The darkness to come
He cornered me early, started talking when I walked into the fire hall and had not let up. A perpetual cigarette dangled out of his mouth and his conversational style was mumbling ramble pierced by awkward silence and intense stares into the crowd. Whenever he made a point, one or both of his arms shot out and swept the air around us clean. Invariably, this resulted in contact, usually with the thick hand or arm of someone beefy and bearded (there were many at the Saturday night dance) whose back tensed up before he turned around. But everyone knew Paulie, and the bearded men laughed and thumped him on the back, hearty gestures which almost knocked him over, before they belched in our faces or leered at me. Finally one of Paulie’s arms landed on my shoulders. He let it hang there, limp and damp. I sent him to the bar to give him something else to do. And then Steven walked in.
Two weeks ago, I slipped out of Steven's truck without saying goodbye. I unplugged my phone and spent evenings into late night on the tiny back porch reading Russian novels and swatting mosquitos, sometimes burning incense as a cleansing ritual. I was leaving for Illinois soon and needed to make a clean break. But there he was in front of me, radiating heat, his faded jeans held up by a cracked belt, his plaid shirt blurred by years of wear. He looked hungry. Lonely. I plunged my free hand into my pocket and gripped the other tightly around my empty plastic cup.
Steven moved closer, smelling fresh as the bay in the morning, his familiar hip almost touching mine. He opened his mouth to speak when Paulie floated back from the bar, a white ghost in a crowd of sweating men in sleeveless shirts and women with wrinkled butterfly tattoos nestled in sagging cleavage.
Blame it all on my roots, showed up in boots and ruined your black tie affair. The band launched into Friends in Low Places. The lead singer's eyes closed as he gripped the neck of the mike. He was pigeon-toed and the points of his cowboy boots intersected at the mike stand. Steven grinned and reached for my hand. As we twirled away, Paulie tipped one beer into his mouth and then another and vanished.
What do you do when the feeling lingers, when someone's touch is like fever against your skin? I was already lightheaded, Steven's hands firm against the small of my back, his chin against my cheek. The song was background to the buzzing in my head. As the band wrapped it up, Steven led me through the crowd and out the door. Outside, it was quiet. We felt no need to speak. The waning gibbous moon was bright, heavy as an egg, the cool air a reminder that fall was imminent. We walked arm in arm to his truck and kissed against the driver's side door until he opened it. I accepted my fate.
The wind tangled through the truck, the fields rustled as we rushed by, and when I shivered Steven pulled me closer. The corn was August-melancholy, still green but going brown at the edges. Spotlit by our high beams, it shuddered in anticipation of the harvest, of the darkness to come. With a crackle of gravel, we pulled into the driveway, briefly illuminating the cottage before Steven cut the engine and helped me out of the truck. He led us to the edge of the cornfield out back. Here the landscape was still, monochrome in moonlight. Framed by dark cornstalks, Steven's face looked serious, purposeful. As he kissed me I thought, "This is happening right now. I am happy right now."
This is part of a short story (in ultra draft format) that I am picking up again. Because I craved the contrast is an earlier excerpt. I keep on editing it and reposting when I see how awkward/unbalanced/sloppy/overwritten it reads. It's been a while since I've written fiction. This is my warm-up.
Image by eggman.
I originally called this post "Fever." For a great version of the song (though with an irritating video), listen to Shirley Horn singing it. It might wipe "Friends in Low Places" out of your mind.
Strong enough
The rope is going to break.
It's inevitable. Why hadn’t he bought a new
rope, something made out of synthetic fiber,
white interwoven with blue strands, a miracle
of modern technology? A rope that would never
break, that you cauterize with a lighter or
with a long match in order to melt the
strands together forever. Something that
would last through the apocalypse.
“This is an heirloom rope,” he told me,
smiling as though he was joking but I knew he
wasn’t really joking. “My grandfather gave me
this rope when I was a boy.”
“So why don’t you put in a frame? You know,
box it up and stick it on the wall? Why did
you leave it on the boat?”
“The rope is fine. It’s a good rope. Strong
enough. And if it breaks, what’s the big
deal? We drift for a while. Our plans change.
We adjust.”
He drove us here in a car the color of the
sky before the storm, a car of no color,
another heirloom piece passed down to him
when he graduated from college twenty-five
years ago. His shoes were hand-me-downs and I
could see his heart beat, the quivering in
the neck, underneath his frayed shirt collar.
The man could throw nothing out, held on
until the emergency, the car dead in the
middle of the night, the sole of his shoe
lapping up the rain.
I grasped the rope with both hands, pulled
hard, willed the inevitable. The rope didn't
break. It burned my palms, punishment for my
lack of faith. I l waved them through the
air, dipped them in water as absolution.
"See? Strong enough."
Image by
Jane
Underwood.
The image was the prompt.
Note: As was brought to my attention by an
experienced sailor, on a boat one calls ropes
"lines." This sounds vaguely familiar (I
haven't been on a sailboat or motorboat since
1990 and even though I grew up around water,
I know zip about boats. Read
Would
you like bloodworms with that?
to get a
sense of the extent of my knowledge). I
just can't bring myself to replace the
word "rope" with "line" here. So my
apologies if the use of it is
grating.
Because I craved the contrast
I moved west in part to escape the relationship, to wash the taste of salt and blood out of my mouth. And there was Shelton, clean-smelling, like soap, like a freshly-washed window, sitting across the aisle at our graduate school orientation. He was thin and pale with a cap of dishwater blonde hair. When he contributed to class discussions, he pushed his rimless glasses back and wiggled in his chair before over-intellectualizing a dot point into a master’s thesis. Silence filled him with anxiety. He adorned it with linguistic frills, explaining simple concepts with an academic loquaciousness. It was cute, for a time.
I've been working on a short story and doing very little other creative work (outside of the Round Robin). This is an excerpt of my story, still in infant form. And since I'm in the middle of it, I have absolutely no perspective on its quality, but I wanted to put something out here, a crumb, a thought, a naughty word, a study in contrasts.
Pursuit and capture
Herbert’s eyes are bloodshot. They move from side to side, eluding mine. His lids are creased with age and a lifelong propensity for quick anger and I resist taking my towel and wiping away the dark line of spit caught in the island of stubble on his chin. He doesn’t smell like alcohol this morning but gives off the odor of rancid cinnamon buns, of too many days spent on the slats of a park bench.
“It’s ok, buddy,” I reassure, nudging him back to his cardboard perch outside The Caffeine Bean. “Just ignore the guy. Has he ever been here before? No. Will he be back? I don’t think so. Do you want a cup of coffee or not?”
The man who tipped Herbert over the edge is crossing Ninth Street. I knew from the moment that guy came into the Bean that he wasn’t from around here. His hair was too long, for one, and it was kind of greasy, flipped back behind his ears. It was very continental, although his accent was hard to place, as if he had been here long enough to sound almost native. He fumbled around in a large billfold like he didn’t know what a dollar was. Maybe he is unfamiliar with our coins. Maybe he’s just cheap. Wherever he comes from, they apparently don’t believe in cleaning up their newspapers or even folding them when they are finished. They don’t believe in tipping the help.
Herbert shuffles after Mr. Continental, waving his cup around, still ranting about five and dimes. Quarters from the cup flash onto the sidewalk and a little boy walking by lets go of his mother’s hand to catch a dollar bill as it floats to the ground. The man, halfway across the street now, pivots, smiles at Herbert with thin lips, then returns to the foot traffic, slamming into Amanda, one of our regulars, knocking her to the asphalt. Amanda’s lunch bag breaks free. The zombies that work in this neighborhood flow around her, flatten her sandwich, smash her bag of pretzels into salty dust. One of them punts her apple into the intersection. Mr. Continental picks up his pace.
“I am not surprised. I am not surprised at all!” Herbert shouts from the corner as Amanda, slightly dazed, props herself up. The light changes. Herbert jumps out in front of the one-way traffic and holds up his hand in the universal sign for stop, scampering sideways towards Amanda as cars start to honk.
The next thing I know, I’m tossing off my apron and rolling up my sleeves, dodging a clutch of suits on my way to stop Mr. Continental. Herbert is tugging on Amanda’s arm, pulling her up. He gives me a high five as I run past. “Get him, Jesse!” he barks. Mr. Continental is about thirty feet ahead of me, but I am gaining on him. I am sly and quick, with the soft step of a panther. By the time my breathing tips him off, I’m close enough to tackle him to the sidewalk.
And he’s light, too light, with hollow bird bones, no meat on them. His shirt is stained. His tie is a clip-on, decades out of date. The impact has jostled his false teeth loose and they shatter and scatter like pearls. The zombies pause, grumble at the conclusion to our sad dance.
I ask a woman in Earth shoes to call an ambulance.
Image by Rob Hill. The image was the prompt.
Today is the last day to submit a story for NPR's Three-Minute Fiction short story contest for short stories that have 600 words or less. This was my submission for the last round (which, obviously, wasn't selected or recognized as brilliant in any way). So far, my favorite story from this round is Mars: In the Beginning, by Angela Muhammad-Ali.
A facsimile of truth
“You come up with the first sentence and go from there. Don’t think about it any more than that,” she told me as she looked over the tops of her reading glasses. Giving writing advice like she knew what she was talking about.
“It’s like I don’t know how to put one foot in front of the other," I replied, "like I’ve never learned how to walk, metaphorically speaking. And who am I to think I can tell a story? I should have taken up poetry.”
