The Hospice of Things
Laura was thrilled. Robert, less so. She finally found the perfect antique farmhouse table she had been looking for. It would go in the sunny kitchen of their new house, something to make it stand out from the dozens of other new, oversized houses recently built on vacant land downtown. The development had been bitterly opposed and deeply resented. It had only come about because of a zoning sleight-of-hand that had condemned a children’s playground and adjacent dog park, turning it over to developers before people in town even knew what had happened. One morning the playground equipment was gone and bulldozers arrived a day later.
But Laura was unaware of the controversy. She worked at home and shopped online, having even the most basic grocery staples delivered to her door. Robert worked in the city three times a week, taking the train early and arriving home late. In the eight months they had lived in their house, neither one of them had ever run to the store for something they needed. They did not know one single person in their development, let alone the surrounding town.
The table had been against the back wall of a cavernous indoor flea market on Route 7. She was lucky to have found it, down a row of clunky coffee tables and dirty plush swivel chairs. Laura left a deposit, borrowed her uncle’s truck, and was now returning with Robert to pick it up.
She swiped the screen of her phone, looking at pictures of the table men at the flea extricated it from the interconnected piles of wooden chairs, tables, golf clubs, beer signs and gardening tools. “Ikea had something like this but it was eleven hundred and you assemble it with one of those little L wrenches. This was only four hundred and the guy said it’s over two hundred years old. The joinery is dovetailed.”
“Dovecoted,” Robert answered, using his correcting voice with a slight rise of the eyebrows that was meant to deflect contradiction.
“They guy said dovetailed.”
“Well he meant dovecoted.”
Laura tapped her phone a few times, bringing up a picture of a dovecote. “A dovecote is a birdhouse. Says here ‘sometimes free standing, sometimes built into the eave of a house or a barn.’” He said nothing. “Sorry Professor, but the guy who actually deals antiques was right. Dovetailing is a kind of joinery.”
“Let me see that,” he said, scowling. “You can find anything on the internet.”
“No. Focus on driving the truck and stop wearing your smarty pants.”
“Then show me the bottom of the table,” he said, craning his neck to see her phone. He reached over and tried to swipe the screen.
“No! Drive this goddam truck and leave my—”
“Well I’m just wondering about the spider factor on this.”
“They said they’d have it all cleaned up.”
“It still sounds pretty webby.”
She put her hand on his cheek. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep you safe fwum da skarwy spidows.”
He pulled his head away. “It’s not the spiders. It’s the webs. I hate webs on my hands.”
“You can wear my gloves and use some lotion afterwards.”
“That sandalwood? No thanks.” He checked his mirrors and switched into the right lane.
“ARRIVED! Your destination is on the right.”
He turned into the parking lot and pulled up to the door. The table was sitting outside by a reproduction cigar store Indian. It was a rich honey color from a recent coat of wood oil. Robert got out of the truck and immediately went down on one knee to scrutinize the underside, announcing that the table was, indeed, spider web free. Laura couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed.
While Robert wrote out a check for the balance, Laura and the dealer loaded the table in the back of the truck, securing it with plastic baling twine that he swore was two hundred pound test. She smiled and nodded, not sure what he meant but not wanting an explanation from Robert about it either.
“You should have waited for me to finish signing the check so I could help you guys load it and tie it up. Did it look like he even knew what he was doing?”
“Make the next right.”
“Why?”
“Turn right on Freeborn Road.”
Robert slowed and made the turn. “What’s down here?”
“I did an area search for ‘Connecticut Antiques Trail’ and it showed red pins for all the places on Route 7, but there’s a black pin on Freeborn Road. What the hell is a black pin?” She instantly regretted asking the question.
“It’s like a black sheep or a black swan,” he said with authority.
“Those are not the same thing.”
“If you don’t believe me, Bing it.” She hated the way he always used Bing as a verb, the way some people used Google. When she hesitated, he picked up his phone and spoke haltingly into it. “What-is-black-pin-on-Connecticut-Antiques-Trail?”
“Robert, please. Not while you’re driving my uncle’s truck!”
The phone replied: “A black pin denotes an establishment that is not an officially recognized part of the Connecticut Antiques Trail because it fails to meet the strict guidelines of the Conneticut––”
“So it’s a renegade dealer,” Robert said. “Probably some old cat lady selling out of her house instead of a giant aluminum pole barn. I think we should turn around.”
