Schifosa

Tags

beach crime, crime fiction, fantastical crime fiction

Misha Solkonikov, flickr

I found a motel on St. Pete run by a quiet German couple. Earlier that day upon my arrival to town, I had deposited the money from the policy with no fanfare.

At check in I wore the black of a widow. I was very quiet, subdued, some might even say I seemed to be appropriately mourning.

On my first evening I wore to the pool a conservative kaftan, had a drink from the bar only at the cocktail hour and only one.

The police had questioned me a few days ago when he died but only to rule me out, had made note of an alibi.

There would have been only the one motive, though a considerable one, the sizable life insurance policy.

After the questioning, I had to survive the duties – the mourning wife, funeral director, hostess and I was surprised I had it in me to be so cold and unfeeling. But all I had to remember was my husband’s iron grip on my arm, the bruising, the years of indignities, and I was a woman of steel. Before I left town I paid the death expert, my white knight.

At the beach my first sunset there, how good the warm breeze felt on my cheek as I followed the path between the dunes, the setting sun on my back, the knowledge of the money tucked away in my account, my German hosts polishing my car in the lot.

There was a little brick hut apparently for storing beach equipment along the path. And beside it, a small concrete outcropping where five smooth black cats lounged.

What did they know? I thought to myself, amused. Very little.

On the beach as the sun fell I must have drifted asleep.

I woke up in the darkness to mewling and purring beside me. The cats, I thought.

One had pressed its lips to mine. I couldn’t move. It had taken all my breath, its yellow eyes penetrating the dark.

I woke, gasping for air. It had been a nightmare.

I sighed in relief and returned to my room. The next day, a group of them waited for me outside my door. I could barely pass to get breakfast.

I was not able to stay at St. Pete without the cats following me, more and more of them. It made me feel conspicuous and self conscious. And of course people looked at me.

I moved to another beach town further north and stayed inside most of the time but found they clustering near the door though I never fed them. They followed me when I went to to the grocery or to town, crowding in, harassing, mewling, hissing.

It’s been months now and I’m half crazed.  To be honest, I hope to die.

 

 

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Billy’s Boots

Tags

child neglect, cult, racism

Rebirth of Cool, Mod and Skinhead Clothing, Dublin

At night, Billy sits with Brother John and the guys at their WAR house in the Panhandle as they watch the videos of the National Socialist Party. Billy always sits on the scratchy green tweed sofa that reminds him of his Granny’s but Brother John’s smells like earth and rain and the chocolate smell of mildew.

It is Hitler’s birthday. Mother Beulah has made a Nazi cake in the colors of the flag. She sets it on the oilcloth. Her arms are exposed and giggling like Granny’s. He imagines them soft to the touch. In the center of the sheet cake she had written in a thin chocolate scrawl: Happy Birthday, Hitler! Mama Beulah has arthritis and her hands weren’t steady but Brother John doesn’t fault her.

Billy gets a corner piece of the cake, where the piped chocolate icing has bunched up and there is a tiny SS bolt.  Everybody is grabbing for the plates and tiny plastic forks. He pulls himself through sweat drenched boyhood, some bigger bodies too, shoving, the guys cackling and laughing. Mama never made a big cake like this. His birthday was on Halloween. She put a candle in a jacko-lantern. He blew it out. There was no one around.

Every night after dinner, they watch the videos of the Hitler youth in the Old Country, before The Second World War. They talk of the racial consciousness of the boy in the video who plays the drum so hard in the Hitler youth band, who looks like a live Little Drummer Boy from Billy’s nighttime book in the guest room at Granny’s. One of the guys, usually Grady, whose sideburns are so wide and long they’re almost a beard, always says that drummer kid’s got his shit together.

Grady wears black boots with red laces. Red laces mean something. Billy’s boots are red with black laces. If he grows up good in the movement and succeeds, he’ll get his blood laces and black boots.

Billy sneaks downstairs after the salute. The salute is when they stand and put an arm out to the Nazi flag on the wall and Brother John sings the anthem he plays on a disc, a song about a pure white America. Brother John can’t sing and doesn’t always know the words but everyone has to put on a German helmet from the bin. No one smiles. You have to make her eyebrows bunch up and your eyes shaded. You have to sing very loudly. When it’s over you have to say, very loudly, White Power!

One time they’d burned an American flag in the woods when the Klan came for speeches and a cross burning. They had a punk Nazi band, definitely the kind of thing his stepfather hated, the sounds clashing like a car accident, screeching guitars, the band leader’s deep growls that didn’t sound like words. A force took a hold of Billy’s body and he thrashed about with the brothers in the heat and inky darkness, their bodies slamming into each other,  girls watching from the fringes, silent and slouching, smoking.

He deserved to go to jail, it was true, that time living with his Mama and new Daddy. He held up a store with some friends and fired shots though no one got hurt. When he got out, only Brother John was there to make bail, along with Grady and a couple of guys his age, punk ass kids like him who were no longer wanted by their parents. His stepfather handed him over. He didn’t see his Mama again. He didn’t see his Granny. He didn’t hear the songs his Granny sang to him in a wavery voice at night about going to sleep, not worrying his head.

There is a mission that night of the cake, a ride along, and he is forced to go and he didn’t know about it. He is wrenched up from his bed by Brother John, his arm clamped by the same grip that held him sometimes against his will when secret things were happening, secret things even the other boys didn’t know about.

There is a group of them together in the pickup truck, the crickets and night frogs screeching, an owl its loud “hoo” insistent. They bump along in back, Grady and another older guy, and another kid his age. John is driving. The grand wizard has joined them, the wizard who always insisted from podiums in speeches they were about nonviolence. Billy asked him once after a ceremony about the noose patch on his robe. The wizard merely glared at him, his face severe under a pointed hat decorated with stars.

When they get to a house in the woods, there are some other skinheads there already with sawn off shotguns. They busted in and hauled out a black man and laid him out behind the truck. The man’s wife runs outside, screaming. A skinhead with a the big fat gun they called The Judge cocks the piece against her skull. The skinhead bending over the black man has a chain over his shoulder.

“You two boys, you young’uns!” he says pointing to Billy and the other young kid in the back. “Time to step up and be men.”

“You heard him now,” says Brother John. “Time to get out now and earn your laces! Time to see something, be someone.”

The man with the chain tells the other boy to run the chain around the hauling hitch. Then he gives Billy the rest.

“It’s in your hands, son. Let’s get this show on the road.”

Billy thought only of Brother John, then. He had no one. Nowhere he belonged. He would get his red laces and even the older guys would think he was a bad ass Nazi and no one would treat him like a baby.

Brother John and Grady held the black man’s ankles while he kicked and screamed. Billy put the chain around them. Brother John handed him the lock. “It’s on you, son.” he said. “Let’s clean everything out now. Be a man.”

While the man kicked and Brother John yelled at him, Billy heard his Granny’s gentle wavering voice singing Mary Poppins’ lullaby: “While the moon drifts in the skies, stay awake, don’t close your eyes.”

He clamps his hand over the lock and sprints into the woods, the undergrowth slapping his jeans, the thick night air flowing over him like warm water, the throats of the tree frogs cheering him.

“Billy!” he hears Brother John call, but he is soon at the highway and can’t hear them at all.

 

 

 

 

 

Hare’s Bride of Big Pine Key

Tags

fairytale retelling, fairytales of Florida, hare's bride

Hare’s Bride by Ellen Cornett, Grimm Reading

The one thing Florida hares appreciate the most is a lone woman and her daughter, a lone woman desperate to see her daughter matched. In fact, the marsh hare of the Keys, named S.p. Hefneri for playboy founder Hugh Hefner, rather overshoots himself with conquests which is to be expected. Often when a daughter goes missing detectives check the protective briers, dense clumps of magnolia trees, and the mangroves along the shore. These are the places where the handsomely sleek hare with dark brown fur and greyish white belly makes his home. And what the little playboy lacks in size he more than adequately makes up for in charm and persistence. Many a young lady has become ensnared.

S.p. hefneri meet women of the island on their garden patches. “Wanna play?” they say, “wanna come out and play?” Usually the hare of the Lower Keys are nibbling a piece of sawgrass or clover, their eyes gleaming with predatory spirit, their mouths secretly watering with the capture of a young woman. Their endangerment has them thinking irrational mating outside the species. They sit in yards, the sound of the surf burrowing into their long ears , the breeze ruffling their coats, their noses twitching to the smell of salt, dead marine life, and fresh grass. They hop. They hop some more. They spring about, stretching their sleek bodies for the benefit of their observers, admiring young women so they hope. Someone will take note. That is their confidence.

Hugh number 121 observes wife number 16 come into the yard. Only 150 of the S.p. Hefneri exist on the island but this one is not worried. What a wonderful tail she has, he thinks. He will make her his. What a wonderful ride she will enjoy on his tail.

“Stop eating our sawgrass. Mother is not pleased,” the black haired beauty Brynn Violet scolds. She has a nice fire in her dark brown eyes. He knows she has only made an excuse to come outside and talk to him. In typical hare fashion, he says to himself, “She is in love, she is entranced, she protests in abundance.”

In fact, Brynn Violet’s mother, being a religious woman, had been worrying the hare was a portent of a hurricane. It was a witch’s familiar, she reminded her daughter. “Go out there and tell the tatty thing to go away.”

The old mother was old enough to remember tales of her great grandmother swept out to sea by a category five, when people were whipped about like rag dolls and drowned in the bay. Brynn Violet’s grandmother had nary any patience for Christian fears about about hares and black magic. In fact, family stories had it she was a witch.

Girl Rabbit, Critters of the Occult, Books to live by

It was said Brynn Violet’s grandmother could enter the form of a hare, that she kept other familiars – crows and magpies – as pets. Yet none of the magic had helped her live eternally. She had been found among the mangroves, her neck snapped. Her mother reminded Brynn Violet of these things often, lest she fall prey to what those poor on the island were susceptible to – practices and beliefs, evil, shortcuts to hard work.

“Take a ride on my tail,” the hare says. “Let me take you to my home where you can stroke my warm coat and drink my tea.”

She refuses him. And again he comes the next day and she refuses him yet again. On the third day, however, she breaks down at last and leaps on his tail. Her mother, observing what is happening, races from the house. But she cannot catch them. Police and detectives cannot find them. Another island daughter, taken prisoner.

When Brynn Violet returns home on her own conniving and strength, she tells her mother the tale of how the dirty thing tried to make her his sixteenth wife; tried to force her to entertain the wedding party of a crow and magpie by having her cook the wedding feast. She managed to steal large bundles of mangrove twigs just outside the window and make a huge doll standing by the hot stove, cooking wedding stew and tea.

It was later told in town the impatient hare approached the doll, ordering it about, and lopped its head off in frustration thinking to bop his soon to be bride on the head. When the twig head rolled off, the hare cried out in shock, alarm, and grief.

“I was so alone,” Brynn Violet says to her mother when she was safely tucked away at home, enjoying her mother’s best stew. She cries as she describes how demanding the hare was and how the crow looked at her with black eyes, how the magpie cocked its head and pecked her arms and hair.

The hare’s bride by shwippie, deviant art

“Well you are home now,” says her mother, kissing her on the forehead.

And that is how the clever Brynn Violet, who is named for the island of Islamorada, meaning purple island, restored herself to her happy life with her mother in their humble abode by the sea.

ladybug

Tags

loss, nature, shrimping

bang pu by Roberto Trombetta, flickr

There is a link to an old story of mine below. It was first published in the Australian journal Pure Slush then I posted it on a blog I started years ago using a pseudonym. I no longer post on my old blog but I wanted to share some of my early work here.

Like many Floridians, I have always loved the ocean, and birds, and fish. It is a tale of love and loss too. Thank you for traveling to my old site. Have a beautiful week.

via lady bug

Chipped Plate Day for Mr. Namaste

Tags

emptynest, grown children, motherhood

lemari makanan by Dzulhaidy Abdul Rahim, flickr

It was chipped plate day. Benevolence sorted through the painted stoneware set on the shelf and yanked out one that was had a nice size chip on the edge. Namaste-nighttime- greeter would like it or she would throw the whole thing in the trash – plate, leftover chili, noodles, cheese, sour cream.

Last night, Kadin had knocked on her door on his way to his bedroom, and in a goofy manner, almost as if nothing happened between them earlier, said “namaste.”  He wasn’t much of a “namaste” guy, had argued for the election of the bellicose, unhinged political candidate though he wasn’t old enough to vote. No, it was a joke. He was mocking her of course.

Earlier he had grumbled about having to take out the trash and the dog. When she started to think about how it made her feel, she sent him her special version of the shake down text. They were on different levels of her townhouse – she, on the third level in her bedroom, watching on her computer the series about debunked methods of gathering forensic evidence, and he, on the second floor, tucked into his xbox game of formula one. The meds she was taking for cancer prevention hobbled her and she wasn’t coming down to talk to him. So she sent the text. He would just have to deal. He had enough of a conscience to come up and work it out with her.

He was too old to punish. She didn’t want him to leave her permanently or ignore her or withhold like what happened with her own parents.

No, she had the art of reasoning on her side, her verbal abilities, and if the going was especially rough, tactics of guilt and manipulation. But the chipped plate seemed a good enough little satisfaction on her end. He would never know, of course. But she would: That she had a choice of what to serve his meal on, a whole, perfectly good plate, or one with a chip. Here ya go, little namaste king, she thought, handing him the leftovers he had quietly protested her making for him. Her funds were low for the month. They would have to be careful. He didn’t care. He decided to pout anyway? Whom had she raised? He was twenty years old. He would learn soon enough. Namaste. She smiled.

While she was in the kitchen, she was drenched, sweating. It was July. Florida. The air conditioning bills can sky rocket and often things break so the AC companies rake it in. Winter times, she shuts everything down and watches the power bill dip. It really was the little things. She was getting old which shown in these small pleasures.

She was drenched and so makes a joke about carrying around the box fan to help her through the weather and menopause. Namaste boy gets a little crazy, says wow, isn’t she getting like a bit explicit.