“Leave it to you to make poetry sound like the easy way out.”
She waved at me dismissively and returned to her biography of Virginia Woolf. I no longer recognized her hands. Sometimes I would find her staring at them, too, the swollen knuckles and liver spots, the transparent skin. We were both thinking: is this what life comes to? A brief period of expansion, of shining hair and growing strength followed by decades of shrinkage? Aging, the long great loss of looks and faculties, terrified me. Yet it was happening to me. Sometimes I thought I visited her for the contrast, for the feeling of her papery skin against my plumped cheek. I planned to off myself before I got to her age, to embody the cliché of living fast, dying (relatively) young, and leaving an attractive corpse. Except I could stand to lose forty pounds and I wasn’t sure that being a law-abiding reference librarian qualified as “living fast.”
My mother had already set up the scene. Her life had become this room, food and liquid ferried in by home health aides, a bedpan on stilts to hover over when the need arised. Twice a week Noelle gave her a sponge bath, wheeled in a basin of soapy warm water and scrubbed off the must. Some old people stop washing. It is no longer worth the effort, or maybe they don’t notice the stink. But Mother didn’t sweat. She didn’t do anything. Frequent scrubbing aggravated her sensitive skin and a daily splash of scent covered some of the rot.
She slept, briefly, book still poised in her hands. She was a talented napper, had always been able to squeeze in rest. Me, with my permanent eye-circles, my aching temples and nap frustrations, I wasn't so lucky.
Her eyelids heaved open. “I made a point of never lying to you.” Here we go again. “There were no myths about the Easter Bunny, about Santa. When you lost a tooth, we just handed over a quarter. There was no sneaking about.”
“But what about that night with Henry?”
“Oh, him.” She let out a woosh of air. “Henry was just a friend.”
This room used to be mine. The walls were semi-permeable, let the moods of the household flow in without flowing back out. Everything was pink, from the rug to the ceiling to the canopy on my bed. On the night in question, my father was away on business. It was early summer and a breeze tapped on the blinds. Max, our fat tabby, pressed himself between the slats and the screen in my window, staring at the shaking leaves. I was supposed to be asleep, lights out by nine for the nine-year-old. But the house was restless. She was restless. The doorbell rang at 9:15. Their conversation was unrelenting, words like waves, eating away at my calm, the low rumblings and crashes of talk. I smelled pipe smoke, candle wax, the clean burn of the gas fireplace. My head pounded. The mattress felt like it was resting on gravel. I waited in the dark, tossed and flipped until my sheet wrapped around me like a shroud. When I woke at 6:00 a.m., I found my mother on the couch, snoring under a thin blanket, two glasses sticky with liquor on the the coffee table.
I recorded the white lies, the outright fibs, the sins of omission, the cover-ups. All children do. I was just more canny about it. I remembered.
Henry showed up periodically for family dinners. He was tall and extremely thin and dressed in an early 70s professorial uniform, tweed jacket with arm patches, a pipe that probably contributed to his death from mouth cancer. He and my mother had met in a freshman philosophy class. I tried to picture them in 1959, fresh and young, earnest in their discussions of Nietzsche and Sartre, living the cliché of what it was to be aware and thinking in those fraught moments before the sixties, before her marriage to my father changed the game.
“So, you don’t tell a kid the story of Santa Claus and that makes you honest?”
I didn’t know why I continued these conversations.
“You know what mistake most writers make today?” Now we were back to writing.
“No, Mother. I don’t.”
“They make it too complicated. They toss too much into plot, subplot. Isn’t the reality of life enough?”
As she continued to speak, I buffered myself with lousy poetry, described and contained her in my mind.
My mother’s hands
no longer grasp
the glass of bourbon,
but instead
hold onto the memory
of things that never happened.
Totally false. She wasn’t a bourbon drinker and her memory is tight.
My mother no longer drinks coffee,
but inhales the smell
of water filtered through
roasted beans
left on the burner
until all that remains
is black sludge.
“Phoebe?”
I looked up.
“Have you heard anything I’ve been saying?”
I shook my head and excused myself from the coffin. The rest of the house was bright, every curtain open. I stepped into her old room, into the walk-in closet where my father’s clothes hung, carrying the scent of cigarettes with them. Outside it was a May Saturday haunted by ghosts of other May Saturdays, the hum of the mower and the over-green smell of freshly cut grass, the chaise lounge getting damp with my sweat. I traveled in nostalgia and every turn brought me back.
It was a curse, a narrative without ending or moral, just endless scenes and scents. I wished I could transform it into a story, into paragraphs, with twists and turns and a narrative arc, and if I failed at that, into poetry.
Henry died six years ago, alone.
When my mother and I cleaned his apartment
I found a box of photographs,
her naked in black and white,
and decades of her letters,
the last one a month before he died.
My mother used to tell me that I knew nothing about poetry, that my language was rich without structure, that I should keep a notebook of words and impressions. When it was full I was to toss it into the air, to watch the words fall and form themselves into a facsimile of truth.
Image: the dark room by ~Mongibello on deviantART.
I am trying to rid myself of the shoulds -- what I should be writing about, how I should structure my fiction. I have to let go of some ideas about length and structure and just accept the fact that I have themes that I am drawn to (family, guilt, the past as constantly present, the difficulty of connection, what it takes to be good, to be loyal, how we handle betrayal and the trampling of trust) and that borrowing from my life is ok and necessary at this point. There are risks in all of this, the most terrifying of which is the risk of writing lousy crap. But I'm hoping (and thinking) I usually write better than lousy crap. Serviceable writing is fine for now.
Oh, and this is a draft.
Never tasted so sweet
Tanning butter. Warm sun, a plunge into
comfortable water, like being in the womb, no
difference between you and what surrounds
you. Afternoon nap in a hammock with your
hair giving off a touch of chlorine. Dinner
by candlelight, light ocean breezes
flickering the flame. The fish on your plate
stares back at you with a dulled eye. Fish
never tasted so sweet.
Creamy potatoes with a layer of crunch.
Haricots verts steamed and tossed with sesame
oil and ginger. You tap the skin on the crème
brulee into shards, take a deep drink of
Sauternes.
In the dark he comes to you, smooth muscles,
breath underwritten by cigarettes and mints.
It isn’t a surprise. It isn’t expected. It
just is. You accept the gift, a kind of
reawakening, the necklace of kisses, his
rough voice, the burn of an unshaven cheek.
You interlace fingers and he speaks of your
beauty, your irresistibility, how you taste
like papaya. He has been watching you all
week.
Morning brings an empty bed, a
freshly-plumped pillow, a trio of hairs
tangled on the sheet. In the shower you sigh.
Remember. Anticipation only lives once.
(Soundtrack:
La vie en
rose, sung by Yves Montand.)
Image by besia.
From a prompt: Just
imagine.
Because I am hungry for art
But worse than feeling the real world slip away is the feeling that I get when I don't write. It's a kind of lovesickness, an ache of not-having. The only way to feel better is to sit down and start typing. Even if it's painful to write, even when I procrastinate, when I avoid turning on Freedom for the Mac and bop around the Internet looking up information on John Quine or Anya Phillips (I've been re-reading Please Kill Me and the 70s punk scene is haunting my brain), eventually I get around to writing. Because I have to. It fills me. Without it, I am empty.
I want to write all night, sipping on red wine and smoking the occasional cigarette. I want to go to sleep at 3:00 a.m., sated with language, and wake up for a light lunch of mineral water and salad, of warmed baguette slices smeared with roasted garlic and chevre. After lunch, I want to linger over a book, sip a cup of muddy espresso in preparation to wrestle with words on and off into the night. I am up at 3:00 a.m. these days, listening to a frustrated cat howl, staring at the billowing curtains as my mind forces me to consider various bleak scenarios, feeling the heat of a feverish, fitful boy as he pushes me off the cliff's edge of the bed. A week of just the two of us -- me and the words -- would cure my angst. One week of writing in a dark room, embraced by a circle of lamplight, feeling the sediment on my tongue as I drain a final glass of wine, letting my mind dance with the headrush of unfamiliar nicotine. Just a week. I would take the time to focus on this useless fantasy in order to discard it before returning to the here and now.
The Round Robin, with its daily prompts and sweet feedback, helps, but sometimes I still feel like I'm bouncing around in my own mind, where (as usual) it's all about me. Other times, though, I create something that I can't explain, but I like.
So here you go, a piece that is a mix of homesickness and the past and an attempt to transcend. And let's hope for a few weeks of health and clear weather, of writing and creating. Of sanity.
Stained
I want
a cylindrical room made of factory glass, the
door a piece of carved mahogany salvaged from
the She-Wolf, Lord's old boat, the one that
is sitting on a trailer in the backyard, the
hitch supported by a stack of cinderblocks.
Against the cool glass, set into block, the
mahogany will seem rustic, warm to the touch.
I will rub my hand against it before I enter
the room, think of the times we went
waterskiing or just bobbed around in the
muddy waters of the Elk, my wet ass spreading
a dark stain on the boat seat.
Even then that boat was a piece of shit. Lord
wasn’t paying attention to it. He let it sit
in the water all winter long. The varnish
wore off, the gleam melted away. Every year
he bought cans of teak oil, stacked them in
the shed, and let them sit. Barnacles coated
the She-Wolf's hull. They were rough against
my hand, cut into my feet as I pushed against
the boat into the heavy water.
