.22 on the Vanity
The door creaked slowly open. Immediately, he found his senses pummeled by an untimed ancient youth. The ageless smell of slightly dusty memories packed away in cardboard boxes intruded viciously upon his nose. The bittersweet taste of mixed emotions lingered listlessly in his throat. His feet carefully caressed the threadbare carpet, worn thin from timeless pitter-patter and the keeping of recollections. Babies had puked countless times upon that carpet, according to his grandmother. Long dried drops of blood mixing with once-dropped sorrowful tears soaked the rug with sentimental value despite its ancient dryness.
Crying children, screaming parents, laughing teenagers, and rock radio stations accumulated in the room as descriptions of memories overwhelmed his ears. He stood there, trying to imagine a baseball flying through the window, a fight on the bed, a child learning to play the piano, a party in the dark.
He walked over to the piano, finding and pressing middle C. The sound was sorrowful, pained, embarrassed. ‘Why did you do that?’ it seemed to ask. ‘I’ve been through years of babies pounding on me, horribly untalented children trying to learn to play me, and only one person could ever really do me justice. Don't I deserve a rest?’ The leaden note fell heavily through the air, rattling the pictures on the wall. The piano obviously needed tuning.
The picture frames stopped rattling, and he looked up at them. They were greyish-brown, faded to match the walls and furniture in the room. It was as if they'd been taken yesterday, but time had stopped and aged in itself. The world had long since passed them by, but they were still young enough to catch up.
He looked at the drawers. He looked at the make-up on it. He looked at the combs and hairbrushes, sitting there keeping the room nicely groomed.
‘Jerry?’ called his grandmother. ‘Jerry, where are you?’
‘I’m in here, Grandma,’ he hollered back.
‘Will you come here please?’
‘Just a minute, I’ll be right there.’ The soft harshness of his words seemed helpless to disturb the listlessness of the room.
He stopped to look briefly at his reflection in the mirror. It, too, was faded, but there were only a couple of cracks, and they were in the corner. He seemed out of place with the reflection of the rocking chair, the hat stand, the piano, and everything else in the room. He started to leave, but a flash of metal caught his eye. He looked down among the perfume bottles and cans of hairspray.
There was a .22 on the vanity.
* * *
The door creaked slowly open. The familiarity of the room's scent enveloped her, greeting her, welcoming her back.
She lay down on the bed, sighing softly to herself. ‘There are too many memories here,’ she thought. ‘Maybe I should move. Or maybe that would just make it worse. I’m not sure what to do.’
She thought about the ancient youth of everything in the room. She knew she was just as young as everything else, and the strain of eternal youth made her young age almost invisible.
She sat up, and a fleeting thought entered her mind. ‘No, that's stupid,’ she whispered, forcing the thought from her mind as quickly as it had entered. She was surprised at such a thought. She wondered how and why she could have come up with such an idea. Slightly repulsed, she stopped thinking about it.
She looked at the mirror. She almost couldn't see herself because her ancient youth caused her to blend in with the cracked paint. She got up and moved over to examine her face more closely. The wrinkles and creases were deep and empty, so that they nearly created a vacuum which came close to sucking in the rest of her face.
Her eyes were still pretty, though. Well, that was obvious, everyone had pretty eyes. She had a ghoulish fascination with eyes. Obvious, revelatory, and mysterious, they enthralled her with their capability for sight. They could reveal so much about a person and, at the same time, be still so distinct and peculiar.
‘My eyes,’ she thought. ‘I wonder if I’m going blind? Well, I suppose I wouldn’t know, I don’t know how others perceive things, so I don’t have anything to compare my sight to.’ She didn't think she was going blind. She could still see clearly. She could see herself in the mirror. She could see the pictures on the wall. She began looking for things to focus on. She looked at the bed. She looked at the rocking chair. She looked at the make-up on the dresser.
She looked at the .22 on the vanity.
* * *
The door creaked slowly open. Jerry was sure he was alone. Everyone else had hiked down to the pond. He had told his grandmother that he wasn’t feeling well. He wanted to stay home alone. He wanted to see the pistol again. Questions tumbled over themselves in his mind. Where did it come from? Who got it in the first place? Why? What was it lying around for?
He looked up at the dried paint on the walls. The stuffiness of the room only made it feel more like a box for the containing of memories. A package of remembrances lying idly about the house.
