The Glass Giraffe

by

  Scott Avella


The first thing Henry saw on the morning after he witnessed the murder of Joachim Willis was a small glass giraffe on the school desk across from his bed.  In the months since he had stolen it, Henry took comfort in the familiar presence of the glass figurine.  Half asleep that morning, Henry was content to find an object in his sparse room that, by virtue of being beloved, seemed not to belong to the world.
He heard hydraulic arms lifting a dumpster over a truck and bottles sliding down like rattling glass bones over gear sounds.  It was Friday and he was to begin work at five o’clock.  In his sleep, he heard the echo of breaking glass continue outside his window and spread over the cement brick alleyways of the entire Ironbound.  Cheryl appeared and the girl he loved wafted in and out of the moment, took residence in the periphery of the other images he saw, or they were brought to where she sat in the laundry room, her eyes closed in the interior of her music.  She was there when he saw Billy, the building superintendent, in the basement where Henry had ushered him, draining dark, metallic water from the boiler and saying in his warm, gravely voice, that everything would be okay.  And it came as no surprise that she was there because Cheryl had always been everywhere. 
The room was still cold.  The floorboards creaked in the hall outside his apartment as though Building D was coming back to life after two days of snow had covered Brick Towers and the rust colored earth around Newark.  When the chill in the room encroached, tingling and teasing helpless, exposed limbs, Henry saw blood on the gray, dusty floor of the basement.  The image of Joachim scratching his fingernails against the concrete wall presented itself last and vaguely as something real, more like memory than imagination.  The glass giraffe, still silent on the desk, receded and came into fine focus.

***

Henry had stolen Ms. Thompson’s glass figurine from the dresser she kept propped up among the boxes and the high piles of yarn in the hallway entrance to her apartment on the first floor.  Coming back from shopping for her one Saturday, he knocked it over and heard it fall and tap hard against the mirror with the other glass animals arranged around a glass boat.  He surrendered the bags, picked it up, first to see if it was broken and then to put it as fast and as stealthily as he could manage into the pocket of his oversized coat.
While Ms. Thompson told him the stories she always told, Henry kept his hand in the pocket of his coat and felt along the long, glass-smooth neck of the giraffe.  On the way out, lingering by the dresser with the other figurines, he examined the diverse pairs of animals, each set bearing exaggerated glass features that made them easily identifiable: thin beaks, elongated noses, flapping ears, round bodies, manes.   He didn’t return the giraffe.  Instead, he said goodbye again as he unlocked the deadbolt and slid the yellow chain across the faded door.
When he got to his apartment at the end of a narrow hallway two floors above, he placed the giraffe on the desk near the bed.  He looked at it on the nights when he could not sleep, when all the kids from the Towers screamed and argued until very late into the night and the thumping music and curse words rose up though the dark.  The watery translucence of its long, thin neck and its pinpoint black eyes painted on a tilted drop of falling glass rendered an expression of blank curiosity.  On Sunday mornings, he would watch the little giraffe on its stage and think of Ms. Thompson sitting in her dark living room, a gray puff of hair falling down her bent face, her worn down chair creaking to her deep, soul shaking laugh.

