The TV had been off for two hours, and Marietta’s mind buzzed, cells searching for sound to latch onto. The bright screen had become a nuisance. She had put it on when trying to mimic what she figured a normal person would do on vacation. Two episodes in, she realized no one was looking over her shoulder.
She’d quickly turned the TV off and turned to the window. Her thoughts weren’t slowed, but Marietta didn’t think she was the type to ever achieve that kind of stasis.
Occasionally, she’d hear a bumping sound coming from the top floor, near where she assumed the unfinished bathroom to be. The sound was no doubt the reason she had become the new home’s ward. That, and the tickets.
“You know the types,” her sister had said in her venomous voice. The false whisper that only worked to amplify her words meaning. Julie was famous for it.
“The types?” Marietta had asked, not understanding.
“The contractors. Oh,” a tsk, “don’t make me say it and sound like an asshole, Mari. You know what I mean. They’ll, you know, skate the tickets and put me down a honeymoon.”
Marietta was beginning to understand what Julie was implying by that point in the phone call and sighed through her nose politely. “Okay.”
“Just, really be sure you get them out of the box when they show up. I can’t believe I was such a dunce and shipped them there. Thank God your little apartment is so close to it. What’s the drive again?”
Marietta had looked up at the clock mounted above her desk at work, willing the hands to move faster. “Hm? Oh, around an hour.”
Julie hmphed, “Yeah, that’s nothing. We’d be on the road an hour and a half at least, and, besides, you know how I get on long car rides.”
Really, Marietta didn’t, but she made a vague sound of agreement. Their childhood hadn’t been full of the vacations Julie’s husband had seemingly made her so used to.
“The pipe issue, Mari, it’ll be the death of me…”
At that point, Marietta had plugged into that odd in-between fugue she’d been visiting lately. It always felt like she was floating, a bystander to her own life as her mind fogged over, the edges hazy. Her sister’s words overlapped and blended.
Marietta hoped the stay at the cabin would fix this. And it had, for the most part. The only times the fog had occurred was when she had checked her phone, her eyes scanning over missed calls and text messages from her mother and her sister. She knew she should answer soon, she knew it. But she couldn’t make her fingers tap out the response, let alone curve to pick the phone back up at all.
Instead, she sat stationary, her eyes glazing over as she peered out the long, floor-length windows of the cabin. A wedding present from Julie’s mother-in-law that now only Marietta had opened.
Marietta sniffled; maybe she was coming down with something. The perfect excuse not to respond to the messages. She rubbed her tongue around her gums. Maybe they felt hotter than normal. Yes, she was certainly coming down with something. Without looking, she kicked her phone further away from her. She heard it fall off the edge of the couch cushion, a dark, modern-styled thing.
Distantly, a clamoring answered it from above. Marietta wished she had listened to the issue with the pipe. The sounds from the bathroom were so disjointed that they kept catching her off guard. Her little jumps irked the accent pillows she was sure had been painstakingly chosen. Marietta reached back to straighten them each time.
She found a perverted solace in the poke of the bird feathers from within the pillows each time she righted them, her guilt manifest.
She hated lying. Even by omission. She could never stand the feeling since a child when that particular quality of hers named her the school narc.
“Mari, the reason they don’t like you is because you tattle,” Julie had pointed out matter-of-factly one night over spaghetti.
“Julie,” their mother had snapped. “Stop that.”
“It’s true.”
“Marietta, ignore your sister. You should always tell the truth.”
Julie had snorted and gone back to scooping up her pasta. Marietta had rubbed at her nose.
The next month, Marietta remembered this moment when the principal asked her if it was true their mother had been drunk in the pick-up line the day prior.
“Yes,” she answered simply.
The principal had nodded and picked up the phone, the hollow sound of the punched-in numbers busying the air before the buzzing that then turned to her mother’s voice. “Hello?”
The ride home was silent, stilted until: “Never spread my business again, Marietta. You hear me, you little brat?”
Marietta hadn’t answered right away, wondering if her mother remembered their dinner discussion weeks earlier. Her mother’s lips were pulled over her teeth like a dog as she watched the road ahead, and Marietta saw that she didn’t.
“Okay, I’m sorry, mommy.”
“Don’t say ‘mommy,’ you’re too old for that shit.”
At that point, tears burned in Marietta’s eyes. “Okay.”
