The Air Above a Campfire

• Eleanor Smith

It’s late winter and Leah sits at the bus stop. The sky is pink, easter egg pink, the color of an early morning sky, and the hum of the highway in the distance is the only thing she can hear. She has an empty feeling at the top of her stomach, almost like she’s hungry.

In high school, when she was waiting for the bus, a classmate pulled up.

“You want a ride?”

“Do you come this way every day?” Leah was surprised that she hadn’t seen him before.

“Yeah, but I’m actually running early today. Shocking, I know.”

So Jasper had started giving Leah a ride to school. Leah waited for him at the bus stop every morning, and he would pull over and pick her up. She got so used to the routine: get ready, run out the door, realize she wasn’t actually running late, and then walk the rest of the way to the bus stop. Her family would never be up that early, and she savored her time alone in the empty house.

The early morning air was so still, so peaceful. She would go through the motions, she had her routine down to a science.

The present silence is shattered by the hissing of the brakes.

“You getting on today?”

Leah shakes her head. She hasn’t ridden the bus in months.

“See you tomorrow,” says the driver as the bus pulls away.

Leah watches the bus go past. Sitting in the back row is a woman wearing a beautiful brown sweater, reading. She has wild curly hair, but Leah can tell it’s well taken care of. The woman looks kind, and Leah thinks they could be friends. As the bus stops to let someone walking their dog cross the street, Leah makes eye contact with her. The woman turns her head and goes back to her book.

The bus lurches around the corner and is gone. It is silent again, and cold. Leah walks back to her empty apartment, shivering, thinking about the beautiful brown sweater.

Jasper’s car had broken down on the way to the state park. It was early March, and Leah was dressed to run, not to sit in a rapidly cooling car. Jasper was walking to the gas station to use the phone. She was rifling around in the back seat in an attempt to find something to wear. Inside his bag, Leah found a big green sweater. She pulled it on and had stopped shivering by the time the tow truck pulled up.

Jasper jumped out of the truck, jogging towards her. As he got closer, he slowed down, and Leah could see that he was smiling sadly.

She grabbed the hem of the sweater and started pulling it back over her head.

“Keep it on. I don’t fit into it, and I want it to get used. Just… take care of it for me.”

It’s warmer today at the bus stop, but a cold feeling still sits deep in Leah’s stomach.

The bus pulls up. The brakes hiss and the doors swing open.

Leah sees the woman sitting in the back of the bus, next to the window.

“Hey,” says the bus driver. He looks shocked when Leah stands up and climbs on the bus. She taps her card and walks to the back of the bus. The woman is sitting next to the window closest to the sidewalk, and Leah sits across from her. She glances over at the book the woman is reading: The Sun Also Rises. Leah hasn’t heard of it before. The woman is wearing a thick red sweater with a pattern around the neck.

The heater running along the side of the bus turns on. The trees outside look hazy from the heat, like the air above a campfire.

Ten minutes later, the woman turns to the inside front cover. Leah sees “Renée” written in the book. Renée looks over at her again and shuts the book quickly. On the next block, the bus stops. Renée gets off. Leah gazes out the window at her, sees the corner store behind the bench, realizes that the bus she would take to get to Jasper’s apartment stops at this corner. Renée sits at the bench and watches her as the bus takes Leah away.

It’s April now, and Leah’s toes are soggy from walking through the puddles on her way to the bus stop, in front of the corner store. In the past few weeks, she’s been riding the bus every weekday. She’ll sit across from Renée in silence as they read. Leah used to try to diversify her reading, but Renée seems to like the white male authors of the early to mid 20th century.

She hasn’t spoken to Renée, but she has spent a lot of time trying to figure out what her life is like. Leah writes all these things down in a planner she had stopped using months ago. Renée only rides the bus on weekdays, she drinks tea every morning. She seems to like black tea: Earl Grey and English Breakfast. Leah bought a box once, but the tea was bitter and left her mouth feeling dry and her throat tasting sour. Sometimes, Renée gets phone calls from a 206 number, and she frantically declines them. Those calls happen every other Wednesday around 8:05 am. that had started unraveling worries her. Every time she looks at it, heat floods her body and she starts sweating. She knows that one tug could unravel the entire sleeve. She needs to take care of this sweater. She needs to wear it when Jasper comes back.