***

It was Henry’s habit those mornings to hold back the blinds and watch the recycling truck make its way back over the pockmarked pavement of Third Street.  That Friday he did so to fend off the stifling weight of an irrevocably changed world. Even as the gray-white light opened into the room, he felt it resting on his chest, making it difficult to breath.
The snow had stopped, but the wind still howled and shook the window in the rotten frame next to the bed.  Salt gathered in lines along the curbside and against the wall across from the four buildings that made up the Brick Towers complex.  Between the buildings, in the dark alleys, snow blew off the tops of the mountains Billy and his son made the day before, and danced across the street in whirling spirals and short, straight wisps.  Beyond Third Street, the haze from the cars and the factories intermingled with billboards, church steeples and the metal drawbridges around the highway.  As the truck turned the corner by the Stardust Hotel, he thought of what he had seen the night before and, appreciating that it had really happened, the view became something empty and terrifying.  The bag of laundry in front of the closet, his shift at the store, the things he was to do on that and every Friday emerged as menacing obstacles, each looming over him.  Copies of once familiar things arranged themselves: the empty street just after the truck; blank florescent lights, unfathomably deep; the way a certain shelf at the store was arranged; the subtle smell of fresh fruit as though he were floating like one of the insects.  Then came an old fear, one that rose up and fell in the middle of the night amid slow shadows on dormitory walls.  The glass giraffe stood tall and stalwartly silent on Henry’s desk.
When he was a child in the bottom bunk, in the strange houses with the other boys, he would imagine he was floating on a sea and the wrinkled blankets were like islands around him.  His empty pillow case drifted near him on the blue sheet by the drafty window, crumpled and flattened under the weight of his body.  Placing his hand inside, he felt the way the cloth transpired across his finger tips.  As he fell in and out sleep, bars of light spread wider across the bed, and when the window slammed hard against the frame, the fear rose up and sank down again.

***

“Why do you do that?” Cheryl was sitting on the bed, leaning up against the wall in a pink t-shirt with sparkling silver sequins.
He stared at his hand as though it wasn’t his, like it was some other thing outside of him--the empty desk, the bed, the blanket sea.
“My big sister used to do the same thing. She used to have these bits of bed sheet, she’d cut them into squares and put them here.” he said. (He barely had that recollection of his sister in the years since their mother died. He remembered the light from a young girl’s windswept hair, the feeling they were outside on the first cool evening of early autumn, and all this at the pristine moment of life when memory first begins.)
Cheryl looked down at him on the bed with doe eyes and extended her lower lip.  Henry carried her hand into the pillowcase, and placing his thumb and index finger around hers, he took hold of a piece of the cool cotton between her finger tips and rubbed it against her thumb.
“Henry stop!” she squealed, “That feels funny!”
She pulled her hand from the pillowcase and rested it in the other on top of her pink t-shirt with the sequins and the thin straps that fell across her bare shoulders.
Cheryl was different from the other girls at Brick Towers.  Every time Henry saw her, she was alone.  She sat around Building D with her headphones blaring loud hip-hop into the lobby, the stairs by where the courtyard opened, the laundry room, always in white socks up to her knees and shiny black shoes, the parts of her school uniform Henry liked most.
Coming back to the Towers from work one night, he heard her arguing in the hallway out past the manager’s office with a group of other girls. She was terribly angry, red faced, fists out, screaming a long string of the worst profanities Henry ever heard.  She continued them in front of the working elevator, even after the girls had gone.  Henry considered walking by and seeing Billy, but when Cheryl looked up and caught his eye from across the hallway, she looked sad and did not bear the exasperated sense, the rolling eyes he found when he saw others from the building.  So he continued, felt her eyes on him as he waited for the elevator.  Then she started talking to him as though they had known each other for a long time.  She was tired of everything, all the other girls in the building hated her because she was Haitian and Puerto Rican and they spoke mean gossip in the courtyard.
In the elevator, after the doors closed and they were alone in the harsh silver light there, he said that he knew what she meant.  He didn’t think she had heard him but as the door opened on the fourth floor, her face brightened and, almost with a gleeful laugh, she came close and kissed him on the cheek.  The doors closed and Henry, realizing he had neglected to press his button, got off the elevator on the sixth floor only to have to go back down to his apartment.
After that night, Cheryl would sit next to Henry in the laundry room and listen to her music with the volume so high he could hear every word.  He listened to it while they watched the towels, jeans and socks spinning in the dryer, and each time he wished he were more like the men in her songs, men whose defiance came across to Henry, and later, he imagined, to Cheryl, as courage.

