Trembling With Fear 9-29-24

The Oracle at Dairy, by Tiffani Angus

The Oracle at Dairy prophesied only to women who reached for the whole milk, never to those who bought the two percent or skim. The voice spoke phrases cryptic and vague, for a divination isn’t a favor; understanding it must be earned. 

Mother reached to the back of the shelf, her hands sliding along the white curves of the plastic milk jugs, their sides misted with condensation. She grasped the container’s handle and pulled it from the shelf. 

“Your children.” The whisper, clear and strong, wafted forward through the spaces between the gallons. 

She leaned in and strained to hear clearly.

“Your children,” the voice repeated. 

“Danger,” it said. 

“Fire.” 

Her hand opened. The jug slammed to the floor. Its cap shot out and flew high across the aisle, finally coming to rest in the case of bright yellow and green bags of frozen corn and baby lima beans. As milk glugged across the market’s linoleum, glowing a thick blue-white in the fluorescent lights, Mother abandoned her cart and ran for the parking lot beyond the market’s smudged glass doors. 

The blacktop was sticky in the heat, and in the car she barely winced as she seared her hand on the hot steering wheel. Speeding from the lot, she sideswiped a parked car, crushing her side mirror in the process. The wailing of sirens, so faint she might have imagined it, wavered through the air and taunted her as she screeched through turns and waited at intersections. At the corner of her block, she almost kept going straight to avoid the inevitable. But her hands were smarter than her head, and the car neatly drove itself around the bend.

Yet no fire greeted her. 

No smoke rose in the sky, thick with the ashes of family photographs, unpaid bills, forgotten drawings under fridge magnets, or her children. Mother sat in front of the house for a moment, sure that at any second she’d see orange-crush flames dance behind the windows, sure that hints of the peculiar, overcooked smell of burning furniture and drywall and toys and dishes—so different from the wholesome woodsy smell of a campfire—would reach her, sure that the voice had been right because she hadn’t been vigilant. 

Inside she checked the oven, the iron, the furnace, and hot-water heater. The medicine cabinet, the outlets, the windows, and the back yard. 

All was well. 

But all was not well. She found her boy hiding in his closet with a lighter. 

On her next trip to the market, the voice repeated its warning. “Your children,” it said. And so Mother ran home, as frantic as before, sure that this time the warning had to be right. But she found nothing wrong at all. 

She returned to the store again and again, and each time the voice spoke to her. And each time she believed that this must be it.

Soon the refrigerator, then the pantry, then the garage, linen closet, guest room, and attic were filled with jugs of milk: stacked, piled, row upon row. The smell overwhelmed them until Mother took to pouring the milk out in the gutter or down random drains before taking the jugs home. Still the Oracle didn’t elucidate. 

Mother tried reaching her hand through the gaps on the same shelf, in the same manner as before, to grasp what was speaking, to stop it. Her hands closed on refrigerated air. 

“Your children,” was all it would say. 

She took to dropping the milk, spilling it across the floor in sacrifice to earn an explanation or at least a few more words. The bag boy, whose responsibility it was to clean up broken jars of spaghetti sauce and rotten fruit that had been smashed under heels, slumped off to get the bucket and mop whenever he saw Mother pass through the store’s automatic doors. Some days her frenzy knew no end, and her neighbors went without milk while her own children became nauseated at the smell of the stuff. 

But still the voice didn’t explain.

She started driving across town to shop at a new market. 

It was all under control. 

The warning followed her. “Your children,” it insisted. 

“This is ridiculous,” Mother said one morning as she climbed over yet another pile of waxy cartons to get to the stove. “What’s my job if not to protect them from harm?” 

She took to calling animal control to report every dog left unleashed to roam the neighborhood, their owners unaware of who reported their pets’ transgressions. Germs didn’t have a chance against her arsenal of anti-bacterial soap, gels, sprays, wipes, and creams. Every unfamiliar vehicle and any visitor walking down the street fell under her scrutiny. She headed up the neighborhood watch, kept photocopies of the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and stored her small handgun in a safe place, unloaded and with the safety on. 

Then the circle widened. 

She packed 100 SPF sunscreen on vacation, calculated the safest routes to and from final destinations regardless of how near, and read every label to check whether peanuts were listed as an ingredient.

The boy and girl grew older and learned not to cram butter knives into the outlets, stick beans up their noses, or run with scissors. They took CPR classes, wore their helmets when they were allowed to ride their bikes, and knew to wash their hands before eating. 

She’d taken care of every danger possible. All would be fine. The Oracle’s warning, over the years, became so much background noise. 

Her children never asked why but followed Mother’s rules, figured out how to get by, how to make her happy. While Mother spent evenings with her organizations and committees and boards, the boy and girl stole change to buy junk food, jimmied window screens loose, and snuck out to parties in the woods. Each small victory pushed them further, for how could they be breaking rules when Mother had never made it clear that they were not to top off the liquor bottles with water, pilfer one pill at a time from her medicine cabinet, and make secret copies of the car keys? They were still her obedient children, safe as long as she didn’t know about the stashes and dealers and money and desperation and petty theft and lies and betrayals and being in the wrong place at the wrong time with wrong intentions.

And one night, on her way home from a meeting, Mother stopped at the convenience store. As she talked on her phone, she opened the glass doors and reached for the jug of milk her hand fell on first. “Your children. Fire,” the Oracle said, the voice no stronger, no more demanding, no different from when she’d first heard it. But she knew her children, knew that they were good kids, and that the voice, finally, was wrong. 

So Mother drove home, expecting to find her house as she’d left it: safe, sound, quiet, whole. 

She was unable to pull into her garage because a dented van, parked at a careless angle, filled the driveway. Without looking down, Mother grabbed her phone from her purse and poised her thumb over the emergency button. And as she stepped from her car and stood to take control of the danger that she’d prepared and studied for, the picture window shattered and a dark silhouette the shape and size of her nightmares ran out the front door. Her girl followed, screaming in anger and then fear. A moan from inside the house told Mother where her boy was.

Her girl pointed. The shape of her arm under the streetlamp was impossibly long, ending not in a hand but a barrel that reflected the weak light. And she pointed it at the man who pivoted and ran for escape toward the street, toward Mother.

And this time Mother’s hands worked in tandem with her head, and as she dialed for help she flipped the headlights back on, illuminating what she had been warned about but had missed, overlooked, miscalculated in her certainty. One shadow turned and the moment stilled, permanent and irreversible, in a flash of gunfire. 

Mother’s hands opened. The jug slammed to the ground and its cap shot out and came to rest on the dark driver’s seat beneath the dashboard’s pinkish glow. Milk glugged a sickly yellow-white under the streetlamps and spread and met with an oily black puddle, staining Mother’s dress darker than the shadows on the lawn before mixing in the gutter. 

And as she lay there, she strained to hear clearly above her children’s screaming and the engine’s ticking and the sirens’ approach, for the whispered memory of the Oracle’s voice and what had really been said.