“Why? ‘Cause it sounds webby?”
“No. I just don’t think we should go somewhere off the official Connecticut Antiques Trail.”
She stared at him for a few seconds. “And...why?”
“C’mon Laura. The Antiques Trail people must have a reason. Is there a review?”
“Yeah. Two reviews––two stars. The first one says ‘Weird,’ and the second one says ‘Sad.’”
“Fuck it. I’m turning around.”
“Robert, who knows why people write what they write?”
“This place made someone sad. That’s not insignificant! And I’d like to avoid triggers today if I could please.”
“Maybe they were already sad. What did you tell me about going to Disneyland when you were eleven? Do you remember?”
“That it was the saddest place on Earth? Yes, I remember.”
“That’s all I’m saying.”
He let out a breath. “What’s the name of it? What am I looking for?
“The Hospice of Things.”
“The what?”
“Slow down, it’s coming up. It’s right...here.”
Robert stopped at dirt two-track that led between large dusty lilacs. “There’s the sign. It just says ‘Hospice.’” Laura pointed to a small piece of paneling tacked to a strip of lathe. “Are you going to turn into the driveway or sit here and block traffic?”
“There’s no one behind us. You really want to go in there?”
“Why not?”
Robert turned the wheel and drove the truck between the lilacs. After a hundred feet, an old weathered farmhouse came into view. It was bare grey wood, without a speck of paint, though its elaborate gingerbread was intact. At the peak, a lacy set of garlands intertwined symmetrically around an ornate lattice. The driveway ended at a player piano, sun-bleached with buckled veneer, sitting on the damp ground.
“Let’s get it for the patio!” Robert said, but then slumped his shoulders and frowned with feigned disappointment. “Wait. It’s probably not for sale—being priceless and all.”
“Robert—just shut the fuck up.”
Laura opened the door, stepped down to the running board and then onto the ground. Tall weeds nearly engulfed the piano but within a foot of its base, a neatly mowed pathway led to another clump of lilacs and on through the field. She walked a little further and saw the pathway diverge around an island of weeds. Sitting in the middle was an old sofa, still damp with morning dew, its cushions split open and springs broken, rusting in the bright sunshine. Walking still further and up a small rise, Laura could see before her a labyrinth of mowed paths cut into the weeds and tall grasses. Shrubs sprouted from the bases of objects at every bend and intersection. She followed a path that curved around an island of lilacs, the blossoms brown and crusty amid dull foliage. Peering into the middle of the clump, she saw the ornate metal frame of a child’s crib, rusting into the ground.
She realized Robert was not with her. Backtracking slightly and looking over a patch of tall grasses, she saw him leaning against the truck’s grille, fussing with his new watch, which he referred to as his “wristband communicator.”
The path flowed across the hillside behind the old farmhouse. She looked into a bunch of sumacs and saw an Art Deco floor radio. Its joining had large gaps where exposure to the weather had forced the pieces apart. The dial was clouded and there were no knobs. Laura realized the trails through the tall grass all led past little shrubs and scrubby trees that grew around at pieces of twentieth century furniture and large household appliances that sat moldering in the shade. A washing machine with mechanical wringers marked the junction of two trails, its tank full of green rainwater and larval mosquitoes. On the opposite corner was a Mission desk, which seemed to be a relatively new arrival to the field. Rain and sun had not completely destroyed it, and books still filled the shelves between the legs. In a dense stand of a wedding cake refrigerator stood next to an unrecognizable jumble of wood and rotten vinyl from something that had nearly crumbled away.
Laura looked up to see a man standing nearby, gazing into an island of tall grass. He turned to face her, smiled, then looked back into the weeds. He was dressed like a gentleman gardener from a hundred years ago in a white shirt, a dark green tie and an apron that fell below his knees. He made a broad, theatrical gesture to the things in the weeds. “A Philco!” he called out. “Next to a Panasonic receiver!” Laura approached and peered into the weeds to see the two radios in similar states of decay. “They are completing their journeys together. We should all be so lucky to have such loyal companionship to the very end.” He turned to her and smiled. “Welcome to the Hospice of Things.” His voice was gentle. It had an easy resonance that was unhurried and inviting. It wanted nothing from her––not to have her sign up, log on, or download an app. It didn’t seek to convince, urge or assert. It didn’t twist itself into knots to capture her attention with cloying affectations or bright aspirations. It reminded her of nothing and no one. She had never heard a voice like it.