***

Ambulances and police cars orbited Brick Towers.  They were gathered toward them by every variety of violence, and the residents became accustomed to sirens.  Each spring, when the weather turned warmer and the courtyard turned green and yellow, the police came through the iron gates and arrested one or two of the boys sitting on the stairs.
His first days at Brick Towers, when he dared venture from his room, he sat on the yellow armchair by the window at the end of the hallway and looked out over the courtyard and street to watch the world.  Even from that distance, he could see that the tenants of Brick Towers carried a sorrow and rage so heavy it bent their backs and made them shuffle when they walked. But when they were there with friends – on the balconies, in the courtyard, on the street or the stairs, when things were safe in the company of others, even enemies – they would open up like light and smile, letting themselves go free in the precious sliver of time there.  He had observed this indefatigable joy with more than a tinge of jealousy at the homes in Elizabeth, in Jersey City, in Perth Amboy, and Brick Towers spread over and along all those cities.
With his weak voice and the way he looked – muffled hair, raised eyebrows, a sallow face and a gaping mouth as though he were always surprised, in awe or need – he had no cause to feel different because he was white.  He felt peculiar because he could not disappear into the habitual routine of everyday, the anonymous life of things for better or worse.  If nothing else, the residents of Brick Towers seemed to have gained knowledge of the measured reciprocity that overarched both love and violence and comprised, for him, the dignity of adulthood.  But everyone he met, from everywhere in all the cities, hid their knowledge and carried its burdens in secret.

***

A social worker brought him to his apartment at Brick Towers the summer after high school graduation.  He never saw her again.  Those days, he stayed in the apartment for long surreal days in dread of the lobby where he would be dissected as a new specimen, and of walking across the parking lot to the short concrete wall near the highway where all the cars and trucks flew by so fast they took the breath right out of him.  At Hope House, the highway was over a hill, past a row of houses with green lawns and trees, and on a clear day, at the top of the hill, he could see the gray streak of the Verranzano Narrows along the blue river.
By the time he arrived there, he was already bigger and stronger than most of the other boys and took comfort in the fact that he could easily knock them down.  It felt better for him to sit at the long table next to the kitchen with his school work and know they couldn’t take his things or make fun of him.  He admitted as much to Dr. Simpson, the psychologist who came to the house once a week and routinely asked Henry to repeat himself while he frantically scribbled everything down on a large yellow pad.
Children seemed to come in and out of the House more quickly than the other group homes.  He would get to know someone and then, suddenly and without explanation, they would disappear.  He had exchanged letters with his friend Peter for months, after his mother came one night and took him.
“Down south.” Elisa said.
Over time, the letters stopped coming, but he continued to think of the plans they made if Peter could come back to New Jersey or if Henry ever went “down south."
There was a picnic bench in the yard and a half basketball court next to the house.  Everyday Elisa and one of the others at the home would cook dinner.  On Fridays  they ate pizza, and it was the only day of the week Elisa allowed them to drink soda.  But it was upstairs, in the boys' wing, that the more nuanced aspects of Henry’s transition to adulthood would take place, and the mysteries that circled around his development were marked by the passage of tree branches floating along the wall across from his bunk.  The particular questions about the changes to his body, the suffocating feeling that overtook him when he saw certain girls in the living room after school, faded and, remaining unanswered, they became subjects uniquely his own.  In fact, until he found Ms. Thompson’s glass figurine, they were his favorite possessions.  The thought of asking someone else about life and nature did not occur to him without the simultaneous impression of losing his most prized belongings. 
Deon, one of the more obnoxious boys he had known, laughed voraciously and sought out the other boys when Henry staggered into the bathroom in one of those awkward, blaringly obvious and unhidden conditions in which teenage boys are apt to find themselves after fitful nights.  Henry’s silence allowed the incident to be attended to by the caretakers with a degree of reticent tact the female social workers likely appreciated more than anyone.  After the subtle, coded jokes at the dinner table passed to other topics, it was the girls in the living room that made him begin to appreciate his reputation for introversion and misanthropy.  If nothing else, it presented the appearance of someone spared the outreaching pain of public embarrassment and the unique agony of whispering teenage girls.
Then one night there was a party. Elisa and the others ordered pizza.  They hung a banner over the stairs and drank soda.  The next morning, a van came and they told him it was time for him to leave.  He remembered the air when he walked outside that morning: a dense, drowning humidity round domes of tiny insects just beginning to rise into the light flickering through shards of grass and thick maple leaves.

