Limbo
By Rhonda Lucas
My parents’
divorce was final. The house had been sold and the day had come to
move. Thirty years of the family’s life was now crammed into the
garage. The two-by-fours that ran the length of the walls were the
only uniformity among the clutter of boxes, furniture, and
memories. All was frozen in limbo between the life just passed and
the one to come.
The sunlight
pushing its way through the window splattered against a barricade
of boxes. Like a fluorescent river, it streamed down the sides and
flooded the cracks of the cold, cement floor. I stood in the
doorway between the house and garage and wondered if the sunlight
would ever again penetrate the memories packed inside those boxes.
For an instant, the cardboard boxes appeared as tombstones,
monuments to those memories.
The furnace
in the corner, with its huge tubular fingers reaching out and
disappearing into the wall, was unaware of the futility of trying
to warm the empty house. The rhythmical whir of its effort hummed
the elegy for the memories boxed in front of me. I closed the door,
sat down on the step, and listened reverently. The feeling of loss
transformed the bad memories into not-so-bad, the not-so-bad
memories into good, and committed the good ones to my mind. Still,
I felt as vacant as the house inside.
A workbench to my right stood
disgustingly empty. Not so much as a nail had been left behind. I
noticed, for the first time, what a dull, lifeless green it was.
Lacking the disarray of tools that used to cover it, now it seemed
as out of place as a bathtub in the kitchen. In fact, as I scanned
the room, the only things that did seem to belong were the cobwebs
in the corners.
A group of boxes had been set
aside from the others and stacked in front of the workbench.
Scrawled like graffiti on the walls of dilapidated buildings were
the words “Salvation Army.” Those words caught my eyes as
effectively as a flashing neon sign. They reeked of
irony. “Salvation—was a bit too late for this
family,” I mumbled sarcastically to myself.
The houseful of furniture that had once been so carefully chosen to
complement and blend with the color schemes of the various rooms
was indiscriminately crammed together against a single wall. The
uncoordinated colors combined in turmoil and lashed out in the
greyness of the room.
I suddenly
became aware of the coldness of the garage, but I didn’t want to go
back inside the house, so I made my way through the boxes to the
couch. I cleared a space to lie down and curled up, covering myself
with my jacket. I hoped my father would return soon with the truck
so we could empty the garage and leave the cryptic silence of
parting lives behind.
（选自Patterns: A Short Prose Reader, by
Mary Lou Conlin, published by Houghton Mifflin, 1983.）
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