Now Silence. Tori Warner Shepard

easier to haul though,” she said, cocking her head to note that her foreign guest wore a sopping, stained shirt. “I got a Bendix. That’ll be fifty cents more for the electricity.” The room was clean but the pillow looked sour and the mattress lumps cast deep shadows under the chenille spread.

      Phyllis was past caring.

      She lay down, closed her eyes, and prayed for rescue. Russell owed her that much. Why in the hell had he let her do this? Why had he made her the innocent victim of those harpies and ex-wives who had literally driven her from her own comfortable home? What she had thought to be her own decision, was not. The bitchy neighbors had driven her out. She had been manipulated. Russell would have been distressed to see her now.

      Jealousy, it all boiled down to jealousy. Even Mum. Well, it figured. More than one jungle species was known to turn against its own. There you have it—jealousy. Russell had given her the house and all the others received were poisoned apples. Well, one day, they’d all croak eating those apples. They’d kick the bucket, be tossed into a pauper’s pit.

      “Jest one more thing,” Mabel Sue said, appearing in the opened doorway without knocking. “If you turn on the lights?”

      Phyllis opened her eyes slowly and squinted in the direction of the voice. “Yes?”

      “Well now, I couldn’t say I’d advise it because of the bugs.” Phyllis swung her head toward the open window and saw that the screens had been removed. “Moths to a flame, like they say.”

      “Right,” she agreed. “I don’t think I could stay up late enough to even switch on the light.” Unending Wartime Daylight Saving—sun forever. A war with no night, no moon and stars. The blazing sun never dropped beyond the horizon any more. When it did, it popped right back.

      “Any chance of finding a bit of supper here?”

      “Care for a lime Jell-O salad? Some chipped beef on a bun?” Phyllis moved her head, faintly nodding. She was too bushed to quibble. “Fine. Another dollar?” Phyllis, being Scottish, was frugal but this woman was stingy-mean. She lay back pitying herself.

      Mabel Sue was a case in point and reminded her just how much she disliked the native people here. Their stupid lazy accents made them seem inferior, unlettered, certainly unambitious and uninteresting. Phyllis weighed her low opinion of Mabel Sue’s dim brain against the facts, but given the present situation, she’d have to admit she’d been outsmarted. In the infernal hour it took her to pedal from Clyde’s station to this appalling house, Mabel Sue had craftily removed the screens, turned off the hot water and set some green Jell-O slime in a mold to pass off as dinner. The bar of soap was a mere sliver. The wretched towels were mildewed.

      She’d been outsmarted by the Floridians, all of them. All of them women.

      Miserably, Phyllis gave up and fell into an exhausted sleep, not even opening Russell’s half-finished paperback that she’d dropped in her sack. The chipped beef dinner had been spitefully placed on the night table as she slept with a bill for the dollar. Flies covered the chipped beef.

      5

      She fled the next day after a breakfast of eggs and ham. Coffee but no tea. No milk. No sugar. Even the blacktop leading back to Highway One, the North-South road, looked hopeful in spite of the wind from the Atlantic. Over the dreary next days the few motels she stayed in smelled like Cuban whorehouses. Sweat and sperm on the damp sheets, damp because everything was damp where the heavy air sank, and she was sure even the angels wept, making the humidity worse. How did she know what a Cuban whorehouse smelled like? It smelled like this.