The Rope
by Joanna GardnerSylvie shuffled down the stairs and into the kitchen. A mug of tea waited for her on the table. The room smelled like steam and soap, as though someone had scrubbed counters while the kettle boiled. But Sylvie lived alone.
She pulled her coat on over her black dress. Above the stone sink, evening's cobalt sky stained the leaded-glass window, its interlocking pattern twisting around itself without beginning or end.
She rubbed the crick in her neck, then drank the bitter tea in gulps, its heat rolling down her chest. The mist had risen before she reached her bed this morning, leaving her in its prison of sleep on the cold floor. That wasn't going to happen again. Black scarf, black gloves, and she was ready.
Outside, the evening mist lay in a thigh-deep carpet over the Green and the surrounding skyscrapers. This mist rose to wake her every night, just as the morning fog always put her to sleep.
Away to her left, the western sky glowed a brighter shade of blue where the sun had set. The mist hid the parkland's expanse of grass, but Sylvie caught its scent of earth and wood, and felt its underground pulse match itself to hers. The mist reached her waist. She would finish in time tonight.
She walked to the sidewalk that circled the Green, the concrete path along which the rope lay waiting for her. A man stood where the ends of the rope met, his torso rising from the fog.
She pulled up short, boots skidding on the stone. She started to remember something. The smell of a neck? The taste of skin? The slide of her belly against another?
Saliva filled her mouth. She shuddered. But she didn't know this man.
He wore a black wool coat like hers. Stubble shadowed the tanned skin over his jaw, and thick black brows arched over his dark eyes. His face had blotched from the cold and steam bursts puffed from his mouth.
"Do you live there?" He pointed over her shoulder.
She glanced back at the stone house, and saw her home as though for the first time. Narrow, tall windows, darker than the sky. Steep-pitched, slate-tiled roof. Blocks of granite forming the walls of all three stories. The only building inside the Green. Her family home. Images tapped the edges of her mind-a last name she could no longer remember, a mother, a father, three brothers.
She turned back to tell the man he had to leave, but he was already moving away through the mist. She didn't stop watching him until he disappeared into the apartment building across the street with its rows and columns of ocher-lit windows, one of the dozens of city structures that frowned down from outside her world.
The mist was at her chest now, her neck. So cold it hurt, the wet shadow washed over her chin and face with a sound like distant waves, and a pressure that squeezed her lungs shut. The cloud rose above her head, above the city, and vanished into the star-salted sky. The lights in the windows went dark as the sleep fell over the city, the same oblivion that seized Sylvie during the day.
She rolled her shoulders, awake at last and glad to be alone again. But she was always alone. She never saw anyone. For all she knew she never would again. But that didn't matter. She had work to do.
The rope lay on the sidewalk, gleaming silver in the night like a newly-molted snake. She picked up one end and began the nightlong process of winding it up.
The next morning, Hugh drank the coffee he found on the kitchen counter in three long draws and left his apartment. He rubbed his eyes as he stepped into the chill morning, then let the scent of the city fill his lungs-asphalt, pipe smoke, a thousand breakfasts sizzling in butter.
His legs stirred the morning mist as he walked. To his left, the eastern sky had striated in preparation for sunrise. A band of pale yellow silhouetted the city, a strip of clouds stretched out above the buildings, and morning's eggshell blue arched up and over his head.
When he looked back down, he saw a woman standing on the sidewalk where the coil of rope lay hidden beneath the mist. He hurried forward, pulse speeding like his feet.
She looked up. His steps slowed as he registered her dark hair, the shadows beneath her cheekbones, the pallor of her skin, the uncertainty in her maple-syrup eyes. The mist reached his stomach where something roused inside, a storm forming. His palms moistened, and his fingers closed into fists.
"Who are you?" he said.
"What are you doing here?" She spoke over his words before he had finished.
Then she looked down at the chest-high fog and ran back into the stone house.
The mist hit his face like an electric sheath of ice. It lifted away as the jellied brilliance of the sun oozed up behind the buildings.
He turned to let the light wash his face, sweep away that strange meeting with-had he talked to someone? Of course not. He never did, not since before, that long ago time of bills and ham sandwiches.
His thoughts leaned back toward the rope, its loops gilded in the sunlight. He took off one glove to scratch at his whiskers, permanently arrested in a three-days' growth, then hefted the rope over his shoulder.
He began his circuit of the Green, his pace slow and even as he unwound the rope, binding the wild place away from the city. For the first dozen steps, he couldn't help checking the sidewalk behind him again and again, making sure he really was alone.
The next evening, Sylvie sipped her tea in the kitchen. Something nagged at her memory. Something that had happened-when? She couldn't remember, and had no more time to try. She finished the tea, pulled her coat on, and headed outside.