He looked back at the gun. It was shiny, and looked almost new, glowing brightly in the dim brownish light. It seemed like it was a cut in the box, a tear in the package, letting in more light than was healthy. The flower in the vase next to the mirror had wilted, exposed to too much light here in this box of memories.
He picked up the gun. He wasn't really worried about fingerprints. A couple of little smudges couldn’t have marred the shininess of the lug of metal.
He heard a screen door slide open. He dropped the gun on a basket of hairclips. It fell over, sending barrettes flying throughout the room. He hesitated, trying to decide whether or not to clean up his mess. Deciding he would, he then changed his mind and ran quickly from the room, slamming the door shut behind him.
‘Whoa, what are you so anxious about?’ asked his grandmother as she regained her balance after colliding with her speeding grandson.
‘Oh, uh, nothing,’ he stammered. ‘I’m just... I... uh... never mind.’
He left his slightly suspicious grandmother behind as he went outside to worry about the .22 on the vanity.
* * *
The door creaked slowly open. She knew instantly that something was wrong. She wasn’t sure what, but she knew it was there. As if one of the memories stored in that room had escaped.
She kicked her shoes across the room. Her feet were weary from walking back from the pond. Her strength wasn’t what it used to be. She remembered how only a couple of years ago, she could make that trip several times without resting and never tire.
Moving over to the bed, she felt a painful prick on her heel. Something small and blunt had punctured her skin. She fell heavily through the heavily memory-laden air to her mattress. She pulled herself onto it and lay there clutching her foot.
Minutes later, after the pain had passed, she raised herself to a sitting position and observed the mess on the floor. She called to her grandson to ask if he knew how it happened.
‘Oh, yeah, I’m sorry, Grandma,’ Jerry said. ‘I was in here earlier ‘cause I... I like to look at the pictures. It... almost makes me feel younger. I’ll clean it up for you.’ He sounded slightly nervous.
He knelt on the floor and began to pick up the barrettes he had spilled. Meanwhile, his grandmother sat back considering his words. ‘They make him feel younger,’ she thought. ‘Imagine him, a young, boyish pre-teen, wanting to feel younger.’
He lifted the case of hairclips onto the vanity table and suddenly found himself unable to distract himself from the gleaming weapon on the bureau. He heard a muffled noise which sounded like his grandmother’s voice. She seemed to be wondering why he had frozen like that.
With an instant of conviction, he whirled to face her and queried, ‘Why do you have a gun on the table?’
‘It was your grandfather’s,’ she answered. ‘He kept it all nice and clean, even after the war ended. It’s just another one of my memories, packed away into this room with all the rest.’ She got up and ambled over to her grandchild, picking up the pistol when she arrived.
Jerry began to look frightened. He started backing towards the door, glancing about himself nervously. He bumped into the piano bench, startling his grandmother. She jerked, and the pistol went off. Jerry fell on the piano, which gave a loud, horrible cry of anguish.
As his blood flowed smoothly and quietly to the ground, his grandmother observed what she had done. Another memory to be stored in that room, filed away under ‘unpleasant.’ She paused, considering the essential quality of this recollection. It was as young as all the others, however, it had not been so young so long. It was going to take her a while to get used to this one.
Not that it mattered. She was, after all, as young as the room and everything in it. She had been this young for longer than anything else in the room, though.
The thought that she had had earlier reentered her mind. She thought that now it wasn’t such a bad idea. She would do it, she decided. And with her late husband’s .22, even. How fitting. She looked lovingly at the weapon in her hand. It was not out of place in this vault of memories. It was her husband’s. It was part of him. Just because it was shinier and could more easily handle the strain of eternal youth didn't mean it didn’t belong.
She heard a door open. She knew someone was coming. She knew she had to do it quickly.
The thought enveloped her in its overwhelming darkness. She lifted the gun. Time stopped. Everything in the world stopped ageing. She was not phased, she had stopped ageing long ago, along with everything else in the room.
She heard footsteps. Time to stop thinking about it and do it. She was trying, she really was. Why was it taking so long? It felt like an eternity had passed, and at the same time, it felt like a couple of seconds.
She lifted the pistol to her temple. She fired it through her temporal lobe. Time began again, and the spell which had been cast upon the room was lifted. Everything once again began to age. She fell to the floor, landing on the square dancing shoes which had been lying next to the dresser since she last went dancing, the year her husband died. There was a scream from somewhere else in the house. The door opened, and a lone figure stood there watching a silver streak fall through the stuffiness of the bedroom.
The .22 landed on the floor next to the vanity.
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