Adela had walked to the train, to the aeroport, its plane, to yet another aeroport and plane to take the train to then walk again to the agency an entire ocean away, and all in the span of two days. A fish out of water, it’s said, she’s more perfectly a carp displaced, this season’s fish, which in her hometown village would’ve already been harvested from its pond, would’ve been hauled to the ramshackle, once drearily dissident Seasonal Market, to be netted from a tub enormously filled with the melting of snow, then weighed before all on a dishonest scale for the approval of the womenfolk, liningup as old as the earth and as patient in their revolve; women at the beginning of the line the oldest and the last no more than a little girl the granddaughter of the forgetting first just sent out with coin on an errand. Each remembered to her as her mother. How their carp would be netted, then bagged and hauled home to their bathroom, there in their own iron tub to swim itself dizzy in lazying loops, awaiting only the wrath of a mother — though progress happens, traditions evolve: now, how the fish would flipflop in the hands of the monger, then the thunk down on the cyclopean head with the brute, senseless mallet, the Angel of Death; Its knife would slice from out of the sky, then the head of the fish, with which to make stock for their soup, would tumble into the wrapping of its own newspaper, they’ve only printed one copy, headlined
Edy leans over the sink with a jar in her hand, polish for silver, rag in the other and fumes.
Adela heads upstairs, past those portraits whose features are no longer visible because the lights have long been slept, upstairs-upstairs to the room of their son Kyle, just made a son of the commandments last month, a barmitzvah, congrats a bounty of mazel, Hanna and Israel and their twelve daughters in attendance in matching dresses you should have — dead in his room, bent at the edge of his bed, expired in the middle of, we’ll leave him at that…then to the room adjacent, a suite even, almost a house in its amenities, and nothing, then to its bathroom tiled and toweled and Kylie, the older sister dead in the shower, her hair in the drain deep in water, a curtain undisturbed…and then, to the open Master Bedroom, and there nothing either, but beyond its fluelessly artificial fireplace that cleaves the expanse, never been lit and into the study, Alan’s head a bald egg nested amid transcripts of depositions, his neck loosely noosed with the telephonecord…
A violation of the Sabbath the Koenigsburgs never kept, Adela dialing emergency the Development’s 0 how she manages don’t ask — she’d like to speak higher of herself and her sisters the other Domestics, as if forced to defense, references, experience, to justify Mass and then, how she’d sworn to an oath — just sitting there rocking herself held through it all: denial, anger, bargaining with grief despite having nothing to offer, through the entire suggested by board, vetted by committee process of Mourning, holding rocked on the rollick of waterbed pitching a heave like an ocean attempting to stay afloat atop another ocean, the floor, her in search of an air separate, alone, until an Officer, ID’s himself as Security Officer 316 (Bundy — Approved) arrives, verifying himself verbally through the intercom as per regulations, the requirement that is courtesy despite catastrophe’s garble; he takes off his coat to float in, to slog on upstairs on his passkey, with gun still holstered as already knowing, and tremulant pale save the chapped red hands and the nip at his nose, which isn’t blood only the bloodless cold and a few or five fingers of whiskified nog, his blazer dusted with waters that might be dribbling that or, better, his tears, or just melting snow, holds Adela until she’s finally drowning in weep, to fall over the tight heat of his uniform lap.
