James W. Morris
RISE
Purdy was doing figure eights, rubbing her fur, alive with static electricity,against Eleanor’s ankles while Eleanor sought the kitchen light switch.
“Hey, you dumb cat,” Eleanor said. “Don’t you know ladies my age who get tripped and knocked down don’t always get back up? Who would feed you then?Ask yourself that.”She took a can from atop the stack in the cat food cabinet.
Purdy discontinued the figure eights, then balanced on her hind legs and deliberately stretched her mottled, gray-and-white body to prop both front paws—nails excitedly extended—against the already abundantly-scratched facing of the bottom storage cabinet. In the old days, the cat would execute a smart graceful hop up onto the kitchen counter and push her nosehard into her food dish before Eleanor had finished filling it. Such hopping seemed too much effort nowadays—the cat was old and would wait to have her bowl ceremoniously placed before her at the designated spot on the floor.
Purdy emitted one of those hard-to-decipher growly cat noises while Eleanor searched in vain for the can opener, which she was sure she’d left on the kitchen counter the previous evening.
“I know what would happen if I did fall down and die,” Eleanor said. “After a few hours you’d forget everything I’ve done for you and eat my eyeballs. Dumb cat.”
Where could the darn can opener be?For a second,Eleanor almost wished she’d purchased a brand of cat food whose cans featured pull-top lids, but of course those cost seven cents more per can just for the convenience and Eleanor resented being over-charged for certain things.
Purdy lifted her face—gray-muzzled, missing a fang—and looked at Eleanor searchingly.
“And by the way,” Eleanor said,“don’t think I haven’t noticed that you’ve been waking me up five minutes earlier each day to feed you. The sun hasn’t even risen yet. I’m onto your game, Missy. Good thing for you I just happened to be awake already.”
Nope. The opener was definitely not to be found on the counter, though she was absolutely sure she’d left it there less than eight hours earlier.
“Well, Purdy. I can be as certain as I want to be, but it still isn’t here. I hate this getting-old crapola. Makes you doubt your memory and your senses. But I guess you know what I mean.”
Eleanor reached down to consolingly stroke the cat, who reared back slightly, trying to determine whether the proffered hand contained food.
Eleanor rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. Feed me.I get it.”
Well, despite having no memory of the action, she must have placed the opener in the gadget drawer last night, then. After ten minutes of searching, Eleanor had located a bent potato peeler and a warped plastic egg-slicer she had completely forgotten about, but didn’t see the can opener. She then searched all the other drawers in the kitchen—even the one she only used for trivets and potholders—before returning to the gadget drawer and removing all the entangled items one-by-one. The can opener was not there.
Since the kitchen was a galley-type, too narrow to hold a table and chairs, Eleanor had to retreat to the dining room to sit down, driven equally by fatigue in her legs and a furious sense of frustration.
“Think, Ellie,” she said. “What else could you use?”
She had a vague early memory of her father opening cans of pork and beans with a hunting knife and a hammer, but she wasn’t prepared to go down that road. Probably slice my hand off, she thought.
A church key! One of those pointy-ended old-fashioned openers with which you lever little triangle-shaped openings into the top of cans. Her husband regularly used one for his beer before manufacturers switched from steel to aluminum cans and added pull-tabs. (After pulling it, her husband would usually drop the detached tab back into his beer. How many other people did that?And what percentage choked while chugging?) Eleanor was sure she had a church keysomewhere, probably in a stored box of excess kitchen doo-dads in the basement.
Purdy came into the dining room and stood steadfastly in front of Eleanor, confused as to why she was not being fed on schedule.
“Well, cat,” Eleanor said. “Do I really want to go to all the trouble of creeping downstairs—and getting covered in cobwebs—in order to rifle through a bunch of dusty old storage boxes, seeing if I can locate an ancient can opener,just so you can immediately get fed?”
Purdy made a murmured cat noise as if in assent and Eleanor laughed.
When Eleanor raised her head in preparation to stand, a small dark shape in the next room, adjacent to the light fixture on the ceiling of the kitchen, caught her eye. God, not another leak, she thought, squinting as she approached. Her eyesight was poor. No, it was not a newly-emerged water stain. It was the can opener. Adhered to the ceiling.
*
Eleanor stared at it. The indisputable impossibility of it.
She went back to the dining room and sat down. There must be a logical explanation. Magnets? No. The opener was mostly hard black plastic, anyway. A practical joke then, or Candid Camera? Well, some unknown someone would have to have ventured down to her shabby out-of-the-way neighborhood, sneaked into her modest nondescript house in the middle of the night, then glued the can opener to the ceiling. Ridiculous.
A miracle, then? Maybe an updated version of the miracle of the fish, only this time the divinely-provided seafood will come in the form of canned tuna. For which a righteous, levitating opener will be required.
“Calm down, Ellie,” she told herself. “Get a grip. And don’t blaspheme.”
