Nobody's Fool

check the street for wandering old women and fallen tree limbs. See if God has lowered the boom on anyone while you were asleep, the sneaky booger.
    It was when she got to the front window and opened the blinds that she noticed it was snowing and remarked the strange, glittery quality to the snow. It was as if it were snowing with the sun out, each flake igniting as it fell. The street was alive with dancing, firefly snowflakes, and Miss Beryl sat down to watch the performance with quiet wonder, perplexed too that the cup of hot tea in her hands did so little to warm her fingers. It seemed beyond her ability to wiggle her toes in her socks, and those toes seemedvery far away. It made no sense. At scarcely five feet tall, Miss Beryl was not very far from her toes.
    And this was the way Sully found her when he came downstairs, poked his head in for the first time in a week, saw that his landlady was indeed up and dressed and seated with her back to him, staring out the front window into the street. “All right, ignore me,” he said when she didn’t respond to his usual observation that she wasn’t dead yet.
    But she didn’t respond to this either, and when he raised his voice to inquire if she was all right and Miss Beryl still did not respond, he went over to her and peered around at the old woman suspiciously, as he might have inspected a store mannequin he suspected of being a real person practicing mime.
    Miss Beryl, who had not heard him come in or speak, was delighted to discover her tenant’s face in her peripheral vision. It had been Sully, after all, who’d been praying for this snow, and Miss Beryl was pleased that his modest prayer had been answered. She just hoped that this strange snow, igniting as it did on its way to earth, would accumulate in sufficient quantity to require removal. She would have liked to tell Sully that she wished him well in this way, indeed in all ways, that having done him wrong, he retained a place in her affections, but her voice seemed as far off as her toes and fingers. “Look,” she finally managed, her voice sounding as if it belonged to someone else, Mrs. Gruber maybe, “at all the lovely snow.”
    Sully would have liked nothing better than to see snow, but in fact the street outside Miss Beryl’s front window was bathed in bright winter sunshine. His landlady’s chin, her neck, the front of her robe and nightgown were bathed in blood.
    â€œWhich way?” Sully said.
    â€œUp!” Hattie thundered. They were standing at the edge of the single stair, the old woman clutching onto Sully’s arm for support and balance. She looked strangely like a child learning how to ice-skate, feet wide apart, knees almost touching. Her hands were swollen from pounding on the apartment door. Sully had been late getting to the diner, unwilling to leave Miss Beryl until he was sure she was all right. When she’d first spoken, the old woman had seemed to be in some kind of a trance, but then she’d snapped right out of it, maintaining that she’d simply had another “gusher” of a nosebleed. She insisted that he not worry about it and was particularly adamant that he not mention the matter to Clive Jr., whichSully had reluctantly agreed not to do. In fact, she did seem fine, scurrying between the kitchen and the front room, cleaning up the mess she’d made. He promised to look in on her midmorning when he finished at Hattie’s, and she had promised to get checked out by her doctor, but the sight of Miss Beryl, glistening with hemorrhaged blood, was still with him, especially with old Hattie teetering on him. If he lost her, she could end up in the same condition. How did the world get so full of old women, was what he wanted to know.
    â€œYeah?” Sully said. “Well, the stair goes down, so that’s the direction we better go, unless you can fly.”
    â€œDown!” Hattie agreed, and together they took the step, teetering.
    â€œThere,” Sully said when they had come to terms with down. “That’s the most dangerous thing I do all day,” he added as they made their way into the diner. “Someday you’re going to try to go up, and we’re both going to go down and stay down.”
    â€œDown is to hell,” the old woman observed.
    â€œI don’t plan to follow you that far,” Sully assured her.
    Hattie did not strictly comprehend this discourse, Sully