Marietta hadn’t called her mother anything for days after that, waiting to hear what Julie called her. Julie did not speak to their mother unless she absolutely had to, which made figuring out the title much harder. Eventually, eavesdropping on a fight, she’d heard mother.
Ever since, that was what Marietta had called her.
Julie had stopped talking to their mother years ago, marking Marietta as the go-between. Marietta’s unread texts were surely gossip about the other waiting to be answered by the only one that would know in either case. That was how the pair communicated, artless jabs foisted into Marietta’s ears for her to de-claw and disseminate.
Marietta’s stay in the cabin was the newest material.
“I’m surprised she let you out long enough to watch the place for me,” responded to, “God, how much she asks of you. I raised such a twat. I can’t believe it.”
Marietta knew the pair would be disappointed in her mistruth. She kept telling herself, They don’t know they don’t know they don’t know. The mantra was both symptom and antidote. Feathers pricked her fingerprints once more.
She turned on the TV again, but she didn’t remove her gaze from the window.
•••
Marietta wondered when she would get lonely.
When she’d first pulled up a day earlier, her treachery on the car seat beside her, she’d found the cabin gave her a pit in her gut for its remoteness and visage. It was too new age to be called a cabin at all, this grey thing covered with windows. The only rooms you couldn’t see straight into were the entryway beyond the front door, and the two wood-paneled locations, one upstairs and one downstairs, for the bathrooms. Other than those rare peeks of tinder and the interior, the only sign the place was a cabin at all was its isolation. It had taken thirty minutes into the forest on curving roads for the place to show itself after the same amount of time getting out of the city.
Even with the distance from civilization accounted for, a night had passed, and Marietta hadn’t missed company. She rarely had any back home, yes, but people were always around her. At work, she could hear and feel the breath of others in adjoining offices. Sometimes it made her feel so surrounded, so overwhelmed, she’d stand in a bathroom stall panting. That had since been replaced by the fogging sensation. Now, nothing. The cabin had helped her after all, the remoteness gifting her the ability to stay in the present.
The place was cavernous in its vacancy. Marietta’s only company belonged to the pipe, which she found stopped at night. Bright and early, the noises would begin anew.
Marietta had briefly considered walking down the hallway from her bedroom to the unfinished bathroom. She wanted to ruin the mystery for herself and identify the offending pipe. Her mother’s words applied tinnily to the situation, a reshaped ghost of mocking’s passed: “What the hell do you know about pipes, Marietta? What the hell do you know about anything?”
Marietta didn’t check the sound; the metallic clangs continued. She had long since stopped jumping, though they grew in their disjointedness. The clangs went from every five minutes to once an hour to as sparse as one every three.
Her spot on the couch was growing concave, used to the shape of her bottom. Really, it wasn’t unlike work. The chair cradled her legs as her mind wandered the perimeter, her hands tasked with whatever she was meant to complete. No, not unlike work at all.
The thought had her rubbing at her nose, the nervous tic a relic from her childhood. She needed to forget this work thought, too. This cabin stay was her getaway. Her vacation.
“You need one.” Her sister had said on the phone the night she had floated the plans. “I’ve never met a person who needed a vacation more. That, and a lobotomy. Hah! That would chill you, wouldn’t it?”
Marietta had flinched when she’d googled the word later that evening. Now though, her thumb running over the bump in her bridge, she wondered if her sister was right. Marietta obviously needed at least a little help, even if not quite so far as physical marring.
Marietta imagined her mother’s reaction if she had to tell her she couldn’t make it to their weekly dinner, that she had plans. Therapy, Marietta would have to clarify after ceaseless digging from her mother. The scene played out with the sort of surety that made Marietta almost worry it hadn’t happened before.
Marietta pinched her thigh, floated back. No therapy. That was final. The cabin’s power took root once more.
•••
She couldn’t remember the last time she ate. Marietta stood from the couch, her seat reshaping itself. She pointedly ignored the table which hosted the proof of her deception and took the long way through the entry hall. The cabin’s layout was full of empty spaces and the occasional tight nook that made no sense at all. She paused, taking in a spot on the floor as she turned the corner.
“I guess he used to vacation here, some weird backpacking trip he did with his friends every year in college, since it was the closest National Park.” Her sister had told her, “He got all teary about it, I don’t know. I’m just glad you’re close to it. I really needed someone I trust there.”
