Callie Ann Marsalisi: FOUR, FIVE, SIX • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Callie Ann Marsalisi
FOUR, FIVE, SIX

All of the eggs are broken. One, two, three. Four, five, six. Both rows of the carton she mistakenly left open on the counter. Smashed. She closes the carton and thinks.

She’s sure she checked them at the store. She had just bought them this morning. It’s the same routine every week, half a dozen eggs, checked before being loaded into the child seat of the shopping cart. Every time the same. She doesn’t remember checking them this specific time, but she knows she did. She should have noticed six broken eggs.

She looks over the messy counter. A to-do list, half crossed off. Another plant she’s on her way to killing. A letter from her doctor, opened and crumpled. Eggs, useless. It’s possible that she has a migraine coming on. But the things she sees before a migraine strikes are more subtle—the silhouette of a backseat passenger, seen in a glance at the rearview mirror; a shape in the corner, gone when she looks directly at it. She has never hallucinated something directly in front of her in the bright incandescent light of her kitchen.

She throws the eggs in the trash without reopening the carton and moves on with her day. By the time she gets out of the shower it is dark outside, hardly a light or a movement to be seen beyond the window. She may as well be at the bottom of the ocean, with her hair wet and the floor cold under her feet. In moments like this she sometimes feels like she is the only person left in the world. Like something seismic has happened while she was in the shower.

As she eats dinner, she is dimly surprised to find that it is only five o’clock. She lets a few minutes slip by and then looks at the clock again to find that now it is nine. Nothing has changed, except another four hours of life are gone. She is in the same chair, underwater, the smell of eggs wafting over from the trash can. Maybe they were rotten. She thinks over all the ways she should have spent those four hours, and when she has finished thinking it is ten o’clock.

Twelve hours later, she sits down in front of a man she has just met and asks him what year it is.

“Nineteen fifty…two.”

If it were 1952, this man would be young. He would be yet unmarried. He would be in the Air Force, a pilot. He would not have so many lines on the backs of his hands.

The notes from the doctor say that his vision is good. It is not his vision that she is there to examine.

She has been taught not to correct her patients. It is far more taxing for a person to have their reality torn asunder each and every day than it is for the people around them to navigate their shifted perceptions. Living in 1952 is better than living in a hospital bed. Better than living at the bottom of the ocean.

The man fares better on the tasks of automatic word production, naming the days of the week and months of the year with ease. But when he is asked to count to twenty, he changes.

“One, two, three,” he says. “Four, five, six. Dear, I finished high school. Top of my class! You know I know this.”

Actually, she does not know. A mind is a deceptive thing, and a step that looks sure may be camouflaging a hollow space underneath. She pushes the man to take that step, to see if it will hold fast or falter, but he refuses. In the end, she is forced to mark the task as incomplete.

She thinks of her own to-do list, half crossed out. Incomplete. She thinks of her own mind and how it already plays tricks on her. She looks at the man across from her and wonders what differences you would see, if you cut open the tops of their skulls and took a look inside. He smiles and asks her who she is, for the third time in forty minutes.

And so it goes. In each room she steps into a new reality, one in which she is at best a supporting character and at worst a movement in the periphery to be seen and forgotten in the same instant. Her coworkers buzz in and out of rooms, hardly time for a greeting, let alone small talk. Let alone human connection. Sometimes she wonders what would happen if she just started screaming, the way she has heard some patients do. She imagines it would be forgotten as soon as she closed her mouth.

She goes to walk into the next room, to see one of her favorite patients, but when she arrives the room is empty. The bed is stripped of sheets. Her heart races, wondering if the woman has passed and someone has forgotten to tell her. She could ask someone and find out, but instead she decides to go back to the end of the hall and walk down it again, counting the rooms to make sure she’s in the right one.

One, two, three. A gap for the nurses’ desks. Four, five, six. There is the patient, sitting up and drinking tea, lighting up when she walks into the room. She had been in the wrong room, somehow. The old woman notices her relief and asks her what’s wrong. She makes up a story about being late. Sometimes it’s better not to tell a person your fears. Better not to take away their happiness for the sake of being honest.

The rest of the day passes much as every other Monday passes. When she returns home it is dark again, and she feels safe when she is inside her bubble of light floating in the darkness. Returned to her own reality. But no sooner has she taken off her shoes than she realizes she will have to leave again. She will have to go back to the store if she wants eggs in the morning.

She is buttoning up her coat when she hears it. From the kitchen, there is a ruffle and a bang and the sound of something being gently placed on the counter. She freezes, standing between the kitchen and the only door in and out of the apartment. She thinks of leaving, chalking it up to one of those sounds that somehow gets amplified by the mind—the sound of a building settling that for one reason or another triggers the fight or flight response. But she knows she has to check.

She clicks on the light and startles the bird sitting on the counter. It is black and white with touches of blue on each wing. A magpie. It cocks its head at her, wondering why she has dared interrupt it in its task of pillaging her kitchen counter. It has pushed open the nearby window, the one with the faulty lock that sometimes comes undone in a storm. She sees that the window is open, but even still she convinces herself that the bird is not there, but rather just a product of her tired mind, her aching brain. The notes from the doctor say that her vision is good.

In a few seconds, the bird will shift, ruffle its feathers and adjust its leg, and it will knock over the fork she left on the kitchen counter. In a few seconds the bubble will pop, and she will have nothing to do but scream.

One, two, three.

Callie Ann Marsalisi is originally from New England, where she earned a BS in linguistics from Northeastern University, and an MA in speech therapy from UConn. She now lives in Wilmington, Delaware. She writes upmarket fiction, science fiction, and fantasy, usually with prominent LGBT+ characters, and is working on finding an agent for her first novel. When not writing, she works backstage with the Chapel Street Players in Delaware. Four, Five, Six is inspired by her experiences working in healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic, and an encounter with a particularly clever bird in Dublin, Ireland.