SILENT
MOMENTS
Short story & illustration
by Kimmo Matias
It wasn't her fault. But as Carla cut three red
roses from her well-tended garden and
squeezed her fingers around them, her body
responded differently. Her smoky grey eyes
seemed dazed as she walked toward the house,
her ash blonde hair moved slightly in the
summer breeze. With each step she squeezed
the roses harder, until the thorns pierced the
softness of her palm. She didn't react. She just
kept on walking, numb, all the while leaving
bloody marks on the patio stones leading up to
the door. She sensed both pain and pleasure,
though at first she hardly registered neither.
When she stepped inside the house she
suddenly drifted back into herself. And right that
instant an intense pain made her reflexes work:
she opened her hand quickly and the roses fell
to the floor. She looked at her hand and
discovered two deep wounds. The large thorns
had dug in all the way. She squeezed the skin
surrounding the wounds and rinsed her hand
under a cold running water until the bleeding
started to diminish. After tying a bit of gauze
around her hand, she picked the roses from the
floor, selected a narrow light green vase and
poured water into it. She was on her way to the
living room when the phone rang.
Carla rushed toward the sound. She grabbed her
worn black leather bag from the half-broken
chair. Most of the things in her house were
broken. Just like her. She felt the insides of the
bag. The phone kept ringing and ringing. It
seemed that she grabbed every other thing
before she finally felt the phone. By the time
she answered, she was panting. "Hello?"
"Hel-lo?"
Then just heavy breathing. It was the
same eerie, almost mechanical voice. Not this
again.
"Stop calling me or I am going to the
police!" Carla shouted firmly, agitated. The
voice at the other end continued but Carla
didn't hear. She had already taken the phone
off of her ear. She was having none of it. It had
been going on for months. Odd calls at every
hour of the day. Sometimes several calls a day.
When she got the first one, she tried her best to
be polite but she was faced with a wall of
silence. She asked who it was. No reply. Just
heavy breathing. As the weeks went on she
began to lose her patience.
Carla threw the phone back into the
depths of her bag and sighed. Why do we
always rush to answer the phone as if our
damned lives depended on it? She returned,
grabbed the vase from the kitchen counter and
carried it into the living room. As she was trying
to figure out where to place it, she got a little
bit desperate. All the surfaces were covered
with something. She had lived in the same
house for many decades and along the way she
had picked up more than a few things. Her
house resided in Waleford, at the end of the
street where her garden met the woods. It was
a perfectly nice petite English country house,
full of mix-matched furniture, cheap paintings
by who knows who, all kinds of decorative
porcelain pieces, cushions, handcrafts, the
wallpapers had a flower pattern. The dark
antique drawers were covered with multitudes
of photographs in dusty frames of all sizes and
shapes. Flower pots on every corner. Nothing in
the room went well together. She had never
had an eye for such things, no one had taught
her anything about style, or fashion for that
matter. Everywhere she looked there was an
obvious but endearing war between colors and
patterns and styles. It was perfectly fine with
her.
She was still trying to figure out where to put
the flowers, when the flashes from the past
came crushing in again. Shouting. Mother's
funeral. A ragged little house. Her father in his
dirty overalls, smiling and touching her cheek
with his rough overworked hands that smell of
coal. Explosion. Curtains in flames. Fire,
spreading. His father Jacob's voice. Run, run,
I'm right behind you! And she ran. Sirens. But
he never came out. Carla stared crying and
shouting at the uncontrollable flames, She
squirmed in the arms of a neighbor who tried to
hold her still, until there was nothing but
remains of what used to be her home. Daddy!