That was her sister’s own tic that had never ceased over the years; she hated others in her space. Julie had tried to joke that Marietta didn’t count as a full person, but her voice was tight. Marietta often wondered how Julie had ever gotten used to her husband. If Julie would lay there seething in the dead of night as he curved around her in an innocent, unconscious display of affection.
Now, Marietta stared at a boot print in the doorway, the toe facing the living room. The sole was huge. When she placed her own foot next to it, it only came up halfway. Mud had stamped it into noticeability. Marietta swiped her hand back and forth over her nose. She pointedly had not been outside since arriving two days prior; she had loved to watch the rain that had caused this mud, but she had held no interest in splashing in it. She didn’t wear work boots either, and certainly none this large. Her feet were bare and tiny by comparison.
Julie would have told Marietta if anyone was set to enter the place during her stay. In fact, her obsessive behavior required it from her like penance. Julie had told Marietta the exact list of people who would enter the home and in what order. First, the five contractors her mother-in-law knew from their work in her own homes to build the cabin inside out, two cleaners to wipe up prints exactly like the boot mark. Next, Marietta, who would usher in two of the original contractors to finish the bathroom as a pipe had done something—Marietta hated herself for not listening— that prevented the room from being finished. Then, Marietta would leave, and the two cleaners would return to scrub out her presence. Then, the newlyweds would arrive, fresh off their belated honeymoon.
The mud print was unaccounted for in this arrangement, a size-13 unknown. Asking her sister meant risking admission she’d been avoiding earlier contact. It meant telling Julie she hadn’t listened to the issue with the pipe, as well, in case the explanations were intertwined.
Goosebumps pilled Marietta’s skin.
The pipe was related to the boot, yes. But, in an explainable way. A belated clanging came from above in affirmation.
“It’s fine. Something the new cleaners are set to take care of,” she told herself. She immediately wished she hadn’t spoken at all. Talking to herself, really. Maybe her sister was right all those weeks ago.
Then, the loneliness struck. Marietta considered reaching for her phone to assuage this feeling before remembering it wasn’t there.
•••
The noises had stopped. Hours ago, Marietta had found herself counting the sounds as she pretended to watch TV. There had been fifteen clangs, then none after five pm.
The contractors were set to be at the cabin in three more days. Her week was unraveling. Still, she couldn’t find it in herself to leave.
“Basically, I just need you to be there to check the mailbox each day. The flight got canceled, so we had to have the company reship new tickets that fit the timeline. The flight threw everything off by three weeks, of course. I’m fucking pissed, so is he, I think. Just… they’re projected to get there the day the contractors come back out. I need you to wait for the tickets until then. I’m just… this was the one thing I—I don’t want to miss them.” Julie had sniffed at that point, correcting the slip. “They’ll be there Saturday. I need you there starting Monday. Just in case.”
Just in case. Marietta had called off work in a concise email to her supervisors and packed a bag with the essentials. A vacation. She wasn’t sure she’d ever had one.
Now, she sat on the couch staring out the window, her normal perch for her time at the cabin thus far.
Marietta wasn’t alone in the cabin. She knew this to be true as her eyes moved from the window to refocus on the edge of the table next to her lie, where her keys once lay.
They, too, were missing.
Her vision swung back to the window. It was so nice to no longer feel that infinite floating sensation, to not tailor her facial muscles to another’s inflection. She didn’t want to lose this time she had.
“Once the tickets are there, you can leave. There’s no need to stay.” Julie had then said her husband was waving at her. She squealed as the call cut off. That was the last they’d spoken.
A letter with the travel company’s logo emblazoned in gold had sat inside the mailbox on Monday before Marietta had even parked the car. She had grabbed it and pulled into the driveway anyway, unpacking her bags while it watched her before she moved it to the kitchen table. It had sat there ever since in silent vigil; Marietta didn’t want to leave.
Even now, Marietta had no urge to flee. Since a teenager borrowing her mother’s car, Marietta had learned the hattrick of keeping a spare in a box beneath the hood. Marietta always forgot things, and keys were the first to go. Inside the box, snug beneath the metal, lay her escape.
Though her hands sweat, she felt no urge to get up and follow through with the getaway.
She tried to make herself scared—to think of the horrible possibilities of the boot owner’s plans. As she pictured the atrocities, Marietta found she didn’t feel a thing. The coffee maker beeped from the other room.
