"Susan's Life of Sevens" by Josie Nabhan-Warren

The world runs on sevens.

 Susan learned this in the deep Texas country of her childhood. She was standing in the muggy heat, watching her Father raise his glinting blade up high before bringing it down with a thud onto the rooster's neck. It took seven minutes for Father to walk outside, go into the rooster’s pen, carry it by the neck to the chopping block, kill it, skin it, bring it back inside, and give it to Mother with a smile. 

Seven people.

Susan dated in college, but only to meet her goal of seven boyfriends. She would have gotten married, but then she would've had to have seven husbands. There's only so much money in the world. Susan speaks to seven people. The mailman. Mother on Sunday mornings. The cashier at the grocery store. Herself. Ex-boyfriend #2. The chatty dog owner on her walking path. The subway attendant.

Seven relapses.

Susan doesn’t like pills, but she doesn't like dreams either. Dreams exist outside of her view, where sevens have no value. 

Seven joys.

Susan allows herself seven methods of joy. Joy is essential to human life, after all. Susan finds joy in architecture, puzzles, occasionally geometry, algebra, baking, running on the treadmill at seven miles per hour, and carpentry.

Seven touches.

Touch is essential to human life. Seven flips for the light switch in the morning. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Susan cannot leave the house until she has locked and unlocked the car seven times. Seven beeps. Her neighbors don’t like her.

Seven days.

There are seven days in the week. Really, why hasn't everyone else realized it? The world runs on sevens. Susan prides herself on living correctly. Monday: wake up at 7 am. Have oatmeal for breakfast. Work in her home office. Walk outside for an hour. Return home at 5. Have red sauce pasta for dinner. Tuesday: repeat Monday, have alfredo pasta for dinner. Wednesday: repeat Monday, have chicken and rice for dinner. Thursday: repeat Monday, have squash soup for dinner. Friday: repeat Monday, have salad for dinner. Saturday: repeat Monday, have cheese and fruit for dinner. Sunday: repeat Monday, go to the grocery store. Have leftovers for dinner. 

Seven words.

When Susan speaks, she likes to count her words. Sevens are good luck. Sevens mean the world continues to run perfectly, exactly, precisely, meticulously, decisively, strictly, correctly, on time.  

Seven minutes.

 It takes seven minutes of boiling  to make the perfect egg—with a firm, jammy yolk but not runny and not too dry. Susan eats her breakfast in seven minutes.  A seven-minute-egg,  seven raspberries, 14 blueberries, and a shot of espresso. When you die, your life flashes in front of your eyes for seven minutes. Susan learned this when she was 49 years old, stuck between the dashboard of her Ford Explorer and American soil. 

7

Suddenly, the grey-white sky parts, and Susan can see every color in the universe swirling around her and her expensive chunk of metal. And when Susan’s rapidly shifting eyes catch a fragment of rainbow in the broken windshield, something in the back of her mind shuts off, and Susan feels as if she is 10 years old again. In fact, she is. Susan is standing beside the schoolhouse's rusty set of swings underneath a soft blue sky. Susan can feel her old-young body buzz with unfamiliar energy, and she glances towards the dormant swing set, looking like a bed of roses in heaven. I remember this. A voice in the back of her head murmurs. Her calloused hands grip the old chains.

Father walks outside.

6

Susan thinks she is alone in the playground, even though she can hear young voices echoing all around her. Susan doesn’t like being alone. Maybe once she's done on the swings, she can find the girl with the yellow hair by the monkey bars. She was always by the monkey bars. Susan throws her body back into the dewy, early summer air and swings full force ahead, out and into the open sky.

Susan can hear the chopping block dragging against the dry ground.

5

Susan is falling. This isn’t how she remembers swinging, but then again, most of her playground experience consisted of sitting on a bench and observing the other children. Susan continues falling. She can’t really see where she is going, or what she is inside of (endless void or cross-dimensional portal?), but she finds that she doesn’t mind. Maybe she's on her way to heaven, and Mama was right all along about Jesus and all them. Susan pictures a friendly-looking man with a beard like her Daddy's waiting for her at the end of whatever she's inside of, and the thought makes her smile. Or maybe the swing has a defect. If it does, maybe some of her other classmates will be wherever she's going. She misses them.

Father opens the chicken coop.

4

Susan can’t stop moving, and it’s getting a little scary now. Her body keeps getting shoved in every which way, going in every possible direction at once, never stopping to let her get a grip of anything. Something in the back of her mind clicks on. Susan closes her eyes because she doesn’t want to see it, but her life comes rushing back anyway, as if it's stuck inside of her eyelids. She can see a five year old Susan sitting on the porch by her Daddy with her little cloth doll in hand and she can see 20 year old Susan running out of the college lecture hall and she can see 30 year old Susan breaking up with her seventh boyfriend over the public phone because it was better than seeing his face fall when she did it in person and she didn't want to do it in her house because then she would still be the same person in the same place and nothing ever changed and she had to be outside but she hated being outside because nothing ever made sense and she needed her Mama and she wished her Daddy were still alive so that she could tell him she loved him and she’s sorry she ever stopped.

The rooster squirms between Father’s grip and the stained wood.

3

 Susan feels like she is pinned to the floor waiting for the ceiling to fall down on her. There is a sharp pain in her chest and a crushing weight on her legs but that doesn't make sense because Susan did everything right. She followed all of the rules. She counted to seven and lived the way humans were meant to. She never meant to hurt so many people. Susan thinks of her classmates, if they ever wondered why she stopped coming. She can’t feel the weight on her legs anymore, so that must mean this is all coming to an end. Susan is relieved. She wants to go back to her apartment on the seventh floor. She wants to see the old lady that lives across the hall and she wants her to say you alright baby? and she wants to squeak out a yes because she can't help but talk to her even if she knows she's not supposed to because that would mean Susan talks to eight people and eight isn’t the correct number. Seven is correct, and Susan has dedicated her life to living correctly. 

There is a thud. The rooster stops squirming.

2

Susan feels brave enough to open her eyes again because she doesn’t think she's moving anymore, but she can’t. Her eyes are heavy like her whole body, and Susan hates it because what's the point of exercising everyday if you're still going to be too heavy to even lift yourself up. Susan feels like she's been lied to. Something in the back of her head clicks off. She’s so tired. She was in a rush this morning. She panicked when she realized she forgot to turn the car on and off seven times. That's how she got in this mess. She’s too tired to care. Susan feels like she doesn’t care about anything anymore; she's just too tired. She should tap the ground, tap the dashboard, tap her keys, but she doesn’t know if it would even help anymore. Susan starts to cry.

Father makes quick work of plucking every blue and red and greenish feather off the limp body. Perfectly, exactly, precisely, meticulously, decisively, strictly, correctly.

1

Susan’s mind is a haven that she burrows into. Tucked far away from the pain and the world and the nothing, Susan is still five years old in her parents back yard. It is the best day of her life. Mama is making chicken soup for dinner, and Susan gets to help her Daddy dig the pit for roasting it. The sky is big and blue in the country, and the air smells like hay. Susan practices her counting with Mama every morning, and she never stops on seven. Susan grips her little pink shovel with her little pink hands and digs. She digs and she digs and she digs. It gets easier to forget that she can’t really feel anything with every pile of dirt upturned. Maybe Mama is in the house right now making her special broth, or maybe she's peeking at Susan and Daddy from behind the thin kitchen curtains, a smile on her face. Susan keeps digging. She knows that Daddy must have killed the chicken by now, but she can’t hear the drag of the chopping block or the thud of his special knife. Susan looks down at her little pit. It's just big enough for her.

Father comes back inside. He hands the body to mother with a smile.