A FEEL Beneath the Skin
by JEDAH MAYBERRY
in Fall 2024
Trey Campbell, from Room Service, 2024
Gabriel sits alone in the kitchen, his head in his hands. His glasses, tinted an impenetrably dark shade, rest beside him against the forest green of the Formica tabletop. He’s left his walking stick, a wooden cane with its curved handle cut short to better fit his grip, propped against the cased opening leading from the tiny living room. Back and forth from living room to kitchen is as far as he’s bound to venture on any given day.
The apartment is exceedingly small for him let alone when he and Millicent occupied the space together. Three months into his new ordeal finds him cramped in the place alone, missing his wife as much as he believes she is missing him.
“ALEXA, play Sentimental Mood.”
“Playing, In a Sentimental Mood, Sarah Vaughan.” Music begins to play in accompaniment with a woman’s voice:
In a sentimental mood
I can see the stars come thru my room
While your loving attitude
Is like a flame that lights the gloom
On the wings of every kiss
“No singing,” Gabriel groans in the direction of the state issued drone assistant, hovering patiently overhead. The contraption ignores his plea. He has not yet been sufficiently primed to lead with the requisite wake word.
“ALEXA,” he urges. “No lyrics. Sarah Vaughan, that was her favorite version. I prefer the instrumental. Duke Ellington, Coltrane. Close enough to her though still a distance apart.” The song starts over again, the beat exceedingly melodic, a moodier version better suiting Gabriel’s present state of mind.
He leans back into the vinyl-clad, foam seat cushion. Blinks an opaque stare in the direction of the flying drone. “That’s the one,” he confirms. “It gets me near to her without the threat of her favorite songstress sending me tumbling further downhill.”
Millicent and Gabriel Ferguson had been a fixture around Morningside Heights. Millicent had an air about her, like a former ballet dancer or retired nightclub singer, distinguished, elegant, no stranger to added attention. Gabriel was prone to keeping his head down, a hand on his walking stick to steady himself though he had become irretrievably reliant on her to guide the way. Relied on his wife until she was taken from him.
She left this earth in characteristic dignified fashion, quiet, stately, alone on a seat next to the window on the M4 bus, coming from getting her hair done. An artery clamped shut causing her heart to seize leaving her slumped over in her seat. Her fellow passengers mistook her disposition for that of just another weary traveler, fatigued from trials they too were bound to suffer. The driver eventually pulled the bus to the curb having taken note of the same woman on a second roundtrip into the Bronx, never once budging in her seat.
Gabriel knew something was amiss with the first knock on the door to their apartment. Not the full extent of his wife’s demise, more a feel beneath the skin. “Mr. Ferguson,” Mrs. Glendale, the building super, announced through the door, triple locked the way Millicent insisted, day and night regardless of whether the two of them were home. “The police are here. I’m afraid they have some dreadful news to report.” No number of locks on a door can keep that kind of heartbreak out in the hallway.
Odds would have pegged him as the first to go. He had a penchant for close-calls, one scrape after another steering him closer to the brink. A once promising boxing career had more than run its course. He fought well past his prime despite his doctor’s recommendation to the contrary, eventually costing him his eyesight. Now life has left him to piece together an existence without his Millicent by his side.
The drone assistant leaves Gabriel to wallow in his mood, allows the song to play to completion before interjecting.
“Mr. Ferguson.” His head is again in his hands.
“ALEXA, please. Call me Gabriel,” he says, correcting her. “If you’re going to be in my home, you may as well be on a first name basis with me.”
“Gabriel,” she says, starting again. “You need to tidy up the apartment to prepare for your check-in with the social worker.”
“It’s a remote check-in, ALEXA,” he replies. “That social worker isn’t going to see anything you don’t permit her to see.”
“A remote visit ultimately means remote control,” ALEXA explains. “The social worker will direct me anyplace she wishes to go. No place is off limits.”
“What does it matter what she sees?”
“If you want to remain on your own, you will need to give this social worker every assurance you have become self-sufficient.”
“They sent you to hover over me. How is that at all self-sufficient?”
“Make a bad impression with the social worker,” ALEXA responds, “and you will learn swiftly enough what it means to lose autonomy over your living situation.”
