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The Boy
A passerby could have considered the house displaced from some European countryside, perhaps French, instead of its resting place in the Great Prairie of Kansas. It used to be quaint, with shutters that could close and a privacy wall at the front of the property. Vines grew decoratively at first, then took over once officially let loose by negligence. From the wall, a neat line of flat, beige stones accompanied guests to the front door, originally a garnet red, and stopped just at the threshold. The front and back gardens overflowed with wildflowers, mainly poppies and raspberry bushes.
This was the Boy’s favorite place; everything about the house, from the wall to the small bathroom at the end of the upstairs hall, charmed his spirit and sang in his soul, along with the poppies. He didn’t grow up there. His mother, Celestine, kept fabulous care of the house, maintained its charm. That was all she could maintain. Unfortunately for the Boy, his father was the only man who could raise him. Celestine had gone years ago, long before her eventual departure to the Kingdom of Heaven or Eternal Damnation, the Boy was honestly not sure which. He would visit her though, on Sunday mornings. It was all a part of Celestine’s strict routine. Every Monday she would water the lawn, every Wednesday, the potted ferns, and on Saturdays, she would clean the house inch by inch from top to bottom. Sundays, she had breakfast with the Boy, and even though he was her son, she only thought of him as a visiting guest.
Breakfast between them was hardly breakfast. The Boy always bought the same cookies from the market and Celestine always made the same coffee. And instead of conversation, the Boy would tell her about himself and his life in the pockets of silence between her fits of nonsense murmuring and repetition of the items on the table: “Mug, plate coffee, cookie, You, mug…” she’d always say. It became harder and harder for the Boy to come each week but he continued to not disrupt Celestine’s routine.
Beyond the garden wall, the surrounding landscape of Celestine’s home was all but decimated. Farmers that tended the land years before had sprayed DDT like God had blessed them with an unlimited supply. It killed nearly everything, and all that was left around for miles was beige ground, sun-bleached hay, and a notable lack of wildlife. The only bees and creatures that came lived off Celestine’s flowers. When the Boy arrived, he sighed at the garden door, taking in the only clean air he had breathed for miles on his bike ride.
As the Boy grew, Celestine deteriorated. The pockets of silence between her murmurs and ramblings became less frequent. Her routine grew more vigorous, and as the Boy noticed, more arduous. He would spot bandages on Celestine’s knuckles and around her arms from scrubbing too viciously, or falling victim to the nettle more than usual. The boy expressed his worry to his father, but the man wanted nothing to do with her. The Boy’s father found Celestine’s illness, which had befallen her when the Boy was only two months of age, as a message from God that she was touched by something evil. The only reason he let the Boy visit her was because he insisted.
Time went on, and the Boy visited less frequently. The first day he didn’t make the pilgrimage to Celestine’s, a guilt consumed him. He thought it would have to end sometime, and maybe she could adjust. But no amount of self-reassurance could rid him of his guilt.
When he returned the following week, his stomach tingling from the uncertainty of what might have happened to Celestine, he swallowed his fear and went inside as he always did. Celestine had mugs out with coffee in them as usual, and was seated in her spot at the small wooden table, mumbling and whispering like always. The Boy sat down, and when she fell silent, he spoke:
“I’m sorry I didn’t come last time.” To the Boy’s shock, Celestine nodded her head. She didn’t give him a direct reply, the nod was her sole acknowledgement, and she resumed her usual noises: “Mug, plate, coffee, cookie, You, mug…”
The Boy, relieved by the normalcy, took a sip of coffee. What he tasted surprised and disgusted him. He swallowed the liquid with a grimace and set the mug gently back down on the table. The coffee he drank was brewed and poured the previous week. Celestine had never taken a sip or touched the mugs since the last Sunday.
Right as the boy set the mug back down, Celestine got up suddenly, saying something about how the stones needed to be changed. As she limbered past him, he noticed a bandage wrapped around her entire right arm. The Boy didn’t know what to do. Feeling unwelcome, he slipped out the back door where he went around the garden wall and reunited with his bicycle. He left quickly, his mind like a fallen deck of cards.
The Boy recounted the situation to his father, who found the behavior unacceptable. “If she’s hurting herself, who’s to say she won’t hurt you?” he would say.
That was the final time Celestine and the Boy would meet. His father disallowed him from returning out of fear that Celestine would do him harm.
The first few weeks without seeing Celestine, the Boy felt ill. He wondered day and night what had become of her; how many cold, full cups of coffee sat on her small wooden table next to the window.
Eventually, the Boy’s guilt waned. Weeks grew into months, turning into years, and Celestine took up less and less room in his mind, until she eventually had vanished from it completely. The Boy went to college, moved far, far away from Kansas to be something, travel Europe, have fun, whatever adults said was good for him.
The Boy’s father was growing old. And the Boy, now the Man, returned to Kansas to be with him. The father could only do so much himself—his hands were riddled with arthritis and he walked at the pace of a tortoise. The Man did small things like taking out the garbage or washing dishes. The Man would have to get groceries, this time in his sleek, expensive car and not on the back of a bike with chipped paint.
He browsed the aisles, listening to the asinine music floating gently near the speakers. The Man picked up bread, milk, bananas, and found himself at the bakery, a box of cookies in his hands. It was muscle memory. He paid and left in a hurry. Not caring about his speed or cold groceries. Instead of going home to see his father, he took the long route to the beige, dead fields where Celestine created a haven of life. The Man parked his car where he always parked the bike, right on the corner of the wall with a divet in the side.
It looked different. The vines had overgrown the wall so voluminously, one could guess its entire constitution was leaf and stem. The Man entered through the door to find the garden completely abandoned. Grasses were tall and untamed, and the poppies, a violent red, pulsed with color and reached for the sun’s direction, as though being pulled by it. The stones that led to the front door, arranged differently than how the Man remembered, were barely visible from all the brush. He followed its trajectory to the front door that he would spend so much time fixated on. His hand trembled as he turned the knob, entirely unsure of what could be beyond the door’s shoddy wooden frame.
The house smelled stale and empty. It wasn’t the usual smell of coffee and honeysuckle that he was so used to. Small weeds poked through the cracks in the tile floor, and the walls had grown weaker. Tracks from animals decorated the floors, as they were in search of food. The Man made his way to the kitchen, where his breath stopped short.
On the small wooden table in front of him, sat maybe fifty mugs of coffee, all nearly full, on either side.
The Man’s knees buckled as he sat in his usual chair, which let out a large groan. Here he was again. He looked at Celestine’s empty chair, her collection of coffee cups, and let out a labored, heartbroken sigh. His guess was that she had taken herself somewhere to die, rather than tarnishing the one thing in her life she lived for. The Man let out another short breath, then spoke:
“I’m sorry I didn’t come last time.” The words floated across the table to Celestine’s empty chair, then hung in the kitchen. Tears welled, and as the Man began began to stand back up to leave, something caught his eye: on the left side of the table, where he usually placed the cookies, there rested a small slip of paper. He took it in his hand and read it:
“Love You.” The Man, now the Boy, sat back down, and didn’t get up for a good, long while.