***

When Irene Jacobs came to Brick Towers, she told Henry it wouldn’t be like before, and she was sorry that no one had come to visit him.  She said she’d come every week for as long as he liked.  They all said things like that. He knew them from back at the homes, the eager types who were there to stay and who left after three weeks.  But over the summer, she taught Henry to put his name and address on his things, helped him get a job at a grocery store in the Spanish section of Broad Street and started him shopping for Ms. Thompson.  She told him everything was just a matter of routine and that’s what he remembered Elisa saying in the meetings they had at the home.  She had taken Henry shopping at Hector and Luisa Garcia’s store before he got the job there stocking shelves and sweeping the aisles.  She said it was a lot of responsibility and that he must do his best to be on time and show up when he was supposed to work. She told him he shouldn’t feel bad or keep himself locked up in the apartment all the time.  She said she shouldn’t give gifts as she handed him the nightlight that he flung down, away from him on the desk.
He walked to work along McCarter Highway, over the rounded green trusses of Bridge Street and across the concrete lot where the crabgrass and spotted spurge flew up to catch the city’s refuse.  He noted the wood boards, canvassed with gangland words, a long hieroglyph that continued from the brick walls of abandoned factories along the rail lines leading to Newark’s hub.  He counted the posts of endless chain link fences built around long vacant lots, for little other reason, it seemed to Henry, than to suspend barbed wire.  At the end of the each night he’d take the garbage to the dumpster in the back, and as the sun went down and the sky turned red and dark, Luisa would put the money he earned in his hand and say, “Muchas gracias, Enrique.” Then he walked back along the same path, lit in the glow of the downtown skyscrapers and the lights from Diamond Alkali across the Passaic River.
Hector was shorter than Henry but had massively built arms with grayed tattoos, jet black hair gelled straight back and the angry, intense eyes of a bull.  On his first day, they stood in front of a box of canned milk and he instructed Henry to stack them on the shelves.  He showed him how he was to stamp a price on each can, stack it and then break apart the box and put it into a pile in the back room.  As he began, Henry’s trepidation eased as he made the task into a routine and took each can out, carefully put the price on the top, in the middle with the blue sticker gun and placed each on the shelf next to the last can. When he realized he would be unable to fit all the cans on the shelf, he thought of Hector telling him he didn’t want the box on the floor.  So he stacked the cans on top of one another until it looked as though the high tower he had made was about to fall to the other side of the aisle.  At the end, slightly worried, he stood motionless in the middle of the aisle and marveled at the suspense created by his work, labeled by himself, “the Tower of Canned Milk.”  When Luisa saw it, Hector came over to him, already laughing.
It was never clear to Henry, at least in those first months at the store, whether Louisa would fire him.  Yet every morning he was met by the faint, affirming smile of Elisa, the questions that fluttered around Cheryl, the warm religion of routine, and he forced himself beyond his anxiety to go out into each cyclical day and learn more about the unspoken minutia of what was expected of him.
When the store was empty, Hector would try to teach Henry Spanish curse words in the back room or behind the register. One night, outside by the dumpster, Hector was smoking and throwing rocks into the abandoned lot next to the store and Henry told him about Cheryl.
“You know what to do Henry?”
“Yeah Hector, I know.”
“You know, girls these days, they like their men to know what to do. You got rubbers, Henry?”
“I got ‘em, I know.”
“Look Henry, I’m trying to help you. We’re friends, right? Look, see this Henry, naranja, okay?”
“Naranja, okay.”
“Now look at this,” and scowling in concerted effort, he took a wedge from it and said, “What’s this Henry?”  He rubbed his hand in the opening of the orange and moved his hips around, laughing at the show he was putting on but flinching when Luisa Garcia appeared from the back door, yelling at him in Spanish. She added, in English, “And stop bothering poor Enrique.”
Hector threw away his cigarette.
“Henry, say puta”
“Puta.”
“Say hijo de puta.”
“Hijo, hijo de puta.”
“Hijo de puta!” he screamed at the empty lot.  “Common Henry, you’ve got to scream 'hijo de puta', scream like you mean it.”