Coffee had always upset her stomach, but it felt like such an adult thing to enjoy. Here at the cabin, she had figured out the perfect mixture of cream and sugar to make it preferable. Stirring was her favorite part. Marietta grabbed the accoutrements and got to work. The spoon fit snugly between her forefinger and thumb. She wished she knew the brand of the silverware, but of course she had no way to ask. Even if she did, she wouldn’t.
Marietta found she felt better without the phone. It had been causing her so much unease, knowing she was ignoring it and had no plans to answer. She had never truly chosen to ignore anyone before and disliked the feeling as much as lying. It was different though; one of the causes for unease was necessary, kept her tied to the cabin and uninterested in drifting off.
Marietta hoped the boot-owner would take the tickets, too. Then, she could really relax. She tried to hide her laugh with her hand.
•••
When the clanging again stopped that evening, as perverted as it sounded in her mind, Marietta wondered if anyone had paid her this much attention before. Her loveless teenage years had blended into loveless adulthood. She figured she wasn’t cut out for that sort of thing and others could sense it more than she. Better to trust than be heartbroken.
Her mother’s fraught relationships over the years had scarred her anyhow, made her wonder if love was even a possibility. Marietta often looked to Julie and her now-husband as proof, but Marietta always noted the near-reptilian look in Julie’s eyes as she looked him over.
The noises were interesting to her. What was the boot-owner doing up there? Was that truly the pipe, an unrelated warning call? Was boot-owner standing with a ratchet, whacking an exposed bit of piping when the feeling called most? She snorted picturing the latter. Perhaps that was what it was. The boot-owner surely got tired at night, choosing to wander into the woods to collect muddied footprints to save for her before stealing off with some of her belongings, hoping she’d notice.
Marietta lay staring at the ceiling. She pictured a zoomed-out, doll’s house view of the cabin. Two lights in the home revealed stylized rooms, one with a figure in bed, her. The other with someone dressed in all black, tiptoeing in large work boots with their ear pressed to the door. The image would almost look as if the boot-owner was scared of her.
What a thought. Marietta fell asleep holding in more laughter.
•••
Who was the boot-owner? Marietta wondered, staring at a leaf drifting towards the ground from beyond the large windows.
A contractor? A cleaner? The mail person? Someone that had overheard the phone conversation with Julie? Someone her mother-in-law had told the plans to? A stranger, wandering past?
The possibilities were infinite as Marietta tracked the leaf’s fall.
She hadn’t turned on the TV for the past two days now. The silence was the crackling of an empty phone call waiting for a hiss of breath. The clanking sounds had never started that day. Marietta was beginning to miss them.
She wondered if this meant the boot-owner was now wandering the house, unmoored. Or that the pipe, the true source, had broken once and for all. Or, maybe, the boot-owner had left.
She didn’t think it was that.
Marietta watched another browned leaf drift back and forth in the wind, reminiscent of one that had tucked itself into her car window a few falls prior. Marietta had been so frightened that she had pulled over on the road’s shoulder and looked over, expecting to see something alive and willing to fight her for its own mistake. Instead, it was the drowsy leaf, finishing its lonely plummet to its final resting place, though now separate from the siblings it had once been attached with. Marietta had spent a long time—too long, her mother had later told her—deciding what to do with the leaf. Marietta hadn’t been able to decide whether to keep it or throw it back out the window. She wanted it to be with its family; she didn’t want it to be lonely. But, then again, who was to say it didn’t want to be with Marietta, that it hadn’t strategically chosen this landing spot.
Marietta eventually decided to keep the leaf and not move it.
Three months later, Marietta agreed to help her sister with a ride to work when her car was in the shop. Julie had sat directly on the leaf. Like their mother, Marietta’s sister could be careless to those on her periphery, be it people or leaves.
“Yuck, Mari, what was that!?” She’d asked after Marietta had gone stiff at the crunch; Marietta should’ve moved it to the console.
The evidence of the leaf’s existence remained in the curve of Marietta’s car seat. She had set the guilty letter on top of the body of her old friend a few days earlier, the few lonely specks that clung tight to the fabric.
A loud sound came from above. It wasn’t the normal pipe noise she was used to, and she couldn’t pinpoint the location beyond the upstairs.
Did the boot-owner think she was scared? Marietta was almost disappointed she wasn’t. Surely, this was the most interesting thing to happen to her. Her shining achievement would be her death, or whatever else the boot-owner had planned for her. Were they watching her now somehow, peeking from the top of the stairs?
