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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 55 > Fiction >Beth Cato - Biding Time

Biding Time

          We sat together every day of the trial, hands entwined where our thighs met. No matter how grim the testimony, we sat it out as a silent team. We were one, strong.

          After the verdict came, we watched together as Mr. Land was led away. He still radiated suave charisma, even in a vivid orange jumpsuit, his chiseled face smug beneath a silver sweep of hair. He met my eyes, briefly, in passing, and my innards curdled.

          The prosecutor told us that with the trial complete and the sentence of 150 years, we could now find closure. What is closure? How do you close a door if the house has burned to ashes?

          “Maybe things will be easier when he’s dead,” I said. “If anyone deserved to burn for all eternity, it’s him.”

          We returned to our hollow home, trying to resume our lives. My husband went back to work as a local truck driver. He awakened in the darkness of morning, yawning with a snap of his jaw. His footsteps creaked down the hall, back and forth, as he shuffled between the bathroom and the kitchen. He returned home late, after I was in bed, and I would only be faintly aware of the solid warmth of his body dropping beside mine. His days off varied little, the only difference being that he spent the day twiddling with wood in his shop out back, and the chair opposite mine was occupied during silent meals.

          It was hardest on me, and I think he would even agree with that. I was the one in the empty house all day long. I was the one restless and waiting at 3:30 most every weekday afternoon, waiting for that telltale rattle of the screen door and the sound of the refrigerator door opening. It was quickly apparent I couldn’t stay home all day, or I was going to go mad. I went back to school and earned a certificate in culinary studies, soon afterward getting a job in the bakery at the grocery store down the street. There was a sort of catharsis in working with the dough, twisting elongated strips like miniature necks and pounding a risen round into compliance. Still, there was no lasting satisfaction from labor. Work made the hours chug by and kept abject misery at bay. Always, there were more doughy necks to twist and mounds to compress, never ending, never ceasing. No completion. No closure.

          We aged like that, drifting in our parallel lives. One day we were called into the prosecutor’s office again. There was a new man in the job now, a young fellow with a buck-toothed lisp.

          “I thought it best to let you know,” he said. “About Mr. Land’s condition before the media carried the story.”

          Synchronized, we perked up. “Is he dying?” my husband asked, his hands clasped.

          The prosecutor shook his head. “No,” he said, slowly. “That’s the issue. It’s been twenty-five years, and he hasn’t aged at all. He’s in exactly the same condition as when he was arrested.”

          “But,” said my husband. His eyebrows scrunched as he calculated. “That would make him about a hundred.”

          “Yes,” said the man. “It’s being investigated of course, but—”

          We looked at each other, my husband and I, both scrutinizing the signatures of our age: the white hair, wild chin whiskers, and sagging softness of our jowls. I think we both understood at that moment that we wouldn’t be getting justice in our lifetimes, that Mr. Land was somehow cheating death in a dark way we didn’t even want to comprehend.

          It was some five years after that that my husband died. It happened on a Saturday. He didn’t come in for supper, so I went out to his shop and found him there, his head lying on the wooden table as though he was sleeping. I stroked his wispy hair in a way I hadn’t in years, then called the authorities. I carried on, just as I always had. Things didn’t change much. The laundry load was lighter, the grocery bill lower. In the wee hours of the morning, I still heard his feet pace the hall, and I knew he was as present as he ever was.

          There was no brilliant light when my own time came, no overwhelming bliss. The restlessness of life continued, like a burr against my nonexistent skin. We were together again, hand in hand as during the trial, drifting. Waiting for that promised closure.

          I think our sentences were rendered the day that two beautiful girls, aged eight and ten, didn’t make it home from school. Somewhere in a cell, Mr. Land is biding his time, knowing he’ll outlive his jail sentence and be a free man. Somewhere, in the space between life and death, we wander this house, waiting for the rattle of the screen door and two girlish giggles as backpacks smack the floor.

          Even if Mr. Land does eventually die, I don’t know if that will really change anything. After all, we were haunting these halls long before we were ghosts.









Beth Cato resides in Buckeye, Arizona with her husband and son. Her work has appeared in Niteblade Fantasy and Horror Magazine, Crossed Genres, Six Sentences, and the books The Ultimate Cat Lover, Chicken Soup for the Soul: What I Learned from the Cat, and Chicken Soup for the Soul: True Love. Her story, “And Yet Stars Still Existed,” has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. For more information regarding her current projects, visit www.bethcato.com.
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