Every Little Thing
EVERY
LITTLE
THING
CHAD PELLEY
EVERY
LITTLE
THING
A NOVEL
P. O. BOX 2188, ST. JOHN'S, NL, CANADA, A1C 6E6
WWW.BREAKWATERBOOKS.COM
COPYRIGHT © 2013 Chad Pelley
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Pelley,Chad, 1980-
        Every little thing / Chad Pelley.
ISBN 978-1-55081-405-7
I. Title.
PS8631. E4683E84 2013Â Â Â Â Â Â Â C813'. 6Â Â Â Â Â Â Â C2013-901004-1
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®
.
For,
       Everyone who had a kind word about the last one.
“Open your mouth and fill it with food or rage.
The same leaf that turns to the light shies from the blaze.”
âFROM “LULLABIES” BY GEORGE MURRAY
“I want to believe our love's a mystery,
I want to believe our love's a sin.
I want you to kiss me,
like a stranger,
once again.”
âFROM “KISS ME” BY TOM WAITS
Contents
HE'D CLOSE HIS eyes and thoughts of Allie would pinball around in his headâthudding and dinging and keeping him awake. He'd recollect her, bit by bit: the dart-hole dimple in her cheek when she'd smirk at her own wit. The artichoke dip she'd make for book club, and how she'd shoo his hungry hands.
You only get the leftovers, double-dipped and half-stale!
A kiss, a sorry. That smell,more clover than cinnamon, of a bath product, or her DNA.
He'd open his eyes and she'd be gone. Nothing but darkness, cement walls, iron bars. The floor in his cell was so cold, it felt like broken glass when he'd step on it barefoot. Most nights he was drawn to his window, if you could call it that: thick glass, no bigger than a textbook, so dense it blurred everything he could see into blunt-edged objects. He'd stare at the hypnotic sway of trembling aspen in the distance and think of the boy: the pacifying, perfectly spaced beeps of his hospital machinery. All those white hoses latched onto his body.
It was lights out long before he was tired in that prison and that was half the problem. Being locked in a cage, alone with his thoughts, and miles away from the people who could answer his questions, like where Allie was now, and how the kid was doing.
He'd lie there on his back, eyes closed, body restless, rocking an ankle back and forth; his toes scraping across bedsheets drier than paper. It was strange the way silence worked after lights out. New sounds would emerge from the quietness, one by one, in an ordered hierarchy. At first it was a guard's footsteps and the tossing and turning of inmates in their beds. Within fifteen minutes he could hear the heavy breathers and what thirty years of smoking had done to their lungs: the cliché rattle, the constant need to be cleared of phlegm. With everyone asleep, he'd hear the waspy buzzing of distant bulbs. And then the whispering crawl of water through old pipes; the drips from faulty plumbing as constant as a ticking clock. In time, they'd all start snoringâa rhythmic orchestra of rattling lungs. People would grunt as they came to, gasping for air, and roll over; their part in the orchestra now gone, the song changed by one less instrument.
The rusty springs in his prison cotâthe
screech
and stab of themâwould get him thinking about his and Allie's first bed. It had a lamp built into the headboard and the bulb would burn until two or three in the morning. Her taste in books had left her tired every morning.
Another marathon, this one's so good!
But they all were. They'd all keep her up. And every morning she'd climb over him, drunk with fatigue, blindly hammering a fist at the snooze button, and fall down over him like a third blanket; her heart beating like a bird trapped between them.
The nights he
could
sleep in prison, he'd wake early to the purple glow of dawn. It would punch through his thick window and lay a perfect mauve rectangle on his bedsheets. Like a book he ought to pick up and read. There'd be a faint birdsong, but the glass in his window was so thick, the bird sounded ten feet under water. It might have been the same yellow warbler, every morning. He'd look for it, through his window, but the window was too narrow to see anything not directly in front of him.
In the mornings in prison, the wake-up call's blare was worse than an alarm clock. It was more urgent. More insistent, like a military warning. And that didn't make sense: they had nowhere to go, nowhere to be. He'd snap the sheets off himself and sit up, disoriented as he came to. His vision dissected seven or eight times by the black cylindrical bars of his cellâthe guard on the other side like a man in two halves. His body was getting stiffer than the bed he'd been sleeping in. His spine with no give to it now, an iron rod, rigid, running from his neck to his legs. And that toilet smell that clogged his nostrils every morning: like bright steel and mould. His toilet hissed incessantly, always filling with water, but there was never more than a puddle in it. He'd sit on the edge of his bed, staring at his feet, dizzy from another sleepless night. Or he'd lie back down and stare up at the ceiling's cold, porous cement. There was one solidified drip in a corner, like a stone icicle.
He'd stopped trying to convince himself that Allie would come and apologize, explain herself, because too many weeks had passed since the night he went looking for answers and got taken by the police. Three months. Twelve weeks ago. He'd lay there calculating the math of time passed. Two thousand hours, it didn't
sound
long enough. It didn't add up to all the distance between them now. Twelve weeks.
Ninety-four days.
One nightâone misunderstanding and a sloppy trialâand now he wakes to the sound of metal bars unclamping, sliding open, so he can follow a herd of hard men to the cafeteria. Choke down dry toast. Concentrated orange juice. Burnt scrambled eggs that smelled off.
He could never recollect that night as a whole; it was a smashed vase he saw in pieces only. He doesn't remember what sentence, exactly, got her crying, but her eyes were so wet with tears they must have been kaleidoscoping her vision. He can picture her strangling a crumpled tissue in her shaky hands. It was his last image of her. Crushed. Remorseful. Love and anxiety, guilt and compassionâshe could never handle two emotions at once without getting the lines crossed and going off like a bomb. He couldn't put a colour to the walls of the room they were in. What time of night it was. But she was wearing the watch he'd given her. She'd always worn the thing so loosely that it swirled around her wrist in circles whenever she'd move her arm too fast. Like when she pointed to the door that night.
You need to leave, Cohen, he's upstairs, he'll hear you!
