The Falling Woman by Pat Murphy

you'd be home."
    I watched him coolly, suddenly wondering if he had ever listened when I talked of anthropology and archaeology. I could see him clearly, but he seemed very distant, as if a wall of glass had been lowered between us at the moment that he laughed. Diane called to me from her room—she needed a drink of water. Without a word, I left to go to her.
    Robert never really understood the nature of my discontent, not even after I ran away from home, not even after I slashed my wrists. He kept waiting for me to turn back into the woman he married, never realizing that she was a sham; she never existed.
    And so I strode through the neighborhood, trying to burn off the energy that kept me awake at night, energy that made it impossible to rest at all. It was on those walks that I first started seeing the shadows of the past. A group of Indian men setting forth on a hunt. Four women carrying woven baskets filled with unidentifiable roots. I remember seeing a Spanish friar, mounted on a tired burro, crossing my path on his way to somewhere important. A troop of mounted soldiers raised dust as they trotted down the paved street, disappearing when they continued straight through a building that blocked their way.
    I clearly remembered the day that I did not go walking. Diane was five and sick with the flu. I stayed home to nurse her, pacing within the apartment. It was August and the temperature was holding steady at over 100 degrees, a heat wave that the TV weatherman kept promising would end. After hours of fussing and complaining, Diane was asleep. Robert was working a late shift at the hospital. I sat at the kitchen table on a wooden chair that wobbled. It was hot, too hot, and I had been drinking beer all afternoon with a neighbor, a slatternly woman who had nothing good to say about anyone. I had been drinking with her only because I could not stand being alone. I was twenty-six years old, and it seemed wrong to sit alone drinking beer after beer. But at six, when the neighbor left, I kept drinking cold beer and staring at the walls.
    In that old apartment, the water heater grumbled, the refrigerator hummed, the floor creaked for no discernible reason. When I listened closely to the refrigerator, I could hear voices, like distant cocktail-party conversation.
    After the neighbor left, I became aware that I was not alone. Very slowly, I became conscious of the woman who sat across the table in the seat that the neighbor had vacated. She was watching me. The light in the kitchen was dim—I had not turned on the overhead lamp and the orange light of the setting sun was filtered through smears of dirt on the kitchen window. The woman's face was in the shadows; I could not make it out.
    I returned her stare for a moment, wondering vaguely how she had come to be there. "Want a beer?" I asked her.
    She shook her head.
    "So what do you think I should do? Run away? Or stay here and take care of the child?"
    I had told the neighbor woman that I was thinking about leaving Robert. She had laughed at me and said that after a few months out on my own I would come running home.
    The woman whose face I could not see did not laugh.
    "Run away."
    Did she speak or was it the rumble of the water heater? The shadows had never spoken to me before.
    There was a coldness in my stomach. I felt ill from the beer, dizzy with the heat. "I can't leave the child."
    I strained to see the woman's face, but she was hidden in the shadows. "Why are you hiding?" I asked her. "Talk to me. What can I do?"
    "Run away." There again, I heard the whisper.
    "I can't leave. There must be something else I can do. There must be."
    She looked down at her hands and lifted them above the edge of the table to show me what she held.
    Across her open palms, laid like an offering on an altar, was a knife, a sharp blade chipped from obsidian and glinting in the dim light.
    Somewhere in the distance, far away, I heard a child cry out, and I started. I recognized Diane's