Read the Excerpt: Lay Your Armor Down by Michael Farris Smith
Chapter 1
She moved in the solemn lamplight of the cluttered house like the vague figure of a troubled dream. She shuffled from room to room, opening drawers and closet doors and picking up things and putting them into the grocery sack. No sense or order in the gathering. A random ring and a broken bracelet from a spilled jewelry box. One shoe. A ragged notebook from the bottom of a stack of other ragged notebooks. Two postcards from a longdead sister. A handful of hairclips. A small wooden picture frame that held the rudimentary drawing of an angel that had been created by her child decades before.
She wore a thin housecoat that hung on her aged and slender figure. Her gray hair in a matted mess. She talked to herself as she moved throughout the house. Reminding herself of errands that had been years ago completed and gossiping about people she no longer knew and singing fragments of songs that had once played on the radio during the summer days of her smalltown youth. In doorways she would stop and look into the shadows and touch the tip of her index finger to her chin and hold it there in troubled thought and then she would begin again to fill the sack with the random fragments of time gone by.
At the end of the hallway the closet door was open and the contents overflowed and spilled out onto the floor as if the house was regurgitating its own clutter. The pace of her rambling quickened as she dropped to her knees and began to dig into the closet as if just remembering something essential. Her arms thin and weak but working in a sudden fever as she pushed away dirty towels and newspapers and shoeboxes and she burrowed into the closet. At the bottom of the pile she found a red tin coffee can and she opened the top and felt inside and touched the roll of cash. She kept digging and she pulled out three more coffee cans from beneath the rubble and each one held a roll of cash of various size. A savings hidden away and then forgotten and then remembered again in the swirling winds of her mind. She dropped the rolls of money into the grocery sack with the random gathering. Ran her fingers across her pallid face. Her eyes like deepset windows into a sprawling world. She seemed to gather herself and she let out a great exhale as if arriving at a moment of resignation.
She stood and straightened her housecoat. Stepped out of her slippers and brushed off her ashy feet and then she stepped back into them and she tucked the grocery sack under her arm and she made for the front door. She opened it and the nightwind greeted her and she gazed out into the darkness. A traveler readied for some journey.
A starblown sky above the winding road that led from the house. The road badly patched and bumpy and she stumbled twice but caught herself both times. Cursing the uneven ground in quick insults before returning again to the harried conversations of her lost world. She wandered from the road and into a field where she pushed through the kneehigh grass. Where searching eyes busied with the hunt stopped and stared in the direction of her shuffling and the wind pushed at her wild hair and slushed through the wild grass and on the other side of the field she entered into the woods where the moonglow gave shadows through the trees and where she held out her hands and touched the trunks as she moved through the forest. The dark guardians willing to give her pass. The wind shook leaves from the limbs and they fell around her in swirls of decay as she stepped across the leafstrewn earth. The small crunches of aged and careful steps.
She was not afraid until she was deep into the woods. She stopped and looked around and whatever confused purpose had been there to guide her slipped off into the dark and left her alone. There was wind and there were the calls of the night and between the black treelimbs there were stars and moon. The heavens infinite. She leaned her back against a tree and hugged herself as if suddenly cold and she began to cry.
She cried and began walking again in no direction. Moving through the woods in a confused and careful gait and beginning to call out the names of people who passed through her mind. Names that both meant something and meant nothing. Her father and a woman she once sat next to on an airplane and a pigtailed friend from childhood and the old man who taught her to ride a horse and the boy who sacked her groceries once upon a time. The wind gained strength and the limbs swayed and bent and her hair whipped on her head and she clutched the sack with both hands and called out to anyone who might be listening and she lost a slipper and moved with one bare foot and panicked eyes and a deepening fear that something in the dark was going to devour her. She was lost in head and heart and soul and she stopped and stared up at the moon and she began to question it as if it had the answers to the universe. Who are you and where am I and what are we and the questions continued and carried her as she meandered through the dark. Walking into branches that scratched her face and bits of leaf and limb getting stuck in her hair and she lost her other slipper and she was no longer crying and no longer questioning the moon but now transformed into something ancient and mindless and driven by some preordained task as if she was no longer of grayed flesh and bone but instead a shapeless spirit of the wood that drifted timelessly. She moved through the night in the random pattern of wind and then through the trees she saw the firelight. She fixed her eyes on the flames as she pushed away lowhanging limbs and crunched across the leaves and her mouth moved as if speaking but she was soundless as she came into the clearing.
Two crouching silhouettes next to the fire. Two figures rising when they looked up at the old woman who emerged from the wood. Twigs in her hair and a torn housecoat and bare feet and sticklike legs and the distant gaze. She regarded the dark figures and then she looked again into the starstruck night. At the marblewhite moon. She let her arms fall to her sides in a great release and she spoke in some language they did not understand. She then fell silent and the sack dropped from her hand and spilled onto the ground. A spindle of cash rolled forward and settled in the firelight and there was no judgment among them but for the emptiness in which they all stood.
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