At the abandoned house near our Nana’s, we use a screwdriver to pry loose the wood from the bay window where the stained glass used to be. Inside, despite the mess, everything is as it once was—in the sink a shriveled-up bar of Dial soap, seventies stickers stuck to the back of the bathroom door (KEEP ON TRUCKIN’!). In the sink, lime green plates thick with muck. A few shattered on the floor. A fogged glass pitcher on the table we imagine filled with Tang, the drink of astronauts. On the counter, a Rotary Club cookbook, opened to Chicken Cordon Bleu. Old clothes cover the bedroom floor three inches thick—dresses, blazers, pants, underwear, bras, all blackened with mildew and rot from leaks in a ceiling that looks like a bubbling upside-down sea. In the middle of the bedroom, a pyramid of shoes rises that reminds us of something that hasn’t happened yet. In another bedroom, filled with old luggage, a polished wood baby crib. Something passed down that won’t go any further.
The place won’t last much longer. Someone has already blackened a living room wall by starting a fire where the fake fireplace is. Someone stole whatever valuables the family had years ago from the dresser drawers, cabinets, and jewelry box. Still, they missed a few things. Some photos taken on the beach where a Mexican-looking woman (swarthy! our horsey girl says) in a two-piece and a wiry man roll in the surf From Here to Eternity–style. (The oldest of us shows how it’s done, arms hugging herself, but rolls into the tide of rotted, mildewed clothes.) In one photo, a girl about our age is eyeing the man and woman, her mouth opened into a shriek or a laugh. We imagine she’s their daughter, surprised and embarrassed to find her parents are still in love after all these years. The youngest of us stuffs the photos in her pocket.
Other keepsakes are left behind. On top of a kitchen doorframe, we find a three-legged cast-iron horse with a Civil War rider. In a wool coat pocket, a makeup compact with powder still inside. A shellacked horned frog in a desk drawer. On a medicine cabinet shelf, among bottles of Campho-Phenique and yellowed Q-tips, a thin silver ring engraved with ALWAYS LOVE ANTOINE. A plea or a promise? Discuss.
As our Nana says, the mind reels. Where did these people go so suddenly without their keepsakes? Without their Chicken Cordon Bleu? Or shellacked horned frog? Were they told to leave this place or else? Were they cursed? Did their luck turn against them? Or maybe, just maybe, did they get lucky? Did they leave before whatever was coming got here?
We find old bills from JCPenney and Texaco. Timothy Crabtree is the man. Carmona Exposito, the woman. We piece it together in our heads. Tim and Carmona put their feet up by the fake fireplace, make their plans. We call the daughter we’ve given them Nina. Nina Exposito. We like the sound. Sexy, like an international assassin. Our horsey girl says Exposito is Spanish for “orphan.” Foundling. Abandoned, but taken in. You just look up one day and there she is down among the duckweed and cattails. Thick eyelashes and dark skin. Swarthy, our horsey girl says.
When we bring our keepsakes back in a cigar box we found (we imagine Nina smoking cigarillos), our Nana is quiet for a while. Then she tells us a story we never used to listen to, about her mother, whose family abandoned their house in Poland, just before the war. Just before the Nazis came. Everything left just as it was. Our Nana’s mother, only seventeen at the time, obsessed all her life with the things they’d left behind. She’d dream of strangers ransacking the place. But then one day—isn’t it always “but then one day” in these stories?—our Nana’s mother had a dream about a woman, a stranger combing a little girl’s hair with a left-behind whalebone comb, the one our Nana’s mother had combed her own hair with, hair that at the time of the dream had been falling out in the sink. It made our Nana’s mother happy that these things had gone on without her, that they had a life of their own.
The clock ticks loud and slow in our Nana’s kitchen.
Our Nana lifts the cigar box lid again and again, as if she expects to find something different inside each time.
See the abandoned house? See the flames roll over the clothes along the floor, leap to gauzy curtains? See the wallpaper blacken and curl? See the bindings and ligatures ignite?
We’re not here. We’ve taken our things and gone.
Acknowledgments
I’m especially grateful to Tommi Ferguson for her guidance, vision, patience, and love. And to Ethan Bassoff and Pat Strachan, without whom…
Heartfelt thanks to Dean Blackwood, Scott Stebler, Ben Fountain, Miles Harvey, Jordan Smith, Rosa Eberly, Janet Burroway, Jarrett Dapier, Ellie Blackwood, Darren Defrain, Debra Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jill Meyers, who generously read early and late versions of See How Small and helped improve it.
To my parents, Anita and Bob Gatchel and Bill and Lois Blackwood, for their love and generosity.
And special thanks to the Whiting Foundation, The Texas Institute of Letters, everyone at Little, Brown and Company, and to my colleagues and students at Roosevelt University and Southern Illinois University–Carbondale.
About the Author
SCOTT BLACKWOOD is the author of two previous books of fiction, In the Shadow of Our House and We Agreed to Meet Just Here, and a recipient of a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award. A longtime resident of Austin, Texas, Blackwood now lives in Chicago.