Getting a closer look at the renegade opener might prove helpful, perhaps bring a sense of reality back to the situation. Eleanor dragged a chair from the dining room across the tiled floor of the kitchen and climbed carefully up on it, but immediately felt dangerously unsteady when she peered upward in the direction of the opener. She climbed back down.
After thinking for a minute, she went to the little mudroom off the kitchen and returned with a broom. The house was old and the ceilings high—over nine feet—but Eleanor with her arms fully extended was just able to contact the can opener with the tips of the broom’s bristles. The moment she did so, the opener detached itself from the ceiling and dropped with a sharp, astoundingly-loud clatter into the kitchen sink. Purdy, shocked by the noise, rocketed into the dining room and cowered under a chair.
Eleanor looked in the direction in which Purdy had disappeared. “Yeah, don’t blame you,” she said. After that, there seemed to be nothing to do but use the opener—which upon examination showed absolutely no residual evidence of what might have been holding it on to the ceiling—to unseal the cat food can and dump its stinky fish-byproducts in Purdy’s bowl and place the bowl on the floor. She knew the cat’s hunger would overcome her fear soon enough.
*
Eleanor was scheduled to have lunch at noon that day with Ann, but postponed, texting her friend that she did not feel well, a common, easily-accepted reason for changing plans used by old people. Besides, it was true. Eleanor did not exactly feel sick, but she certainly did not feel right.
She took to her bed for the rest of the day. In the afternoon she dozed a bit, and awoke with a memory. She was a teen, preparing for a casual date with a boy she’d just met, a tall athletic boy who volunteered to take her ice skating at the new-frozen pond in Shake’s Woods. But her skates were not to be found at the back of her clothes closet where she thought they’d been stored, so she asked her mother—who happened to be in the hallway, passing the entrance of her bedroom—for assistance. “Mother,” she said, “have you seen my ice skates?” “Yes, Ellie, they’re on the ceiling,” her mother immediately replied, matter-of-factly, as she continued without pause down the hall. Perhaps her mother was trying to make some point about her children needing to keep track of their possessions, but Eleanor—already tense with anticipation regarding the date with the new boy—was so frustrated by her mother’s lack of interest in her missing-skates problem that she didn’t speak to her for three days.
What was that boy’s name? Eleanor now wondered. She couldn’t recall—the tentative ice-skating date fell through and he seemed to lose his already moderate interest in her after that. Anyhow, after that day the phrase, “It’s on the ceiling,”became a sort of in-family joke, a reply any one of them was likely to give when asked where something might be.Eleanor hadn’t thought of it, this stupid little sardonic rejoinder, in years—probably because she was the last member of her immediate family left living and there was no one to joke with.
*
The next morning Eleanor awoke feeling quite a bit better. There were unexplainable, head-scratching incidents, mysterious occurrences,written into the narrative of every person’s biography. You can waste your time, dwelling on them and obsessing about what happened,or you can just simply accept the fact of them and move on. It’s the same for that mentally-held compendium of gnawing little regrets accumulated by each aging person enjoying an otherwise happy life; it’s better to put those regrets aside and live as fully as possible in one’s ever-dwindling present.
Eleanor ventured downstairs and fed the cat, encountering no difficulty locating the can opener. She then sat in the living room with a bowl of bran flakes in front of her and watched a morning program on TV which featured a bunch of women—what her husband would call yentas—all seemingly talking at the same time. After the show was over, she climbed determinately back to the second floor of the house and entered the narrow bathroom at the top of the stairs, planning to brush her partial denture, which she’d left soaking overnight. The toothbrush she used for that purpose was not where she left it.
“Oh, no,” Eleanor said, after a second. She hesitantly craned her neck slowly toward the bathroom ceiling.
*
The ceilings on the second floor of her house were lower thanthe first, so Eleanor felt she might be able to reach the rogue toothbrush with the tip-end of a bath towel, if she flicked at it right. In fact, she was successful on her first attempt; when the snapping towel touched it, the toothbrush let go of its grip on the plaster,then impelled off a side wall, spinning helicopter-like mid-air for a half second before dropping, with a kind of sick inevitability, into the toilet bowl.
She sighed, retrieved the brush from the bowl, and tossed it directly in to the trash can. Eleanor was not the sort of person who would ever consider using a toothbrush that had been in a toilet bowl, no matter how pure and pristine the water in the bowl was reputed to be, or how spectacularly well the brush had been cleaned and sanitized.
Before exiting the bathroom, Eleanor stood still for a moment, then pointed and raised her chin to face the ceiling; she extended her arms outward, palms up.
Why?
*
Eleanor met Ann for the agreed-upon lunch postponed from yesterday. If she’d cancelled again, she knew Ann would worry, think Eleanor was really ill, be full of nosy questions. Better just to go.