***

The first time he went to tell Billy about the heat, two girls dragging two wheel carts full of shopping bags stopped talking as he came around the corner and passed them in the stairwell.  Irene Jacobs had always told him to say hello when he saw people from the building, but he stopped when some of the kids started following him through the courtyard chanting the words “hullo-hullo.” Then there was Marcus Thompson and Joachim Willis who would laugh and leer at the procession from the wall or the stairs until he thought it better not to say hello, except to Ms. Thompson, Cheryl, and to Billy.
Billy Roberts was tall, thin and haggard with a gray beard over his flannel shirt. On his first day at Brick Towers when Henry forgot his key at the manager’s office, Billy followed him and the social worker to the elevator and shouted after them, “You won’t get very far without this, young man.”
Henry thanked him and Billy Roberts said very slowly, “Now I don’t know anything about any Mr. Roberts, young man. You call me Billy.”
“Okay, okay, thank you, Billy,” uncertain if he was being reprimanded but trying to sound as grown up as he could.
Billy and the social worker laughed.
“There you go, young man.”
Henry had seen Irene Jacobs speaking to Billy when she came to Building D to visit him, Ms. Thompson and her other clients.  She told Henry he could trust Billy, that if he ever had any problems in the building or needed help, it would be fine to tell him and he would help. Since then, after some initial hesitation, Henry frequently stood in the doorway of the manager’s office, asking Billy about the day and the building and whether or not he wanted anything from the store.

***

Through the languid passing of the afternoon, Henry’s memories, strangers to one another, commingled as though they wanted to live in the same world.  This new world, darker and more dreadful than Henry had expected, was no different in its need for memories that could live with one another.  And with Cheryl, when she was in a room, she kept coming back and it felt to him as though she was at the center of things, the common violence, both minor and devastating, and the process by which memory wove a single tapestry from diverse threads of contradictory happenings.  Like on the night, lonely and tired of the tempestuous clanking of a copper rivet against the dryer wall, she accompanied Henry upstairs with a plastic bag of unfolded laundry, they kissed across from the skyline of Newark above the highway, and as though he were watching from outside, it felt as though his whole self had turned to snow and twirled around the flat and frozen sea of the bed.
Then she vanished. Two Fridays passed, then three, then four and she did not sit next to him in the laundry room and did not look up or say hello to him from the brown vinyl couches in the dim lobby.  Hector told him girls were like that and he should act as though he didn’t care, pass her without saying anything at all.  But he thought about Cheryl all the time and spent hours at the school desk trying to write to her.  The little glass giraffe stood in a corner amid page after page of scribbled out and crumpled up love letters.
In September, she went back to school and he waited for her in the lobby.  He saw her mother, limping against her cane, and her little sister arguing with her about carrying the bags they had, throwing her arms toward the floor as though they alone were too much of a burden to carry.  When he gathered the courage to approach Cheryl in the lobby and give her one of the shorter letters he had written, she didn’t say anything and stared out blankly, half in the world Henry was in and half in the intimacy of her music.  He left the letter beside her on the couch.
The next night when Henry got to the apartment, he found his letter--an unopened business envelop Billy had given him, crumpled and still damp under the door.  Written across it was a note from Cheryl that read, “Stay away.”  When he saw the desk inside, he felt as though a scream was rising silently but strongly inside him and, suddenly enraged, he threw all the crumpled love letters from the desk until the giraffe was left alone, looking.  He took it to throw, hot and angry, as though possessed by some terrible need, some unknowable need to smash it hard against the floor.  Instead, he dropped it to the bed and threw his hands, collapsed and cried for a long time.  Relieved that no one was there to see him, he emerged from his stupor, placed the giraffe back on the desk and fell asleep, confident his display would have little consequence.

