BY LESLIE CONTRERAS SCHWARTZ
Quarantine
The lights in the bedroom flickered off and on. I lay in our bed listening to a heavy thumping coming from somewhere, quickening. In a half-dream, I created the idea of walking to the door and shouting, Who’s doing that? Even the thought of it was tiring, and I rolled over with eyes half-closed, lucid enough to be afraid to sleep but longing for it with the same urgency I longed to take a deep breathe without pain, or to be able to sit up with my lungs feeling crushed. I tried to fill my thoughts without something other than the every second of half-breathing, the crushing and stupor.
Was the sound growing near? Was it a foot banging a door, my daughter running circles in the living room, feet pounding in a rhythmic pattern? Was it the neighbor at some task again that required loud repetitive pounding and screeching? The questions were something to latch onto in my mind. I entertained them.
A slit of light broke from the bedroom door and my son crawled in beside me, wrapping his small limbs around mine underneath the coat of blankets. He was whispering but I could not hear because of the thumping. Who is doing that, I said. I slept.
My husband woke me to feed me soup, water from a straw. I sat up in bed, the room bluing. Our five-year-old was jumping on the bed, adding a beat to the drumming that started again when I opened my eyes (though I was sure I heard it in my sleep). It had been weeks since I’d left either the bed, or the couch, laying, blinking, and when awake, staring through the window, at a wall, at one of the children’s faces. Breath came as if through a tiny sieve, which I gulped in small pockets. You’re here, the doctor said this morning on the phone. Be grateful. So the air like fish eggs, like the meager rationing in the form of pills. Sucking, coughing, my chest strained and ready to snap. Nebulizer hush and burr. Inhaler sip. Eight more times. Times seven. Again. Times sixty days.
The world shimmered in blue, the faces of my son, my husband and our girls, cast in that same blue. One morning or one night, or the next day, or the night that was yesterday and before, tomorrow, I dreamt of running at full speed down our street, past the school, toward the bayou ten blocks away. The banks were filling with rain, ready to break over the edge of the concrete embankment, and I ran so hard every part of me ached and knew that this feeling, familiar, happened yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I woke up wheezing and choking. The thumping in my ears, my own heart racing, like I was running, every second running.
At the insistence of my husband, I sat outside wrapped in a blanket and feeling shorn. I watched my children play in the front yard while the light flickered through the leaves of the tree on the lawn. Underneath the world—or was it beside it, along it, between it? (There was no relative space to pin it)—I saw the pulsing of blue, an under-color to the kaleidoscope of reality’s rough imagery—my son’s kid sneakers of black and red and white, flashing lights when he jumped, my eight year old’s plastic sandals, both of them dangling off the edge of a spider swing, their small hands flayed out and waving. The laughter, her sigh. Underneath it all was this color, not an earthly blue, blue of ocean, precious stone or gem cut into rock, a sky flanking a horizon. No. This blue which was not blue was the color of sacred, deep, with a center to it, blood of childbirth, the whitened lips of the dead, the infant’s purple wail—all of it mixed together, long and unraveling, a cruel silence with a terrifying bell inside.
I rested my head back on the chair and stared at the sky that was no longer the sky. I blinked and felt close to that color—this underwater, the blue eggs, blue veins on an infant’s foot, the black feather of a blue jay that feigned blue, the blue mouth of a glacier. Was this what ran parallel and twinned to our lives, a universe linked with a battered rope to this one, where I had died, and hanging by a thread to the universe where I lived. The giant bell in its cruel silence behind the blue, and my rollercoaster heartbeat readying me for the terrifying drop to the ground. I longed to hear the bell. I would not share it, only save it inside my body, and never, even to my worst enemies, tell anyone the sound it made that killed small parts all at once with a blow. I opened my eyes, feeling heavy. I had already heard the bell. I had already imagined my children without me. I sat feeling the holes of it, growing cold. Light overhead grew brighter until wind threw the branches together, a dark shadow enveloping our family. Spin faster, I said to my children. Do it again.
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Leslie Contreras Schwartz is the author of Who Speaks for Us Here (Skull + Wind Press, 2020), and the collections Nightbloom & Cenote and Fuego (St. Julian Press, 2016, 2014). Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Missouri Review, Iowa Review, Pleiades, among other publications. She is the Houston Poet Laureate.