At the restaurant, after inquiring about Eleanor’s health, Ann commenced her usual verbal binge,listing her own ailments, what her doctor said about each one, and why she thought he was bull-headed and wrong. In truth, Eleanor didn’t like Ann all that much; she was well-meaning, sweet and harmless, but boring. They’d met through their husbands—who had been golfing buddies—and now that both were widows some obscure, small-print subsection of the social contract seemed to indicate they should try to remain friendly. Anyway, it did lonely old ladies no harm to get out of the house once in a while.
While Ann was describing in detail her newest misdiagnosed symptom—an ominous, electric tingling occurring intermittently in her left instep—Eleanor’s mind strayed from the subject of her friend’s foot to her own house. She had to wonder: what unanchored possession of hers would she find attached to the ceiling when she returned home?
*
She did not have to wait long to find out. Upon entering the living room through the front door, house keys still in hand, Eleanor saw Purdy, her back attached to the ceiling, dangling lifelessly above the windowsill from which she must have risen.
Eleanor let out a yelp and dropped her keys. When she did so, the cat startled back to life; she was not dead—the stupid animal had actually been dozing comfortably, her legs extended and drooping unsupported mid-air.
Eleanor’s panic soon infected the cat, however—she began wailing, while manically waggling her legs and tail. Eleanor rushed off and returned ten seconds later with the broom. She didn’t feel she’d have to swat at, and possibly harm,the cat; the previous rogue items had detached as soon as touched.
She steadied herself, planted her feet and purposefully raised the broom above her head. When the tips of the straw bristles began to approach Purdy’s body the cat seemed alarmed, but the moment they contacted her fur, she dropped from the ceiling. Eleanor reflexively extended her left arm to mitigate the fall and catch the cat, a mistake. Purdy’s extended claws raked down Eleanor’s forearm, leaving parallel scratches, which immediately exhibited drops of blood. The cat disappeared into the basement, chased by Eleanor’s echoing scream.
*
During the next few days, Eleanor ate and slept little. Her shredded arm hurt, for one thing—and she was tortured by a hard-to-repress memory of her grandfather gleefully relating how a young friend of his had died from “blood poisoning” after getting a tiny cat scratch. His friend had laughed off the insignificant injury and subsequent infection until it was too late. Eleanor’s gouges were long and deep and looked horrible, but showed no sign of being infected.
For her part, Purdy refused to come out from the spot to which she’d retreated—behind the storage boxes in the basement—no matter how much Eleanor prompted her to, calling her name with put-upon sweetness and shaking a cardboard container of kitty treats that Eleanor assured her were yummy. Finally, she decided to relocate the cat’s food dish down there and let her be.
In the early hours of Sunday morning, Eleanor,lying half in bed without hope of sleeping, heard a vehicle pass by on the quiet street outside and a subsequent thwap that indicated her newspaper had been delivered. It was pretty rare for people to receive a physical paper these days—she was the only one on the block—but Eleanor had a forty-year streak of completing the newspaper’s coveted Sunday crossword puzzle in pen that she wanted to keep intact. She’d attempted once or twice to do the crossword online but found she couldn’t concentrate with an expectant computer screen blinking at her.
Eleanor donned her glasses and peered at the rectangular glowing red numerals on her clock radio. It was 4:12am. Retrieving the paper would be something to do, anyhow. She was sleeping in a t-shirt—a faded green one of her husband’s that read “Fly, Eagles, Fly”—so she pulled on some sweatpants, tucked the t-shirt in, then put on a pair of heavy-soled house slippers she kept near the bed.
*
Outside, in the dank November cold, Eleanor paused on the walkway a couple of yards from the house and looked up and down the street. She decided she liked her neighborhood at this time of day, with all fuss and noise quieted. The night sky was clear and numerous bright stars were visible—the bulb in the streetlamp nearby had been burnt out since 2019. Eleanor crunched through a thin rime of frost on the dead strip of grass laughably known as her front lawn, which she needed to traverse to retrieve the warm, plastic-wrapped newspaper from its landing spot on the driveway.
As Eleanor prepared to step back through the door of the house to reenter, she abruptly felt it—an urgently compelling physical need to ascend skyward. But it was not an irresistible impulse or desire originating from within her person as much as it was a newly-felt certitude, a premonition,that gravity was about to make an exception in her case. It was going to let her go, set her free of the earth.
Eleanor reeled a bit with the import of her new understanding, flitting lightfooted across the lawn, astonished. Then she dropped the newspaper and began an unhurried drift away from the house.
There was great joy. Why did it not occur to her that there would be joy?
James W. Morris is a graduate of LaSalle University in Philadelphia, where he was awarded a scholarship for creative writing. He is the author of dozens of short stories, humor pieces, essays, and poems which have appeared in various literary magazines, and his first novel, Rude Baby, was published last year. More info at www.jameswmorris.com.