The mist was beginning to form in tendrils near the ground. At the sidewalk, a man in a black wool coat held the end of the rope. Sylvie stopped. The memory twitched again.
She started forward. "Stop," she said, raising her voice.
The man looked up in alarm, then back down at the rope. He let the end fall into the ankle-deep mist, completing the loop. But his gaze locked onto Sylvie's and recognition moved within her. The mist rose to her ribs. Her breath came shallow and fast.
"You lay the rope," she said. "Why?"
His eyes narrowed. "I wouldn't have to if you'd leave it alone."
He looked down at the mist, then ran across the street.
"What's your name?" she called after him.
He ran inside the apartment building. Its windows peered down at the Green with suspicion, like the lights in the other buildings at a hundred heights and depths.
The mist swept her face with its freezing rinse. The city lights extinguished, leaving a black skyline against navy blue.
Her breath shook as she filled her lungs. She had been upset. Why? Hands on her hips, she tried to reach back in time, but the memory was gone. She turned, searching the Green, the city, the ground. The satiny rope lay before her like a summons, leading her mind along its path and into the dark distance.
She began her loop, one step after another, coiling the rope as she walked and freeing the Green once more. But she had been upset. That knowledge followed her around the Green, half a step behind her all the way.
Clouds hid the sky when Hugh arrived at the Green the next morning, a thick layer of gray shot with black streaks like rips. A woman stood on the sidewalk as though waiting for him, hands in the pockets of her black coat. The coil of rope rested on her shoulder, and the mist reached her booted ankles.
His weight shifted to the balls of his feet, ready to fight. Or to reach out and touch her neck, to rest his face on her chest, to confirm his inexplicable knowledge of what it felt like to run his hands up that waist and over those ribs.
She looked down at the rope, then held it out toward him. "You want this?"
He took the rope from her. "I don't need help."
She opened her mouth and closed it again. The mist was at her knees.
"I'm Sylvie."
He heard her name echo twice, fading each time.
"Hugh." His voice echoed, too, skipping like a stone over the mist.
She lifted a hand toward him. He held a hand out to her. Their gloved fingers didn't quite touch. The mist reached her chest, then her neck.
She shook her head and sprinted for the house, pausing to look back over her shoulder before the door clicked behind her.
The mist poured itself upward and away.
His hand still reached toward something that wasn't there. What had she said her name was? What had who said her name was? He closed his eyes, rubbed his lids. The rope pulled against his shoulder. He couldn't remember.
Still frowning, he began his loop of the Green with measured steps, feeding the rope out to the sidewalk and clinging like lichen to the memory of the escaped memory.
Sylvie woke that evening on the kitchen floor. Her skeleton ached. She pushed herself up from the chilled stone and rubbed her arms. What had kept her so long this morning? Whatever it was, it wasn't going to happen again. She hauled herself up to the table and wrapped her numb hands around the tea mug. For a moment she felt nothing, then heat needled her fingers.
She pulled her coat on and swallowed the hot tea. Scarf, gloves. She ran out the door.
Outside, wind from the west pushed at her, whipping her face with loose hair. It didn't touch the mist, though, which was only a spider wisp blurring the ground. A man stood at the sidewalk, hands in his pockets.
She shivered neck to pelvis, then walked forward more slowly.
"Hugh." She hadn't shouted, but her voice carried over the flaying wind.
He jerked up at the sound, squinting. "Sylvie?"
She kept walking forward. "I want you to stop binding the Green."
"Could you stop? Would you?" He took a step toward her.
The mist was at her waist, and she was right in front of him. "Never."
He leaned in, pupils widening, breath warm on her face. Then his mouth was against hers, flattening her lips between his and her own teeth. He smelled like coffee, tangled sheets, confused dreams. The wind rose to a roar as she kissed him back.
And Sylvie remembered, all at once. Everything. Childhood, her family, the years with Hugh, every circuit of the Green since then, a string of sunsets and sunrises as long as the rope itself.
He pulled away, panting in time with her breath, his fingers pressed into her shoulders, his cheeks mottled. Neither of them managed a word before he let go and ran away.
The mist rolled over her and the city, leaving the buildings still and black. The wind disappeared, like Hugh had.
Hugh? She frowned. She didn't know a Hugh. She didn't know anyone.
"Hugh," she whispered.
The shape of the sound fit in her mouth. She licked a strange taste from her lips-more like coffee than tea-then picked up the rope and began circling the Green with only the night for company.
© Joanna Gardner
Joanna Gardner's work has appeared in The Rose & Thorn, Rosebud, and The South Dakota Review. You can visit her online at joannagardner.com.