***

When Billy came out of the manager’s office with a red metal box to fix the furnace for the second time, Henry asked to go with him.  Billy agreed under the condition that Henry promised never to go without him.  He said it was dangerous and there were a lot of ways for a boy to get hurt. Henry knew he was talking about Marcus Thompson and Joachim Willis, and he knew Marcus was a boy once, too.
Ms. Thompson was very old, already legally blind and going blinder.  Even though she could no longer read, her apartment was brimming with magazines, old newspapers and catalogs, books with nearly naked girls with large breasts and parted lips on the covers, all in piles past Henry’s knees in places.  Henry suspected Ms. Thompson was also afraid that someone like Irene Jacobs would come and, with some story of “best interest,” take her away from Brick Towers. But Irene Jacobs told Henry that he could help her by shopping for her on the weekends.  After a time, she began baking and the ingredients for her creations increasingly made up the bulk of the grocery list she’d give him in the morning. Henry would return from the store just as she took the cookies from her ancient General Electric stove and they would retire to her living room while the cookies cooled in the kitchen.  It was there Henry would come to learn all of her stories. She told him about singing in the choir at her church, about when she first got to Brick Towers, about wartimes and factory work, and about her family.  Listening so intently, he never asked why the glass giraffe he noticed on their first Saturday morning together was the only one that did not have another just like it, whether the other was lost or broken, or where it may have gone.
Once, the door to Marcus Thompson’s room was open and Henry caught a glimpse of the posters of rap stars and basketball players on the wall, and the laundry lying everywhere on the floor.  He never saw any other sign of him staying there.  She had a picture of him on the wall from when he was a child. Ms. Thompson would say, “That’s my boy, Marcus” and tell Henry once again how he played football in school and his coach once said he had enough potential, if he got himself together, to get a scholarship and go to college.  But Henry knew Marcus didn’t go to school anymore because he was always standing with the other boys on the stairs or in the courtyard.
In the picture on the wall, in the dark wood frame around the others of his sisters and his father, he looked very small with one hand stretched out on an old car and the other in the pocket of his gray dress pants.  He was smiling so widely his eyes squinted as though it were very bright outside. Behind him was a green field, heavy with recent rain. It appeared as Henry imagined “the south” would look.

***

By the time Henry got ready for work that Friday, the sun had already moved away from the window and the orange in the apartment faded into shadows.  He had already spent most of his day in bed, unable to sleep, unable to wake and face the bitter chill in the room.  He walked past the bag of laundry in the corner, went into the bathroom and got dressed.
As the elevator opened in the lobby, he heard the static of the policeman’s radio before he saw him with another, standing sternly in their blue pressed uniforms in the manager’s office, talking to Billy and a bald man in a crumpled suit. Cheryl sat alone at the end of the couch with the big, round saucers of her headphones hanging down around her neck, watching the police, her hands over her lips.
He walked past them, careful not to turn to the manager’s office, and directly to the stairs outside.  He wondered whether Marcus would be there, where he always stood, tall and lean over the hand rail on the stairs with a paper bag in his hand and a loosey behind his ear.  At the front door he put his hood over his head and hurried down the icy stairs, past the police cars and out onto Third Street toward the store
.
***

