It Will End with Us by Sam Savage Page A

in the birdseed?”
    Maria is forty-seven years old and believes in magic. She has believed in magic since she was achild, when her mother saw the Virgin standing on the roof of a church.
    It was a Mexican church, of course.
    I say “of course” because Mexico is a thoroughly magical place, Thornton and Silvia discovered when they traveled there.
    I personally have never traveled to Mexico.
    Connecticut is the most distant place I have traveled to. My mother traveled to Boston, New York, and Chicago. My father traveled to Brazil and Argentina. Thornton has traveled to England, Japan, and the Philippines, at least, in addition to Mexico. I can’t imagine where Edward might have traveled to by now, if he has traveled at all.
    First Edward, then Thornton, then me.
    I remember a big square high-ceilinged box of a house, dim and almost cool on hot afternoons when the louvered shutters were pulled over the windows, and ice cold in winter when the only heat was from coal grates in the fireplaces, and that had been white once but displayed vastly more gray weathered wood than paint all the time I lived there.
    I remember as a young girl saying to myself, “I am Eve Annette Trezevant Taggart of Spring Hope,” half pretending I was an old-world aristocrat, and then looking around, embarrassed, fearing I had spoken it aloud.
    Even now—especially now, I suppose—I can be sitting quietly, unaware that I am even thinking at all, and suddenly I’ll hear my own voice so loud it makes me jump.
    Other times, Maria will look over at me and ask, “What did you say?” and I’ll know that I was muttering.
    I remember my mother at her desk writing and muttering to herself also.
    For a long time I thought that just being here, the physical distance from Spring Hope, would allow me to resuscitate Papa and my brothers and my mother and her famous notebooks and all the dogs and Spring Hope itself, the entire past just as it was, lying apparently lifeless in the darkness within, in the damp and fog, so to speak, as I also pictured it sometimes.
    Even though there is very little solitude here. Maria is here much of the day, or Lester is here, even when I don’t need him. Sometimes they are both here, all three of us in a row on the sofa watching television.
    And there is also the fear that once started, I won’t be able to stop.
    My mother’s name was Iris.
    That being the name both of a woman who was born in the first part of the twentieth century in South Carolina, in the southern portion of the United States, and lived and died in the so-called real world, and of a phantasm of no fixed or definite shape that draws and clusters to itself a host of other images like filings to a magnet. This phantasm was born with the first opening of my mind onto the world and will die with me, finally.
    Wild irises called blue flags bloomed every spring in the ditches that lined both sides of the narrow rutted lane that ran in from the highway to the house, and in the boggy places in the woods, and along the edges of the dikes, but I don’t know if they were the reason she was named Iris, though she was born at Spring Hope in April.
    I remember my father, in canvas jacket and rubber boots, coming through the door of the house with an armful of blue flags for her birthday.
    She once told me that the blue parts of her eyes were called irises because they were the color of the flowers and that the same parts of my brown eyes were called mushrooms.
    Before the blue flags I remember the red sorrel that we called sour grass, that grew in abandoned fields and that we chewed on for the tangy sour flavor.
    Which is the second-oldest memory I have of any kind of taste.
    The oldest, I believe, being the taste of a penny when I was two.
    Even today, if I hear someone say that something or other possesses a metallic taste, I notice on my tongue the flavor of a penny.
    That flavor being another of the memory-items, so to speak, that cling to the figment of my mother