Before you read this note, read the short story that it ends: the bed that kept november
On a moonlit night, in the middle of June, November’s empty bedroom seemed to sigh.
It was used to the silence. It was cheerful even. But that night, while the lunar luminescence played along the windowsill and danced onto the floor, the room’s silence was just a twinge oppressive. Nothing awful, nothing to invoke dread, just a bit heavy.
The old bed in the center of the room was still as always, which is to say that it was quiet, subtle, but not quite immobile, and at the very moment when it felt like dread might finally overtake the room’s atmosphere, the bed creaked and the weight retreated. Not too far, but far enough. Maybe oblivion had decided to take a day off, or maybe there was more strength left in the heart of the room, but whatever the case, the balance of cheer was healing.
The day had been a lively one, and the neighborhood children, rambunctious as always, caterwauling down the hill on their bikes, and running through the scruffy lawns and over the cracked concrete sidewalks had made a merry sound that had wafted through the windows.
November had wondered: “Is it time I try to get out again?”
She had made the attempt at Easter, the literary parallel was too perfect not to. The girl who had descended for three months to rise again on the same day as Christ? Her resurrection might even be more impressive, the time was longer, and choosing to leave her refuge would certainly be a more difficult choice than choosing to depart hell. But while the allusion was altogether lovely, it wasn’t enough.
At the moment that she’d been about to try, she remembered something that she’d been trying hard to avoid thinking about for the long months spent swaddled inside her respite: no one had come looking for her. Her senses were dimmed in her cocoon, but she could hear well enough to know that there hadn’t been a stampede of police and special agents tramping through her bedroom. No forensic specialist had come to look for strands of hair, or some other biometric clue with which to track her. The canine units had been absent, not a sniff had been spared to search her out. A friend had peeked into the room, disturbing the hinges of the door, but didn’t stay after a cursory glance to confirm the disappearance. Her brother had snuck in to use her phone for a prank call and had left it in the charger when he was finished, but he hadn’t tried to find her either. The world had forgotten her, and at the moment of decision, she chose to forget the world.
It was only after the instant of choice had passed, and her mustered strength had demobilized that she remembered another fact, that gave the lie to her claim to isolation. Every Wednesday at eight o’clock exactly, she felt the faint vibration of her phone on the bedside table. It had rung that way for nearly half of a year, without fail, without response.
November was fairly sure that her bills were still being paid, or if not, the minimum payments on her credit card would have her checking account last through the decade, and fraudulent callers had never made her a target, even when she was had an active external presence. Deep down, she knew the truth, someone out there still cared, still wanted to see her paintings, still yearned to listen to the guitar that she had put down for the last time all those months ago. She still had a friend, but that friend wasn’t where it was comfortable.
And so she stayed.
But on this particular June evening, November was weary. The bed was still warm, the book still ambled along an easy, but the comfort was colder than it had been in January, and the heat in her bones seemed to be dissipating to a lukewarm lull. Not a bad lull, but not the roaring fire that she had sat by for long lazy weeks. Spring had come and gone, and while she had heard summer through the windows, but autumn was coming to her mattress.
“Oh well,” thought November. “At least it’s better than the chill.”
But while November had passed by the opportunity for freedom with a smile and a wave, the fall that was coming wasn’t the season she was expecting.
The last day of June held a promise in hand, but said “hold on, it’s not yet time,” though no one heard but the wind.
The first day of July, the whole world heard.
It was a beautiful day, and though November couldn’t see it, the ramshackle streets of the neighborhood were filled with American flags. More fireworks than had ever been purchased in a single year, flew off the shelves in a week as America prepared for semi-sesquicentennial to be remembered.
November lay reposed in the same place she had been for months, her body slightly off parallel beneath the layers of fabric that concealed and constrained her form from the outside world. The birdsong of the morning failed to wake her, but the passing doppler of a fire truck racing to put out the aftermath of an amateur pyrotechnic jogged her to awareness.
She was stuck, she knew that, but the chains binding her weren’t just textiles. She liked the simple life she lived under the covers. The outside world was confusing and unfamiliar, the colors of its and signs clashing in a way that her bedspread never did. It was bedlam out there, and anyway, who cared if she chose peace over chaos, to read a good book rather than feel compelled to write one. Why think when simply being was easier.
To her own ears her protestations rang hollow, but still, they rang, didn’t they? Her paints were dried, but the creations had never been a masterpiece; her crochet work sat abandoned, but it would have been abandoned at the mall by a careless owner anyway. There wasn’t a reason to care, nor to worry, so though dully discomfited, there wasn’t a point in moving on.
At seven fifty-eight, the vibrations started. It was early. She was never early. Why was she calling?
The vibrations continued, yet they weren’t the rhythmic beat of the phone’s components.
Something was wrong.
The shaking grew stronger. The creaking of the beams and thumping of a tree against the window finally broke into November’s awareness. Something different was going on, something unheard of.
It was an earthquake, and as the bed she had laid in for so long started moving for the first time since it was placed in the room, she felt herself sinking deeper than she had ever gone before, sifted into depths she hadn’t even know were there.
As she fell, she felt herself struggle. The depths called out, “comfort, rest, liberation from the cares of the world” and her very soul cried back, “I have life left to live.” Her hands moved with more determination than she had had since that fateful day after the snow.
It wasn’t enough. She kept falling.
She felt her strength flicker, then fail, and as the quake mustered final shiver, she felt the darkness close in.
But then, in the instant of defeat, when the last fire of self had been kindled and been found wanting, a buzz, not the arrhythmia of tectonic impact, but the calculated pulse of motors. A call. The same call which had been made, week after week, without fail, without response. It was there again, and in that moment November realized two things. The first was that she was not alone. The second was that in her descent, while she could never again breach the top of her mattress, the way out was through.
And with a muffled cry, she heaved. The vibration of the phone carrying her through the edge of the bed and onto the floor below.
And as haphazard fireworks lit the sky, the casualties of storage not designed for cataclysm, November answered the phone.