I’m not talking about my sex life she said. He could handle it. He was twenty. Well, maybe that was a little much so she added, My hormones brought you into the world and they also almost killed me with cancer. Besides, she wanted to say, changing your diaper was quite the raw and unfiltered experience in reality, if you want to talk explicit.

He would learn soon enough, wouldn’t he: the unexpected vicissitudes of life, the need to eat leftovers,  learning maybe temporarily to be poor, learning he won’t be served just what he wants and when. She had not completely spoiled him. But guilt – mainly, the divorce – had slowed down some of the teaching.

When he went to work later, his summer delivery job, in thunderstorms in a city full of car crashes from severe weather, power outages, blown out traffic lights, she turned her phone on to charge. In case he needed her.

Namaste, she thought.

In the fall he would be gone to school to live off campus with his friends. She was giving him a great deal of her furniture. He was already interviewing for next summer’s internship and would probably not be back.

Her heart was so wounded. But of course this was so right.

What had she left undone? Everything, it seemed.

But maybe he would think it natural to take the chipped plate for himself, leave the whole plates for others. He would never see it as a punishment perhaps. She knew he had confidence to not see it as a lesser position.

Only the clock kept her company, and her little dog’s snoring. It was the fifth day of July and some were still shooting fireworks down the street. How quiet it would be come August.

 

Mother

Tags

abuse history, childhood trauma, Memory

 

Neil Moralee, Watchers in the Wood, flickr, Familiar by Dorcas Casey

Walking her dog beside the wood one afternoon in July, Maja noticed for the first time a black mattress in a clearing of trees. The mattress was tucked inside the canopy of green leaves, almost indetectable. The week before she had seen a huge pumpkin there. It looked fresh and it wasn’t Halloween. She had thought at the time it was odd. Pumpkins of course didn’t grow in a Florida wood.

She stopped to observe the clearing. The clouds were gathering. The trees and vines and undergrowth was taking on an intensified darkness like it did on a rainy Florida day in summer. Her dog sat her little white bottom on the warm asphalt of the street, unfurling her long tail and sniffing the wind which sure smelled to her of the rain drops and wet street and wet earth to come.

Twenty years ago, her mother had flown down from Pittsburgh to be her with her for the delivery of her first grandchild. Maja was due on Halloween. When he didn’t come on time, they tried all kinds of silly tricks – walking backwards, primrose oil, eggplant parmesan, driving down a bumpy road. A week later, Maja had still not delivered and her mother had to go home on her return flight.

The night before she left, she entered Maja’s room where Maja was getting ready for bed. Abel was still at work.

“Maja,” she said, pointing a long nailed finger at her, her face framed by the darkness of the room, the only light being at the light on Maja’s dressing table where she sat, removing her earrings. “I know you have delayed the child on purpose! Don’t try to hide that from me now, girl.”

Maja, mute like she had always been over her mother’s extreme paranoia and superstitions, said nothing. Eventually her mother drifted from the room.

Maja shivered that night in her bed to think of it, the tightness of her swollen belly indeed hers and hers alone, thank God. Her mother’s absurd accusation she had prevented the birth reminded Maja of her loneliness growing up, her fear.

When Maja moved to Orlando with Abel, she had been grateful for the very odd climate, the exotic green an over exuberant lushness. It reminded her nothing of home, the cobbled and slightly frail seeming streets, the huddling of old dark buildings and homes so close to one another, the grayness of the days fall until late spring. She had gone back for her mother’s funeral right before Justyn’s tenth birthday.

In the wood there was something over the black mattress, something standing there, large and hunched. In the place that seemed to be its face, Maja observed the dark penetrating eyes, the ugly open maw. Was it a person or a tree? She had a horrifying thought it was some form of her mother. She gathered herself and made her way to her porch.

She knew she should call the police, or someone. But she would let the mattress set out there for the night.

Justyn was safe in his liberal arts college up in South Carolina. He would have laughed good naturedly at his mother’s belief there was someone in the woods.

How much that had cost her, she had thought, that laugh of his, its nurturing and its preservation.  It had been well worth it.

She went inside her three story townhome and locked the door.

liquid asylum

Tags

mental asylum, mental health treatment history, mental illness

Oakwood Cemetery, Austin, by kissingtoast, flickr

We think you should know, but you do, don’t you, dear ones, ones who have passed on, ones who now live in the street, ones who have killed and molder in prison, ones who live in underground spaces forgotten under cities until money and children and food go missing, until abandoned houses are destroyed, until libraries parks and public places reek of unseemliness, we will never leave you, the representatives of who you were before you were placed on operating tables, drilled clean through your skull, hammered through your eye socket, shocked with insulin and electricity, precious memories flying, shrieking, from your skin, old personalities, pleasures, predilections lingering saddened, forlorn, in corners of the operating room.

See? The doctors and nurses and orderlies said. We don’t have to put them in cages. Look! We don’t have to put them in straight jackets. No longer the padded cell! And yet we said to you, we pointed this out dear ones: Your tongues are now so jammed in your mouths you can barely speak.  They congratulate themselves, the nurses, the doctors, the orderlies while you convalesce in the infirmary. There are cigarettes outside behind the surgery, there is wine and beer on breaks, a cake to celebrate the next hundred batch, and sex in the janitor’s closet. And finally, families can bring their smiles to the common areas and feel relieved for they are not pretending.

We the spirits of this place, the spirits that gathered when the town said We will build buildings for a keeping of those not fit to live among us, we those spirits want you to know we have been watching you and know you, the real you and not your spirit of violence and destruction, of hate, but the one you can’t remember now, the one born of God, the one who must exist somewhere, the one you hope will be recaptured, the one who will get married again, the one who will help you regain the respect of your children and community, the one your your mother and father believe will break through the face you present, the blank mind, the addled tongue, the hand that drifts up uncontrollably to pat the space on your head where a drill bored through, the drill taking you though it didn’t care, not really, leaving you sensitive to light and noise, any loud noise, any disruption to a mellow day which nowadays means just about any sound.

And for those of you who became like power plants with nothing but current running through, for those whose bodies veins were flooded through with insulin over and over, you were just as fucked. We have your memories up here on a shelf. You may never get them back but we keep them and send them back in little batches like molded leaves rotting on trees, memories of leaves, veiny outlines, lace.

When you come back in your mind to us no matter where you are, the flophouse, the prison cell, the cardboard box, the bungalow with a picket fence, we know you want the whole thing back, what you were, or, more accurately could have been. You are with us in spirit and we meet you in the air while you are drift in your dreams, we meet you to try to help you find what you are looking for.

In your mind you go back to the place where you lost yourself, you go back to your old bedlam, you come home to us, your home you never intended to feel as home and yet it was the site of this terrible new self you were born into, and there is no place like home my dear ones for here we keep who you were, you will find it here, we promise, if only you return, to make yourself whole among us again, to confront your executioners as they say.

It is not as haunted as tourists say, you know that, those foolish people who want to give themselves a shiver spending a night in restraints. Idiots. We have half a mind to show them real fear, but it would be a waste, alas.

You were the real beauty and the romance, my how we miss you, our beautiful, broken ones. Bring your old and weary bones to lie here again and let us give you back your old self. Your memories await. So too the tears you cannot cry being too feeble to feel. We will give you your self to you whole, along with your pleasures, as well as a deep and lasting sleep if you come to us and find your home once more in the bosom of health. It did not happen the first time, the wholeness, the health, but let us try again. Please.

 

Wild Animal

Tags

adoption, bipoalar, dysfunction

Hailey Kean, unsplash

The door that always used to creak up in front of me while I sat in the hall of the manse was heavy and dark. It moved like an old grandfather. It created a shadow over my face, blocking the light of the hall light. It kept me in the dark for hours. Until it wanted me to leave. Then it slammed shut, waking my mother, waking my father. My sister slept.

Why don’t you want to sleep in peace? said my adopted mother. Why don’t you stay in your room with your sister? She was awake now standing over me in her curlers and robe. Why do you sit in the hallway half the night like a hyena?

I thought of that later, wondering if my eyes glowed in the dark, wondering if whoever was opening the door to cast me in darkness was hoping to see my glittering eyes. I wondered if it was my dead birth mother. The one who gave me life. I wonder if she was wild too.

When I went to a friend’s birthday party with my mother and sister, I tore into my friend’s gifts and opened them myself. I couldn’t wait. Like a wild animal, my mother said, shaking her coiffed head. She apologized profusely to the child’s mother. In a dress and everything, she said to me, later in the car, jamming in the lighter with a pointy red nailed finger.

I sat beside the door that night and consulted the dark blocking the light, its nonseeing coolness a relief after so much scrutiny. You could do anything in the dark, say anything. Be who and what you wanted. I could take the heads off my dolls, stab them. I could pinch a boy, make him cry. I watched for my birth mother again. She would have to be a ghost. She was dead. She had hung herself in the dark. In the dark of her lonely house far away from my father.

I know I make my adopted mother sad. My Rangerette boots that will never be so clean as she hoped. Digging with my grandfather in the garden for Easter eggs. He, a wild animal himself, encouraging me, boisterous and loud. The two of us just on the other side of feral and he my adopted kin. Maybe I wasn’t too far gone after all.

I could have been anything, my mother said to me, confronting me the day before my divorce was final, talking to me with Dad and my sister in the therapist’s office. You always thought you were so special, always thought you could be more. But you were always so wild, couldn’t keep your mind on anything. Now look at you.

I know she considered me not technically hers.

That night, I sat on the floor of my newly acquired empty apartment, my default shelter. I am not sure there had ever been any options here. Does a dog choose its course? I watched through the sliding glass door the moon setting over the lake. I watched with my glittering eyes. I would not sleep for years.

witch in the woods

Tags

cannibal witch, mental illness, Russian folklore

Mike Kniec, To Grandmother’s House We Go, flickr

I went to a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. Often I took a path that cut through the woods, a path that connected our small campus to a street of high end shops in town. In the heart of the woods there was a little bridge arching over a small brook. Beside it there was a stone cherub. When I was unhappy senior year, I often sat beside the brook to quiet my mind. Changes would be happening soon upon graduation. Life would no longer be as simple as cramming for tests or writing papers. I had to find work. And I did not know where I might find work. And I didn’t want to go home.

Over my college years, I had become distant from my parents, my father and stepmother. They didn’t often visit at school, not even when other parents came. And they didn’t always help me get home when I didn’t have a ride for holidays, except for Christmas. When I was younger there had been other problems as well though I hadn’t remembered them until I spent long quiet hours in dorm rooms, empty, echoing halls. Was I a young woman with a bad attitude? Or had I encountered neglect, even abuse? I couldn’t know. I just felt home was dark and unknowable.

Thanksgiving my senior year I walked through the woods alone. I was a Halloween baby which means I had turned 21 and since I was alone I felt I owed it to myself to buy a drink. Not even Max was here with me, my boyfriend since freshman year. He also lived in Florida and found himself on campus over holidays. But he went to Myrtle Beach with a friend. On Friday of the break, I sat on my bridge having had a white Russian at the bar. I felt the moss on the brick, soft to the touch and under my stockinged legs. The time between the pink sky and utter darkness had become my favorite time and in these woods there was always a dove to serenade me, or an owl or whippoorwill. I wished the cherub was real, still I was glad for its stone presence. Something about it comforted me.

I sensed a pre-mature encroaching darkness but when I looked into the woods I noticed it was only a darkness limited to a particular shape. As it neared I could hear clinking and clattering, like a wooden windchime. I made out skirts which swished among the leaves. And a very high pitch of hair, a nimbus surrounding the face above which floated a high ruff accentuated with clattering ornaments. The woman held a long staff of a particular shape. When she neared it looked vaguely like a giant pestle. She wore circlets of bones and skulls on her neck, wrists, and waist.

“Waste of time,” she said, “waste of a girl.”

“What?” I said, hoping I didn’t hear what I thought I heard.

“Don’t waste my time. I was going to say something helpful to you. I know you’ve been loitering around here, but I resent wasting my breath.”

She walked past, her skirts dragging on the footpath. She smelled of roasted meat, dirt and damp leaves, unwashed skin, tallow, smoke. Likely one of the crazed homeless like we have in Florida.

“I remember your babcia, your sweet little Polish grandma” she said, “And you. I remember you when you were a girl and your babcia cared for you.”

I said nothing. I let the whippoorwill speak. It was getting cooler. I had a strange taste in my mouth, like something was deeply wrong. Of course there was: How could she know me? Yet somehow I felt I was also expecting someone dark to show familiarity with me, a stalker, a murderess. I felt my blood coursing.

“You don’t know me,” I said, in defiance of the bones which clattered on her frame.

“You babcia made huge batches of pierogis every summer and took care of you and your brother and sister. She taught you about plants and flowers and placing plant offerings on the alter for the ceremony for the Feast of the Assumption. Remember? You have abandoned your ways with the Virgin Mary.”

“I remember.”

“A waste,” she said. “You will never be your babcia.”

“She’s dead, I don’t want to go home. Mother is dead too, long ago.”

“You are spoiled. I should have boiled you up in the pot when I had the chance. I should have taken you and chopped you up and eaten you.”

“The red ribbons tripled on my wrists for the Feast were my babcia’s protection against the likes of you.” I said, practically shouting now, so much louder than she was being with me. I shivered. The cream of the white Russian was not resting easy on my stomach.

“But you forget, I also eat adults. You appear to be sweet meat. I’ll bet your flesh tastes bitter.” She ran the black tips of her fingers along her tongue. “You’re a bitter, stupid girl. Who cares if your step mother abused you? Who cares if she only cares about her own birth children? Go home and pray I don’t find you or I will take away one more waste of a life and be nourished. Be glad you’re even alive. Be glad every day I allow it.”

I stepped away. I backed away not taking my eyes from her. Then I turned and ran.

When I got back into my dorm, the dark empty, echoing halls, I checked behind me before closing the door. There was no one.

I didn’t mind the rest of my holiday alone in my room. The food in my minifridge was a comfort. I made soup and tea with my kettle.

