The 19 stories in Stephen Spotte’s latest collection, Invisible: Stories, blend elements of make-believe with sharp, systematic observations and insights into the twisted manifestations of life, love, and death. The story “Invisible” from the collection is available to read here in full. Invisible: Stories is available from Open Books Direct and Amazon.

Invisible

I don’t wonder what I am or where I might be headed, and I never look back. That’s seeing yourself too clearly, the mistakes and trouble everywhere. Better to leave it behind.

It’s nice here in the barn watching sunlight slip through cracks in the old boards, throwing imaginary animals onto shadow.

About head-high there’s a knot hole shaped like a rabbit. When I was little—eight or nine—I’d come out here on summer afternoons and sit in the hay with my back against the splinters waiting for that rabbit to show itself. I’d stare and stare at the far wall, not once looking up at the knot hole, and suddenly, like magic, there was the rabbit.

As the sun moved lower the rabbit dimmed and faded away. They all laughed at me, but I could never shoot a rabbit. Squirrels are different.

The light glows purple and fades as another day goes by. Through board cracks the trunks of the trees turn soft. I’m grown now with no time for shadow rabbits.

Starting in fall there’s heifers to feed, and the mules need their hay pitched too. They work all the seasons, these mules, but in fall and winter there’s nothing for them except pulling logs out of the woods. Not a bad life if you ask me. I can think of worse things than being born a mule. Being invisible is a lot worse.

Outside the leaves are turning colors. It’s their time. I like watching them through the big doors we keep propped open to let in air. I like it when the wind hurries them down, leaving behind a space where a leaf once grew. Not an empty space, but a space filled with emptiness. Tunnels. Every leaf-hole connected to another, the bunch of them twisting and turning away like memories.

I dip into the sweet-grain and give each mule a taste. They see me head for the bag and perk up their ears, stamp a heavy sound.

Can they know what’s underneath? Their hooves leave flat places on the floors of the stalls. The hoof prints cover up others already there, making them disappear at the edges like days layering on.

With time the floors slope to the middle. Then I rake out the stalls and fetch the wheelbarrow. I fill in the depressions with fresh clay, dusty pale as dry cement. I breathe in its lightness as I shovel. My snot turns white. The stuff blows against me, mats my hair, turns me into a different kind of invisible. So big, and all that happiness in a handful of sweet-grain. There’s worse things to be born than a mule.

The heifers look up as I fork their hay, eyes big and trusting like Mary Louise’s. Hers were blue. Big as a heifer’s and blue.

She cried last time and told me love is all two people need. We could see it through, the bunch of us, her kin and mine. She pressed her face against my neck. Tears trickled down my skin like hot sweat.

Love can do that, mix the hard with the easy until problems seem harmless. I know better. I come out of the shadows, trouble starts. It always did and always will. Stay in the greenbriers like a rabbit, that’s what I say. Mary Louise never understood, and I couldn’t tell her. Now it’s over and done. Never look back . . . but it’s hard sometimes.

Pap hobbles through the big doors looking dark against the last light. I can’t see his face at first and think how he could be anybody, even a scarecrow with that old straw hat and coveralls. He drags one leg; the arm on the same side hangs flopping with every step. He’s got a cane now. I made it for him out of hickory. The bottom is brown from manure, the top brown from the sweat and dirt of his hand, but the middle still shines gray.

He nods and heads for the tractor where his parts and tools are spread out on the seat and on the empty hay cart hooked up behind. Pap hasn’t done farm work since the stroke, but he intends to tune that tractor engine before spring. He can’t talk now. He’s got one arm and one leg for a job that needs two of both. I nod back.

Pap gets mad if we talk to him now that he can’t answer. It bothers the others. Not me. I’d rather not talk anyway. Pap has made it plain we’re to stay the hell away from the tractor.

Pap’s invisible too. We all are. Our births aren’t recorded, so it’s as if we were never born. Sometimes I see my reflection in a store window and think, there goes a ghost, but ghosts were somebody once. A ghost leaves behind a record of a life. Paperwork filed with a name and address, next of kin, accomplishments.