So, the room. It is lit from within, white
light/white heat. Even the ceiling is made of
factory glass. The floor, too. It is empty. I
will go inside, lock the door, and remove my
clothes. I will press myself up against the
glass. See if you can tell me what you are
looking at, my blurry image refracted in each
square. I will light a cigarette, will snuff
it out on the rounded wall, again and again.
You will see flesh, the death of ember, the
end of the spark.
Lord is dead now, too, washed away, though
not in the way you would expect. It had
nothing to do with water. It was emotion. The
dike broke, his water wings deflated, a big
hole opened in his roof and the house filled
with rain. You want me to tell you about it,
to be more direct, but I won’t. I have his
boat and my plan. Every weekend I sand down
the mahogany, try to remove the stains, think
about my cylindrical factory glass room. I
picture Lord on the other side, horn-rims
slipping off his nose, one hand marking his
place in the book. I mystify him and he likes
that.
Image by
Vinje.
I serve in this fashion
I trace an outline of my daughter’s hand on
thin tissue paper. The paper is pink as
cotton candy and her hand is limp. She is
asleep.
I’ve spent the last weekend tracing her limbs
and torso while she sleeps, working my way up
to her delicate head and wispy hair. I just
want to catch an idea of that hair, a tendril
here, a mass of frizz there. In her sleep her
toes flex like a dancer en
pointe. I follow the stretch of
the arch of her foot, sweep up the ball to
the tip of her big toe. Elizabeth stirs and
tenses as the felt-tipped marker grazes her
flesh, but I am stalwart and stay the course,
capture the foot for posterity’s sake.
Elizabeth is three years old, red-haired and
long of limb. Her knees are like mine were
when I was her age, stretched and knobby all
at once, awkward joints connecting leg bones.
I can already see how her hips will jut out
at thirteen, will buffer themselves in fat
and muscle. Buying pants will become almost
impossible for her, will become a source of
frustration, and she will start to wear
slimming flat-front trousers with wide legs
no matter the going fashion. Her skinny legs
will protrude from an ample rump, those
now-slight hips will grow to temporarily
house the wide skulls of ten-and-a-half pound
babies. She will slap the first man who
remarks on her child-bearing hips and then
she will marry him and bear two children in
three years.
They will exhaust themselves with fights over
money and discipline. When she discovers that
he's been sneaking out to Bible study
meetings and is on the road to becoming born
again, Elizabeth will leave him. I'll take
the family in, my 26-year-old daughter and
her two preschooler boys, will put aside my
plans to redo the upstairs in preparation to
sell the place. She'll be practically
unemployable, her only experience being
reproducing and windexing the glass off the
windows, running a vacuum cleaner across the
floor so thoroughly that you could eat off of
it. It will be as though she were a teenager
again, the petty little fights over who left
what dish in the sink without washing it, her
stealing my cigarettes and popping diet pills
so she can stay up all night. I will wonder
what happened to my golden years, my "me"
time. She'll get an earful every night.
Eventually she will go back to nursing
school, will find a new place to live and get
a job. One of the night-shift orderlies, an
atheist, rational and compelling, will seduce
her with stories from his service in the
Persian Gulf. He'll move in after their third
date and will start whipping that fatherless
household into shape. The boys, teenagers by
this time, will be desperate to escape the
two of them, sick of the discussions of Ayn
Rand and the tyranny of other people's gods.
There are other things that will keep them
away, the sounds that leak from the too-thin
walls of the tract house, the atheist's cries
in the middle of the night followed by the
low dove-coos of their mother soothing him.
They will visit me for dinner almost every
night and I'll serve them roast beef and
potatoes, spaghetti and meatballs, fish
sticks and french fries. Sometimes one of the
boys will sleep on the pull-out couch, his
brother in a sleeping bag on the floor.
But for now Elizabeth is a little girl with
chubby feet and dimpled elbows. Her neck is
thick, strong muscles leading to an
unremarkable chin that dips out blandly from
under her lower lip. Her dad and I are still
debating about whose nose she will have. All
children have cute button noses. It takes the
hormones and stretching of adolescence to
reveal the nose’s true nature.
The bottom of the sea
Tom was pinned to the sea
floor, staring into the gloom of pale green
water, when his family started drifting past
like surreal floats in an underwater parade.
The first one to show was Faye, his father’s
girlfriend, jammed into a one-piece bathing
suit with a plunging neckline. It was the
same suit she had worn on the Mexico trip and
even in the murk he couldn’t stop staring at
her cleavage, worried that something would
pop out. Faye was bounteous, but untidy. She
was a concern. He tried to speak, to get her
attention, but his words came out as a giant
bubble. Faye’s pale blue eyes were open and
unseeing. Tom watched with increasing
tension, staring into them, not noticing the
pocket of air that contained his voice had
winnowed its way to the surface. It was the
same with all of them, his sister Veronica,
his parents. They floated past one by one
without purpose or reason, looking as they
did in life. Except for their eyes.
Unresponsive, flat and always open, their
eyes were sightless. It was as if they were
dead. Veronica, in her pajamas, wearing one
of those high-necked flannel nightgowns their
mother insisted on buying, clutched a leash
with a stiffened hand. Tilly was on the other
end of it, pulling in undeath as in life,
stretching the girl’s arm past her head as
she floated by on her back. From the look on
his father’s face overhead – his eyebrows
raised, mouth shaped like a giant O, as if he
were in mid-shout – the man was surprised to
find himself there with the rest of them. He
was dressed for a pickup ball game, with
catcher’s mitt and a ratty Phillies baseball
jersey over a pair of running shorts and his
legs, weighted down by over-technical
sneakers, just missed brushing Tom’s face.
It was only once his father floated away,
became a speck in the water, that his mother
showed up. She was almost within touching
distance, if Tom could have moved his arms.
Her body slowly began to turn, the white
terrycloth robe twisting around her legs and
then spinning out again. With each turn the
fabric fluttered and fanned in a slow motion
dance. There was a beauty to it. For a second
Tom thought he caught her eye, thought he saw
a flash of recognition, but then she, too,
was gone, carried away by the current.
He was emptied. Bereft. How could they leave
him tied to the bottom of the sea where there
was no air? But he was alive. The air just
came. He became aware of the heaviness in his
chest, how his lungs, thickened and clogged,
would fill like balloons, suddenly buoyant.
His chest would start to expand and his body,
reborn, light, would pull against its
tethers, and then his lungs would empty
again. He would wait for the next breath to
push into him, to refill his body with
lightness.
An eleven-year-old boy lies on a hospital
bed, his body a pale thread under bleached
sheets. A cap of greasy blonde hair clings to
his forehead and underneath his sallow skin
blue veins trace a map of the body. Sleep
glues his eyes shut. White Velcro ties bind
his wrists to the bed frame and his arms are
so thin that the elbows jut out like smooth,
rounded stones. Two lines run from a plastic
port in his hand to an IV stand. A tube
snakes from his mouth to a ventilator sitting
to the left of the bed. The night nurse
re-taped it a few hours ago, inadvertently
placed the tube at a rakish (though more
comfortable) angle, so that Tom looks as if
he should be holding a candy cigarette
between his teeth instead of a ventilator
line. For the moment, his lungs are
receptacles. They expand and contract at the
ventilator’s bequest. Intake and outtake, the
machine does the work with quiet hums and
hisses. His breath is external. Electric.
The room is dark. His mother sleeps in a
slate blue reclining chair by the window,
mouth slightly open, head slumped against her
shoulder. A copy of the New Yorker lies open
on her lap. In this light the circles under
her eyes look like shadows and her unwashed
hair has the tousle of sleep. Because she
keeps forgetting to brush, her teeth are
mossy and her breath sour. When the
respiratory therapist, a large square man
named Joseph, walks into the room, she
doesn’t stir, having become accustomed to the
strange cadence of hospitals, where day and
night are delineated by the migratory
patterns of doctors and residents, the
dominant physician leading his or her flock
with authority during business hours. The way
they trample! At night, residents travel
alone or in whispering pairs, quiet in
soft-soled shoes, not wanting to bring
attention to their drawn faces and wrung-dry
minds.
Joseph visits twice on his shift to check on
Tom’s numbers and clean the vent line. He
pulls a pair of gloves from the box by the
door, struggling to get them on. Underneath
the latex, his pale hands shimmer with a thin
layer of sweat. He smells of cooking grease
and baby powder. Tom’s vent tube is gummed
up; he has pneumonia and the thick secretions
interfere with his breathing. As the man
bends over him and attaches the vacuum line
to the vent tube, his body exudes heat. Tom
feels the warmth of breath, of Joseph’s
proximity, followed by the industrial pull of
the vacuum. It sucks away thick clots of
mucus. Every ten seconds or so Joseph dips
the tube into a glass of clean water. The
water rushes with the joy of movement, of
life.
With each suction Tom’s lungs sag. They
deflate, go limp, until they spasm in
protest. He begins to cough. The coughs are
productive and Joseph continues with his
careful cleaning, until, satisfied, he leaves
the room, nodding politely to the bleary-eyed
mother who has just woken up. Exhausted,
scraped clean, Tom falls into a deeper sleep
while his mother adjusts his blankets and
smoothes her hand over his forehead. She is
grateful to feel his skin under hers, is even
relieved by the warmth of a fever. Tom is
still here and fighting.