After graduation, I took a menial job shelving books at the library. It was all I could find. I lived with my father, stepmother, and stepsisters.

It was a while before I went to graduate school. Eventually, I found a job as a librarian.

I had my child baptized in the Polish Catholic church and made a beautiful offering of hawthorn, wheat, and roses at the Feast of the Assumption. I promised Mary I would not forget my faith and tied red ribbons around my child’s wrist to protect her from boginki, forest spirits who would take her away or hurt her.

At thirty I was diagnosed with bipolar depression. The faith of my childhood and reawakened faith of my young adult years became extinct with the medications. I felt I had lost some critical link to my mother and my babcia. My life was no longer as sad, scary, and uncertain. But it also was no longer as interesting. It was flat and strange, a foreign territory.

With my diagnosis, I had to assume my encounter with a cannibal witch was some delusion of my illness.

And yet, I don’t feel I would be the person I am had this thing not happened.

One week when my child was away with my husband’s family, I stayed off my medications to see how I would feel. All I felt was deeply confused. I could not accomplish a thing and I did not sense the witch of my babcia’s bedtime stories or the Virgin of her faith.

Nevertheless, I remembered Baba Yaga’s lesson to be grateful.

I returned to my medications and never strayed from them again.

Laughy Taffy Daffy God and Country

Tags

empath, Memorial Day, PTSD

What Lies Above by Kinga Britschgi, deviant art

It was Memories of Laughy Taffy Daffy God and Country Day and Mrs. Seidelbraun had a major issue: She could not manage to extricate herself from the bed. Soon Taffy Day participants would be flooding the streets, floating good spirits balloons, spewing fireworks from their mouths, doing midair acrobatics with the aid of their combat-sadness-anti-gravity-boots.

On days like this, the air turned butter it was so smooth, the sun was a creamy smear in the sky, neighbors greeted each other with kindly salutations, even those who on non Taffy Days dreamed secretly of administering unnoticeable but painful papercuts over slights, grudges, micro aggressions. People baked for their neighborhoods, the smells of sugar and pastries filled the air. There was hugging and laughing and handing out candy. And of course there was taffy pulling, greased pole climbing, pig calling. Years ago, there had been a brief memorial for The Town of Daffy Day residents who had given their lives so that everyone could be Happy, but really, that part of the day started to become both boring and super triggering. And so they made do with laying flowers on the one memorial in the town: A water feature of an upright gun holding a helmet.

Every year had become worse and worse for Mrs. Seidelbraun. The first year she recognized painful gravitations on Memories of Laughy Taffy Daffy God and Country Days, she managed to make it down the elevator of her high rise apartment, down to the street of festivals, parades, and bacchanalian frivolities. She didn’t laugh exactly but she didn’t exactly frown either. She played it off and no one was none the wiser, including Flora who managed to be offended at every affront to festivity. They had decorated a float together, full of paper flowers and young girls from a local ballet company pirouetting on tippy toe as the truck pulled them through a street raining with confetti. She even managed to eat a Happy Hot Dog beside which Mr. Happy was administering his annual contest of Happy Hot Dog Stuff Yourself Silly. She put mustard and ketchup and relish on it, a sign to Mr. Happy she was still A OK. A Good Girl though she was 40.

That was a couple of years ago. Last year, she made significantly less progress. She pushed herself up to standing in her studio apartment and slid her feet into her dilapidated old slippers and shuffled over to the window overlooking the street. Sshh shh sshh went her feet, the only noise in the apartment though the marching bands down below were beginning to warm up and people wearing the combat-sadness-anti-gravity-boots were whirring by, practicing their maneuvers in the air. Prayers were being sent up to heaven on balloons with strings of flowers attached. Prayers that said “Only happiness,” “only peace,” “no triggers,” “trigger warnings please.” “please be happy always and keep us all happy.” She knew what the slips of prayers said. She helped copy them from the Community Suggestion Book for Wellbeing. Flora would be upset with her for staying inside. She hadn’t pulled it off, getting to the street. And she was right, Flora had called the next day, upset and angry.

In a way she had been glad she wasn’t even going to have to face Flora this year, at least not on the day of the event. She would simply have to admit the truth: Her bed held her fast as mud in a deep bog. It would not release her, it had sucked her energy, her strength. When she closed her eyes she saw terrible things, she heard terrible and agonizing cries and explosions and pops. She tasted blood, dirt, gun powder, fear. And yet, she couldn’t open her eyes for long, she kept falling asleep again, or falling into visions, into nightmares or waking nightmares. She saw friends she knew bloodied and missing half of their faces, their eyes and limbs torn away, children running in the streets crying and naked. The sky was exploding and there was fire, as if this place were a very deep hell. Buildings had crumbled and were splitting, tumbling like large giants laid low, groaning in agony. She cried out but no one heard her. She had not discovered a way out. All day, she had dreamed of the past, or maybe some distant time in the future, maybe sometime soon.

 

 

The Land of Absolutes

Tags

dysfunctional relationships, fantastical literature, satire

Chimney Pot Papers, woodcut Fritz Endell,1919, flickr

There is an interesting place called the Land of Absolutes. I would like to be able to tell you about every aspect of this land, but alas, for the storyteller to be heard, she must be believed. I will provide a sketch along with an example family from the town to give you some rough idea. You will hardly believe it. It is better than a ride at Disney.

In the Land of Absolutes, there is nothing in between. There is no person that is in between. To live in Absolutes, you must be so tall, you are the tallest of humans who have lived on the planet, or so small so as to be the size of a little mouse. If you are going to be fat, let’s do this right, round yourself out, roll around like Violet Beuregarde! If you are going to be skinny, be invisible when you turn sideways. When you yell, yell all the way, when you talk gently, talk so soft that someone needs to get right up to your mouth to hear you. They might not even hear you at all!

When you are political, march every day for your cause. Carry signs. Bash people over the head with them. Punch the opposition. Carry weapons. Go to jail. When you are apolitical, sit at home and stare at the dust particles filtering through the air in a shaft of sunlight slanting in. Count the particles. Make note of them. Make a chart. Compare the number of particles from day to day and see if the numbers correlate to anything. Leave your tvs alone, a sad gaping eye in your living room. Pretend the outside world does not exist. Order your groceries delivered, your clothes, your shampoos and soaps, your sex toys, your love, your religion, your peace. Be quiet and uninvolved. Keep to yourself.

You know what people do when they aren’t either all the way tall or all the way short? All the way fat or all the way skinny? All the way political or all the way uninvolved? They can’t exist long in the Land of Absolutes. Imagine it. Where are they going to find clothes? How are they going to find food? It’s either packaged for tiny mice sized people and twig people or huge tree sized people or barn sized people. When the in between people are out and about in the Land of Absolutes, they get bashed over the side of the head or swept along in the latest political riot. When they knock on the door of the apolitical they never receive an answer. There is a hush still as the grave.

The “in betweens” as they are known are really tourists, looking for a place to exist. They make do. Often, they are observers. Actually, nowadays as migration patterns have set in and people move from town to town looking to escape Absolutist policies and public life, they have founded communities for themselves. It is not possible for In Betweeners and Absolutes to cohabitate or be in relationship. Their separate communities, with guards and their own fly over helicopters, curfew hours, checkpoints, ensure there is some measure of peace. Though sometimes there is an attempt to mingle.

I tried mingling once, getting out there. I wasn’t finding anyone in my community with whom I wanted to settle down for a while. I wasn’t looking for a Bond, which is what they are calling it nowadays. More like something a little more tuned down. A Mutuality with Happy Consequences and Occasional Challenges But Overall Happiness. There is a kind of person I always tended to be attracted to in the Absolutes and that is the tall tree-trunk kind of a person with big opinions, someone political and passionate, who does not get their love in the mail. I met him in a town square one night at a rally. He was so gorgeous. And so ambitious. Nothing he did was halfway. How very Absolute of him. I was attracted immediately.

What I didn’t know about the Land of the Absolutes is a rule that applies to them: All things must be done absolutely. As an example, what that means in family life in the Land of Absolutes is a strict obedience to the rules laid down by an iron fisted matriarch or patriarch from time immemoriam.

On our first date I ate at my new love’s house. The family was served plates by another family who worked for them, some of the thinnest people I had ever seen. I have seen needles thicker. These thin people laid plates of meat, potatoes, and vegetables in front of us. It is amazing these thin people made such gorgeous, delicious looking food. It looked like food they never ate.

We commenced to eating. Now, I happen to love potatoes. Imagine my joy when a white, fluffy potato was found in front of me, next to the succulent meat and buttery vegetables. I lovingly lavished it with butter, salt, pepper, sour cream. I was starving. I took a bite, looked around and smiled, just in case I needed to say something or listen. But everyone was eating. I took another bite, and another, and another! I ate it all! How tasty!

Suddenly, there was a dead silence, no clanking utensils against plates, no scraping with the labor of cutting meat, not even the tinkling of ice in a glass. I looked up. They were all staring at me! These huge people! What did I do?

“We eat everything in rotation here,” said my love. “This is crazy, the way you are eating!” he crashed his hand down on the table so the dishes and utensils clattered. He was yelling and I was scared. When he had been yelling about politics or people he didn’t agree with, other people, I had found it funny. Now, it terrified me. Everyone in the room was huge, staring. Their heads barely fit under the ceiling. I marveled at the table. How did they find enough wood to build it? “You will fill all up on your potato and won’t have room for the other things on your plate! Are you even sane? Do you even know what you are doing? Are you even a grown up?” There was growling then and leering, baring of teeth. I backed slowly away, and made it through the door. I ran all the way home, I don’t know how. I am hardly an athlete.

In my own house later, the moonlight shifting through windows in a room I’m sure contained dancing dust particles, I pulled out the photo album of my childhood. I flipped on the light and turned to the page of my three year old self who had buried her hands deep in her birthday cake. She had stuffed her mouth and the icing had stained her lips blue. Her head was tipped back and she was smiling. Her mom was holding her on her lap and smiling. The dad I knew who took the picture was smiling as well. Though you cannot see him in the picture, I know he was there and how he looked at his little love.

 

semaphore

Tags

alcoholism, drunk, single life

Massimo ankor, flickr

How to explain the skinned elbow. It wasn’t like the time Miska hopped up on top of the bar to dance and had fallen, some of the guys coming to her rescue.

No, this was Berta home alone with her frozen dirty martini, underestimating her body’s ability to absorb the alcohol on no carbs. But also, self medicating when her midlife boyfriend reunited with her and her fear of abandonment set in.  Overweight, middle aged Berta, divorced from a 20 year marriage to a doctor, grateful for a man’s expressed interest in her even if it was only for the easy sex. And it was always hard for Berta to know the difference: Was he just interested in the sex or did he have a truly vested interest? And did it matter any more? Was she supposed to care?

How to explain the loose skin at her elbow when she showed for girls night out. An hour before, standing at her sink, a sudden sensation overwhelming her and a slow, slow tipping of her body like she had heard cows tip at the slightest pressure at night while asleep. She couldn’t stop herself. She tried, but she kept going down, to the kitchen linoleum, her midlife boyfriend having told her only hours before it made him really hot to watch a woman emerge from a bathtub. She had been secretly grateful he had yet to see her creaking up to standing from her townhouse tub and she had wondered what would happen when he finally witnessed it.

She had lain on the kitchen floor when the dirty martini laid her low. She absorbed the humiliation. Of course, she would never tell. But what if she had been forced to alert someone because of broken bones, or worse? She would have rather died. And she thinks: She probably just would have died. Before calling. Before texting. Just died.

sister

Tags

cancer, family, sisters

girl, before 1823, public domain, Barbara, flickr

Sister, do you remember when, scared in the old manse in Texas, you and I whirled and whirled through the hallway during a thunderstorm? Do you remember when I left you in the hall so I could go find our mother? I remember what she said to me when I entered her dark room: Where is your sister? Why are you not taking care of her? Why did you leave her alone?

Sister, do you remember when, many years later, you held my hand while I had my hair buzzed off? Do you remember when I was sick, when I had cancer? Do you remember going to my appointments and asking questions when I was weak? Do you remember begging relatives to come to my surgery when everyone seemed to have better things to do? Had I died you would have arranged my funeral, you would have seen me honored.

I wanted to say to our mother then, when I survived: Here is my sister, Mother. She has taken good care of me. She has not left me alone. I will always be in debt to my sister. She loves me. And I love her.

for National Siblings Day, April 10, 2019

wife of the synchromystic

Tags

alien hunt, Kentucky goblins, synchromysticism

Traveling Museum of the Paranormal and Occult, currated by Dana and Greg Newkirk

Linda was new to it –  goblins, Bigfoot, ghosts, witchcraft, Tarot cards. She had married into it. She had met Rob at the seminary where she had served as a secretary and he had been a student.

One day, when they were home and he was studying, they received an email from an old friend who had begun to coin himself a synchromystic: Things were suggesting themselves, said his friend. His friend had received a note from a man describing beings in his yard, beings with large, round eyes, beings similar to a sighting reported fifty years ago at another location but connected to it by an underground cave system.

That night, she baked sugar cookies in the shape of large domed head. She used shiny licourice pieces for eyes. She cut plump three toed feet cookies like the shape of the footprints the writer of the note had seen around his house. When Rob came into the kitchen and saw what she had done, he smashed the cookies with his fists, despite the hot pan. This was serious, he said, and he was going with his friend to check the cave where dark shapes had been seen.

She actually hadn’t been aware she meant it in fun, though maybe she had, she couldn’t be sure. Certainly when he was buried in studying predestination, atonement, salvation, sanctification, she was on more certain ground and she understood him as well, so much like her father and her father’s father. She wasn’t sure what had happened, and she didn’t relish finding herself in a cave with his newfound zeal.

The next night, she did find herself in a cave where the locals said dark beings emerged from an old defunct mindshaft. She was there, in her old hiking boots and a sweater, the air having been cleared with sage and an evoking call to the goblins. What in the world would her father have said? He had died and was lost to her, she acknowledged to herself with a great sadness like a hole opening up in her and swallowing all thoughts. It was the strangeness of this that made her miss him most, this most unexpected turn of her marriage.

