Ellie, Eleanor at church, spins her wedding band on her finger and heads from her car toward the store. Gregory will need release soon. The path to the queue of shopping trolleys at the front of the store is arduous, so she steps as fast as she can, with caution, over the clusters of balled, rough, bent grass she meets en route. She only needs a few items, but the arthritis means she can’t carry a basket like she would have in her youth. Even for a small shop, Ellie needs a trolley.
Over her shoulder, a dozen long-abandoned cars—metal ghosts—sit at the dipped end of the car park, blanketed in thick tumbleweed, each buried too deep to dig free. Scything balls of detritus spin on by, carried in the wind.
Ellie thinks of nests—bird nests—emptied of eggs. What becomes of eggs once they’ve fallen from the warmth and comfort of their twig bed? A flashback. The disgust on her mother’s face moons ago, Ellie no older than six or seven. The one time they’d baked together, a rancid chicken fetus had fallen from a cracked shell. Ellie had refused to eat the sponge cake they’d produced, could only think of the small lump of beak and feathers—helpless, lifeless—floating in a bowl of flour and butter.
The tumbleweed pandemic does not scare Ellie, despite the bombardment of attention-grabbing headlines and the regular updates of disruption and fear the media churn out. No, Ellie does not feel alarmed. Just sad. Like a jilted bride or—how she imagines, herself not blessed with children—the mother bird of a pecked-open dead egg might feel.
The tension in her old shoulders dissipates as she escapes the melancholy of the weed-clogged car park.
To lose oneself in retail therapy, in a darned weed-free environment, is one of life’s simplest pleasures, she thinks.
***
A coin in the trolley socket, handbag resting in the fold-out toddler seat, Ellie fishes her list from her pocket, shakes it open with a firm flick, then checks her wristwatch. The clock is ticking. She needs to shop quickly. By ten at the latest, she must be home to slip into her white dress and lie with her husband.
Ten is their preferred time for release, relief, before sleep.
***
A creature of habit, she knows her way around the store like she knows Isaiah 41:10, Jeremiah 29:11, and all the other of God’s uplifting verses—the ones full of hope she recites to herself as she lies next to her husband before drifting off each night: fresh fruit and vegetables by the entrance, microwaveable meals in aisle thirteen, and milk, dairy, and bread towards the back of the store. In and out in no time at all, as fast as her knees will allow.
Ellie sets about her shopping duties, smiling with just her lips at other stone-faced customers, tsking at the newspaper section with its infestation of inflammatory headlines.
Tumbleweed Takeover.
Family Home Buried by Tumble.
School Closed due to ‘Weed Crisis.’
She has heard the stories on the radio, echoing themselves like an eternal well of mirrors. No one has come a cropper yet—no one even injured, from what she’s heard—not directly so, anyhow.
The media have nothing else to report, she thinks—the election’s now over, the same greasy, right-leaning pillock in power for another term.
Propaganda.
She loads her trolley with oranges and bananas to keep her regular, then moves toward the bakery at the back of the store, the scent of fresh-baked dough a soft balm to her sadness.
Her trolley half full, she looks up from the iced buns. To her left, on the end of the electrical appliances aisle, an advertisement screen shouts information at her. A wide-eyed blonde with a broad grin—too many teeth, perhaps—speaks without blinking from the 54-inch plasma screen. Ellie listens. Something about the advertising model wins Ellie’s attention.
“With the AshCompressor300, you can give yourself and your loved ones the sparkling eternity you all deserve. Simple to use, quick and easy to assemble—why not treat yourself or someone you know to our product today!”
Ellie moves closer to the display, moth to flame. The screen and its associated stock are sandwiched between walls of boxed microwaves and kettles. Unsure exactly as to what she is looking at—a new product, she thinks—but what is it for? Reeled in by the colorful packaging, she picks up the most prominent box, which is no larger than an average toaster, and squints to examine the small print.
A man wearing the store’s brown polyester uniform pulls a large stock trolley laden with tens more of the product on board. He sidles up to Ellie and nods at the display.
“Selling like hotcakes,” he says. He winks. His name badge tells Ellie this middle-aged man is called Gary and has worked his way up to Assistant Manager.