I finish up the heifers, get the milk buckets, and go to the end of the barn to milk the two cows. The barn cats hear the buckets clang and come tumbling out of the haymow. I empty some ants and bits of hay from their bowl. They live on milk and mice and whatever else they catch, a bird or a chipmunk. I sometimes find the evidence: feathers and bits of fur mixed in with the hay. Our cats are born and grow up here. Some stay. Others go off and don’t come back. When one leaves another takes its place. We’re never without cats.

As I stoop to pet them I think how they’re invisible too. They have no history either, like the leaves and the light, a different light today than yesterday, a different light every day since the world started.

Nobody knows our situation except kin and people who marry in. I tried explaining it to Mary Louise. Now that’s over and done.

We barter produce and make some cash cutting wood. We don’t pay taxes or Social Security. There’s no electric bill. None of us has ever set foot inside a schoolhouse or had a driver’s license, but we drive our pickup over every inch of road in this county because Pap’s third cousin is sheriff. The county is plenty big enough for me. I never had the urge to go anyplace else, until now.

The spiders are starting to hide away for winter. Maybe they live under boards or in hay. I don’t know. I see those brown spiders come out in spring, each to its own corner. A spider lays a big ball of eggs and hangs there, never moving. More patience than I’ll ever have. Sometimes I drop in a fly and watch while the spider kills it and wraps it up in spider silk, a little blanket of death. Not quite the same situation, I’m thinking, but the dead are still dead.

The mules stamp. If I was superstitious I might think they could read my mind. They can’t. They’re just mules wanting sweet-grain and wondering what I’m doing down here at the other end of the barn.

Pap is hammering on that rusty engine casing. I hear him breathing long and hoarse. I can tell he’s mad, the hammer’s heavy. His mechanic’s light throws a bright circle on the floor. Maybe his lungs will bust open. I don’t think he cares anymore. Now that he can’t talk. Only he and I know the truth. Not even his third cousin knows. Kin are kin, but close kin count more.

I tried explaining things to Mary Louise. I asked her to sit down and watch the rabbit come up on the wall, but she was yelling at me and crying. All I said was we couldn’t get married. She kept asking why and hitting me with her fists. I couldn’t tell her why: invisible is forever.

She wanted something else. She said we could go to Charleston where people don’t know us. I could find work. Be among strangers? When you’re invisible, it’s the strangers who are dangerous. They might tell, and suddenly your picture’s in the paper.

Picture. I’ll never stop seeing that one blaze up behind my eyes, a red desert of washboard dunes. A picture memorized out of a magazine when I lay with a fever long ago.

After I got well I went looking. I found it, crumpled up and smeared with ashes. Pap smoothed it out. The land of Egypt, he said, where Pharaoh persecuted the Israelites, and when he opened the coal stove the flames licked it out of his fingers.

Why that came to mind just then I couldn’t say, but I felt the purity of fire again. White heat behind my eyes.

God’s anger.

When my eyesight came back everything was like before. The same but somehow different. There were boards all around, stalls with their dug floors, light coming in through the big doors. The rabbit.

Who died in anger?

To be consumed in fire when the leaves are turning makes a certain sense: red leaves, red desert, no green anywhere. Then the chill of the hollows, of darkness out beyond. The valley of the shadow of death.

I saw what I’d done. Shadows without walls. The sudden stillness was God’s whispered forgiveness. In the desert everything moves with the wind, dunes gliding over dunes. Pharaoh’s army lies buried under sand. Pap told us so.

Here the boards resist. I’m safe from being covered over.

The mules hear something. They stop and listen, ears toggling. Mules can tell what’s down there compacting slowly in the quiet.

I’m glad those stalls are done. Someday I can stop thinking about it. Never look back, that’s the secret. Pap came in just as I was finishing up, but he knew. He stopped and looked at me, and his eyes didn’t say a thing.

In summer, the daylight slides into evening. Time is gradual; there’s a softness. Now the difference is a thin pale sheet. Mary Louise’s kin will wonder.

When the moon comes up I’ll start walking toward it. There won’t be anything behind me, not even a shadow.