They sat at the lip of the cave overlooking a drop down into the trees. And the light was fading and all the familiar sounds of her Kentucky were being parsed for hints of the extraterrestrial, the alien, the spiritual, whatever wanted to speak. It was decided she should participate in the “Spirit Box,” the thought being she was a virgin to the process and would have fewer preconceived notions. She would wear noise canceling headphones attached to a constantly scanning radio, the idea being that spirits use electronic frequencies as a means of communication.

Rob had developed a hardened expression for her since he picked up on the idea she might be making fun of him. He had not smiled, except around his friends. He had rarely touched her, except to help her climb. Would he be pleased she was helping? She was not sure. She was worried of course, and felt a tightening in her stomach. How about what my stomach is communicating to me? She wanted to say to the cave of men but of course dared not.

“It will take a while to get used to this,” instructed Rob’s friend who was holding the earphones. “Listen for a while before letting us know what you hear. If something or someone is trying to make contact there will be a pattern.”

Of course she was somewhat familiar with this, having transcribed many meetings as a secretary, having taking dictation. She appreciated that she was given the opportunity to wait before being expected to report.

The headphones descended, soft and snug around her head. It was cool outside and she had worn her hair down, a light jacket over her sweater, jeans. In a way it was like hiking and camping, no different than when she was in high school with her friends and they scared each other with stories and local legend. But had they really believed anything then? Or was this just an excuse to scream and hold hands and hug and share a time which was fast disappearing before them? Adults doing this voluntarily doing this struck her as odd and slightly pathetic.

Then she heard it, a voice from the Spirit Box that sounded strangely deep and resonant, like her father’s. “Kill,” she thought she heard it say. “Kill him,” it said. Then: “Kill Rob.”

She took the headphones off and trembled. She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said.

“It’s a little disorienting at first,” said Rob’s friend, but just try it one more time. “It would be really helpful. It’s ok if you feel a little bit apprehensive, it’s normal.”

She relented to having the headphones slipped back over her head, having caught a glimpse of Rob’s hard, foreign stare across the cave, illuminated by the lantern. He had never looked at her like he did now, like he might murder her.

There was silence, on the headphones, only static like white noise, then a loud booming voice: “Kill him!” Then more static. Then at last an unmistakable instruction: “Push him out!”

It was her father, warning her!

She stood up, walking over next to Rob at the lip of the cave overlooking the drop. She did not let on. She had the Spirit Box attached to her jeans with a clip and the soft headphones covered her ears.

“Kill him!” commanded the voice. “Kill him before he kills you!”

“Dad?” she said. She saw Rob’s face grow even angrier, his brow furrowing deeply, his jaw set. She was still making fun of them, pretending the spirit of her father was contacting her.

He reached for her but his friend put a hand on his shoulder to stop him and shook his head “No.”

“Kill!” said her father. “Now!”

Rob’s eyes glowed and burned. He wanted her to die.

Without warning she shoved his shoulder and using his surprise to her advantage, pushed. He fell from the mouth of the cave and disappeared, screaming, down, down, his friend, in shock, holding her arm, lest she fall after him, the white headphones glowing around her neck like the primitive necklace of a matriarchal tribe.

the language of flowers

Tags

broken relationship, divorce, healing

The Language of Flowers, or, floral ensembles of thoughts, feelings, and sentiments – Internet Archive Book Images, 1869

She knew she was getting over him when she threw his shriveled dead flowers in the trash. They had been drying in the sun on the bookshelf next to the window. When she had received them she put them in a cream china vase, a wedding gift from long ago. She had received a life and home from someone else back then as a bride and now in her townhome life of temporary lovers on the outskirts of town she received flowers not from a husband, but from a friend who is a man.

She put the flowers in one of her favorite vases and displayed it on the black table in the middle of her living room, taking a picture for him, showing her friends and her sister. She then moved the flowers to the top of the fireplace where it half obscured the tv and she welcomed the intrusion. That was before he came over for the last time.

When things began to fall apart only a week after she received the flowers, this the landmark of their three months together, she moved the flowers out of her line of sight, over on the kitchen counter, though at that time the flowers were still opening and drinking in water. She kept them there because she didn’t know if the man would call again. She couldn’t bear to get rid of them altogether. Maybe there was still hope. She called him. She received no response.

She moved the flowers over to the window, on the bookshelf, an out of the way place. But she couldn’t throw them out, not quite yet. Soon a pizza box was set beside the flowers, a used box which needed to go out with the garbage. Dried flowers drifted to the kitchen floor, a floor which needed to be swept and mopped. There were a lot of things she needed to attend to after the breakup. She tried to reach him again, No response.

She replenished her kitchen with the little money she had left, picking up a basil plant she loved to have on hand, a little indulgence. The  bag clerk at the store had asked her what it was and sniffed it deeply.

At home, the woman put the basil plant next to the vase of drying out flowers, on top of the pizza box, its simple plastic container holding a plant that would last her the summer.

The man’s flowers dried and drifted down. They became ugly.

She watered the basil and put some fresh leaves in a dish to make it more fragrant and flavorful.

Someone else called her and showed her kindness, another man. She felt: What usefulness, drying flowers? There is no call.

She threw out the dried flowers into the plastic bag in the garbage container and shoved them down so their stems broke. How much she had felt for this person. Tomorrow she would clean out the vase. Tomorrow she would put soap into its creamy cavity as well as warm water.

Maybe when she got her house cleaned up and her sink fixed she would make a meal for  the new person. But for now she would let him treat her. She would leave her house behind for a couple of hours. And she would try to forget about this man, whom she loved.

She held the vase and felt its coolness in her palm. Its smoothness was like a good love that should only hold living things. It was a beautiful vase she got for her wedding many years ago. It had always been one of her favorites. It didn’t matter it had served another purpose in a previous life. It was still hers. To do with as she saw fit.

International Women’s Day

Tags

Abuse of women by partner, flash fiction, International Womens Day

German poster for International Women’s Day, 1914. The poster was banned in the German Empire.

A little less than a week after International Women’s Day, I still would like to participate by re-posting a story of mine about a woman’s abuse by her significant other. This is a critical topic at a time we are recognizing women’s rights.

I think I am going to read this tonight at a local reading. It fits the word requirements. And I also think because of its detailed dialogue and descriptions it will be easy for an audience to follow.

Thank you for following my post, the link is listed below. If this is a repeat for you: I have made improvements. Thank you for your support and for reading.

 

via the pleasures of not stirring

Eastertide on Old Cheney

Tags

Easter undead, Ghosts of Central Florida, Orlando History

Raped house by Florian L., flickr

At Eastertide when the moon sets over the lake of Old Cheney Highway the Easter bunnies walk out of the bougainvillea on their hind legs to join the risen ones, who, ancient and young, dance noiselessly, gape in windows, eat candies, and murder the complacent. The undead hoard: former humans and creatures, witches, natives who were infected by white men, criminals, slaves, children who worked the celery fields, babies murdered by their mothers, drug addicts, the mentally ill, the homeless, death row inmates electrified or killed by lethal injection at the Florida State Prison. Many had grown up with songs of Easter, the trappings of wealth and elaborate parties and champagne. Some had not been as privileged and had grown up in meaner states. None had been missed or glorified or given their due. No, quite the opposite. They pop open plastic eggs with gummy fingers and drop chocolate candies into their maws and tear the heads off of candy bunnies and chickens. Nom nom nom they say, chewing. Nom nom nom……If a concerned homeowner comes out to protect his property, they make short work of him too. Nom nom nom…..blood mingling with chocolate dripping down chins. Most people know on Eastertide to stay indoors at night on Old Cheney Highway. And the alligators are there to help if a project seems too big, storing flesh under the banks of the lake until it rots. Nom nom nom…Don’t be a hero on Old Cheney the evenings at Eastertide. Nom nom nom……nom nom nom…..Stay inside and eat your candy Easter morning.

Dark Hearts

Tags

alcoholism, poverty, valentines

heart by goandgo, flickr

Continuing on with Valentine’s Day celebration is a stark little story called Dark Hearts. It is amazing how much pathos exists in life and in stories when the subject is economic disparity. More than heartache, the despair of falling short and not being able to take part lives long and cuts deep.

Dark Hearts

It was Valentine’s night and Vicky only had fifteen dollars. When Jim her husband passed out, she told her daughters she had an errand to do and they were to go to their rooms without disturbing their father.

It was a freezing New Hampshire night, the temperature hovering somewhere around zero. The drive was icy and the Corolla was almost cowering it seemed, begging her to be left alone under its blanket of snow. But she scraped the hood and windows clean and ran the engine. She took off down the drive. She arrived at the grocery a few minutes before the 9:00 close.

She swept through the doors of the brightly lit market, the place as strangely cold as the outside but in a different way. She wheeled the cart to the front of the store where the boxes of candy hearts and stuffed bears had been that morning. They weren’t there. They were tucked off to the side, out of the way, by the wine. A big sign over the table said “40% off our everyday low prices.” Still, it wasn’t enough of a discount. She couldn’t buy each of her girls her own heart of chocolates and her own bear.

There were a couple of boys standing nearby gawking at the table of extravagant after-thoughts.

This, Vicky said to herself, was an opportunity. The only one, short of shoplifting.

“Yeah, my girlfriend would kill me if she knew I was buying her Valentine’s stuff on sale,” one of them was saying, the tall one with a protruding Adam’s apple and light fuzz on his lip.

And at that point, Vicky enacted her plan.

“But what would your girlfriend think if you brought her sparkling wine?” she said brightly. She knew of some cheap stuff she could let on that she was going to buy for them, wine they could not buy for themselves, being so obviously under age. She could let on she was going to buy it for them and they would think they owed her.

“I’ve always had a fantasy,” she said, getting between the boys, threading her arms through theirs. “I want a double valentine. Do you know what it is I’m saying?”

The boys nodded and laughed with their newly minted voices.

“I think I would like that,” she said, “very much.” She gazed steadily into the eyes of the one with the fuzzy lip. He looked older, like he could be the leader of the two of them though not the leader of many more.

“Why don’t we all meet in the bathroom?” she said. “I’ll bring something to drink. How about that?”

They started quaking and laughing nervously.

“But first, you have to do something for me.” She pressed herself up against the leader. “I want both of you to ask me to be your valentine. I want a bear and a heart and a balloon from each of you. Do you think your girlfriends would mind?”

“I think we’re not going to tell ‘em, lady,” said the fuzzy peach lip and they both laughed some more, with a skittery, tremulous quality to their voices.

“Leave my valentines with the cashier. I’ll get wine and I’ll see you in the bathroom.” She kissed the one to seal it.

As soon as the boys made the purchases and disappeared into the men’s room, she grabbed the hearts, animals, and balloons from the cashier and took off in the Corolla.

At home, the smell of spaghetti sauce still sweet and cloying in the air, she found Jim sitting at the table.

“You were out,” he said.

“The store was having a sale on valentines.” She didn’t care what he knew or how he felt. She had hoped he would be asleep and that the girls could have an evening with their gifts but she had left the purchases in the car just in case.

“How come you have money for something like that?” he said. He slammed his whiskey glass down. “Let me see this bullshit.”

He went out to the car and tore open the door. He pulled out the balloons, candy, and bears. He ripped at them, flinging them about the yard, the chocolates flying, one of the bears falling into a ditch, the balloons drifting down in tatters.

“Why do you always like to make me feel like a monster?” he said. “But you know, you’ve never been nothing but a whore since the day I met you.”

She would leave in the morning when he was still getting over what he’d done to himself. And when her girls saw the chocolates, the punctured balloons, and bears drowning in the snow, they would go and not make a fuss.

Amy

Tags

love story, Raymond Carver, valentines

Bright side by Ben Raynal, flickr

There are significant moments in everyone’s day that can make literature. That’s what you ought to write about.
— Raymond Carver

Moments of literature do not have to be actual moments of a writer’s life, but moments that could be a part of anyone’s daily life. Raymond Carver is one of my favorite writers of short fiction and he makes profound use of realistic elements. Here is a tiny story for your Valentine’s Day told in the style of realism. Love to you, and happiness.

Amy

He stood at the foot of her son’s bunkbed. She had slept there the night before, her son being grown and in college. He had been dating her for about six months, but had not succeeded in getting her to sleep the entire night with him. She slept alone.

She reached out and touched the name stitched on his shirt. He kissed her lips. She wore only gloss. He liked that.

“I want to make you some coffee,” she said.

Her hair was mussed up. He wanted to forget his scruples, drop his pants, and climb right into her child’s bed, but he was running late.

“I don’t have time.” It was cold outside. He had to get the truck started. “OK, make me coffee, would ya? And chop, chop.” He patted her bottom.

She would pour him a steaming pint in his big thermos with cream and sugar and he would drink from it slowly to make it last. He would make sure everyone noticed its presence too, clinking it down here or there.

When he came back into the house, she was on the kitchen counter, kneeling, stretching for a bag of sugar.

“Watch it now, baby,” he said, trying to scold her, though he had caught a glimpse of her dimpled thigh under her nightshirt. He knew he would remember it all day. He pulled her down and retrieved the sugar. She took it from him with her icy, thin fingers.

“Let’s get married,” he said.

She didn’t look up to meet his gaze. She held the bag over the mouth of the thermos. As he watched a seemingly endless white stream fall into his coffee, he felt a pressure on his chest.

“Yes,” she said. When he looked up, he saw that she was watching his face, was not watching the sugar, was smiling in that way she saved for things that secretly pleased her.

Valentine’s Sugar Water Love

Tags

love dysfunction, women's freedom, women's liberation

A Bird in a Gilded Cage by Jeanne, flickr

Oh lady, how is it you are caged again despite the tatters of your plumage, evidence of former loves’ ravishing and broken promises, cheeping meekly your protest and your cause fading as it is among desert blooms in a noonday heat under a new lover’s burning interest. The gilding on the wires, the prettiness of the perch were the wild proclamations of love you accepted despite yourself. And you tasted without wisdom the pink sugar water in the little bowl, delicious but without nutrients.

