Empty places

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I curl up on the floor in, with the window wide open. The wind of the approaching storm tears at my mother's second-hand curtains, and they ripple above me like a raging sea.

Thirty-seven. Forty-eighty-one. Ninety-six.

I type in the phone number by heart, needing both hands because I'm shaking like I always do when I do this. The cornice almost comes off, I should get up to close the window, but I don't move, I focus with every fiber of my being on what I hear. For now, it's quiet, except for my own breathing, but soon the static noise starts to crackle, it gets louder and louder, and then anything could happen, that's the only thing that reaches my consciousness.

It rings.

I close my eyes, my heart seems to be pounding in my throat, which is impossible, my eighth-graders would look at me like that if I told them something like that. At the same time, what is possible and what is not are less and less separable categories for me. Reality is more arbitrary than I imagined.

This line is not live. It wasn't even alive when I lived there, where the device at the other end is dusting. I know what's coming next, another cynical move by alleged reality.

Someone answers the phone in the empty house on Seaholly-Hill.

Fibrous tendrils woven on the windowsills. Molding boards under my feet. Cold rain drips down through the hole in the ceiling.

"Hello?"  There is no answer, only a draft blowing through the rickety building. "Füli?"

It's him, I know. If I concentrate hard, I can hear his breathing over the noise.

His hand in mine.

Bloody skinned nectarines in my hand.

His hand is on my mouth, he holds me down.

I grip the phone so hard that my fingers hurt, and then I don't dare to open it. I'm waiting for something different than it was before, but in vain. I disconnect the line and close the window as fast as I can, as if I can shut out my terror along with the storm.

"That's exactly what I wanted to ask you to do," says mother, opening the door she left ajar. - Are you okay?

"Of course!" I hastily throw down my Clint Eastwood cotton t-shirt that I used for sleeping. A year ago, it was tight on my breast, which made Clint look like his botox treatment had gone badly wrong, but today it just flops on me . "My train leaves in twenty minutes."

"But you'll be home soon, won't you? Like you said."

"Yes." I fasten my bra, which is two cup sizes smaller than before, and even though mom doesn't say it, I know she's still horrified by the sight of my collapsed breasts. My pants are no longer tight on my thighs either, which I would have been happy about not so long ago, considering that all the pants were always tight on me, but the sudden weight loss made me just scraggy, not slim. "I'll just discuss with the principal what else he wants to discuss, then I'll rush back."

"Okay. I'll help you pack the rest of your things. Take the black umbrella, I put it by the door."

She took it with her to the store just as a precaution, and for now, I'll take it just for that reason. The black one is the only umbrella we can afford, apart from that we only have a duckling and a neon yellow one, both of which, like the curtains, are something that no one else needed anymore.

I put my bag on my shoulder and close the lid of my ninety percent packed suitcase. It's the middle of August, which means that I informed the school management just in time that I was resigning, after only nine months. The problem was not with them, and especially not with the children. The reason is my move, due to which I had to pack up the part of my belongings that I brought home from my husband's house a year ago.