The bottom of the sea is murky. Out of the
green, a small shape moves toward him. It
travels in a nimbus of light made blurry with
disturbed silt. The slow movement is hypnotic
and Tom is filled with a sense of calm. As
the form emerges, he recognizes the fine long
hair of his maternal grandmother, white as
bone, a flash of brightness in the deep. The
mud and sand, the irregularities in the sea
floor slow her down. She catches his eye and
waves. Tom feels warm, well-fed, almost
satiated. Gram will catch up with him.
Everything will be ok.
But someone is tugging on his elbow. His
mother has returned with purpose and
animation. Tom looks into her eyes, her face
a series of hollows, furrowed brow over
darkened eyes. Her dark hair floats around
her head in crazy corkscrews.
We love
you. Stay here with
us,
she demands. Gram waves again, smiling,
encircled by jaunty bubbles. There is no
hurry. When it is all over, the end will only
matter to the people left behind. He has
infinity stretched out before him. His
suffering will eventually be a memory and
such memories are stored in the body,
destined to rot.
Give the living a little more
time.
Image: "Murky Water"
by
-Ebil-Bils.
Suspicious minds
Because Frank Smith is an
investment banker. A lawyer. A high-powered
PR executive. Or so the rumors have it. He
showed up in Bank Nile about a month ago,
rolled into town in his ’49 Ford truck, which
looks beat up but runs suspiciously well.
Maya thinks he’s wearing a mouth piece. He
talks like he’s been eating ice cream, his
tongue slightly numbed, the words not totally
clear, but there is no stink of alcohol or
sign of the needle. There is no ice cream
cone. She swears she’s seen him adjust those
just-so nubs of his when he thought no one
was looking.
His hand are smooth. Even though the palms
are filthy and his fingernails blackened with
earth and compost, those aren’t the hands of
a man accustomed to hard work. He keeps a
dust bowl hoe by the garden patch, makes a
show of rustic tools, the rusted metal rake,
a long pointed shovel. Frank claims to know
about healing herbs, says he’ll fix you up
with something for those migraines, will make
a poultice for your aching back.
But don’t let that investment
banker/lawyer/PR man sell you a goddamned
thing.
****
Image from an online
costume shop. This post was originally my
response to a photo prompt. I keep on
returning to it for the blog, but didn't want
to use the original picture, for obvious
reasons. And if you are in the market for a
fake beard, I recommend the fine selection at
the Etsy shop I Made You a
Beard.
I've been struggling to write and hopefully
will be back on track in the next week or
two, writing, thinking, and visiting other
blogs.
Berkeley type
There’s a man with thick silver hair who will
save me. I’ll run into him at Good Vibrations
or while thumping melons at the Berkeley
Bowl. Eyes quizzical, brow scrunched, I'll
ask his advice as I peruse the erotica or the
tomatoes. “How do I pick a ripe one?”
I'll say, then press my lips together in
anticipation, run a nervous hand through my
own uncombed mane, worry the tear in my
formless tee.
He’s capable, my man with silver hair, knows
what I require. “I haven’t read this stuff in
years,” I’ll tell him, batting my innocent
eyes. “A girlfriend of mine recommended the
selection here. Do you have any
recommendations?” Or: “My naturopath
has finally given me the green light for
nightshades, as long as I don’t combine
potatoes and tomatoes in the same week. But
how can you tell when a pineapple tomato is
ripe?”
He’s firm, my man with silver hair. Turns out
his name is Nathanial and he stays away from
pornography and tomatoes. He scrapes a thin
layer of coconut oil on his multigrain toast
and makes his own organic soy milk. He lives
in a house constructed of bales of hay coated
in plaster, collects the rainwater and the
grey water to pour over his lush,
nightshade-free garden. In a far back corner
of his yard, a former girlfriend has
constructed a pyramid of empty television
sets and we sit and watch in calming yogic
poses, balancing our diminishing frames on
iron loungers furred with ivy.
Nathanial leads me away from temptation. He
slices layers of butternut squash, thin as
sashimi, dries them in the sun, and layers
them with nut cheeses and frothy cucumber
juice: lasagna! With him I learn the
taste of a peach, the value of chastity, the
length of my arms from fingertip to
fingertip. During our monthly fasts, we see
visions, hummingbirds like fairies in the
passionflower, fabulous eagles, strong and
formidable, emerging from sketchy fog. And my
parents appear before me, penitent and
humbled. They kneel at my feet and I dismiss
them with a forgiving wave. The vision
repeats and I never tire of it, my power, the
moment of clarity.
When it’s over, when I am saved and clean and
about twenty-five pounds lighter, after my
visions start to wear thin, Nathanial will
move on to the next orphan. He is
evangelical, gathering souls away from
processed foods and packaged T&A, a beam
of light that moves from soul to soul. I want
to warn them, the lady paused in front of the
cornflakes, the college boy reaching for a
six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best, the skittish
dog-walker about to cross Dwight: It isn't us
he wants. It's the karma.
From a prompt last summer:
I am counting. Despite the first-person point
of view, this is fictional. Just a reminder.
Image: The infamous Berkeley
Bowl, from a
2005 New York
Times article.
8:37, Saturday morning
Every Saturday he and his mother make
pancakes and he watches the drama unfold. The
eggs, chilled in their container, ignorant of
their fate. Then, she selects two. It is
never random. She moves from the back of the
carton to the front. Surely the last eggs
know what’s up, though she shuttles them back
to the refrigerator before destroying their
brethren. This is when he insists on touching
an egg, on holding it for a brief minute,
transferring his warmth to its cold shell.
“Do you want to crack one?” she will ask and
he always shakes his head: No. The
mess! Tom can tell she is relieved, even
though she doesn’t let out a sigh or stretch
her thin lips into a smile. It’s the way she
angles her shoulders, the slight relaxation,
the slump, when he returns the egg. He has
become a master of the nonverbal, of the
facial expression, trying to figure out the
scene before inserting himself into it.
One Saturday, he did drop an egg, just let it
go onto the kitchen counter to see what would
happen. “Whoopsy!” his mother exclaimed in a
too-bright voice as she hurtled herself
across the kitchen to get a wipe. The clear
white was oozing over the side of the
counter, had just started to drip down the
cabinets and onto the floor, and the dog,
attuned to any utterance that sounded vaguely
like “oops” had already honed in on the
trail.
This time his mother did sigh, gave out a
loud sigh, before taking out her frustration
on the dog. “Mandy! OUT OF THE KITCHEN!” She
threw up her arms and stomped her feet,
glared as Mandy slunk back to the living
room. “I’m sorry, Mama,” Tom said, his heart
fluttering, as she picked pieces of shell off
the counter and attacked the remains with a
sponge. The air around them, charged with
anger, calmed as she looked up at him.
Everything stopped. She reached out and
cupped his cheek, leaned over to kiss his
forehead.
It’s always the way, she thought, the anger
that explodes out of nowhere, like an egg
cracked into hot oil. The expression on Tom's
face, the knowledge that she
is
her mother,
that she will be apologizing forever for her
lack of self-control, for the spark that she
passes on unwittingly. Here's hoping he isn’t
as delicate as an egg.
From a prompt: You hold it.
As Anne
told me
recently, the prompts have been good to me
lately. Though very shatter-focused.
Image by Petr
Kratochvil.
Away from here
We kept on digging that night, pushed through
soil rich and dark, encountered earthworms as
long as Joe’s middle finger. He had a trowel
and I had a pick-axe, but most of the time we
used our hands, took off our gloves and did
the dirty work directly.
Nobody had told the little one about what had
really happened to Tristan. I mean, he knew
he was sick and saw the old cat collapse on
the kitchen floor, heard the pained meow. He
saw me cry and hyperventilate and gather
calming forces, but we couldn’t bear to tell
him what was happening, what would happen. He
hadn't known loss and I swore he wouldn't,
not until I was old and sinewy, not until
Joe's alcohol-pickled mind had gone south and
his hands were blurry with the shakes. I had
seen enough of loss myself by age eight,
learned early to keep a tenuous hold on other
people. My boy, he could remain untouched.
There wasn’t time or money for the vet, so
Joe lifted up Tristan's lank body, bony at
the spine but swollen around the belly,
carried him off into the back yard. I tossed
him a kitchen towel still wet from the dish
rack. The boy, always his father's shadow,
made for the door, but I knelt down and
blocked him with a hug. "Tris needs a little
privacy, that's all. It's like at the
doctor's office. Daddy's giving him medical
attention. Why don't we read a book?" We got
through two stories when Joe finally came
back in, eyes red, the towel clinging to his
fingers. "Tristan's ready to see you, kid,"
Joe told him. I sent the two of them out
there alone.
Joe told me later that Tris hadn't put up a
fuss. He and the kitty had sat together by
the corner of bamboo that Tris loved to hide
in, where all you could see in the thick
stalks was a pair of shimmering green eyes,
maybe the hint of white whiskers. Joe had
professed his love while the cat panted,
glassy-eyed. Then, a little business with the
damp towel. Tristan had even rested a paw on
Joe's trembling hand. It was true mercy, over
in a few heart-breaking minutes. Before he
came back into the house, Joe had shaped him
into a comfortable round, pressed his thumb
gently against each eye to close it.
He told the boy that it looked like Tristan
was taking a little rest now, sleeping off
his fit. “Give him a quick pat like a good
boy.”
That seemed reckless to me, letting the boy
touch him. Didn't Joe remember the heavy
quality of dead flesh? Once the heart stops,
it's like petting wax. But the boy didn't
seem to notice, came in dancing and told me
Tris was better, was sleeping.