“Hello,” Laura said, and she laughed, though she wasn’t sure why. It felt good to laugh without a reason. “Thank you.” She wanted to bow, or curtsy, and though it felt odd, she was unashamed for wanting to do so. She turned, as though to introduce Robert, but he of course, was not there. “My fiancé is...oh, I don’t know where he is.” She laughed again.
The man’s eyes held a gentle, amused expression. “And what have you brought me today?” His eyebrows went up with curiosity.
“Oh, uh. I mean, we didn’t bring anything specifically to you. We just bought an old pine table. It’s in my uncle’s truck.”
“That sounds lovely.”
“Yeah, it’s supposed to be two hundred years old. It has dovetailing,” she said, enjoying the confidence she felt using the correct term. “It’s dovetailed. Beautifully so.”
“I see. Well—” he looked briefly at the ground and pursed his lips before looking up and fixing his eyes on hers. “I am prepared to offer you five thousand dollars for that table.”
Laura was terribly confused. “It’s...um, we only paid four hundred for it. It’s for our kitchen.” He nodded and smiled like an old family doctor, patient and understanding. “Our house is new, and I read online that new and rustic are a visually compelling contrast. It’s trending.”
The man closed his eyes and nodded slowly, as though someone told him this every day. He opened his eyes when she was done talking. “My offer stands at five thousand dollars.”
“You want to buy the table in our truck for more than ten times what we paid? Why?” She wasn’t suspicious, only amused. His soft face and smiling eyes put her at ease. And while some far away part of her felt that this was altogether too odd— the grass islands and decaying antiques— a larger part of her felt at peace among these things of the past, as the rain and sun left them unstuffed, unjointed, water damaged, delaminated, and rusted. There was now an odd sense of freedom growing within in her. It was a fluttering of pleasant possibility, a feeling she last felt as a child. It was the opposite of how she felt around Robert with his stacks of catalogs that he read as though they were magazines. And the days of thought and deliberation he put into ordering a pair of jeans. And her reams of unread work emails. And the notification pings from her phone. And his phone. And the way Robert had insisted that dovecote meant dovetail, and black sheep had the same meaning as black swan. And his reluctance to deviate from the approved and internet-endorsed antique sellers of the Connecticut Antiques Trail. And how their closest neighbors never came out during the day, retrieving their mail only at night. And how her car’s phone app never properly worked and no one could fix it. And Robert’s new talking watch. And how the houses being built in their complex went up overnight and were moved into and lived in by people who never said hello.
These things exhausted her. Individually they were annoying but together, they were taxing and some weekends she stayed in bed for twenty-four hours, sleeping through Saturday to Sunday at noon.
She looked around. Robert would hate this, she thought. He would be snarky and make up a meme, then verbally describe it. “I can see Dr. Spock with one eyebrow raised and the words ‘Very odd, Captain.’ Right?” But he wasn’t here, nor were any of those things, and she felt light-hearted because of it.
“So this is an art installation?”
The man smiled, pondering her question. “Insofar as art imitates life, you could call it an installation. I think of it more as a gateway to vibrational liberation.” This made no logical sense to her, but her lack of understanding did not bring frustration or judgment, rather, it was a delightful puzzle for which the answer was already unfolding inside her heart. She nodded and smiled, feeling meaning sweep over her. “Here the ‘mind-forged manacles’ are broken. The lightness you feel is because of a severation with the past’s burdens. Your present is becoming unburdened and you feel it possible to move into an expansive new existence.”
Yes! It made sense to her, and she nodded, smiling for what felt like a long time. “But these are only representations of the past,” she said. “That time— those moments are gone.”
“True, all of it is symbolic. A thing only becomes what we say it will be,” he said. “But walk the pathways. Use the representations to divorce from the past and manifest the future. And then,” his hands were a foot apart and he moved them upward, as though lifting something into the air where it diffused and dissipated. “Move into that new way of being. Become the new way.” He turned and walked into a clump of sumac, disappearing into the tall grasses on the other side.
