Katie Cortese
Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: In Katie Cortese’s deft hands, this story juxtaposes the greatest kinds of loss with the mundane details of a life lived in the aftermath. Medieval torture shares a paragraph with the limitations of automatic doors at a gym, and “Windex and elbow-length rubber gloves” show up near the memory of a funeral. Through it all, we see the ways grief manifests: in the body working, and in memories of the body. This one’s a heartbreaker.
“Neat Freak”
Katie Cortese
The neighbors have a pool, and a trampoline. I see them bouncing, the kids, when they get home from school, little faces floating for an instant above the fenceline like heads stuck on stakes around some medieval fort. The screams would fit right in. Without seeing their faces, there would be no way to tell it wasn’t torture drawing those screeches, which sound like sheet metal being rent in two by one of the muscles-bulging monstrosities from my gym, where the bros have to stagger themselves to keep from wedging the automatic doors permanently open.
When the kids jump after school, loosing all that pent-up energy, shedding fractions and sentence fragments and French grammar like the fluff from my terrier’s beard, I vacuum. Every rug gets massaged by my state-of-the-art Bissell. Every mat. Even the linoleum and the hardwood in the hall. The engine’s steady roar turns all but the shrillest squawks to static. Holy white noise.
Sheila would be older than the neighbor kids now—the boy nine or ten, and the two girls younger, twins with glinty copper hair—but she never liked sports. At the pool, she’d read under the umbrella. In the park, playing after school, she’d pick a swing and twist until her toes barely touched, then ride the delicious unfurling. These shrieks would bother her too. She hated car backfires, fireworks, the twenty-one-gun salute at her father’s funeral.
Her father would say the kids next door are just blowing off steam. I’m too wound up, he’d say, if he were here, and Sheila too, if she were. What I need, he’d say, what I really need to do is find a hobby that doesn’t involve Windex or elbow-length rubber gloves, sponges or stiff-bristled brushes. He’d say, You can’t scrub some things away.
What got me though, what really got me, more than the screams and the neighbor children’s brief flight, more than the drum roll of their feet on the pool deck, what sent me running for the steamer and duster with the stereo blasting Queen, was the time the girls came by selling cookies for the Daisies, their mother waiting with a wave at the curb. Their trim little fingernails, rounded half-moons, flushed pink, unpainted. When Sheila was found in that hole by the river—the man who’d pulled her from her swing after school long fled to Oklahoma where he wouldn’t be caught for three weeks—her nails had peeled to the quick from clawing at crumbling earth before choking on her own spent breath. The remnants were still done in purple sparkles, rimed with the blackest dirt I’d ever seen.
My nails are wasted from scrubbing, worn to nubs I hide in my fists, but in my house everything gleams. Through the diamondized windows, after school, sun pierces the blinds sharp and holy, clean as a shriek parting air.
Katie Cortese is author of Make Way for Her and Other Stories (University Press of Kentucky, 2018) and Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories (ELJ Publications, 2015). She teaches in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University where she serves as the fiction editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.
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