That’s how we ended up at Strawberry Creek
Park, looking like grave robbers, sifting
through the dirt in the dark, Tristan in a
Teva shoebox tied with butcher’s twine. Fog
had blotted out the moon and the damp had
sunk into my bones, made me drop the
flashlight more than once. Mid-dig, a mama
raccoon and her kits peered at us out from
the bushes, rustled the leaves with interest.
Joe tossed a trowelful of dirt at them. "Git!
Git! This isn't a midnight snack." They
shambled off in the direction of the creek,
looking like hunchbacked cats themselves, all
the fur with none of the grace.
A half-hour later, we had a hole two feet
deep and just wide enough to jam the Teva box
into. Tristan's stiffened body shifted as we
pushed him into the hole, hit the sides of
the box. I hadn't looked at him since the
collapse, but suddenly I had the urge. I made
Joe cut the twine so that I could shine in
the flashlight and take a final look, could
stroke the tips of his fine orange fur.
The next morning we told the boy that Tristan
must have taken off, shimmied through a hole
in the fence, or through some miracle of will
had scaled the nine-foot planks and taken off
for a better place. He put his little hand in
mine and asked, "Is he OK, mama?" There was
only one way to answer it: Tristan was fine,
perfect, whole.
Maybe he’s sitting on a rock by the Bay now,
eyeing the ground squirrels, dipping a paw
into the cold water as he searches for fish.
Or he’s stalking a bird in a field of waving
grass, tail quietly twitching before the
final pounce. Tristan is somewhere out there,
away from here.
This was from a writing
prompt last summer: write about something you
don't want to write about. I didn't want to
write about our cat's
death, at least not directly,
so I wrote this instead. It seems to fit
the theme around here these days. It was
originally three paragraphs with very
little spelled out, but as I expanded it
the details it became more gruesome. Not
sure what I think of it, but here it is.
Thanks to rcb for the advice to slow down.
This one's slower than usual at least!
Image: Strawberry Creek, by
Edwin
Deakin, from
Berkeley Architectural
Heritage Association.
Lure
I flicked a career away as
easily as I tossed down shots of vodka. The
brown shoes and heavy overcoat, the thick
wool suit in regulation blue, opaque hosiery
that marked red rails around my waist, that
made a serpentine path from my navel down:
the uniform is all I remember, how the wool
smelled alive in the rain, the flecks of mud
that the shoes, too high for the job,
splattered against my ankles as I walked.
If Robert hadn’t kissed me, I probably would
have stayed. We were in the claustrophobic
break room, sitting a little too close, but I
liked it that way. He smelled like brandy and
coffee, with a touch of rot underneath, the
sweetness of the grave, reached out with his
gloved hand to cover mine. I
wanted
him to kiss me,
willed it to happen, just to breathe in the
warmth, get a little taste of humanity. An
exchange of knowledge. Or maybe it was the
lure of touch, a desire for contact beyond a
fatherly pat on the hand.
Sweat was forming on his forehead. I reached
out with my handkerchief to blot it away,
traced the scar above his right eyebrow.
“Hunting accident,” he said mysteriously. I
saw the flash of a Bowie knife, the wince of
fists, felt tinny redness fill my mouth.
Pouting in concern, I leaned in close, he
leaned in closer, and we kissed. His delicate
fingers, soft in their leather coats,
relentlessly explored my nape. Obedient, I
followed his lead. We went from peck to
panting and pawing until the door opened.
Filler for NaNoWriMo, from
a revised Round Robin prompt last spring.
Impossibly short in the face of all the other
words I've been tallying lately.
Image: Kiss V, 1964, Roy
Lichtenstein.
Faking it*
Surely there are hidden meanings everywhere,
waiting to be uncovered. This was my
hypothesis when I started my latest
self-improvement project “Barbara’s Weekly
Epiphany.” All I had to do was approach the
world with a childlike sense of wonder, to
keep my eyes and mind open, maybe even wear
my heart on my sleeve. All of that
information that has beaded off my
consciousness, repelled by my cynical
attitude and “been, there, done that” grubby
cliché-ridden approach was going to be
captured now, in a mind as open as my VW
sunroof on a light-pierced June afternoon.
I started a blog about the project, wanting
to share my insights with others:
epiphanyquota.blogspot.com.
First epiphany? You have to sell your ideas,
sell yourself, if you want to succeed. You
have to believe in you, or no one else will.
Second epiphany: fake it ‘til you make
it is more true than you think. Third
epiphany? In the middle of a crowded public
park, if you close your eyes and quiet your
thoughts, you will hear the vibration of the
world, the sound of its heartbeat.
The blog started getting a fan base, made up
mostly of earnest young men drawn by the
stock photo I’d put up that looked vaguely
like me fifteen years ago. They were drawn by
that and the supportive and slightly
flirtatious comments I’d left on their own
blogs, encouraging observations on the
quality of their writing, the strength of
narrative voice and character, how close I
felt to them though we’d never met. These
exchanges led to other epiphanies, ones that
I didn’t share on the blog: bullshit
actually works; the reality of the online
world both mirrors and denies the reality of
the solid world; men will believe anything.
One of them -- let's call him Brad, a name
that fits in its brevity and practicality,
that matches his corny, Hemingwayesque
writing style -- got a little too interested.
How was I supposed to know that he would take
my ego-stroking seriously? I thought I had
covered my tracks (always cover your tracks,
a too-late epiphany), but somehow he found my
phone number. I have an old habit of letting
the machine pick up and would stand over it,
listening to these silences injected with
anticipation, the light touch of breath, the
occasional throat-clearing. The messages
hovered in the air, sticky and thick, for
hours after the caller hung up. Brad
eventually told me he was responsible, in an
email where he attached a photo of someone, I
presume himself, in
flagrante. I immediately moved the
sordid pic to the trash, changed my number,
and blocked his emails. There are some sick
fucks out there.
I type this in my ratty old bathrobe, a mangy
Pomeranian on my lap. But I could be lying.
You never know.
*From a Round Robin prompt last
winter ("my latest epiphany"). Every word of
this is made up. Really. And I'm all for
positive thinking, have spent years faking it
and am on the cusp of making it.
Image: "Epiphany," Henry Ascensio. From
Tavistock Gallery.
Foundation
The story was that he and Willard were drunk
when they poured the foundation. It was a hot
day, unusual for May, and the sky was
cloud-veiled, the sun nothing but a glowing
round cloaked in grey. The men mixed the
cement by hand in a wheelbarrow, kept taking
slugs from the whiskey bottle. Vi and the
girls started out planting flowers, then
prepared a lunch of liverwurst sandwiches,
sugary potato salad, and coleslaw. Finally
all there was left to do was to sit on the
metal lawn chairs and watch.
Everything went down so easily. The cement
had a nice resistance, just yielding enough,
like Vi on a good night. It was a perfect
mix, Willard agreed, as he passed the whiskey
bottle back. Running a trowel over it was
soothing, could almost put you to sleep. Dusk
was enveloping the neighborhood as they
wrapped up. One of the girls had fallen
asleep on a blanket on the dirt, and the
other one glowered as she kicked up clouds of
dust in the rutted driveway. Al struggled
with the wheelbarrow until he decided the
hell with it, it was just a rusty piece of
shit anyway.
Vi finally had to drive everyone back to
Delaware, the men singing a song she didn’t
recognize, the girls bleary-eyed and hungry.
When they returned the next weekend, excited
to start building the cottage, Al ran his
hands across the foundation and groaned. It
didn’t take a level or a plumb line to figure
out that they had to start all over again.
Image: The house at Hollywood
Beach, August 1957.
A crumb
But first, a preface to the crumb.
I haven't been here lately. My son is out of
school until after Labor Day and we've had a
series of pet-related good things and bad
things. Cat dying: bad. Adopting a kitten and
a new adult cat: good. Nora the dog passing a
pea-sized bladder stone at the Emergency Vet:
bad, though it could have been much worse.
Attempting to dissolve remaining stones
through antibiotics and diet: good, though if
it doesn't work she will still need surgery.
Me giving Nora cranberry extract pills with
xylitol in them: potentially very bad,
since xylitol can be
fatal in small doses to
dogs. Nora surviving xylitol
exposure unscathed: amazingly, wonderfully
good.
In between pet-things and kid-things, I'm
still taking the Round Robin, a writing
prompt-based class. So here is a crumb for
those of you who are still reading this blog,
from the prompt I
remember.
I
remember that her fingers were thickened by
arthritis, were scattered with freckles.
Helen’s nails were coffee-stain yellow,
bitten down to the quick, and she kept
fumbling at the wedding ring on the fine
silver chain around her neck.
I looked at her hands because it was easier
than looking into her eyes, or letting my
gaze drift to her useless foot in its bright
blue stocking. Sometimes after a visit I’d
look at my own hands and realize that time is
written on our hands the fastest of all.
Already my knuckles are puckering in
idiosyncratic ways and the backs are
beginning to resemble the uneven surface of a
barren planet, ropy with rocky veins and
hairline fracture wrinkles.
Helen wasn’t a worker. The hardest work her
hands had seen was the kneading of whole
grain bread dough, maybe a bit of digging in
the garden. She’d cracked open books, propped
them up, her thumb and pinky keeping them
open. Me, though, I’d scrapped carcasses in
the field, held up splintery boards with the
meat of one palm while I grasped a hammer in
the other. Some jobs we worked all winter
long, if we were lucky inside, but we weren’t
always lucky.
