Short Story: The Tomb

They start giving Stacy Haldol when she is eleven. When she jumps out a fourth-story window and breaks her spine in five places, “they” tell her to do it. To jump. Different they. She smokes like a chimney from a life on neuroleptics. She is 44 years old but has lived one hundred years. She has an IQ of 147. She has a walker.  When the ex-nun hears Stacy coughing and wheezing one day just breathing from all those cigarettes, she says, “You’re killing me with the cigarettes and wheezing today, Stacy!” One day someone comes up and says to her, “You look so pretty today, Stacy!” She gets this look on her face like she’s just taken a bite out of a piece of rotten fruit and says, “I don’t want to be pretty,” shaking her head, “I don’t want to be pretty.”

The last time I see her she is just sitting out there waiting for her ride with her walker and she sees me and says my name like she usually does with a special emphasis on the “O” as if she’s affecting a vaguely French accent but it sounds somehow different this time, this time tinged with unknowable or secret pain, and I get this weird sick feeling like I know I am never going to see her again so I tell her I am going to school someplace new (where she once dreamed of going, to research cancer) and that I am excited for it all and she asks me if she can hug me (at least I remember her asking me this) so I hug her for the first and last time and say goodbye and ride away from her and the building and into the cold and dark November evening on my bike. The air feels so still and quiet in the fields between the cities, like an uninvaded tomb. I don’t see her again. The river is so loud.