Laura walked down a path that went around an Early American-style highboy. The brass drawer pulls were tarnished and green, and they stained the wood around them. Ahead of her was an old, Remington typewriter on an upright log, about waist high. Rusted solid, the keys were bent around each other and the type strikers jammed together in a knot. Laura reached out and touched the space bar. The carriage did not advance but the bell made a weak, muted ding.
At the sound, she remembered an upstairs bedroom in her grandmother’s house. It was the farthest from the stairs, the last room in the hallway. It had been her mother’s room, but now it was used as a sickroom for her grandchildren. As a young child, she had been put there once when she had the flu. She remembered how the room changed each time she opened her eyes. It seemed like a different place. Furniture was moved, taken away and replaced. The seasons followed each other faster than they should, spring going past summer into winter, and she had the feeling of years jumping back and forth until she didn’t know what little girl she was. Her mother was a teenager, passing by the doorway, unable to hear Laura calling. Her young grandmother, wearing a patterned dress, came to her and felt her forehead, calling her a name she did not know. A boy stood in the doorway, staring at her, but he faded away before her eyes and she was alone again. Eventually her uncle came in and carried her downstairs to watch Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. Time settled back down into the present and people looked the way they should. Laura remembered sitting on the sofa, watching Rudolph, and being very glad she was her own little girl with her own mother, uncle, and grandma.
It was gone now. All the moments she had seen while lying in that room were gone. She ran her hand through the grass, and she found herself saying goodbye. It wasn’t a conscious but more like stepping into the stream of a river and allowing oneself to be carried away. Goodbye to all the sick little girls she had been, to a teddy bear with buttons for eyes, to the knotty pine paneling, goodbye. Walking along, she felt seed heads of timothy on her fingertips. Goodbye. She could hardly remember what she was thinking before she came to this place. It felt like waking from the haze of a fever dream. Maybe that’s what cutting off the past feels like she thought. With each step, she left behind shadows and went further and further into the bright light of now. She was glad to feel the being of her own person. It felt clear, like opening a window and letting in the fresh air of morning. As she walked, the unconscious burden she carried, to people and things— all of it fell from her, and if she let go, it simply went away. It had always been her choice.
Laura thought of Robert and began backtracking her way to the truck. She was not surprised to see two men with ties and aprons carrying the dovetailed pine table past her. They set it in a grassy area a few feet off the pathway.
When she got into sight, Robert blew the horn and wildly motioned for her to hurry up. She opened the passenger door. Before she even stepped onto the running board, the words poured out of him. “Oh my fucking Christ you will not fucking believe this! I’m sitting here and this guy comes up and hands me five thousand dollars!” He held up a wad of bills inches from her face. “And he says it’s for the table that ‘burdens you.’ That’s how he said it. So, what the fuck? I said ‘Sold!’”
“I know. He made me the same offer.”
“And you didn’t say yes?” He was excited and his voice was high. He used the street slang he learned from characters on a popular TV show. “Whadda fukka wong wiff you?”
Laura didn’t look at him, and stared out over the gigantic hood of the truck. “He keeps things outside so they fall apart.” It was the best description she could give.
“Cool! Whatever! He can grind that shit up for all I care.”
“He says it’s to energetically enable the present by letting go of the past.”
“Oh sure. I bet he’s got all the crystals and sage and hot yoga.”
“I want to go home.”
He stopped gushing and looked at her. “What’s the matter with you? I sell this dovecote table for ten times what we paid and you—”
“Just take me home. I want to give this truck back to my uncle and go home.”
“What— you’re mad?”
Laura looked at him and saw the fear he lived. She saw how his expressions were made of separate faces, like the way individual frames of a film reveal details that fluid movement obscures. She saw generations in each separate face, how his cocky arrogance hung on multiple lifetimes of anger and fear. She saw the past, forming the words he spoke to her.
“You make no fucking sense. You should be glad I sold that piece of crap. We got five thousand bucks now thanks to me.”
She turned away and looked out the window. It had always been there, driving his actions and speaking through him, seven generations of a story carried forward into the moment. She had never been aware of this before, but now, as his hand turned the key, she could see clearly. Hanging from it was the dead weight of the past.
Christopher Hadin is an environmental educator and horticultural therapist. His work has appeared in Sky Island Journal, The Thieving Magpie, Better Than Starbucks, October Hill Magazine, and Schuylkill Valley Journal. He lives in Ferndale, Michigan.
