The Fiction of Owen Thomas

Still Life

A Short Story

Excerpt B

Mrs. Foves folded the pages back into the envelope and returned the envelope to her handbag which she closed with a snap.  The Number 6 route had added eight new stops in the past year and the ride was now up to forty-three minutes before reaching her stop at the end of Nightingale Boulevard.  She leaned her temple against the window and watched the ground on the surface of the world spin away beneath her, its colors blurring into a single streak of movement, as she sat motionless above.

Having disembarked, Mrs. Foves stood in a pool of sunlight on the street corner watching the bus labor to push itself up along the sloping arc of road that circled around the library and then up behind the museum and then, moving downhill now, roar past her back up Nightingale from whence it had come.  The man who had given up his seat was now back in the window tipping his hat.

She started to cross the street and begin the next and final four blocks of her commute to work. She stopped suddenly, one foot on and one foot off the curb, and looked up the hill at the museum.  She found something strangely compelling about the site of the edifice – two stories of dark brown, window-speckled stone, with fluted flourishes along the roofline and down the corner columns, perched on a hilly lawn – that she could not explain. 

She stood and looked at it, blazing in the morning sun, feeling the heat of the day slowly rising out of the earth, building its strength in the air.  She had been to the museum only a handful of times, and not once within the past many years.  Her last visit had been for Stars Among Us.  Billed as a celebration of local artistic talent, the exhibition had really been more of a low budget filler between far grander, professional displays. But the community enthusiasm for a display of local color had been surprising, and there was some talk of making the show an annual event.  If the idea ever took hold, Mrs. Foves was not aware of it, for she had never been back.

And while she stepped down from the Number 6 Bus onto this street corner almost every day, today was the first time Mrs. Foves could recall having taken particular notice of the museum up on its hill.  It was as if someone had quietly carried up the stone blocks and built the museum overnight as she slept and she was now seeing it for the very first time. 

No.  That was not right.  Not the first time.  The second time.  Like she was seeing the museum for the second time. For it seemed oddly familiar to her. Like an echo.