Are you no different from the old text’s version of you blaming you for lust of the eyes and desire for possession, the taker of the fruit, the ruination of the world? If so you have been tricked by becoming a possession yourself, a possession of the man who only proclaims but does not understand, the worn out troubadour intent on his fame but not married to the idea of actual love.

Dear Lady: How is it you never remember that the ones who declare their greatest love early, a morning mist disappearing in the late morning sun, convince themselves and maybe some small part of you that this time it is life and not death? No matter that you said you would never be trapped by anyone who did not care to know your treasured secrets, tender details, beating heart.

Take heart. You know you are finding your strength when, after the bloom falls from the rose, your thoughts and feelings rise up, those old girlhood bones, causing your suitor to blink, stumbling in your blinding light. How he had not anticipated the murder of the scrim of the false lover’s reality. How he underestimated the individual he has enslaved behind it.

She has a will and a conscience and a mind and needs! How awful these stabs to his eyes! How cruel the world of women he thinks, how cruel and ungrateful this one! he says. No appreciation of the gilded cage, the golden perch! The thing has escaped, is flying outside, around and around, wild and uncivil, its leg uncuffed and the sugar water left behind in the bowl.

 

We Awake

Tags

coming of age, experimental fiction, girlhood

girl, brush, ocean and window by Jacopo Ramei, flickr

The tide pushes through the bottom of the door where we sleep on our mattresses. The water fingers our hair. It rises to the level of our windows and pulls us to sea where we rock upon the mournful waves, the seagulls distant and crying, our nightgowns soaked and sticking to us, our bedclothes heavy. We roll over, pressing our faces into saturated pillows.

We sleep through the day, the sun burning our throats, our foreheads, our lips. At low tide, the water leaves us on the beach. The crabs fashion the tresses of our hair and pinch our ears, but we dream of overprotective aunts and punishments. Our mother is crying but we can barely move or open our eyes.

It is dark again and a cool black wave, gently and firmly as a father, moves us into our room. We hear the gentle heaving sighings of waves, of giants, rumbling over, making us feel small and when we open our eyes, finally, to the night, we are not in water at all but are wakeful, dry, and blind.

First appeared in Corium Magazine

r.e.m. 2

Tags

dream journal, experimental writing, Jack Kerouac

Experiment by Oliver Henze, flickr

Notes: In a writing workshop with Laura Lee Bahr at the Kerouac House in College Park, Florida, participants brought written accounts of their most vivid dreams in order to work them into stories. The workshop was entitled “In the Language of Dreams.” One of my favorite exercises involved using the phenomenon of synesthesia to depict a dream narrative. Synesthesia is an unusual connection of the senses, such as seeing colors when one hears a sound, hearing sounds when one sees an inanimate object or colors, smelling colors or sounds, etc. I have already written one such example in a previous post entitled r.e.m. 1. Here I have written r.e.m. 2. I hope to write more as I remember my dreams from my present life and from my past. Maybe you would like to write the contents of your dream using synesthesia. I challenge you to try it and let me know what you think.

When you awake in the reverberating silence of the dead night you remember the deep crimson anger of your ex, the burnt meat hunger for your life. He is on his way to get you in his gray silent stealth. When you step out into the hall, there is his silhouette framed in the door to the living room, his limbs hot tar menacing, shimmering in the light behind and to the side.

You must by half measures approach, first grabbing a figurine friendly as pink on your lonely days. It is on the hall table and you think it could serve as your ally with which to bludgeon the void at the end of the hall intent on nullifying you, then you think better of it, recognizing the power of long knives rubbed together for the effect of the silver invasion of the body white heat through the belly. And so you grab them instead.

The red arrow intent to kill is no part of your soft purple disposition, your mother soft purple, a little blue, a little indecisive, Blue in Green pensive. You must press a bone corset to your back. With the kid gone it is now only you, only you to save what you have this little harmonious honey smelling house shedding past lives, your income dependent existence, contingent mother purple life, Mozart’s Lacrimosa days with Jesus who is plum peaches proud of you.

But Jesus doesn’t want you to die, not because of your ex’s resentment heavy, death certain as millstone drowning, torture by crushing, him and you.

But your ex has left your home by the time you enter the living room, shotgun style shape, backdoor directly facing front, knickknacks from lifetimes past standing at attention like disarrayed soldiers in cabinets and curios against the embrace of walls.

There is a line of elderly women, silent question marks, filing through, back door to front, taking a short cut from church. Should you shut your doors and force this line of gray green stream of hobbling but certain pebbles, bent knees and hunched frames, to walk around the outside of your house?

Surely this stream has found its most natural least resistant route. Would you want the question marks to break over the unevenness of your lawn, thrown off by the syncopated rhythm of roots, uneven resistant sod, hidden wells the deep voices of male voices chanting brown and merciless? You have nothing against the raisin wizened feet yearning for the concreteness of blue even.

When the stream dies, a young woman, a bright pink cotton candy bird, flies in, intent on taking something precious from your depleted honey house which is shedding its skins of former lifetimes. You tighten your bone corset as she flies from object to object, sending puffs of light candy scent from her wings, her attention the disappearing melt of candy floss.

And yet you, by comparison, are a wide open midlife ancient sea whose value had become diluted, whose salty tidal undulations are nonplussed regarding the bright and shiny, the new and fresh. Soon these things too will be overtaken, rusted and sighing.

She spirits into your house, ultravioletly jagged, picking up the few shells of your belongings, a crystal biscuit barrel, a milk glass pitcher, a silver cake stand, a china tea cup. You do not recognize her chocolate hair or robin’s eggs eyes, her spirit a puppy’s, not unkind but aggressive.

Teletype incessant she fires at you as she picks up your belongings: Can I have this? What about this? Would it be alright if I took this? Until most dissonant of all, yellow white clashing, one note off of each other: A Spanish sword demand she take your cream colored porcelain vase inscribed with a bright blue double happiness.

You, the ocean, spit up onto your shore an alternative: a smooth piece of driftwood, an immense antique book containing a story with a pink red happy ending, a chocolate cherry love tale suitable for her age, the double happiness beyond her wisdom, but the book offering the ideal for her, the cosmetic appeal of pages with script regular as a ticking clock, the pictures dancing from the flat white.

Candy floss girl settles into smooth salt taffy and signs your notebook – A guest book? A list of contacts? A signature book? She forms her large loopy Beethoven’s Eroica letters, pulling and pulling and pulling notes from the orchestra, the strings, woodwinds, brass, drums, larger and larger and larger.

When she finishes forming her letters, you see the marks that signify your identity, the soft purple mother love of your nature, the chaotic strands drawn together like a neat package tied with a bow, a package hidden and mysterious, secret. “Margaret” it says, your own self blowing against your face, the breeze against your face gentle and mild, your morning at last blossoming into your pale summer.

the pleasures of not stirring

Tags

Narcissistic abuse, Turkish cuisine, Women's protection from violence

Turkish Delight Baklava by Jeremy Brooks, flickr

The Florida sun is setting across the parking lot and blinding the eyes of the customers along the western facing stand up bar in the grocery eat in restaurant. Amir and Nada are replenishing the chickpea patties, hummus, tabbouli salad, tzatziki sauce, and fresh baked breads in the display case to be ready for the evening shoppers.

The bell clings against the door. In walks Ms. Dashel. Amir had always felt guilty since Ms. Dashel had become a customer. Her first visit to the Mediterranean market had been with Ulysses Sallas, a notoriously demanding man, a local chef in town who shopped there for specialty ingredients. Amir felt in some way that the store had become a trap to hold Ms. Dashel to something against her will.

She sits in her usual spot in one of the free floating tables, plunking down her satchel and grocery bag on an adjacent chair. She orders a Turkish coffee.

She hardly makes eye contact but she has the dark wild gaze Amir has noticed since the woman starting visiting the store on her own.

Though her eyes that first visit had been a soft, twinkling brown as she floated around on the arm of her new boyfriend, Mr. Sallas, Amir would have sworn her eyes had turned color. He had noticed in recent times they are black with flashes of white shards, as if her eyes were now the obsidian of his homeland.

As in times before he wants to reach out to her and physically reassure her but of course his faith prevented it. He retreats to the counter with her order and begs his wife to speak to her.

Nada is a kind a woman but more reserved than her husband. She believes people’s business should be their own. But Amir was kind to everyone and out of respect for his heart she would do what she could.

“There is a huge bruise on her arm,” says Amir, in whispered tones behind the counter while Nada grinds the coffee. “It looks like that brute has grabbed her.”

Only last week Mr. Sallas had come in and yelled at Nada for poor technique in the preparation of his coffee.

Amir always suspected Ms. Dashel believed herself to be Mr. Sallas’ one and only. Amir had noticed she filled her bag up with things normally stocked by the offensive orospu çocuğu. She was probably running his errands while he was sleeping with someone else.

The delicate Nada carefully sets the ornate demitasse cup and saucer down in front of Ms. Dashel so as not to startle her. Ms. Dashel stares at the blank table at nothing in particular. Nada notices on her exposed upper arm, bare because of her light pink sleeveless sundress, a deep purple bruise the length and width of a thick long finger.

“May I sit with you, Ms. Dashel? I am so tired,” she says, hoping Ms. Dashel will understand her intrusion as a request for a favor rather than a display of pity.

“Yes, dear,” Ms. Dashel replies in an abstracted tone. “Please make yourself comfortable,” but she stares at the table as if her beloved coffee had not been set before her.

“Ms. Dashel,” says Nada, “do you mind me observing that pink favors you. It is a lovely dress you are wearing.”

Ms. Dashel makes eye contact with the lovely Nada whose deep brown eyes gaze at her steadily and compassionately as the eyes of Umay. She bends to bring the tiny demitasse cup up to her mouth. Nada notices a little quiver in her left eye, a faint tick along the outer crease.

“Will you be buying groceries from us today, Ms. Dashel? We are so happy to have you here,” says Nada.

Ms. Dashel applies a tiny gold spoon full of sugar to the dark offering and take another sip.

“When we have coffee at the diner,” says Ms. Dashel, “I don’t stir my cream. He always says it is stupid,” says Ms. Dashel, finally. “He believes I am stupid, even in the little ways.”

“Who says this?” says Nada, knowing the answer but not wanting to appear presumptuous.

“Ulysses Sallas.”

Ms. Dashel applies the rim of the deep blue demitasse cup to her fading painted lips. “He laughs at me.”

Nada can only imagine. She remembers vividly Ulysses, a large man, a rope of a ponytail down his back, demanding she start over with his Turkish coffee. She had felt the back of her neck burn as she stood at the stove with the ibrik, willing it to build more foam as demanded of her.

“I want to tell you a secret about stirring,” says Nada, gently, carefully covering her hand over Ms. Dashel’s frail bird claw.

“There is a certain pleasure to be had in not stirring. Let me tell you about those pleasures. First of all, it is beautiful to watch the cream enter the coffee and swirl around, isn’t it, yes? Also, you never know what each sip will taste like. Will it be creamy? Will it be dark? Life is a mystery, and there are some of us who enjoy mysteries and beauty.”

Ms. Dashel’s hand had warmed under Nada’s touch. She retrieved it and put it into her lap. She pushed her spine up against the back of her chair. “You are right,” she said.

That afternoon Ms. Dashel used Mr. Sallas’ credit card to buy Turkish delights for the market employees and their families. She had Nada wrap special boxes for the children and tie them up elaborately with bows. Then she had Amir cut the card in half with the shears he kept behind the counter.

At closing time, she and Nadir and Nada devise a plan:

She would leave town for the beach, using cash only. When she speaks to Ulysses for the last time, she would pretend she didn’t know how the rampant credit card charges occurred. She would be having her last cell phone conversation with him – which she would have by airplane mode to avoid him tracking her.

She would stay at the beach for a month or longer. She would start her life elsewhere to avoid Ulysses’ anger, she would sell everything she had, Nada would help her. It didn’t matter anymore, she would be safe. The night she would say good bye to him, she would be looking out on the ocean from her campsite with her dog, a box of Turkish delights beside her, her favorite kind, large pink chunks of rosewater.

*The inspiration for Nada’s thoughts come from a wonderful little lifehacker article called Why You Shouldn’t Stir Your Coffee.

sur s’dey chh’nam t’mey, hello year new

Tags

Cambodian American, happy new year, khmer rouge

Messy, Sodanie Chea, flickr

Starbucks chocolate mint coffee for breakfast, the last of the bag in the freezer since the Christmas before. She was now going on $15 dollars in the account since Christmas week when she forked over the promised last one hundred for the concert ticket promised her son. She was praying to some god her Plenty of Fish date tonight was the paying kind. She was counting on it. It was dinner.

Once she had dated a man who had used a coupon their first date and then expected her to split the cost. Mean little life. There were times she felt she was hanging on like a tick on life’s back. Not at all like the genteel mannered life of her upbringing, her white rich mama having adopted her from Cambodia and trained her in the way of proper southern ladies. Her mama had assumed after the divorce she was being wined and dined, that rich men were courting her. Let her assume, thought Chanthou.

She had changed her name back to Chanthou Seng. Her son retained his father’s surname, Rouse. She had been Georgia Abernathy as a child, heaven forbid, then Georgia Rouse, married.

She touched the picture she recently taped to the refrigerator, a picture of a Cambodian woman handing over her baby to an American soldier in a helicopter. The copter was on the roof of a hospital and the mother was saving her child from horrors and likely death under the Khmer Rouge. Chanthou had ripped it from the page of an old magazine at the library. She had no pictures of her family.

The coffee grinds in the Mr. Coffee filter inside the basket still smelled a little like mint chocolate, like some old forgotten dream. She retrieved a china mug from her long ago Christmas wedding shower. She wanted to smash it. But she had an affinity for beauty and could adopt a cold objectivity for sentimental objects when it served her.

The wedding ring quilt she had given to her dog. It was some cheap mass produced western looking thing they probably made in her country or some other place with no unions, ten hour days, women fainting and falling out. It was a delicious feeling when the small white pet began to tear at it with her teeth and paws.

