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Show THE UPSTAIRS PEOPLE-46 She was supposed to prepare the trays for the souvenir stores, to give people something to remember the town by. A useful occupation, they said at the Agency. But she was never quite organized. Never done. Tompforrow the white-haired man from the Agency, with his gray-green eyes the color of the ocean, would be coming with more shells. And he would look sad and shake his head when she told him once again that she had nothing to give him. Even so, they sent her a check every month, but he would remind her she hadn't earned it. He'd never say anything, but he'd lean on his cane and look right at her as if there was something he wanted to figure out. And he'd move quickly, using has cane carelessly, expertly, like a man who had someplace else to go, something else to do, but who somehow still had the time to carry her a sack of shells, to ask her how she was doing, to look sad when it seemed she hadn't been doing much. For all his quickness, sometimes his eye moved toward the sofa like he wanted to sit for awhile, but she pretended not to notice. Today, perhaps, she would finish a tray or two, but when she wheeled up to her table, one of the creatures was there in the middle of her work space, its green Martian-like head swiveling around as if listening for something important. She wheeled back into the kitchen, found a large jar under the sink, put it on her lap, wheeled back into the livingroom, lay the open jar on its side near the insect. She prodded it with the lid. It started to climb onto her hand, and she screamed, but finally it crawled inside. She flipped the bottle upright and quickly screwed on the cap, placed the jar into the pocket on the back of the wheelchair and went out the door that opened onto the back yard. Michael followed her, then curled up in the grass. Still as he was, he looked like a sudden absence, his blackness sucking the colors into the space that was himself. She |