I read a book once about men working on a
tower, applying mortar and making repairs in
the ice and slush of January. They were
suspended from ropes attached to scaffolding,
wore gloves with the fingers cut out as a
symbolic act. Their hands were gouged and
scuffed, palms smoothed by rough passes over
granite, life and work written on the
body.
Image: The kid, pretending
to be a cat, because we don't have any good
pictures of our actual cats being actual
cats. Yes, he is holding an egg mold, which
is this fictional cat's weapon of choice. It
makes him fly or it's a bomb or he shoots it
or something.
Join one sentence with another
For about eight months now, I've been taking
a course at The Writing
Salon called the
Round
Robin. Once a week the
instructor, Jane Underwood, sends a class
email with that week's writing prompts and
partner assignments. Every day, for no
more than twelve minutes, my partner and I
each write on that day's prompt, sending
the resulting "writes" to each other by
email. Occasionally, the prompt is a
photograph. Usually it is a phrase
(yesterday's was "I feel exasperation
tensing my face"), sometimes just a word.
The point is to just do it,
to see what happens when we let our words
flow without forethought or editing. Each
partner responds to the other's work,
pointing out the things that they like,
encouraging the good. The process is
exhilarating and a little scary. I read the
prompt, gnash my teeth, and then start
typing, not knowing where I'll end up.
And where I end up often surprises me. Mainly
I divert my thoughts from real life, bored
with the worn roads of me,
well-traveled and devoid of wildlife. The
words don't tumble, exactly, they waltz,
softshoe onto the page, join me at a
leisurely pace. I start with one sentence,
join it with another, and before you know
it, I have a story. A vignette.
Like this one, so different from what I write
here.
Writing
prompt: The test
It’s nothing. Just a blank sheet of paper,
8.5 x 11 inches. The doctor passes it to me.
I stare at one of the desk legs, slit my eyes
until the carpet and wood blend together, a
fuzzy field of sand and tree.
Did she mention what I am supposed to do with
the paper? Is that the whole point of this
test, to see how I react? Origami isn’t my
thing, doc. I can’t even fold a paper
airplane. And I am not up to folding a cootie
catcher. The idea makes me smile, though, a
cootie catcher with various diagnoses hidden
underneath the flaps, with pictures of clowns
and crazies decorating the outside. Pick a
number, say the riddle, figure out the
problem.
The sheet of paper sits there, like a
command: Do something. So I do. I grab it and
growl, start ripping, take what I’ve ripped
and rip through that as well, doubling,
tripling the thickness of the paper until I
can’t rip anymore. By now I’m stomping around
her desk, going in circles. I take what
remains of the paper and toss it into the
air, cackling as the confetti drops around
us.
I sigh, sit down. “I feel so
much
better. Thanks, Dr. Krapinski.”
She offers me a cigarette.
Image from here by way of I Am the Cheese.
More on cootie
catchers.
Writing prompt: Give us some trivia
Illustration by Ed Harriss.
I was born with a stork bite on my neck, an
egg-shaped mark pink as a salmon fillet. On
some children this mark fades, but on me it
spread down and around my neck, a two-inch
wide necklace of permanent blush. “That’s a
natural piece of jewelry,” Mom would say,
“Some people pay good money to have that kind
of thing tattooed on their skin.” Those
people didn’t live in my town. The people in
my town thought my neck band was the mark of
the Beast. After twenty turtleneck winters
and dickey summers, I finally had a plastic
surgeon burn that thing off of me. It was
worth every cent, every painful minute.
People think that calling them stork bites is
cute. Like the stork doesn’t exist and, even
if he did (yes, it’s the males that you have
to worry about), he wouldn’t nip an innocent
baby on the nape of the neck! What do they
know about storks? Those birds are aggressive
as hell. There’s nothing cute or funny about
them or their predilections. That’s the brain
stem, you know. One chomp there and you’re
paralyzed for life. Dead before you even get
a chance to give out a second wail of hello
to the world. My parents turned their backs
on me for five seconds … five seconds … and
that nasty stork took his opportunity.
Still, I’m one of the lucky ones. My father
had a younger brother, Cole was his name
(they did name him). He was born at home.
After the exhaustion of a 33-hour labor, his
mother took a nap. The midwife was in the
bathroom, and Grandpa — well, Grandpa wasn’t
known for hanging out at the scene of a birth
or death. By the time the midwife came back
into the room, the stork’s work was done.
Missy waved that bottle at Cole's face, tried
to coax the nipple between bluing lips. When
she turned him over, she saw it. This was no
salmon mark, but a clear bloodless bite, a
chunk of the baby’s neck gone missing.
So. You think the stork brings life, carries
babies to their mamas in a soft muslin
hammock, all pure and sweet and
accommodating? No. Babies are born through
blood and sweat and pushing, through
exertion, the body like a machine that just
keeps going until that thing is out. Then you
have to keep watch, for the stork waiting to
make his mark, for the death that can creep
into the room on innocent-looking sleep, for
the deadly cough that you can’t hear from
down the hall.
Keep your babies close.
Gary Flanagan's Chihuahua
Next post: what I did on my winter blogcation.
And by the way, I have nothing against chihuahuas.
chihuahua skull image from Skulls
Unlimited.
Take John and Elise. John was in love with
her, but clueless about the ways of women.
Not as taciturn as his father, a slab of a
man, thick and slow, who tended to talk only
after having a few, John had learned little
of relationships or communication. He tried,
though, bought Elise a toaster oven. He
researched and did price comparisons and
found one that would fit over the counter. He
matched it to her appliances, black and
sleek, made sure Elise could cook those
frozen tater tots that she loved so much in
it.
“Happy Valentine’s Day!”
Elise was expecting flowers, maybe even a
dozen red roses or some sort of singing
Valentine. She wanted the cliché, craved it
after seven arid manless years. There was so
much expectation that when she unwrapped the
box (how many roses could be in such a huge
box? And so heavy?) she burst into tears.
What in the hell was this?
John, bless his
naïve heart, thought she was crying with joy,
until Elise ran out of the living room,
opened her kitchen window and flung the
toaster oven, still in its box, out into the
warm California air.
Start with a question. Focus on intent. For
John, love. For Elise, unmet expectation, a
dry spell Hallmarked to death, broken by this
practical, this unromantic
man. But intent
no longer mattered to Gary Flanagan, whose
chihuahua was crushed under a toaster oven
flung from a third story window. As soon as
Elise heard Taquito’s truncated yelp and
Gary’s shouts, she knew something bad had
happened. She looked at John, still in shock
himself at the strange turn the afternoon had
taken, through the kitchen doorway and held a
finger up to her lips, her bloodshot eyes
widening in warning.
And then, she didn’t know why, she felt a
surge of lust. Elise marched over to the
couch and starting ripping John’s clothes
off, pinned him against the flowery cushions.
Caution be damned, they consummated their
two-week relationship right then and there
without saying a word.
In the confusion of expedited passion, her
underwear went missing. Afterwards, John went
on a hunt, made a big show of it, checked
behind the huge ficus in the corner, rifled
through the china cabinet, lifted Elise's
hair and brushed the nape of her neck with
his chapped lips. “Nope. No underwear there,
either. Guess you’re just going to have to go
commando,” he told her and she laughed like
it was the funniest thing in the world. Like
it was the first time she heard that one.
Elise picked up a takeout menu from the
coffee table. “I don’t know about you, but
I’m starving. Chinese?” she asked, waggling a
flyer from Mr. Chen’s Vegan Delites.
“Chinese!” John responded with a jocular wink
as he tossed her bra across the room, just
missing the trash can.
Below, on Broome Street, a crowd had
gathered. Tacquito’s hind quarters were
barely visible under the box and a trickle of
blood from his mouth had formed a dark comma
on the sidewalk. Laura Falcon from Apartment
16 had heard the impact. She had poked her
head out of her window and called the police
right away. After putting down the phone, she
went out to comfort the victim, that sweet
and single Gary Flanagan from the sixth
floor, handed him a huge mug of coffee and
some chocolate chip cookies. Together they
waited, stared up at the bank of windows, row
after row of shiny glass with ominous gaps,
windows cranked out to catch the breeze.
Curtains flapped, blinds shuddered. Potted
plants teetering on windowsills had taken on
a dangerous quality. "Rows of terrabombs,"
thought Gary, newly enlightened about the
pitfalls of gravity.
There were too many possibilities. “Not a
peep from up there. Not a peep.” Gary kept
repeating, and Laura would give him a
reassuring pat on the shoulder. To Gary it
felt creepy, like she was enjoying this
chance to make herself useful. Indispensible.
After the police took a report, took little
Taquito away, she invited Gary into her
apartment. He refused. Fred, the condo
building's maintenance man, sprayed down the
sidewalk as Gary watched, still holding on to
the chihuahua's six-foot black leather leash.
The comma of blood turned into a rusty cloud
and slowly dissipated, washed into the
gutter. Gary went back to his one-bedroom,
determined to get totally drunk.
John and Elise have never told John, Jr.
about the night he was conceived. They’ve
grown quite comfortable with each other’s
foibles over the last twelve years. He’s
better about flowers, and she understands
that you show your love in the best way you
can. Sometimes she wonders what would have
happened if John had
brought
flowers. How long it would have taken them to
get beyond their assumptions? They couldn't
stop talking that night, about the past,
about how childhood confusion solidifies into
adult surety. Elise is glad he gave her the
toaster oven. She wouldn't change what she
did that afternoon, wouldn't even alter it
even by one second. Without the toss, the
truncated yelp, the immediate intimacy of
being partners in a crime of happenstance,
she and John would never have gotten this
far. There would be no John, Jr. It was fate,
all around.
