For nearly three hours, Cait sits in the chair in the silent room.
Once, she was the tiniest girl and no one even noticed her. And this is now not then, and she's still small, still quiet, and she is still mostly overlooked.
Traffic on the highway hums its deadpan melody. A yellow warbler sings counterpoint.
I no longer love the wineglass, just its stem, Cait thinks, while the brassy chime of an antique clock peals someplace behind her. Like sound will overcome her reticence. Like love won't ever apply to her.
Cait in a dirty white dress with a faded flower print. Cait with hair lank as ditch weed.
Aunt Trinity left a good four hours ago, let Cait know of ways to break right through, killed two mosquitos in her room and said, "That's two less bloodsucking bitches y'all need to mind."
Cait wonders if she sat like this before, so still, so quiet, so decorous and factual. Wonders if anyone ever sat so true.
For now, it's hard to think of someone other than Mr. Kosiński, his kindly face all gathered in the doorway, his Polish husk so sweet across the room, like storied hazelnut. He thought today was his day, when he would teach Cait how to be French, but he got it wrong, and who knows now what so many crisscrossed schedules bode?
These are her doldrums. Something meteorological. Won't anyone come help?
No. Of course not. How we—stripped, abandoned, supplementary—extricate ourselves from smudged insipid traps determines all the rest of this.
Cait sits in the astonished eye of a teacup storm on a silent chair, past noon. Her lashes curl and drip. Her lips purse and pale. She tries to frown, a pint-sized girl under a crushed daisy crown.
Will any of this coalesce? What is this ache? Squall or squib? Does she wait for something in the sky to break?
A knock on her door. She never wants to answer. Blam. Blam. A second and a third. Cait sighs, then sighs again.
"Okay," she whispers, like she's lamenting a version of her own name. "Coming, I guess."
Beyond the screen a haloed queen, some gypsy harlequin badass goddess. A Bolan lyric layered onto robust bones.
"Time to be alive again, pretty lady," the apparition says in a voice soft with dark confectionary. "Come."
The antique clock chimes every quarter hour and does so now, and will chime unheard one million, four hundred and one thousand, six hundred times more while quiet, overlooked Cait rides rails and road righting the myriad wrongs done to her, accompanied by a grinning ghost.