Images

by Brian R. Quinn

I recognized the old house instantly in the multiple listing’s directory. A location, clouded by time.  Those years were like darkroom prints, bathed in separate trays, developed o’er long until the contrast was lost, the blacks too black, ruined. 

Standing in the tiny house now all is silent. The old man is gone. The TV mute. A row of ever-bedeviling remotes left behind on the kitchen table, each wound in masking tape, stripped down to their most basic abilities. Mute. Volume. Power. 

My high school years crackled with the sound of basketball courts, secreted beers, and heated experiments performed in dark commuter parking lots with any girl I could lay my hands on. 

But that all changed in Ellen’s house. 

The kitchen was cramped, barren. Her father was ubiquitous, smoking end to end, seated at the corner of the table splashing cheap vodka into a stained, cracked coffee cup. Ellen's mother was deceased. Ellen’s elder siblings blamed their father’s harsh treatment for her passing. She just gave up on living, they told me. Ellen missed her terribly.

We stretched tin foil across the basement windows and turned the cellar into a darkroom. Our first print? A young girl, Ellen, stepping barefoot through a shallow stream with her blue jeans rolled up to her knees. The image is black and white. She emerges from shadow with her head tucked into her shoulder leading a small dog on a rope. Strong, defining sunlight shines across her back. 

Walking down the cellar steps is like plunging into the cold water stop-bath, the memory is clear and distinct, the fixer acrid, pungent. I reach up and peel back the foil still covering the half-height window. Light lunges across the washing machine, the floor, the sump pump. 

My family lived in a fine home with property. Ellen in a tiny saltbox cape on a postage stamp lot with four brothers and two sisters. Regional high school was a stepping stone, college just around the corner. But the stone was wet, slippery. I was trading upper-class for working class. At the time I sensed it, tried to ignore it. In the end I failed.

Her father's smokes were tasteless, odorless. He was thrown to the floor in a barroom fight, smacked against the brass foot-rail, a nerve behind his ear crushed. Taste and smell were eliminated in a split second. I did not sense the oddity at the time, found no pity. The malady was fitting punishment for a man who'd put his wife in an early grave. I took advantage. We drank, smoked, and cuddled in the family room, right under his flaccid nose.

He sensed it. Hated me for it. He was losing his little girl. It showed in her look, her stance, and her attitude toward him.

He caught us one night on the sofa. We were supposed to be watching TV. He screamed at Ellen, Your blessed mother is watching you! Then lunged at me, arms out, drunk and sweating. 

Ellen stepped between me and her rampaging father with arms crossed, defiant; a tiny girl facing off at last against her drunken bullying parent, protecting a young boy, her first lover.

I missed it. Her courage. Her strength. I moved on the next week, found another girl, and left Ellen alone in that house with her old man sitting in the kitchen, all by himself, gulping vodka from a coffee cup.

I considered buying the tiny house as a kind of penance for my sins against the young girl who walked in the shallows leading a small dog on a rope. Penance, or one-upmanship? A chance to finally put the man who could neither smell nor taste behind me.

I see it now, sitting by myself, in the old man's chair. I was just a boy. The pressures at that time were too great. I failed to stand up for Ellen the way she did for me and abandoned the one I loved most.

Those years move along in their separate baths, unnoticed, until the foil is peeled back and the light creeps clearly and distinctly across the floor, reminding us of their passing.

---

Brian R. Quinn is a Multi- Emmy Award winning TV news journalist living in Manhattan who has spent the last thirty years covering news in New York City and overseas. Much of his written work is rooted in those experiences. His fiction has appeared in Boomshakalalking, Invasion, The Chamber, Figwort, Tender Fury, and Adelaide.