Renée will get off at the stop in front of the corner store, and Leah will get off at the next stop and walk home from there. Even though she never has a destination, it feels nice to have a routine.

A door opens across the street. Leah writes down the time in her planner: leaves work Friday, 4:36. She closes the planner and clutches it in her hand.

Leah is wearing the sweater, which is now so worn that it looks less like a knit garment and more like a solid piece of fabric. There are pills of lint coming off it, and a lot of the lint is more gray than green. She often picks them off and throws them behind her, like tossing salt over her shoulder.

Her usual bus pulls up and Renée gets off. She seems surprised to see Leah there, but she doesn’t question it and sits down at the other end of the bench.

Leah wants to say something but doesn’t know what. She hasn’t had a conversation, a normal conversation, with anyone in so long. She doesn’t want her voice to crack. She found out that he was her dad’s friend from high school. “You didn’t know that?” her dad had asked, “That’s Martin Weiss! That’s why he always said hi to you!”

Leah glances at her sleeve. The cuff

Leah stands up and crosses the street. She sees Renée’s sweater, the beautiful brown one that she was wearing the first time Leah saw her, and it is all Leah can think about. It seems so soft, so warm. Leah’s sweater feels less comforting, more constricting. She can’t lift her arms in it anymore, it’s so small. If she could knit, maybe she could weave the loose thread back into the cuff. She wants to make a sweater like Renée’s. Maybe she could ask Renée where she bought the sweater. She stops in the middle of the sidewalk and writes that down. Her hands are shaking, and she can’t feel her fingers, and the handwriting is almost illegible.

When she looks up, Renée is turning the corner. Leah walks faster to catch up. She just wants to see where Renée is going, then she’ll write that down, then she’ll go home. She just wants something to talk about. Leah tries not to think about the cuff of her sweater. The sleeves no longer cover her whole arm, they are so shrunken. The thread blows in the air as Leah walks even faster to catch up with Renée.

They’ve walked blocks at this point.

Renée is approaching a busy intersection, one with a stoplight. Leah sees the light start counting down. If Leah can’t get across the street, she’ll have to wait until next week. She looks at her feet, and notices, in some distant part of her mind, that her shoelace is untied.

She sees Renée’s back and the beautiful sweater. She starts running. The light is still counting down, and she’s half a block away. She has to make it. There’s no alternative. Her foot lands in a puddle, and she thinks about the first time she spoke with vicious. verbose. vacant. variable. voracious. viable. virulent. vulnerable. vital.

Renée. That’s why she’s writing these things down. Her next conversation has to be better.

Leah is reaching the intersection. Her foot is wet. Everything feels distorted, blurred, out of focus.

The light turns red, and Leah starts sprinting. The curb comes up, and she isn’t expecting the drop. Leah sees the little red book fall into the gutter, and she goes sprawling into the busy intersection. A car honks. The last thing she sees is Renée’s head turning, finally noticing her.

The time we have spent counting and waiting is unfathomable. When your only viewpoint is your bedroom window, and your periphery is nonexistent, you lose your friendship with time. In response to the clock and calendar slowly drifting by, we bend and stretch, turn and break. As we count and wait, we read and see and hear. We learn words.

Words we know. Words we resonate with, and words we fight against. From these words comes creativity. Beauty pours onto the pages and canvasses that fill our houses. Unlike the strictness of Roman numerals, art and literature are flexible. They flow across the page in a river much smoother than the stream of time. We can use these pieces to declutter our home and our mind, opening our eyes to the world in our periphery that we had lost so long ago. Welcome home.

When the construction of Fort Snelling was underway, John C. Calhoun sent surveyors to the surrounding area of the fort to understand geographically where they were located, the surveyors came upon the name of Costco, they decided to give it the name, Lake Calhoun, to honor the Secretary of War at the time, Mr. John C. Calhoun, the inhabitants of this land, the Dakota people have used this lake for centuries to fish, swim, clean, and more. They had already given lake a name, but they Makarska. The name translates to English as per day meaning Lake Makai, meaning earth, and ska meaning white or white Earth lake this name was given to this body of water because of its white sandy beaches.