The day after the toaster oven incident, John
left Gary Flanagan an anonymous apology note
stuffed with twenties. The police said it was
no use dusting for prints, and it was true,
John had worn gloves just in case. Couldn't
they have at least tried? Was Taquito's life
worth so little? Gary has another dog now, a
minuscule mutt from the SPCA who trembles in
cold weather, whose barks sound like an
infant with whooping cough. Nowadays, he
tends to leave the building by the back door,
shuffles Pepin past the dumpster and parked
cars. He avoids the scene of the
crime.
Shadowplay
The year was marked by the scent of patchouli. It roped and twisted its way into my room, coated the curtains, soaked into my skin. Some pseudo-hippy incense-burning chick with Camarillo brillo hair lived in the room next door and I put up with a lot of unwelcome odors. Pot smoke, sweat masked by scented oils, cigarettes and sandalwood. My least-favorite scent is an amalgam: Fall Term 1987.
Fall Term 1987 wasn’t limited to the waftings of pseudo-hippy chick. There were hints of puke (my own, my friends: we drank a lot), late night clothes exuding flat beer fumes and the remnants of cigarette smoke, the sticky 18th birthday remains of Coco Lopez and rum. That fall I comforted myself with baked potatoes clotted with butter and sour cream, used their earthy scent as an antidote to the disinfectant-sharp dining hall air.
Then there were the freshly opened condom packets; musty sheets left to go grey on the bed; my roommate’s apple shampoo; and the dangerous pull of Carl’s room across the hall. His walls were bare. In fact, the room was practically empty, save for a dead rose propped up in the empty whiskey bottle on his college-issue desk. I remember the smell of alcohol on his breath, sweet as molasses, as he unlocked the door.
He introduced me to the band Joy Division and to the previously unknown pleasures of the grownup crush, revealed the depths of my ability to obsess about certain kinds of men -- rebellious, prone to dressing in black, ready-made blanks for my projected fantasies. I wrote a short story about him for a freshman composition class that began "Carl is tall, dark, and handsome. Not classically good-looking ...." It was true. He had a Jeff Goldblum look, the dark-haired, smart, slightly nerdy ectomorph with his thick orange turtleneck, heavy boots and thrift store coat. He smelled like whiskey and cloves. The pull to Carl was obsessive. Single-minded. And pointless: I had a boyfriend and Carl was almost completely uninterested in me.
The real danger was Alonzo. Twenty-six, a senior from South America attending our small college on a sports scholarship, Alonzo was friends with Carl, but seemed to prefer the company of freshman girls. Rangy and tall, with hair like the young Kafka, Alonzo hung out in the dorm, crashed our parties, insinuated himself into our budding social lives. “Come on! What’s the problem?” he’d ask, eyes bulging, hand outstretched for my roommate Martha, making an offer we couldn’t refuse.
By the spring semester Martha had dropped out of college to get treatment for her eating disorder. I was unmoored, lost without my fellow drunk from a dysfunctional family. One snow-fresh February night Alonzo offered to take me out for a Procolino’s pizza. Afterwards (his intensity, his forcefulness) I reluctantly went back to his place, a windowless room in a Spanish professor's basement.
Shadowplay II (Gordana &
Marko Zivkovic)
The professor wasn't home. Alonzo switched on
a desk light, turned on the clock radio and
reached for me. I could smell his cologne in
the air. Polo. Not a good sign.
You know where this is going, right? It’s an
old and very common story. I hesitate to call
it rape, rape with its violence and
violations and death threats and nightmares.
This was more like coaxed coercion. Alonzo,
all exploring tongue and crawling hands, used
his knee to push me onto his thin camping
mattress. I protested. He insisted, did what
he brought me there to do. (I recently found
out that Alonzo had been inducted into the
college’s athletic hall of fame. The entry
noted that he was so eager to get a U.S.
education that he was willing to sleep on the
floor. Yeah. That's right.)
Afterwards, the room damp with forced
intimacy, I focused on the radio. George
Michael was singing Faith. Martha loved
George Michael. She also had a crush on
Alonzo, similar in intensity to my crush on
Carl. Now there was something between us.
Another lie. I already had a moat of lies
between me and my boyfriend, a series of
flirtations and one night stands that I
excused by thinking of his early treatment of
me, as payback for the 1 a.m. visits, the
nights he lost to bong hits and Elephant
beer. It was getting uglier and uglier,
wasn’t it? What was I becoming?
Alonzo the conqueror drove me back to the
dorms in the professor's car. I headed for
the showers. The coed bathroom was empty, no
need to shout all-clear. Little blue
toiletries bucket in one hand, towel tossed
over the curtain, I turned the hot water on
full-force.
I couldn’t wash the smell of him off me fast
enough.
Writing prompt: Bone tired
Two notes: This is fiction. And for a much more encouraging take on "Fake it until you make it," check out the post The Greatest Love from the fabulous Melinda Roberts Tyler of Melindaville.
Image from
It is Called Mount Cope.
I’ve been reduced to this, eating cheese
crumbs out of my clothes, stepping over the
cat puke on the rug, shuffling outside in a
pair of de-elasticized boxers and a
translucent t-shirt, ancient and holey, to
get the New York Times at 10:30 a.m.
Yeah, I’ll wave at you, neighbor woman from
across the street. Hello. Hello. I don’t know
your name because you never gave it to me.
The first thing out of your mouth when we
moved here two years ago was “Don’t park your
car in front of my house again.” OK. Thanks
for the welcome, lady. That was when I cared,
when my skirts were crisped by the
drycleaners, when I ran a brush through my
hair in front of a wiped-clean mirror, when I
spent half an hour every Saturday wrestling
with that damn morning glory vine on the
fence to keep it in line. I cared what you
thought then, Neighbor, but I don’t anymore.
No. I don’t give a fuck. I trace these two
years gone and if I cared I might wonder what
happened. He left, briefly, though he’s back
now. We’re back to the marriage bed, so to
speak. I still can’t stand the feel of his
hand on my back, how his fingers trace their
way down to my ass. Fake it until you make
it, the expression goes. That’s his
philosophy, anyway, and at least he’s here.
Says he’ll stay with me through this little
setback of mine. This emotional trough. He
claims to know what love is. This is it,
supposedly.
But I don’t believe him and wait for him to
disappear.
Writing prompt: There is grace in that direction
Photo from
apartment therapy.
“If only I was drunk,” she thought,
remembering those tales of drivers fueled by
alcohol miraculously surviving car-totaling
accidents, their floppy limbs and carefree
attitudes rescuing them from death.
Extricated from smashed tin-can cars, they
get up and walk away with a sprained wrist or
broken toe while their sober counterparts are
Medivaced and rushed to emergency surgery.
Then she remembered: she was drunk.
This wasn’t normal. “Really, this is an
outlying event,” she pictured telling the
paramedics. “This is not my standard Tuesday
afternoon.” Her stressful weekend had bled
into the week and she couldn’t stand the
muscle tension, her shoulders pulled tight,
the way her tendons held her limbs at awkward
angles. Victoria couldn’t even hug her
husband properly. Unconvinced by his warmth,
by his beating heart so close and welcoming,
her body maintained its stiffness. She felt
like an impassive observer as her hands
thumped him on the back, a prelude to
withdrawal.
When Laura suggested sharing a bottle of wine
with lunch, Victoria thought: why not? It
beats valium. The crisp Sauvignon blanc
complemented her crab salad. They each had a
tiny glass of Port at the end of the meal
over a shared piece of chocolate cake. She
felt marvelous.
No. Not drunk. Just a little tipsy, a little
loose. Maybe she wasn’t hurt after all.
Victoria slowly raised her right arm, then
her left. She moved her head from side to
side, bent a leg. Sore. Bruised but not
broken. Her tailbone ached, and her left hip
was probably turning purple, the broken blood
vessels leaking into her muscle fibers. She
turned around, pushed herself up. How would
she explain this one to Barry? Oh, it was
easy enough. Chris was in the habit of
leaving his toys right by the stairs and both
she and her husband had almost tripped
multiple times. Maybe this would convince her
son to be more careful. Even though he had
nothing to do with it.
Once she was off the floor, Victoria inched
her way up the stairs, favoring her left leg.
To better assess the damage, she went into
the bedroom, stripped down to her underwear
and stared at her battered image in the
mirror. Years before she had fantasized about
taking up boxing as a way to get out built-up
anger. Intrigued by the idea of sanctioned
violence, she wanted the thrill of knocking
her fist into another human being, but had
never worked up the nerve to sign up for
lessons. Victoria balled her freckled hands
and took jabs at the mirror as she danced and
swayed. Her hip was as dark and soft as a
ripe plum. One of her cheeks was yellowing
and there was a thin line of clotted blood
coming from her nose. Her back ached. But the
tension was totally gone.
Writing prompt: Many in the park are reading the white butterfly
I love that cabbage butterfly as if it were a fluttering corner of truth itself!