Work passed slowly before he fell into the routine of it.  Hector, who had been screaming something to him in Spanish from across the store, came over and asked him if anything was wrong.  He could not think how to answer nor did he give much thought to how his silence appeared.  At the end of the night, he carried the flattened boxes and the bags from the front register, and the one from the backroom, out to the dumpster and took the money from Luisa. He went back home to Brick Towers where, at the end of a hallway, the bare apartment with a glass giraffe, a nightlight and the skyline of Newark lay wide open, redeeming and warm enough to make him happy.
When he got there, he turned out the lights and sat in the cold apartment illuminated only by the nightlight under the desk.  The night before, after the sounds from the parking lot and the courtyard had silenced and he lay gazing out the window at Newark, it occurred to him to go the basement.  He imagined over and over again the four screws on the front panel of the boiler, the gauge glass and the rubber tube Billy had used to drain out the dirty water.  Like courage, what got him out of bed and into his coat and sneakers came upon him suddenly and without warning or explanation.
He had a vision of Marcus Thompson standing, hooded, in the basement by the boiler, over the still animated body of Joachim Willis, who cried and whimpered because he could no longer scream.  In the vision, Marcus walked to Henry and made a close study of him. Sensing the knife in his hand, Henry waited for it in the smell of leather, smoke and hot, acrid breath.  Then Marcus smiled wide and, almost like in the picture he had seen of him, his eyes tilted and thinned into red crescents.
Henry went over what Marcus said, “You’re that retard from upstairs, right?” That was the word that Henry remembered, “retard.”  The word caught him off guard but his voice would not work to answer and his legs shook so violently he thought he wouldn’t be able to stand.  Then he thought he remembered Marcus Thompson laughing when he showed him the knife and turned to walk back toward the exit to the courtyard.
The glass giraffe looked tranquil on the empty desk, a pond frozen by winter.  Henry thought about routine, about a story he told himself as he walked to the van on the day he left Hope House.  He considered for the first time that he may have been spared for a reason and decided, even though it was not the normal time, he would take his clothes to the laundry room and sit in the warmth there and wash them.

***

The florescent lights hung over the blue seats bolted to the floor and reflected off the silver washing machines and dryers against the wall.  An old couple he recognized from the building sat together in the corner.  The man smoked a pipe and the woman gazed out into the curtain of smoke in front of them.  After Henry put the clothes, the detergent and the quarters into the machine, he sat down in the evaporating scent of lemon.  The next day was Saturday and he was to go shopping for Ms. Thompson.
While the washer was filling with water, Cheryl’s shiny black shoes appeared on the floor in front of him. She stood looking at him for a long time without saying anything.
“Did you hear what happened?”
Henry watched the white capped water spill onto the glass of the washer door.  For a brief moment, he was overcome by a sense of privilege.  He spent much of his time imagining what it would be like for him, Henry, to know something, something other than the passing mystery of the scenery or his own shallow memory, something important that no one else knew.  Now that he had achieved it, by misfortune or blind chance, he found himself becoming afraid again and learning as well as any other resident how reassuring it was to want desperately to forget what one knew.  He wondered what was written on Dr. Simpson’s yellow pad, what it made of his difficulty speaking and his claims of self-restraint.
“A boy got stabbed last night.”
She had lingered on the word “stabbed,” breathless with morbid and childish excitement.  When Henry did not respond, she threw her hands into the air and began walking away, her headphones still over her ears.  Then she spun around, her shoes screeching along the linoleum floor and sat on the blue chair next to Henry.
“The cops were here and talking to Billy, you know? Even the owner came here.  I know you saw them Henry. Some Latino detective, too.  I think he was Latino.  It was Latisha’s cousin, Joachim.  I mean the boy who got killed.  Henry, you listening? You’re always lost, you know?  Henry, are you still mad at me?”  She lowered her headphones and looked around the room.  Her voice lowered to a whisper.  “Look Henry, it was only that one time okay? You’ve gotta stop thinking about me that way, okay?”
The washer started spinning. He saw the stairwell of the basement, Billy, Cheryl on the brown vinyl couch and the glass Ark in Ms. Thompson’s apartment, still waiting to leave before the flood.  He thought of how he might act in front of Irene Jacobs and tried to imagine the police coming to ask him what he remembered.  Then, as the fear fell away again, he sat next to Cheryl and watched the clothes spin in the dryer.  The entire time, as the music from her headphones escaped into the room, he broke his promise and thought of how she was that one morning. The lavender smell of her crawled up on the bed, under and on top of all the laundry – the socks, jeans, towels and underwear.  Her bare shoulder kept rising above the crack in the window frame and everything around her, snow laden now, turned a drowning brilliance of the whitest light.


[12/07]



Scott Avella - New Jersey (1975 - 2008)_____________________________________________________________________
Since dropping out of law school, Scott Avella spent his days working in cubicles, traveling and writing in his Philadelphia cabin. He attended the MA program in philosophy at the City University of New York and contemplated an MFA in creative writing. His novella, Brick Towers, is based on “The Glass Giraffe."