Something Bright

I sighed as we sat wearily looking at one another. Imagine having so much and still looking for something else! It was bedtime and all we had for our pains were dirty hands and tired backs.
I scooted out to the bath house before I undressed. I gingerly washed the dirt off my hands under the cold of the shower and shook them dry on the way back to the house. Well, we had moved everything in the place, but nothing was what Mrs. Klevity looked for.
Back in the bedroom, I groped under the bed for my jammas and again had to lie flat and burrow under the bed for the tattered bag. Our moving around had wedged it back between two cardboard cartons. I squirmed under farther and tried to ease it out after shoving the two cartons a little farther apart. The bag tore, spilling out my jammas, so I grasped them in the bend of my elbow and started to back out.
Then the whole world seemed to explode into brightness that pulsated and dazzled, that splashed brilliance into my astonished eyes until I winced them shut to rest their seeing and saw the dark inversions of the radiance behind my eyelids.
I forced my eyes open again and looked sideways so the edge of my seeing was all I used until I got more accustomed to the glory.
Between the two cartons was an opening like a window would be, but little, little, into a wonderland of things I could never tell. Colors that had no names. Feelings that made windy moonlight a puddle of dust. I felt tears burn out of my eyes and start down my cheeks, whether from brightness or wonder, I don't know. I blinked them away and looked again.
Someone was in the brightness, several someones. They were leaning out of the squareness, beckoning and calling—silver signals and silver sounds.
"Mrs. Klevity," I thought. "Something bright."
I took another good look at the shining people and the tree things that were like music bordering a road, and grass that was the song my evening grass hummed in the wind a last, last look, and began to back out.
I scrambled to my feet, clutching my jammas. "Mrs. Klevity." She was still sitting at the table, as solid as a pile of bricks, the sketched face under the wild hair a sad, sad one.
"Yes, child." She hardly heard herself.
"Something bright …" I said.
Her heavy head lifted slowly, her blind face turned to me. "What, child?"
I felt my fingers bite into my jammas and the cords in my neck getting tight and my stomach clenching itself. "Something bright!" I thought I screamed. She didn't move. I grabbed her arm and dragged her off-balance in her chair. "Something bright!"
"Anna." She righted herself on the chair. "Don't be mean."
I grabbed the bedspread and yanked it up. The light sprayed out like a sprinkler on a lawn.
Then she screamed. She put both hands up to her heavy face and screamed, "Leolienn! It's here!
Hurry, hurry!"
"Mr. Klevity isn't here," I said. "He hasn't got back."
"I can't go without him! Leolienn!"
"Leave a note!" I cried. "If you're there, you can make them come back again and I can show him the
right place!" The upsurge had passed make-believe and everything was realer than real.
Then, quicker than I ever thought she could move, she got paper and a pencil. She was scribbling away at the table as I stood there holding the spread. So I dropped to my knees and then to my stomach and crawled under the bed again. I filled my eyes with the brightness and beauty and saw, beyond it, serenity and orderliness and—and uncluttered cleanness. The miniature landscape was like a stage setting for a fairy tale—so small, so small—so lovely.
And then Mrs. Klevity tugged at my ankle and I slid out, reluctantly, stretching my sight of the bright square until the falling of the spread broke it. Mrs. Klevity worked her way under the bed, her breath coming pantingly, her big, ungainly body inching along awkwardly.
She crawled and crawled and crawled until she should have come up short against the wall, and I knew she must be funneling down into the brightness, her face, head and shoulders, so small, so lovely,
like her silvery voice. But the rest of her, still gross and ugly, like a butterfly trying to skin out of its cocoon.
Finally only her feet were sticking out from under the bed and they thrashed and waved and didn't go anywhere, so I got down on the floor and put my feet against hers and braced myself against the dresser and pushed. And pushed and pushed. Suddenly there was a going, a finishing, and my feet dropped to the floor.
There, almost under the bed, lay Mrs. Klevity's shabby old-lady black shoes, toes pointing away from each other. I picked them up in my hands, wanting, somehow, to cry. Her saggy lisle stockings were still in the shoes.
Slowly I pulled all of the clothes of Mrs. Klevity out from under the bed. They were held together by a thin skin, a sloughed-off leftover of Mrs. Klevity that only showed, gray and lifeless, where her bare hands and face would have been, and her dull gray filmed eyes.
I let it crumple to the floor and sat there, holding one of her old shoes in my hand.
The door rattled and it was gray, old, wrinkled Mr. Klevity.
"Hello, child," he said. "Where's my wife?"
"She's gone," I said, not looking at him. "She left you a note there on the table."
"Gone—?" He left the word stranded in mid-air as he read Mrs. Klevity's note.
The paper fluttered down. He yanked a dresser drawer open and snatched out spool-looking things,
both hands full. Then he practically dived under the bed, his elbows thudding on the floor, to-hurt hard. And there was only a wiggle or two and his shoes slumped away from each other.
I pulled his cast-aside from under the bed and crawled under it myself. I saw the tiny picture frame—bright, bright, but so small.
I crept close to it, knowing I couldn't go through it. I saw the tiny perfection of the road, the landscape, the people—the laughing people who crowded around the two new rejoicing figures—the two silvery, lovely young creatures who cried out in tiny voices as they danced. The girl-one threw a kiss outward before they all turned away and ran up the winding white road together.
The frame began to shrink, faster, faster, until it squeezed to a single bright bead and then blinked out.
All at once the house was empty and cold. The upsurge was gone. Nothing was real any more. All at once the faint ghost of the smell of eggs was frightening. All at once I whimpered, "My lunch money!"
I scrambled to my feet, tumbling Mrs. Klevity's clothes into a disconnected pile. I gathered up my jammas and leaned across the table to get my sweater. I saw my name on a piece of paper. I picked it up and read it.
Everything that is ours in this house now belongs to Anna-across-the-court, the little girl that's been staying with me at night.