“What exactly are they?” she asks.
“Kits. For when someone dies. You slip their ashes in there”—he points to a large jar not dissimilar to the one you might find on a food blender—“then press that button, and in a matter of minutes, from the bottom drawer, a small diamond pops out.”
This is frightful, she thinks, how awful. With her index finger, she makes the Sign of the Cross on her chest. Her face contorts, like her mother’s had long ago, on cracking a dead bird into a mixing bowl and after Ellie had told her she was marrying Gregory. He’s no good for you, never smiles. But Gregory had smiled at Ellie on their wedding day, and Ellie had known what was best for herself, best for Gregory. Her and Gregory and Jesus shared a love like no other.
“Sales have boomed since the tumbleweed. People feel they deserve to treat themselves,” he says.
Ellie looks at her ruby-encrusted wristwatch, a gift from Gregory on their fortieth wedding anniversary. Nine-thirty. Time is pressing on—she must get home to open the door, open the window, bring her husband some relief. As much as she wants to state her disgust, she hasn’t the time. She goes about her business and makes her way to the tills.
***
Twenty minutes later, the crescent moon making a clear show of itself in the otherwise dark sky, Ellie pulls up outside her house. She lifts the shovel from the roof bracket of her car. It has become a regular occurrence to sweep away the plethora of tumbleweed that swamps her drive before she can reach her front door. She has never swept without tears in her eyes. Tonight is no different.
A thin segue cleared, she carries her groceries inside, rattling back and forth as fast as her old legs will allow.
Inside, she unpacks her comestibles and, in her actions, knocks her husband’s favorite glass to the floor.
“Oh no,” she mouths, and as she collects the shards, tears budding in her eyes, “Gregory will be cross.”
She’d purchased the glass for her beloved on a holiday back in the late seventies, on their honeymoon, from a gift shop in Lynton and Lynmouth after riding the cliff railway there. He’d smiled that day—she remembers it clearly—that broad grin, the dimple in his chin becoming more prominent, just showing itself through a thin dusting of stubble.
As a tear drops to the tiled floor, a rumble emits from the cupboard she’d used to house tin cans in. As the noise ascends in volume, she grumbles. The sound is distracting her from the hands-and-knees chore of sweeping up the glass.
Slowly standing, she fumbles for the parcel tape she knows Gregory keeps in his odd-bits draw and uses a snake of tape to seal the noisy cupboard closed.
A task for the morning, she thinks, as she places the tape back.
After this, her appetite not up to much and Gregory already in bed, she prepares a meager meal for one.
Two glasses of water and a five-minute macaroni later, she makes her way upstairs, brushes her teeth, then braces herself before opening her bedroom door.
Tumbleweeds spool out onto the landing.
“Darn it,” she cusses.
She battles her way through the thick, brambly soup toward the bedroom window. “Gregory. You wouldn’t believe what they’re selling down at the supermarket.”
Yanking open the window, she tosses the build-up of rough, bent grass outside, watching as they cascade into her garden below. This process, which she’s grown accustomed to, takes time—but it must be done. She worries that if she doesn’t remove the balls of dry grass, she won’t be able to get out of the room in the morning.
Her arms ache. Her day has been full of misery. Gregory, lying supine on the double bed, does not reply to his wife.
He’s sleeping, she thinks.
After ten minutes of pushing out weed balls, Ellie sits at his side and reaches for her husband’s hand—mere bone.
“To have, and to hold,” she whispers.
From her soft seat on the edge of the bed, her spine pressed up against her husband’s side, she sobs and addresses Gregory, aware he is unlikely to hear.
“Do these people not realize? Ashes—if that’s the decision the deceased have made—should be scattered, in the breeze, released amongst nature, when all are ready to say goodbye. Not compressed into monetary objects. How callous is the modern world.”
She looks up at the cobwebbed ceiling with its jungle of black-smudge-encrusted flypaper strips, her husband’s hand cold in hers. A solitary tumbleweed clings on—is wedged, caught between sticky strips and the dusty Tiffany-style shade. The weed ball and the glasswork shade sway together, gently, in the breeze drifting through the open window.
Swing there like a lynched body….
