Vieja

The Unprecedented Times
December 2020

I looked out the window and saw an old woman slowly walking down the street. There was a man in the room with me trying to make me understand something I did not want to understand. I couldn’t help but imagine the old woman falling over, down below me so far in the street. I imagined it again and again. I longed for the fall, even. I imagined myself to be the sole witness because the streets were barren, and the sky was barren, and the old woman walking was barren, too. If she did indeed fall, I would surely rush out of the room, not saying a word to this man who was forcefully talking to me in this small room, trying to teach me some sort of lesson. I would run to help the old woman. Certainly she would have broken something because she would have such brittle bones. I wondered if pain turns into something different as you grow older.

The old woman didn’t fall, and I felt bad that this truth came to my dismay. Perhaps the man in the room was right, and I am indeed a horrible person. He kept trying to explain and explain, but I wouldn’t listen, or so he told me, though I thought I was listening.

“You’re like a brick wall, but worse because at least a brick wall isn’t constantly pacing around the room,” he’d said, or something like that, to me. After he told me I wasn’t listening to him for the seventh time, I decided I might as well not be listening to him, so I stopped. That’s when he started yelling, short of breath and patience. He threatened to throw a candle at me, and I almost longed for the tallowy blow—maybe it would be the one that freed me.

Even after the old woman had long made her slow, meandering way down the brick road below my window, the urgency I felt to be ready to save her should she fall never left. I stayed on the tips of my toes, cold against the hard, wooden floor, just in case I needed to leap toward the door. After the man gave up on yelling and explaining and left, I couldn’t shake the urgent pulling. I went around the rest of the day, finishing every task as if I were in a hurry. I soon forgot the source of the urgency. I couldn’t place what I felt I needed to do that I’d seemed so dead-set on doing.

When I went to bed the old woman returned to me. She fogged into my mind just as she had down the street earlier through the window, and I couldn’t fall asleep. Finally, when sleep roughly slid over me, it was a horrid sleep. I dreamed of spiders as big as pumpkins crawling over my feet, and of large men running at me, screaming unintelligible obscenities, first ripping at my clothes, then my skin, and then my limbs. I sat as an oozing stump and saw my arms and legs, detached and foreign, jerking slightly on the floor before me. I cried until the large men took one of my arms and rammed it down my throat, then I woke up, gagging and covered in perspiration. I saw that the man who yelled at me had returned, but he was now harmless and pathetic with sleep next to me.

The next day I left the house before the man could wake up and I wandered through the streets. At first I thought I was doing so aimlessly, but after a while I realized the urgency had seeped back into me, and I found myself combing the streets for the fallen, old woman. I searched in the garbage, pried manhole covers open and screamed down in the sewers. I went into the few businesses still open asking them if they had seen an old woman wandering alone. I searched for hours, but I found nothing. My feet grew stiff with the cold, clotted mud and my pants grew frayed and tattered at the edges.

I was somehow certain that the woman had fallen somewhere and that I was her only hope. I knew I needed to find her, to save her. I also knew that all her family must either be dead or hidden away somewhere and that if there were any hope for this old woman being saved, it was me. I imagined her in a gutter, groaning, mouth sputtering with saliva and eyes glazed. Then I feared that lizards or cockroaches would scurry around her failing body, waiting until she was too weak to fight them off before they covered her and gnawed her aged flesh. I sat down in the darkening street, and imagined never going home again.