We are always on the anvil.

We are always on the anvil; by trials, God is shaping us for higher things.
-Henry Ward Beecher

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28 August 2010, Chicago, IL

She skims her fingertips over the dark bruises on her torso, down her arms, the labyrinthine patterns and familiar old aches.  Emily watches them in the mirror, sees how they bend and flex with each careful breath she takes.  She frowns, and eases her shirt over her head.  Thankfully it has cooled enough that her long sleeves would not raise too many questions, and the brightly colored fabric could cover the blue-black patterns she did not wish to explain.

There is a key in her pocket, burning away a small hole at the back of her mind.  It is warm and heavy, weighty with promises she'd rather not carry.  A small thing, bound with so much expectation.  The more she ignores it, the more it bothers her yet.

Early morning light filters in through the windows, pale and colored, rosy, gentle.  It touches the sheers at the windows, colors the ceilings, pushes its way between the stacked papers cradled in one dining room chair.  It almost reaches in far enough, now, to prod the hard corners of the carrier boxes that have re-emerged from a closet.

Despite a clear admonishment to rest, she'd spent half the night packing.  Books, photographs, odds and ends -- they're safely nestled into nondescript cartons.  Hidden.  As if her presence could fall away from this flat as quickly (or slowly) as it had grown into it.  By the middle of the month, she would be gone and it would be as if she'd never lived here.

The morning is quiet and calm, but Emily is not.  She takes that promise-key with her when she leaves the walkup, carries it hot-and-worrisome in her pocket as she walks.  It brings her to another stack of apartments elsewhere in Lake View, a place where she checks the post box before heading upstairs.  Where the window on one floor, at the end of the hallway, stand open regardless of the weather without.  Where the lift hasn't worked any day she'd come visiting.  To a door where she knocks once, twice, out of habit more than anything else, and waits.

It's the waiting that bothers her.

She waits until she's sure there's no answer, then she counts out another ten, fifteen, twenty seconds before sliding the key into the lock and letting herself inside.  Emily toes her shoes off at the door, pads across to the table on the balls of her feet.  Sorting through the mail, she finds the bills that need paying (they're handled, of course, noted in clear script what was paid, when, to whom), the personal things, and she takes the junk to be binned. Grocery circulars, retail fliers, credit card applications, the like.

This is a promise, too.  Or, maybe, the way that Emily keeps hers, keeps a promise she'd made him.  One thing in lieu of another.  The boxes, you see, she'd packed them again. Moving was just on the horizon -- but he'd left her a key, and with that key a promise that there would a lock into which it would fit.  She kept her side of this bargain by testing it.  By gathering mail.  By wiping the dust from the counters.  By making sure there was nothing rotting in his fridge.  By visiting just often enough to know that she'd notice the day when the rent wasn't paid and all the locks were changed and the Super cast her a strange look in the hallway.

She slipped on her shoes and locked the door behind her.  With the end of the month just a few days away, Emily would know as soon as next weekend whether the rent was paid through September.  Her rent was paid through mid-September, but not beyond.  She's given no one her promise-key to carry warm and weighty with them as they go.