Her son was up finally, on his way to work a double. He was tall, dark, the skin and facial features of home. He was so much taller the top of her head fit under his chin. He would never know she had only $15 dollars to her name until the month’s alimony came through.

She received a text from a man she hadn’t met yet who would meet her out for tea, and, she hoped, some of the restaurant’s Thai offerings, like the Satay Satay Salad or the Thaiger is Crying Sandwhich. Yum. Are you ok with beards? he said in his text. Cause right now I look like Santa. Something about that completely cracked her up. She smiled. She told him so.

When she received a text from her ex the day before, something having to do with their son, he had said something hilarious, and she cried. She would not have confessed this to him of course. But despite her bitterness, she found the old laughter both poignant and painful and no less a kind of miracle. The icy slim blond who was her replacement wouldn’t tolerate much of a rapport between the two of them so she keeps it brief. She needs her monthly aid and would not cause trouble.

How much fun when she was young. In college, climbing in the campus fountain, dancing with her friends. I don’t give a fuck she had shouted for the whole quad to hear and her friends had repeated after her, laughing, all of them soaked and twirling around, three a.m., no campus security. She remembered what she felt like when she said that, something she would never have said before when she was a foreign daughter with white rich Christian parents.

That’s what she felt now at the prospect of meeting Santa. And he had joked with her that she should sit in his lap.

She had a feeling he would pay.

And if he didn’t, she would make her escape.

Christmas Cake

Tags

breakup, Christmas, relationships

Christmas Cake from Cornwall by Ramones Karaoke, flickr

He liked the feel of her in his hands, like risen dough he mashes down and forms again when he is on the job as a pastry chef. She is large, so much larger than most women he has seen, and so fair.

Secretly, to his family and friends she was his big cinnamon, that is what he called her, using a synechdoche in which a part represents a whole, in this case, the sweet smell of her and kindness representing her oversized sweet yeast bun type body. He was no small creature himself and when he met her and slept with her, he felt a kind of echoing satisfaction in his bones, through his blood and flesh.

He brought to her sweet confectionary: chocolate covered strawberries, cheese cake, chocolate ganache, banana bread, baklava, cream cheese iced red velvet. He loved to watch her consume his offerings with abandon, to observe her big red glossed lips, her cheeks smooth and creamy, her plump, baby like fingers shoveling in bites of his creations.

And yet. There were times when he felt it might be more appropriate for her to wait. Why did she always have to eat a piece of what he brought her on the selfsame day? What was wrong with her that she didn’t have the restraint to put something in the freezer, to wait for an occasion to bring out and share it later at an event?

He wasn’t sure what event he had in mind exactly. She was clearly on her own, divorced, hanging out in coffee shops while he worked all night, jabbering with musicians and reading her poetry and sending him pictures on her phone. She had her little white dog and her adult son at times. She was no longer a socialite but a burnt out star.

Still, she could have used some restraint.

But she clearly loved him: “Dear Charles, you are the best, the most brilliant! The night we spent was beyond compare. Remember that waiter? hahaha! You made short work of him, my beautiful god!” This is the kind of thing she would text to him by phone and he would erase it with one click of his generous strong finger, preferring instead to talk to her the next day on his way home from work.

For the holidays, he made her a huge Christmas cheesecake, topped with a strawberry swirl glaze, red and green candies, a yellow chiffon cake side dyed with a green checkerboard pattern of tiny green trees. He had to work on Christmas Eve but stopped by to give her the cake and wish her well.

Her face was tear stained when she opened the door, he could see that. Her son had preferred to stay with his father for the night. And she was alone.

She took the cake from him and set it on the counter. She embraced him in thanks. She insisted he sit down for a moment. She had made coffee.

She took the cake from the box and placed it on a silver stand and exclaimed over it and kissed him again.

He sipped her coffee, she knew how to make it just the way he liked, straight, smooth, and dark.

And yet, she took a silver cake cutter, a holdover from a different life, and sliced right through the heart of his cake, the artfully swirled puree, the tenderly created trees.

That plump, baby hand on the silver server, the lifting of a piece right from the Christmas heart of it all and the ungracious plopping of it onto a plate, the insertion of a large bite right into her fat face.

He couldn’t take it anymore.

He told her he had to leave.

In the crisp and biting air, alone on the front step, he knew: On the morrow, he would be free.

 

*

You may also enjoy my Christmas story “Santa Baby” published in the UK journal Use Your Words: here.

You may also enjoy reading my story “Cocoa Beach Christmas,” here.

“Santa Baby” is racier, while “Cocoa Beach Christmas” is most definitely rated G.

Thank you for reading and Merry Christmas!

Flash Nano, day 2: A story that takes place in a bathroom

Tags

flash fiction, mental illness, suicide

Photo by Emily Austin, unsplash

Misha had thought to kill herself only hours before, lying in the deep bath of what a wealthy friend derisively called a “tract home.” She had been preparing for the well heeled event, a cocktail party with her husband’s colleagues, partners in the medical practice. Every year, around the time of her birthday, she felt herself slipping below the rim of reality as if she had slipped beneath the skin of the surface of a warm bath and was looking up at the world and its players, distorted and menacing. She thought she was screaming, but no one could hear anything. In a moment she would have to relinquish her soaking when the water turned cold. Then there would be the fixing of her hair, the straightening of her dress, the application of makeup, and the selection of jewelry.

What would she talk to these people about? And the women were all so stark and regal, proper doctor’s wives. She never lost the baby weight. That feeling of her self consciousness oppressed her. Planning on ways to kill herself did not help either, as if she were her own judge and jury, and sided with the sophisticated medical crowd regarding her value as a human.

At the party, things were as anticipated. But she found her solace in the locked bathroom where she let the water run from the faucet long and in a soothing little torrent. She used the brass stopper to close the drain and watched as the sink filled and the excess water spilled into the overflow holes. When she turned off the sink, she played with the water with little twirls of her hands. Maybe she should die in the bathtub, slashes deep and long in her flesh, the blood red and warming her as her body cooled. What if her child found her though. No, maybe there was something not so jarring in appearance.

What she didn’t realize was that there was someone in the toilet stall. A young yellow haired woman emerged, thin, a before pregnancy body, a black spaghetti strap halter dress hanging off of her like a dress hanging on a hangar. Her eyes were blotched with errant mascara and her hair mussed a bit as if she had been sitting on the toilet holding her head in her hands.

Misha remembered the night of her marriage. It had not been quite what she had anticipated. All the build up, the move from Minsk, the ceremony arranged by Rob’s parents in the United States. Misha so concerned to be beautiful, according to her advertisement on the Russian bride site, her parents and brothers and sisters and whole family crying before her trip overseas but wishing her well. The vodka, wine, cranberry juice, black bread, the gift of salt, the old sad songs for the loss of a daughter to her groom. After the ceremony in an empty white church devoid of the embellishments of her country’s faith, she remembered the lightweight veil on her head and realized what she had always wanted as a girl: To feel the orthodox bridal crown. She sat in the hotel bathroom, the first night of her married life and felt the sting of tears. What was wrong with her? She chastised herself. She thought of her parents, how happy they were, she tried to be happy too.

“How can I help you?” Misha said to the sniffling young woman, but the girl ignored her and dabbed at her eyes with a linen napkin from the stack provided by the sink. “Here, dear one, let me give you a hug.” The girl acquiesced and Misha felt the racking of her sniffles against her chest and her birdlike shoulders in the folds of her motherly arms. Where had she come from? She hadn’t even noticed anyone slightly under the age of thirty. The youngest couples were not that young, all of them having survived medical school and residencies and made it into partnership.

“I have to go,” said the girl, and twisted out of her grasp and slipped through the door.

Misha, who herself had only, hours before, been crying silently as she lay in the deep water of the tub, could not find the child among the mix of people when she emerged from the bathroom. At least she had been given the chance to be of comfort and she did feel a little lighter.

That night, she slipped out of her dress, took off her jewelry and lit candles around her tub.

Rob kidded her she would turn into a prune. She kissed him on the mouth. His eyes registered surprise. She had been withdrawn from him some weeks.

She slipped into the warm water all encompassing and primordial. How beautiful to hold herself in this way, suspended, and know she would come up for air.

flashnano 2018: day one, “father”

Tags

Christianity, end of life, family

marty hadding, flickr

Put the tiny cup to my lips, father, and I will drink the grape juice, the blood of our Lord. I am too weak to grasp it myself and cannot lift my head from the pillow.

Your kindly, knobby fingers I know so well, and the freckle by your ring finger. The bells of your church in Arkansas years ago when I was a child, the bright green lawn, the white of the walls beyond the gold cross suspended from the ceiling with taut wire. At the front of the church I sing with my friends “So My Sheep May Safely Graze,” our voices reverberating, mother on the second row where she always sits. You in your red velvet chair behind the pulpit. I know where you keep a glass of water, on a shelf just below the Bible, a secret shelf.

Do you remember when I went with you to give a last communion to an invalid lady? You served her from a velvet lined burgundy kit containing the juice and wafers, Jesus’ body. When we were sitting in the car later in front of her house, I stared hard out of the window, afraid to look at your face because you said I was strong. Tears stung my eyes. When you asked me what was wrong I said will that lady be alright? You said nothing. Our experience became a sermon illustration.

I try to speak to you but my words cannot make it into my mouth my body has become slowed and lazy with the sedatives, the morphine.

I love you, father.

You hold my hand, you tell me where to go, you tell me where I will meet you. You ask me to reserve a place.

lips

Tags

cancer, dating, midlife

woman wearing eye covers by Amadeo Muslimovic, unsplash

She had a date, Ms. Myska. A miracle, really, considering it had only been a month ago that she lay on the operating table awaiting anesthesia, uncertain if cancer would take her down with her uterus.

And here she was, healthy as a new chick, sitting across the table from a smiling man with retro looking glasses, a man who knew how to choose a restaurant, to order, to talk. It hardly felt deserved, actually, Ms. Myska being somewhat shy, somewhat of a scurrying mouse, somewhat worried about her problems though she put on her best face.

Still, her face was betraying her. Sangria was the culprit. Sulfites, likely, in the wine. She began to feel her bottom lip plump out into a perfect rectangle and she wondered if the man saw, though thankfully the lights were dim.

She hoped she didn’t seem awkward talking to him because she was trying to talk while worrying. But to Ms. Myska worrying and doing something else at the same time was like walking and chewing gum.

The hysterectomy, the next phase in her fight against cancer, a fight to stay one step ahead of the reaper, saw her experience with a new drug. And it plumped out her lips and caused them to be red and chapped. This had been an unexpected. Though the swelling seemed to come and go – some days she felt she was over it, and some days her lips seemed to be stretching the boundaries of her skin – she was resigned to the permanence of the situation and sometimes observed the phenomenon with curiosity, like a scientist, or sometimes with horror, like a Japanese citizen in a monster flick, shaken to the core by a walking lizard exploded beyond all reason in size and ferocity.

As she watched her date order their tapas she hoped her lips did not cause her to blurt out any of her presently closely guarded feelings and thoughts. Here were a few: “Hey, you are even cuter than I imagined.” Or: “What would it be like to kiss you?” Or: “I think it’s really sexy when a guy knows how to order. Total hotness.”

Her lips had a serious side too. They wanted to say things like: “How come your other relationships didn’t work out?” Or: “Tell me how you feel about being a widower.” Or: “Do you snore loudly? Do you have flatulence? Would you mind if I did on occasion? Or minded if I enjoyed burping very loudly? Would you mind if I occasionally struggle with insomnia? I talk to my dog constantly, is that a problem? I sometimes cry, unprovoked, is that a big deal? Messy house? Financial messes?”

Instead she said: “I love making coconut shrimp. Yum.” He was a cook too and they compared notes.

When they were off to their cars at the top of the garage under the inky sky, they hugged goodnight.

It was only later, in her car, driving home, that she realized he had turned his head sideways to kiss her.

She was glad her lips had not picked up on this. Her lips only realized it later, with her brain.

She liked him.

But she was glad.

 

 

Nettie

Tags

Halloween, witch

Let death find you alive by Kara Harms, flickr

There is something wrong with Nettie, who lives at the edge of town. There is something wrong with Nettie who walks beside the trees. There is something wrong with Nettie whose dress once pure is coated with a dark liver colored stain. There is something wrong with Nettie, no one has seen her little dog in weeks. There is something wrong with Nettie, her hair has ratted. There is something wrong with Nettie, they say she walks in the woods naked at night. There is something wrong with Nettie, kids hear her scratching at their windows. There is something wrong with Nettie, someone found her in a tree, gripping the trunk of it in her thighs. There is something wrong with Nettie, when the moon is full, she walks beside the highway. There is something wrong with Nettie, some say she ate a man, homeless, her teeth, sharp and ruthless. There is something wrong with Nettie though she was once one of us. There is something wrong with Nettie, but her former husband and children turn as if embarrassed, aggrieved. There is something wrong with Nettie, and no one will say what, exactly, and no one will do anything. There is something wrong with Nettie, she climbs the sky every night riding a rough stick and wearing a red cap over hair matted with sticks and rocks she collects sleeping on the ground. There is something wrong with Nettie, and maybe, one day, she’ll die.

Ms. Myska’s Kintsugi

Tags

cancer, death, kintsugi

Kintsugi by Abigail Moses, etsy store, JoStarrCo, link below the story

Ms. Myska’s upcoming operation had altered the course of her daily thoughts and interaction with the world. The surgeon told her he would use robotic arms to go into her womb and extract her cancerous uterus. Always before learning of such she had a mousy nervous way, an odd way, that people noticed and remarked upon, albeit through veiled observant glances and uncomfortable laughter. And now, Ms. Myska’s nerves had sent her over the edge. In fact, she had come to believe she could interact with the insensate world, something she kept a secret but something she felt nonetheless.

It started with her fear of death. Mrs. Malvoline, at the weekly Bible study luncheon, had told her when learning of the upcoming procedure: “Well you know Mitzy Bowzer had that done, all fancy Dan, the surgery modern as a toaster, and she lost her bowels from between her legs. Slipped right through.”

