"Fools Who Step in Rings" by Vanessa Tamm
Abby stuffs her mouth with paper, wraps a towel around her head, and crawls into her coat closet. She leans back against the long down jackets, taking short breaths through her nose, smelling mothballs and damp, imagining her blood is slowing down. She sits there for so long her fingers begin to tingle. Small blue and green asterisks appear, pushing against her eyes, and she hopes for a correction, or at the very least, an explanation. She needs to know what it’s like to drown on solid ground.
Two hours earlier, she had stopped at a grocery store in a town off the highway to buy peanut butter crackers. It was the beginning of the school year, and she was thinking of the stack of ungraded spelling tests on her kitchen table; she was thinking of a little boy in her class who had a bowl cut and turned in homework that smelled sweet and earthy, like beetroot; she was thinking of her grandfather in the hospital, shouting at the nurses for so long that Abby finally slipped out of the room to drive back home. She was thinking of these things while sitting in her car, brushing crumbs off her lap to stamp into the carpet, when she noticed the woman across the street. She was standing in front of a blue house, which was wedged between a gas station and an auto shop. Instead of the usual square-shaped yard, the property was round: a circle of soil surrounded the house and white planter pots surrounded the soil, like a fairy ring. She was wearing one gardening glove, and her hair looked pink, and Abby wondered if it was dye that had turned the woman’s hair that shade or the evening light, slanting red across the asphalt. Then the woman clutched at her chest and tumbled to the ground.
The one fish Abby ever caught, back when she was eight, flopped into the mud just like that, writhing against her line. Abby leaned forward until her neck was pressed against the steering wheel. She looked frantically around the parking lot, hoping to see a customer or a cart attendant, but the only movement came from a dog in the car beside her. The dog had its mouth pressed against the cracked window; its tongue was lolling against the glass. Abby stared at the tongue for a full minute before she remembered there was a woman in the dirt, then she opened her door and ran. The woman was lying on her stomach, her eyes unfocused and wrinkled at the edges. She was gurgling, trying to breathe or speak, and Abby had flashes of that fish, her grandfather stamping on its head again and again and again. She remembered feeling relieved when the fish stopped moving.
She was sure she yelled; she must have yelled. What kind of person wouldn’t yell for help? Then she kneeled near the woman, just outside the white pots, remembering, as the woman winced in pain, a vague warning from her childhood about fools who step in fairy rings and disappear forever. She reached her hands out but instead of grasping the woman’s wrist, she found herself scooping up the soil; it was warm and smelled of homework from that little boy. She thought back to her own school days, squatting in the grass, poking spongy mushrooms, pretending she could see wings dancing in a circle. The woman closed her eyes and Abby whispered,
‘Don’t disappear.’
Then a man came running from the grocery store, a plastic bag swinging from his elbow. He dropped his bag and pressed his fingers to the woman’s throat and yelled at Abby,
‘Why the hell are you just sitting there? What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?’
And Abby felt a jolt in her chest, like she was the woman, like she should be the one in pain. She gasped and coughed and crawled away, trying to catch her breath, thinking, for some reason, of her grandfather crying when the nurse stuck an IV in his arm. A chicken had rolled out of the man’s bag, so Abby picked it up, looked around, set it gently on the sidewalk as an offering. But the woman had already stopped breathing.
When Abby wakes up inside her closet, her neck is resting against a pair of boots and her husband is kneeling beside her trying to tear off the towel. He scratches at the fabric and tugs at the loose strings and finally pulls it up from her chin. She can’t see anything except a bright orange scarf, so she reaches out for it, finding her husband’s arm instead. They sit like this, his frantic breathing filling up the closet, her fingers curled around his sleeve, until her eyes adjust to the light. He’s slumped against the door frame, the lines between his eyes deeper than before, and she wonders how long it took to pluck her from the ring.
Vanessa Tamm holds a BA in creative writing from Birkbeck, University of London. She was a finalist for Meridian’s 2019 Short Prose Prize, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Chicago Review, Portland Review, and elsewhere.
