live like that. He went outside to think while she readied dinner. He wanted to think. A plastic tub sat next to the door. They had kept it for recycling but it was empty now. He smelled diesel fumes and earth. The wind was sharp and cold off the shadowed mountains . The sun set behind their rough ridges and the shadows dimmed and faded. Already ice was collecting on their window panes. He thought. He lived with her near a distribution center that trucked soda throughout the region. Just a few hundred yards off there was a rough field and in the rough field a herd of hard-ribbed dairy cattle. Jerseys maybe. He couldn’t tell. They looked so emaciated and their hides all dim. They lowed some mornings. In the dawn when the fog rolled off the brown...