This during the chicken salad salad sandwiches at a table mounded with fruit in the center around which the ladies chattered about their families and their diets.

Ms. Myska laid her croissant sandwich down on her plastic plate and held a napkin to her lips.

Greta Malvoline had not known of or could not have guessed Ms. Myska’s feverish sweats in the middle of night, her nightmares of being chased through the town by robotic arms that could move in 360 degree rotation, arms that played with her hair, put things in her grocery basket, made her meals – gourmet style – far superior to her humble culinary efforts. And now, in waking life, arms would take the organ that had once held her baby.

The room where twelve ladies sat around the luncheon table in the church, twelve ladies strong, good as the twelve apostles, was too close for Ms. Myska, the now cloying odor of fresh baked bread and fruit overwhelming. She grabbed her purse and scurried to the door. Outside the church at the memorial garden where the cremated remains of former parishioners sat in jars. She felt sick but she wanted to show respect for the dead.

“Oh earth,” she said, “If I die, will you hold me?”

Even Ms. Myska knew she was being a bit dramatic. The surgeon had reassured her he had performed thousands of robotic surgeries without mishap. And the upside was a quick recovery.

She felt a breeze then, a caress. The leaves rattled “yes.”

Tears welled up in her eyes. She had her answer, then. She couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like this was a reassurance.

She must think of something pretty to be buried in, she thought, looking around at the colorful urns where others’ ashes were stored. Were jars standard or could she choose a favorite?

She thought of her great grandmother’s ginger jar. When she was a girl she had brushed against the pie crust table where it was displayed. The jar broke into many pieces. Rather than scold her, her great grandmother had gathered the pieces and glued them back together, teaching her about the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi. “The Japanese believe, my little one, that a repaired vessel is even more beautiful because it is the scars that show uniqueness and beauty. Artists often highlight the cracks in a repaired piece of pottery using gold. It is a lesson in resilience. A repaired vessel is a sign of soul.” And her great grandmother gently brushed her cheek with a crooked and withered finger.

One of the items Ms. Myska procured for herself after her great grandmother’s death was the repaired old ginger jar. Ms. Myska’s mother, a practical woman, was in the process of tossing her odds and ends. The jar was sitting on top of a pile of old books and newspapers. Nula spirited it away. “That’s useless, you know,” said her mother. Nula ignored her. She kept her magic jar in her room beside her pet rock Harry and her matryoshka doll collection.

The afternoon of the earth’s reassurance, she was happy to not return to the ladies who by now were commencing a study and discussion of the Messianic prefigurings of Jesus. It had nothing to do with her. The irrelevance of this arcane type of scholasticism coupled with a stomach heavy with a rich lunch inspired her departure. To stay might have brought about drowsing during the lecture, adding yet another incidence of eccentricity to her reputation.

At home, she retrieved her great grandmother’s blue and white ginger jar from the china cabinet. She kept it in the place where the little interior light of the cabinet could highlight it. If she looked carefully, she could see the places where her grandmother had lovingly glued the pieces back together. She placed it on her dining room table and sat before it.

“Little jar,” she said, “Will you hold the ashes of my bones when I am dead?”

She couldn’t be completely sure, not when she thought of it later, but she could have sworn she heard the lid of the jar rattle lightly against the lip. Maybe it was just her nervous agitation upsetting the table slightly and disturbing the jar, but it seemed perhaps she had her answer.

Ms. Myska buzzed about the kitchen making her dinner of chili beans and cornbread and feeding her dog. It took a great deal of time for the beans to cook and though it was early afternoon she anticipated a late night dinner.

On the porch she sat with her needlework. The sky was busily forming and reforming clouds as she followed the pattern for the large splashy peonies on the printed canvas. It was pleasurable to push the colored yarn through and know that this was her only chore for the afternoon. Years ago she had entertained her husband’s – now ex husband’s – clients with elaborate parties. Years ago she had raised a teenage son. Years ago she had scurried around a library large as a city block looking for patron’s requests. Now all that was required was the simple tent stich. Her tiny white dog sat beside her on the small porch swing.

She had a sudden worry for her. Who would care for the little thing were something to happen?

“Sky,” she said, “Will you watch over my dog Belle when I’m dead? Watch over her to protect her? Protect her as a mother?”

The clouds bowed up then forming a perfect circle like a mother’s arms. Miraculous! Ms. Myska had never felt so close to the sky and she stayed outside on her porch until the summer storm blew her indoors.

That evening, the whole of her house bathed in gold while Ms. Myska ate her supper. It was as if it were a crack in an artisan’s pot that had been repaired with gold. The whole of her life was a history of her scarring and repair and for the first time in weeks Ms. Myska lay in her soft bed with her dog at her feet and slept without nightmares.

Go here to acquire Abigail Moses’ wonderful work of art above “Kintsugi.”

Meeting Medusa

Tags

friendship, healing, trauma

BW faces by E.

A woman walked into the salon. Mateo, a new hairdresser, observed what appeared to be separately dyed chunks of hair, each strand moving independently so that the whole had an effect of a dark crazy nimbus around her face. For some reason, no one seemed to notice, but he was working on the rougher side of town now, having struggled to find an opening. Maybe a lot happened without notice or comment.

No doubt he would be assigned to the striped headed woman being that he had more of the walk in clients. As he finished with the client in his chair he briefly mused on the challenge of his afternoon: This once trendy way of dying large swaths of hair in contrasting colors to jarring effect was going by the wayside, and thank God. He had seen it work for a few regal beauties. But for the average person: Quel dommage!

He tried to honor the customers who wanted extreme hair dyes, but he always found himself secretly compromising with expressed wishes when it came to actually applying color. He always told himself they would be amazed at how becoming his magic would be and they wouldn’t mind he altered their plans ever so slightly. And usually, he was correct. A few light streaks in strategically located places around the face and crown and they looked ten years younger, brighter, smarter. And no walking around town with a Ringling circus tent for hair, not on his watch.

At last he had the wild haired woman – whose name he learned was Willa – on his chair, hair bouncing on her head long after she sat still. He grabbed for his readers on the dresser of his station. He needed them to do the detailed work he expected of himself. Having situated them on his nose he saw something most unexpected: Willa’s hair was full of life because her hair was indeed alive. The chunks of hair weren’t individually dyed, they were each an independently writhing and hissing snake! Mateo jumped in alarm as if bitten. His heart was racing. And he almost fell to the floor. But he maintained enough composure to hold up a finger indicating “just a moment” as he raced to the bathroom.

He threw up his lunch, the leftovers from the dinner his partner, Ray, had made him the night before. His throat and nose burned and he washed out his mouth and splashed water on his face. He gazed at himself intently in the mirror. Often when he did this he could imagine Ray’s soft brown eyes looking back at him. And he saw them now, encouraging him, believing in him. He needed this job. Desperately. The whole of their lives hinged on his resourcefulness.

He stole out of the back door of the shop and drove to the bait and tackle to fetch a container of crickets. From years of fishing with his dad, he knew where to buy them and he knew from Ray, who kept their garden, this is one thing many of the nonpoisonous ones liked to eat. Ray kept for them a beautiful garden full of plants they used every day, roses, citrus. But Mateo’s father had cut off all contact.

In the back room at the salon, he managed to get all the crickets into a hair dryer cap, having sealed off the tube that attached to the dryer. And then he worked the cap over Willa’s head, trying not to think of anything but Ray’s soft brown eyes, even as the snakes were whipping his hands and arms. And at last, there was less and less movement under the cap as the snakes sated themselves. Willa seemed happier and more satisfied too. Now he could talk to her in peace.

“How did you come to have snakes for hair?” he said, watching her face, trying to determine what was going on.

But Willa didn’t speak, or she was unable to tell him. She looked at the floor.
He brought her the lemonade Ray made for him every day specially with lemons from their garden. He was right in guessing this would help. When she seemed open to talking, he arranged to make special visits to her home for what he jokingly told her was “the cricket cure.” He saw her smile, just a little, and he knew he had a client.

He and Ray began visiting every Saturday, bringing their little dog Matt Junior.
Until one weekend, they arrived at her home to discover her head was full of hair instead of writhing serpents. And at last Mateo found out the cause of the poor woman’s affliction: She had been attacked on a Sunday as she was coming back from church. The attacker must have been watching her for some time and knew her schedule and when she would be most vulnerable. He dragged her out into the garden, and her house, being remote from neighbors, meant no one could hear her or see what was going on. She was raped in her garden. And her grief in the months following resulted in an unruly head.

It had been a year since the tragedy and Mateo and Jay were helping her to feel like herself again.

The first day of Willa’s normal hair, Mateo smiled in the good lady’s sunny kitchen, a glass of wine in one hand and a handful of Willa’s healthy hair in the other. “It’s time to get back to gorgeous,” he said, and he put down his wine and began to section off her hair for his signature radiant style.

Heft

Tags

divorce, motherhood, teens

Cristinella by vitto, flickr

Just before Julie’s morning break, the security monitor flashed on a girl with black hair and kohl lined eyes. Julie zoomed in on her to get a better look.

The customer stood at the ladies’ jewelry counter, perusing a turnstile of watches. She then summoned Rosemary to unlock the clear plastic case. A few minutes later, she slipped a watch into her jacket pocket.

Julie was just about to alert her undercover shopper when the girl stopped and looked up at the camera. It was Chloe. Behind the dark hair and goth makeup was the face of Julie’s own child. Julie stroked the monitor with her fingers. Chloe hadn’t been home in a long time.

As if in response to Julie’s touch, Chloe shot her the bird. She then stormed off to the womens’ hosiery department. She slid the watch into a ladies’ pantyhose sleeve, holding it up so her mother could see what she was doing.

“Do you want me to go down there and handle it?” This was Julie’s boyfriend, having watched the events from the security room. He had been a witness to many such scenes between his girlfriend and her daughter, but nothing was ever stolen. Things were merely rearranged.

“Leave it,” she said.

The divorce had created a new child, someone Julie didn’t recognize. To make matters worse, her ex rarely called, and when he spent time with Chloe, it was to let her know her mother was a whore.

By the time Julie arrived on the floor, Chloe had gone. She tipped the watch out of the sleeve and held it in her hand until it was warm. It was deceptively heavy.

First appeared in decomP magazine.

Seeking Brother Lawrence

Tags

healing, midlife crisis, spiritual crisis

A woman was feeling lonely, desperate. In fact, that’s what a former, much younger lover had told her: She was lonely and desperate. That was a year ago. And no dating since. And since then the gynecologist had showed her a picture of something in her uterus, the scope light making it appear as a large shining globe like the top of an alien’s head, half of a crystal ball. She was old enough to have given birth to her young friend, and she did give birth to a man only a bit younger than he. And now she would have to give birth to her uterus to be rid of the foreign body growing inside her.

She remembers telling the young man when they broke up: When you are alone paying your own bills and worrying about fixing your own house and taking care of your health, feelings are a bit different, life is harder. You’ll see. Asshole. Well, she didn’t call him that, but she wanted to. He still lived with his parents, to her shame, among piles of books and hoards of cats.

Brother Lawrence Bible Verses 4 You promised to deliver daily Bible verses by text, every day for 40 days. Part of the course was to write in a journal and by the end of it track spiritual growth. Before this scheme, she had thought she might start writing letters to herself or composing texts to herself, some which might be Bible verses. In her letters, she would say the things she wanted to hear from others but didn’t – reassurances, promises of love, apologies. She would pretend to be others and sign their names. She needed to feel better, somehow. And she would do anything.

But the Brother Lawrence thing seemed so much more direct. Sure, Bible verses were connected in some ways to dark memories of her upbringing, but she wouldn’t have to put forth as much effort to think of them and send them to herself. It was a service she could receive for once and perhaps it could feel more like a gift. Now that she was divorced and without prospects, she wasn’t beyond sending flowers to herself at Valentine’s, for example, but at what cost. She had grown tired. And now she was sick. And in need of an operation.

The site did not send her any texts.

She called Brother Lawrence, the customer service line listed on the site. There was some music on the hold line, Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.” How many times had she been to church and listened to the organ arrangement. She had even sung it in a church choir. And now it was coming through static on the Brother Lawrence help line.

“Hello?” said a wavering voice, finally, picking up the call. It sounded like an older woman.

There were no formalities to help the situation and so she proceeded. “Look I signed up to receive your Bible verse texts, which I think is a wonderful service. But I haven’t received a verse yet.”

“We are just a nonprofit aiming to do our best,” said the woman and there was the sound of a chiming clock behind her.

“Isn’t it automated so that once I sign up I begin to receive verses?”

“I don’t know.”

There was some silence between them.

What more could be said.

“Thank you,” said the woman and hung up.

Maybe the older woman on the helpline had been hinting that they needed a donation to activate the verses.

The money required to get her uterus out, alien head and all, mitigated against charitable donations.

Yet another nothing is for free moment. And so she rejoined the dog eat dog world, got over her depression, got rid of her uterus, went back to the gym, took her life back, went back to school and eventually got a job.

A few months later she received a text from Brother Lawrence: “God loves you.”

A Woman and her Box

Tags

absurdism, addiction, women

Some experiments by Gisella Klein, flickr

After a housewife spends hours before a glowing box pressing buttons, her hands sweating, her legs and arms weakening, her pupils dilating and contracting, fluids streaming from every orifice, she goes about her tasks which do not involve punching buttons or looking at a glowing box. These tasks, by comparison, cause little reaction. She goes back to her occupation before the box as if returning to an essential fire. Her life crashes down around her, her family leaves, her house disintegrates and is taken away, and eventually someone takes the box away. She spends the rest of her life dreaming about the times she sat before the box. She dies and is put into a box. The box that had been her glowing box becomes a black box piled on top of other boxes nourishing the soil with mercury, chromium, cadmium, and lead.