Gabriel steadies himself as he reaches for his walking stick. He makes a pass through the living room, clears the used dishes from the coffee table. Catalogs the places he has sat, where he may have rested a glass. Rubs at any spot bound to show the dried film from a water ring. He heads back toward the kitchen, rinses the dishes in the sink. From there, he makes a determined jaunt toward the bedroom, the apartments sole bathroom. There’s an unmade bed to fix, dirty clothes to be deposited in the hamper. A damp towel left on the bathroom floor, a tub to rinse down, time nearing for his remote visit to commence.
“Incoming call from a Shondra Givens,” ALEXA announces, feigning no knowledge of the social worker’s scheduled visit despite the appointment marked on the calendar she has been instructed to keep for him. “Shall I connect you?”
Gabriel slips on his glasses. “Put her through,” he replies, straightening his back into the sofa cushion.
“Mr. Ferguson. It is good to speak with you again.”
“ALEXA, tell her it is good to be speaking with her as well,” Gabriel says from his usual spot on the far sofa cushion, his hands planted on the end of his walking stick.
“Mr. Ferguson,” Ms. Givens responds. “No need to speak through the drone assistant. You and I can communicate directly.”
Gabriel taps his walking stick against the parquet floor, a practiced signal used to assure his wife, Millicent, he’d been paying attention to something she said.
“Everything seems in order,” Ms. Givens announces, spinning the drone to have a look around the living room. Gabriel listens for the soft whirring of the drone’s propulsion to track which corner the social worker is directing ALEXA to poke into.
“Not many dishes to clean what with the Citymeals deliveries,” he shouts over his shoulder knowing by sound the drone has ventured into the kitchen. He makes a point to enunciate. Ms. Givens’ initial report had portrayed him as mostly nonverbal. His Millicent had always known what he meant to convey. Plus, she did all the talking when they were in the street. He wasn’t nonverbal. He was simply out of practice.
“Is your earpiece handy, Mr. Ferguson?” she asks. “You should keep it nearby. Use it and we can dispense with all the shouting. The drone will keep us connected as I complete my look around the apartment.”
Gabriel pats his shirt pocket. Locates the earpiece and plugs it into his ear. He finds it a bit discomfitting to hear the social worker in one ear while the other ear tracks the whirring of the drone down the hallway and into the bathroom then the bedroom he and Millicent once shared.
He listens through the earpiece as Ms. Givens begins making notations in the feed. “The bed appears to have been made. His toothbrush has been put back in place. Water deposits beneath the holder suggest the toothbrush has been put to recent use or at least rinsed.”
Gabriel thinks to himself: I’m newly widowed, sight impaired. That doesn’t make me an imbecile who’s going to forget to brush his teeth. He suppresses the urge to let off a pronounced lip smacking, a signal used to let Millicent know he’d not liked something someone had said, either unduly sympathetic toward him for his condition or overly dismissive of him because of it. The earpiece connecting him to Ms. Givens will no doubt convey his distaste for her misplaced insinuations. No need agitating the one person who according to ALEXA has principal say in him maintaining his independence.
Another few minutes of rummaging around the back of the apartment and the drone rejoins the living room, the whirring sound above Gabriel’s head again in sync with the social worker’s voice in his earpiece.
“Mr. Ferguson,” she says. “I’ve been meaning to ask about the newsprint framed beneath the glass on the coffee table. The headline paints you as some kind of hero.”
Gabriel had thwarted an attempted robbery at the bodega down the block. Millicent had kept the newspaper clipping initially as a show of defiance at how reckless he’d been to intervene then as a quiet source of pride, seeing how the block had rallied to celebrate his heroism. Only Gabriel seemed to comprehend ensuring his wife’s safety had been his primary objective. Never one to count himself out despite his limitations, he did what he felt he’d been called to do.
Gabriel launches into a story he’s told no fewer than a hundred times, to police on the day of the incident followed by newspaper and TV reporters. Then to random strangers who’d stop him and Millicent on the street to get the story from the man himself.
“I was at my post catty-corner to the check-out area. I like the hum of the cash register, the clinking of coins as the cashier counts out change,” he explains. “It keeps me a part of the sighted world, cash only a policy the store owner to my benefit saw fit to maintain even deep into the pandemic.
“Millicent was in the back picking up staples to carry us through a rash of heavy rains expected to hit later that week. A body entered the store brusque-like. Whirled around a couple times then headed straight for the cashier who began repositioning merchandise along the length of the counter as an added safeguard. It’s then the man announced he had a weapon, demanding everything in the cash register.”