Tomas Tranströmer, "Streets in Shanghai"
Photograph from
Wired
New York
Many in the park are
reading the white butterfly. Or worshipping
the wrinkling God, exposing their
winter-white limbs to the sun. Backs against
thin towels, resting on hodgepodge quilts or
supported by near-dead grass, they lie among
the remains of dog shit and crushed beer
cans. Four months of relative darkness, of
travel wishes: the sea and sky clear, the
beach unpeopled, a tropical drink supported
by sand. Stuck in the city for the long haul,
they celebrate the coming of spring.
They travel from studio apartments, from
many-windowed penthouses, stream in from the
train station, form in groups released from
grubby cubicles. Maybe they are cutting
school, calling in sick. It could be that
they don’t have anywhere to be in the first
place.
She props herself up on her elbows, surveys
the landscape of bodies. Across a line felled
by desire, a white butterfly floats, a
promise fulfilled.
Writing prompt: The visitors
Image from promotional materials for 2005
animated film,
Kontrol Eskape.
Daniel came with a backpack full of canned
cat food and Max, a fluffy grey tabby
artfully splotched with patches of orange, on
a leash. As he kissed my cheek, his
toothbrush nudged me in the chest. It was
tucked into his front shirt pocket alongside
a container of floss and a ballpoint pen. He
had a change of clothes in the car and had
packed a tent, too, just in case.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be staying,” was
the first thing out of his mouth. Max,
unleashed, threaded my legs and dashed into
the living room. Later we found a small disc
of cat urine on the floor by the ficus, Max’s
lament, his only accident.
I made a crimini mushroom omelet with
muenster cheese and served it with a side of
crisp potatoes roasted with whole shallots
and rosemary sprigs. When Dan emerged from
the bathroom, freshly showered, he opened a
bottle of Pinot. We sat in eating in silence
until the second glass, when he rolled up his
left sleeve and showed me the marks, a neat
imprint of fingers wrapped around bicep.
“Eric’s at it again.”
His boyfriend was a brute, a nasty sort who
was attractive if you didn’t know his back
story, didn’t know he was a sweet manipulator
that could turn maniacal. Daniel turned and
lifted his shirt, revealing an archipelago of
bruises on his lower back, a long bloodied
scratch across his spine. He never had a mark
above the clavicle or below the groin: Eric
was strictly covert.
“I forgot to take out the recycling.”
Suppressing a sigh, I reached for his hand,
tamping down my guilty urge to blame the
victim, give him a hard time for sticking
around with beautiful Eric, the work
acquaintance I’d set him up with. Eric of the
deceivingly kind brown eyes and silken hands,
of the long fingers of bendable steel and the
high-pitched staccato laugh, a machine-gun
guffaw that was as hairtrigger as his rage. I
didn’t want to know about it, didn’t want to
provide sympathetic catharsis.
“I forgot to take out the recycling, so he
dragged me to the bin.”
“I’m so sorry, Daniel.”
A story of kicks by wingtip, recycling
carefully sorted and dutifully delivered to
the curb, Daniel’s attempts to keep his
expression flat and his apologies genuine –
Eric wanted simple obedience and sincere
contrition, not a melodramatic man-beating
scene. Last time it was about dry cleaning,
though neither of us can remember whether the
issue was overstarching (Eric has very
sensitive skin) or Daniel’s forgetfulness,
the shirts that weren’t picked up in time for
the conference.
“He’s so . . . quiet about it, have I told
you that? He doesn’t yell or scream. But his
face is terrifying, Janine. It looks like
it’s going to collapse on itself. Someday his
brow will fold into his mouth and he will
reveal himself to be the alien I know he is.
Max always runs under the guest bed before
anything happens. He’s my early warning
system.”
Daniel took off his glasses and rubbed his
eyes. I knew tonight wasn’t going to be the
beginning of his redemption story, just
another painful, repetitive chapter, the time
before the revelation. He would be back there
maybe even tonight. The reunions were the
best part of this, weren’t they? Max would
stay with me this time and I would stay out
of it.
I
leaned back and grabbed another bottle of
wine from the rack.
Writing prompt: Streetsweeper
Photograph by Jane
Underwood.
Janine had been passing him
on her way to the drugstore for weeks now.
She never went into the diner – too much
saturated fat, not enough green stuff, unless
the dye they used in their mint chocolate
chip ice cream counted – and, to be honest,
she had other reasons not to go in, too.
Ever since returning home to pack up her
mother, she’d been stepping inadvertently
into the past. The town itself seemed stuck
in a time warp, with all that neon and the
thriving Mom and Pop stores (who would have
thought that northern New Jersey was so
retro?). It was the kind of place where
people stayed, aged in place. The pharmacist
at the corner drug store was a high school
acquaintance, a former football cheerleader
who was brainier than anyone knew. The guy
who pumped her gas was the brother of
Janine’s best friend from elementary school.
The clerk working at the library circulation
desk was the person who introduced Janine to
marijuana, that first secretive toke during a
school trip into New York.
Janine was tired of going through the dance
of friendly interrogation. Over time she
developed a willful blindness and only saw
the path ahead of her. That was difficult
enough, considering the state of her mother's
apartment, the tangled and rotting neurons
clogging her mind. This time he saw her.
“Janine! Janine Rickenbacher?”
It was Tommy. In the same job he’d had since
high school, handyman/janitor for Zorba's.
Some things never change, but Tommy had. He’d
hardened, his eyes had darkened a shade, were
brassy and brittle. He took off a glove and
reached for her, his hand calloused, the
fingernails bitten to nubs.
Writing prompt: talismans
Image from The Heart
Chronicles. "Vintage" (presumably
long dead) rabbit's foot from the Etsy
shop marytofts: antiques and
curiosities.
Do the talismans protect
you? They do not.
Do
they bring on a creative rush, make you
joyous when you are bereft, give you the
courage and faith to love when your heart is
stony and withdrawn? They do not.
Then why carry them around? Why write on the
bathroom mirror each morning “I will have a
great day,” in perky cursive with mauve lip
liner if it doesn’t really work? The coffee
will overflow, the bus will be late, someone
will eat your sandwich from the communal
refrigerator.
I knew a girl who used to carry around a
rabbit’s foot – lucky for her, unlucky for
the rabbit, the joke goes. Whenever she was
called on in class, she would pull the foot
out of her pocket, would worry worry worry
the soft fur. Later she dropped out, ended up
as an exotic dancer in that sex shop strip by
the airport. Some luck.
I’ve opened umbrellas in the house, I’ve
stayed on the thirteenth floor, I’ve watched
frozen as a black cat crosses my path. Still
here to tell about it, and to say: luck is
often random. Sometimes we bring things upon
ourselves, the good and the bad, we court the
accident or flirt with the firing. Or we pave
the way for happiness, work hard, make
intelligent choices, drop the bad friends.
It’s not quite a crap shoot. It isn’t hocus
pocus. But if your talismans bring comfort,
well, that’s ok.
Writing prompt: Write about a box
Photo
from Columbia News
Service
It wasn’t just one box. It was twenty. Or
probably more than that – thirty or forty at
least. Her mother was a pack rat and a
compulsive shopper. In between this visit and
the last she had acquired a juicer, a new
microwave, an iPod (did she know how to
program the thing?), and a set of wooden
spoons from a charity based in Africa, in
addition to countless other things that
Janine couldn’t identify. Some of the boxes
were opened and empty; others sat waiting for
the knife, their contents in darkness.
It wasn’t just the boxes. It was the
newspapers. The books. The bills. There were
piles obscuring the windows. Her mother had
beaten down a path back to the rest of the
house, like a deer makes a path through the
brush and undergrowth, to get to the kitchen,
the bathroom, the bedroom. Could she get to
the bedroom? The couch -- the only piece of
furniture without boxes and papers on it --
had been made up like a bed, with a soiled
set of sheets and a blood-stained pillowcase.
Janine followed the trail back to the
bathroom, walking carefully, one foot placed
in front of the other because there wasn’t
enough room to walk normally. Willow, her
mother’s ancient grey tabby, all bones and
croaked meows, darted in front of her. Janine
didn’t respond in time and her fall triggered
an avalanche of boxes, a flurry of papers as
her mother watched from the kitchen.
“Find the birth certificate?” her mother
asked. Oblivious.
Writing prompt: Watch it!
The Metro is packed. The threatened end-of-day thunderstorms have arrived and I am jammed in with other hangdog federal workers, soaked tourists, and a crowd of high school students all wearing identical Smithsonian raincoats. I stare at a man’s hairy hand, thick gold ring on his index finger, as I hang on to the pole by the doors. We breathe in the heavy air, faint with adolescent sweat.
Picture from The Janus Museum.
As the warning chime rings and a disembodied voice tells us “Doors closing,” she walks in. I see her almost every day at Union Station sitting by the Christopher Columbus fountain behind a phalanx of plastic bags. “Got any money to spare today, baby?” she’ll ask. Before I encountered her there, she once sat next to me on the Metro, in one of those seats half hidden behind plexiglass at the back of the car.
She’s hard to forget, this middle-aged African American woman, probably homeless, maybe a little crazy. Every morning she gets up and puts make-up on her face, stripes of beige and dark tan, giving herself the face of a bland tiger. Her eyes are always hidden behind sunglasses. Today she wears a threadbare, stained trench coat, tan, stylishly cinched at the waist.
Commuters flatten themselves against daytrippers as the tiger woman forces her way into the car, except for man beside me. “Hey, you: watch it!” he yells. She ignores him, the doors close, and we’re on our way. Next stop, Judiciary Square.