They were running out of time, or did the boot-owner know that already? Was Marietta truly that interesting to watch? The thought was thrilling. Nearly scandalous in its flattery. All she did was sit and watch other things, really. She figured the two of them were alike in that way.
The boot-owner had two more nights. That was it.
Marietta grew hungry and stood. She was now used to avoiding the kitchen table and opting for the entryway instead.
Marietta used to love playing hide and seek as a child. She preferred the act of searching, the airlessness it gave her stomach as she turned corners until she smacked into the warmth of her sister who was always slightly too rough in her frustration at being found.
“Mari! No fair!”
Now, Marietta pictured the boot-owner standing around the door frame, waiting. She held in her laugh, imagining rounding the corner and eclipsing their body heat. It wouldn’t be too bad, honestly.
Though she didn’t miss being around people, Marietta missed bodily contact. Her sister would give her vaguely condescending hugs full of “oooh”s when they saw each other that Marietta secretly reveled in. Their mother would give constricting ones that pulled too tightly against Marietta, her nails nearly breaking skin as she clutched her. Marietta preferred Julie’s hugs, but, nevertheless, she stored each of these moments of contact up just the same; she needed to be touched. She was a tactile creature who disliked being around others; an enigma.
Marietta wondered if the boot-owner ever felt this need for contact, if they’d experienced hungry skin. She supposed she should hope they didn’t.
Marietta tip-toed up to the entry way and spun it quickly, expecting to see the boot-owner standing there, caught making a new shoe mark for her to spy on.
The space was empty, and goosebumps raced up the back of Marietta’s neck.
Finally, there was the fear.
•••
The kitchen sink had become full, but Marietta dreaded washing the dishes. She wished the boot-owner would pick up the slack. She tittered at the thought.
The letter still sat on the table, untouched. The only thing in the home that she dreadfully wanted removed. It was causing the only break in the stillness of her mind. She wasn’t used to her thoughts being this slow, this sluggish. She had nothing to keep her up at night; she had left work perfectly between projects, and the house needed no upkeep. She was utterly at peace.
Marietta wandered back to the living room, a bowl of food warming her lap like a cat. She’d always wanted a pet, but she was never sure if she would be a good owner. Well, she thought, no bother to worry about it now.
Marietta had never thought that phrase in her life, of that, she was sure. Whether it be from impending death or the mind-numbing quality of no responsibility—par the cursed letter—, Marietta now understood sanctity. A bird who had flown and flown and flown for years in a treeless sky had finally earned her perch: utopia.
A loud stomp came from overhead, this time unmistakably from her bedroom. The boot-owner was toying with her, she mused. She wished she could be more fun.
Marietta wondered if they felt the same relief here, tucked away in these square feet of forest, this person who had known she was coming somehow, someway.
No, she reasoned, the boot-owner’s mind was frantic, running at rates more like her own when removed from the cabin. Panicked, sweating thoughts of cat-and-mouse beyond Marietta’s own musings probably filled their head.
Marietta wondered if that’s why she felt so calm, if there was a balance of serenity and panic that meant she took the share of peace for the week while the boot-owners stumbled. If their mind raced for hers to mellow. She should thank them, really.
Marietta stood, planning to make another cup of coffee. Whether it be a final one, or the first of the last until the boot-owner struck. She truly couldn’t guess, reaching for a new mug all the same. She missed the sensation of stirring. It felt the closest to a task in the cabin as she faced the front door, back to the table. She truly did feel bad about the tickets. Though, Marietta guessed her sister would get them at the same time anyway, on Saturday, when the new contractors showed up and found the cabin and its contents. Whatever that would look like, and whether Marietta opened the door for them or not. No, the tickets didn’t matter as much as Marietta thought, it seemed.
As she poured, the goosebumps came back. Marietta rubbed at them, angling herself to face the counter now. The spoon made satisfying clinks against the mug’s rim. She had grown to love the sound, a faint twin to the noise from above.
A feeling like hide and seek visited her stomach once more as she tapped the spoon off and set it back on the counter; Marietta felt someone creeping up behind her. She’d grown used to the feeling after years of living with Julie, her older sister constantly worried Marietta had stolen clothes from her wardrobe or gloss from her drawer, had entered her room without permission.
Marietta knew she was right this time; she tried to hide her smile as she turned.
Lily Wissler is an emerging queer writer from Dayton, Ohio. She is currently studying English – Creative Writing at Ohio University. There, she is Head Fiction editor for Sphere Literary Magazine.
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