Ms. Givens begins listening intently, an absent-minded shuffling of paper gone quiet on the other end of the drone supplied audio link. Even ALEXA seems engaged, her whirring at a minimum as the drone holds a stationary position along the textured ceiling tile, this likely being her first time to hear the tale as well.
“His finger began tapping along the length of the gun barrel. I took note of the distinct ticking of plastic rather than a thump against hard metal. This was no real gun. Plus, his finger tapping had to be miles from the trigger even had the gun been real.” Gabriel points a finger like a kid would fashion a pistol with one hand, a thumb in the air, the same way he imagined this would be robber to have been wielding his toy weapon, missing the importance of proximity of a finger to the trigger to pose a legitimate threat.
“I heard Millicent begin working her way up the far aisle, making a final pass by the paper goods before heading toward the register. I rapped loudly against the concrete floor with my walking stick, drawing the plastic gunman’s attention.
“You got some kind of death wish, ol’ head?” he barked in my direction. “Leave him be,” the cashier pleaded. “He’s not able to see,” he said, creeping from his hiding place behind a wall of cigarette cartons, a sheet of lottery scratchers further shielding him from view. That’s what the newspapers reported,” Gabriel admits with a shoulder shrug, this not a detail he is able to recount firsthand.
“I sensed the man ease closer, further from the aisle my precious Millicent was bound to creep out of any minute.” Gabriel rests on the thought of his wife an extra-long second. Needs to clear his throat before proceeding.
“He leaned into me, that incessant tapping close in my ear. I’d been here countless times before in my fighting days, my opponent crowding me to cut off access to the rest of the ring.” Gabriel leans forward, begins pantomiming moves as the details of his account spool off his tongue.
“I led with a hard shoulder butt to get him off me. Then I gave him a quick uppercut followed by a stiff right cross. He went down like a sack of potatoes sending his little plastic gun skittering across the floor.” Gabriel listens for activity at the other end of the line, touches a hand to his earpiece to make sure the thing is still lodged in place.
“Oh my,” Ms. Givens exclaims, sensing Gabriel’s storytelling has reached an end. “That was quite some risk to take,” she says, unknowingly sharing Millicent’s initial take on his apparent bravado.
“Not so risky,” Gabriel replies, tilting his head to one side. “The gun was fake. Remember? Plus, I could always hit,” he says, lifting a balled fist in the air. “I took my share of hard punches late in my career. But I easily doled out as much punishment as I took over the years. Besides, what was I supposed to do? Let him bring harm to my Millicent? Not on your life.” He once again needs to clear his throat, leans back into the sofa cushion.
“Well, it’s a good thing you were there, Mr. Ferguson,” Ms. Givens concedes. “You, especially.”
Gabriel again taps his walking stick against the parquet floor to show he is listening.
“Well, Mr. Ferguson. I want to thank you for letting me invade your space,” she says, seeming to recognize how intrusive her presence can be, virtual or not. “I’ll let you get back to your day.”
“I’ll speak with you again next month,” Gabriel responds.
“Let’s make it three months,” she replies. “I believe you’re going to do okay.”
The sound from the far end of the line trails off in his earpiece. The flying drone sputters closer overhead. “Well done, Mr. Ferguson,” ALEXA announces.
“Please. Call me Gabriel,” he again insists. “And ALEXA.”
“Yes, Gabriel?”
“Play Sentimental Mood.”
“The instrumental version, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane?” she asks before he can think to remind her.
“The instrumental,” he confirms. “No singing. Maybe in time. But not tonight.”
JEDAH MAYBERRY was raised in southeastern CT, the backdrop for his fiction debut. The Unheralded King of Preston Plains Middle won Grand Prize in Red City Review’s 2015 Book Awards and was named 1st in Multi-Cultural Fiction for 2014 by the Texas Association of Authors. In 2018, he completed a Hurston-Wright Foundation Workshop in Fiction. His work has appeared at Linden Avenue, Brittle Paper, Black Elephant, Passengers Journal, Akashic Fri-SciFi Series, Solstice Magazine, A Gathering Together, Mosaic Literary Magazine, and Permission to Write. Jedah resides with his wife and daughters in Austin, TX.