First appeared in The New Absurdist

A Woman Rides a Train

Tags

aging, relationships, woman

Untitled XXIII by Julia Ortiz, flickr

She had long since forgotten what it felt like to have a man’s eyes on her. She was forty-two, still passable for her late thirties, but had grown used to the fact that men weren’t going to look at her when she walked into a room, that she would be ignored no matter her capabilities, her joie de vivre, her “soul.” How she laughed to herself to remember her past reassurances of older female friends when they mourned their changing looks. These reassurances, she knew now, would have seemed as specious to them as her beliefs about the “soul” itself. How could she have known that so much of happiness was tied to what she had once thought was superficial?

One morning a year after her baby was born, she took the metro to the D.C. Mall. She wanted to spend a quiet day in the National Gallery looking at paintings, letting the silence and the beauty change her or refresh her in some way. She and her husband had lived in Gaithersburg for a few years but she had rarely followed through with her plan to get away from the house, to entertain herself with this rare private indulgence.

She closed her eyes as the train sped away from the station. She settled into the jostling car as it whirred along the rails. She was grateful that even the small decisions involved with driving a car were not hers to make, that at least for a while, there was little reason for vigilance. As the stops rolled by one after another she had to rouse herself to pay attention.

And that’s when she saw him standing by the door opposite. She hadn’t been sure what made her look at him, of all the men standing in the car, with their identical suits, grasping their briefcases and newspapers. He was watching her. She met his gaze. He did not look away.

Was he really looking at her? she wondered. Maybe she was mistaken. She turned, saw the car was filled with people reading, dozing, talking on phones. She resumed watching his blue, almost gray eyes. He smiled at her then, just a small turning up of his lips. He knew what she was thinking. It made her uncomfortable to think he knew something about her just from this one gesture and yet she felt something in his gaze that was innocent, that was merely curious, intensely curious.

She had to think about her breath and to make herself focus on her metro stop. When it arrived, she pushed herself up from her chair. She lurched forward. How very unattractive, she thought. She felt her face burning. She looked at his face once more before stepping out of the car. He was still watching her. He was still smiling. She stood on the platform while the doors closed and he did not let his eyes move from her face.

She wanted to cry. She liked him. Or she liked the idea of him, that’s what she realized later when she thought about wanting to cry as she stood there watching some stranger being pulled away from her. He was curious and he was handsome and there was something shy in his gaze too, something that made it safe for her to like him, and she wished she had stayed in the car and hadn’t been so true to her plans.

Years later, when she thought of the day the man had looked at her, she realized a part of her feelings of loss about becoming invisible had been about a lost identity but also a great deal had been about something else, that something that would never return to her in the shape of her yearning, in the empty space that is left when she finally became no one and everyone, both at once.

first published in Atticus Review

Ugly Betty’s Fourth

Tags

dating, fourth of July, women

 

preparing for our fourth of July barbeque, Jenn Vargas, Flickr

Driving back from dropping off her son at camp outside Hampton, Tennessee, she turned off onto the road leading to the cabin. It was the week of the 4th and frankly the time had been less than hoped for.

The cabin was tucked back in dark woods, remote, still. The inside paneling was dark. The cabin was equipped with a wood burning stove and an upstairs loft with a bed. There was limited wifi and not much in the way of cable.

Since her divorce she and her son had developed nocturnal habits with their electronic equipment – he with his video games, she her social media and movies – but in the dead of night here there wasn’t much to do and not much to entertain him. She knew she had contributed to this way of being, this spoiled way, and she had spoiled herself too in constant escapism. It had been the guilt that had perhaps entered in between them and made her a different kind of parent than she might have been.

She hadn’t noticed the gas gauge. She was almost on empty. It was growing dark and before long the car’s GPS fell off of radar. There had been flooding and she had to gun it across a flooded run running as rapidly as a small creek. She was scared and shaken. And alone. Her son had helped her find the cabin initially by using the map system on his phone. Luckily she started to recognize landmarks and used her memory to help guide her choices.

At the cabin, the leaves of the wood were the kind that becomes their most intense green right before darkness. There was a porch around the cabin. Along the front it was tiny and screened in, an airless room. Along the side it was open and big enough to house a small jacuzzi tub, the one compensation. She suited up and took the cover off of the tub and stepped in and was lulled for a moment. And then she worried about what may be watching her, what she couldn’t see – animal, human.

She went inside, locked the door, drew the curtains, and started a fire in the wood burning stove even though it was a warm night. She would sit on her towel in her wet suit and dry out. She was able to contact the dating site she just couldn’t stay on it forever. Only a couple of people had sent her messages but only the bare minimum of what had become the usual. Hi. or Hey. or sometimes Hey gorgeous. or worse Hey sexy. Would she ever get to the point of responding to Hey sexy. She hoped not.

She had planned to write her fiction. She wasn’t feeling imaginative. She was feeling dull and useless. In a little bit she would need to scrounge up dinner.

She took a few pictures with her camera phone for the site. Why not. Her hair was brown and short now because of the chemo. Only a few years ago she had what seemed like a more photogenic quality. Now she looked more her age. She wore heavy black framed glasses that even looked a bit stylish with their heaviness. She had done a series of black and white photos wearing her glasses and a necklace set she had bought when she was married, one from Talbots, a silver mother of pearl set. She was selling herself online now as Ugly Betty which sometimes netted her responses like You’re not ugly! and You’re hot why are you saying you’re ugly! Sometimes people were funny which made her feel better. Sometimes she wondered if that was her only goal.

She had even gone so far as to see if anyone living in the area would want to meet out, something she’d seen guys do. So many guys came to Orlando on business and wanted only a one time or short term dating situation. Or who knows maybe they said that and were actually married. These were the sort of behaviors she had become accustomed to.

A log fell. She propped it back up with the poker and put in a fresh one from the iron basket beside the stove.

There wasn’t anyone in proximity to where she was it seemed. With the difficulty of getting through the woods it was best. And as far as staying put, the cabin was not as comfortable as she’d hoped either with hard wooden chairs in the kitchen where she’d have to sit if she wanted to write at a table. She missed her padded high back chair in front of her narrow and cheap but elegant rustic Queen Anne writing table at home, hardwood and only stained. It was ironic to be away from home on vacation and miss the things you had.

As she had many times she reminded herself since divorcing she was here for her son, this had been the main goal. She had successfully dropped him at camp, though in a fashion typical for his age he hadn’t wanted her to hang around. She sensed this at least. She had brought the dog as an excuse, to save face for them both, so she could leave. She had not become one of those hot cool moms. She was chubs at this point and she felt he might be ashamed of her but she didn’t pursue it with him. Ugly Betty was an apt name. She could have done some things about her state. She couldn’t get motivated.

Really, all she wanted as an Ugly Betty was to meet a man who wasn’t so overly dependent on his ego that he could be a companion. She pictured him smiling at her and giving her a side hug when they were out. He would be proud of her even though she wasn’t perfect. He wouldn’t be perfect either – average looking too, average build or even chubs like her, it was ok, even desirable in some ways. She wanted to have the sense he protected her, or could if she needed this. He would have a bit of a personality combined with a kind of sober realism. He wouldn’t flirt too much with other women when they were out or stare because he understood her feelings and wanted to value them, wanted to be the man she wanted. He wouldn’t see her as a short term opportunity because she had been sick.

Had she had a man like that maybe he would want to help her with things. The day before, the day of the fireworks, she wasn’t sure how to use the celebratory explosives and her son wasn’t sure either. They had tried shooting them off in a tiny side yard that was barely a clearing apart from the trees and underbrush. She had registered her son’s disappointment. Some of the fireworks were faulty, the rest just simply lackluster. She had bought them somewhere. A discount store which is where she buys everything now, even clothes, canned foods, dishes, and towels.

Ugly Betty’s man would have rounded the fireworks up in Georgia on the way up, big, loud explosives that would take off the tips of fingers if you didn’t know what you were doing. The silence and stillness of the woods would be penetrated with their force. He would show her son how to do everything, letting him take over and feel like a man.

It made her feel good to imagine her man with her now. In fact she got up to make him dinner. When her son wasn’t with her she had to fight with herself to find reason to make the effort. In her imagination her man was sitting there, on the couch now, having fiddled with the television antenna. He was watching her backside appreciatively. He liked the way she looked, he had often told her. He liked her Rubenesque figure, her dark eyes, her full lips.

She stirred the garlic and anchovy paste into the olive oil warming in the pan. She had come with plenty of food in the cooler, plenty to feed her son, who ate huge amounts. This would be something her man would appreciate, be grateful for, her resourcefulness. She would make spaghetti and hot crusty bread.

She put the spaghetti pot on full of water. “You know you have to bring it to a boil first before adding the salt,” she said to her dog because her man was engrossed in something he was reading in the paper they had picked up on the way in. “That way you don’t get pock marks on the bottom.”

Never again had she thought she would meet anyone else who might be able to benefit from what she had accumulated over the years, an intimate knowledge of the kitchen’s secrets.

She felt invigorated now, enough to open a bottle of wine she had indulged in to celebrate the successful drop off of her child. She put it on the table covered with the red checked tablecloth she had brought from home, along with other festive décor for the holiday.

She fed the dog who was wearing her Fourth of July bandana.

Her man would hug her appreciatively when she was finished cooking, would smile at her with his twinkling blue eyes, and after dinner they would enjoy themselves in the hot tub under the inky night sky, listening to the few remaining fireworks, smelling the gun powder drifting through the trees.

She wouldn’t think about what was looking at her through the trees.

She would think about what she sees.

glades

Tags

everglades, gator, survival

water ripple by nullality, flickr

They all want to see the gators tucked back in the brackish waters she navigates in the tour kayak through the glades. Take me to them they say but then they hunker down when eyes, snout, jaws, emerge from the murky water where armor like bodies search for sustenance, prey. Or they are a bit more relaxed when the gators, spotted up on the shore, bask in the sun, seemingly content for the day, or afternoon. They take pictures of their massive bodies, along with creatures hovering above them in trees – owls, a nest of baby birds. Sometimes if they are quiet and still, which she encourages on her tour, for the best chances to see wildlife, they may spot a bobcat, or even sometimes a panther, through the dense mangroves.

There are all assortment of creatures she points out to them – possums, pelicans, egrets, cormorants, raccoons, heron, sea turtles, snakes, osprey. She tells them of the fishing tour they can take for snook, snapper, red drum, sheepshead, and more, tours which can include the cleaning of the fish and a meal with either cooking provided or cooking instruction. She doesn’t tell them she could also provide them with instruction on catching and cleaning possum, for example, and a lesson on her granny’s recipe handed down since early settlers, possum n’ taters. It was safer to stick with a conversation about cooking fish. Though to loosen the mood when they saw a gator, she joked that she had the recipe for fried gator tale bites with mango chutney. She could get a little chatty sometimes, but mostly when she was trying to make her passenger comfortable.

She doesn’t talk about the time she lost her balance when she was alone in the kayak and a gator clamped down on her arm with its massive jaws. The beast rolled her and the salt water invaded her nose and mouth and her screams mixed with his deep and primitive grunting. In her anger and panic she thought of the dens of rotting meat gators keep just below the outcroppings of shore. She managed to stab it in the eye with the hand not under control of its grip and extract herself from the bloody water. She nearly lost her arm and required three surgeries, but it was repaired, not without nerve damage and scarring. But she didn’t talk about it, unless compelled to by a curious tourist, though sometimes she lied. The truth was bad for business though she always coached her clients on how to behave in this wilderness.

She covered half her body with a tattoo, a gator stretched out, his tail along her back, his body over her shoulder and his head on the arm that had been crushed. She had him decorated with flowers and butterflies. She didn’t allow herself much time to worry or think, just went back to work as soon as she could. She was learning what it was like to support herself without a husband, not in the way she had been raised, but in the way she was learning to survive.

Schneewittchen

Tags

fairy tale remake, snow white, writing prompts

I am listening to Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Dangerous Old Woman: Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman. She analyzes myth and stories showing what they can teach us about ourselves. In her analysis of Snow White, she points out that each character is an aspect of the self. I wrote this particular piece when I first became interested in retelling fairy tales. I had just read Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and wanted to try my hand. In this piece, I do not go into a detailed retelling but this is the idea behind this voice piece which explores a bit of modern day jealousy in the literary world. Let’s say it takes the saying “murder your darlings” in a different kind of direction. Flash fiction writer Kathy Fish posted a flash fiction exercise this past week having to do with voice which you can find here and I thought….oh, so that is what I was trying to do. What would the voice of each of your favorite characters sound like if you retold a fairy or folktale through their perspective?

woman in the studio by Craig Cloutier, flickr

There was never a time I knew Anoushka when she was not in some sleepy-eyed phase of a delayed bloom. Yes, she was much younger than I was and much more beautiful and far more talented. I felt some inexplicable responsibility to protect her though at the same time, I wanted her to wake up and not rely on me. It was becoming so that I was constantly reminding her of her talents just to keep her going. Yet she remained untried in the real world and I grew weary. I wanted her to ply our trade, to finish her stories, to submit them for publication, to suffer.

And while I haven’t wanted this mother’s role of reassuring her and encouraging her in her writing, I have found myself taking up this mantel. Maybe there has been something to gain by my being her friend, OK, call me creepy if you want, call me a sycophant, call me a desperate, middle aged lady who’s flattered that this twenty-something would want to be friends with me, someone who is – what – not hip to the scene or whatever it is they’re saying these days.

And no, I’m not a lesbian. I’m happily married to a man, thank you very much. I’m happy most of the time, that is. OK, let’s just say I’m happy enough to get by, alright. But one can still have beautiful, young friends, can they not? Yet I grew weary of the dewy youth on this one as I waited for her to break out of her writing virginity, to publish the product of her labors. She secretly gloated that she was much better than I, better than most. So out with it, I said. If she demanded so much from me by way of reassurances to her ego, do I not have a right to insist she pop the publication cherry?

It was her lethargy I craved to kill, but as my weariness grew, other aspects to her personhood and our relationship became vulnerable to my vicious fantasies. I wanted to be rid of the very idea of her and of our friendship. I could not afford the ambition she siphoned off with her need, her expectations that I love her for her looks and her humor and her youth and as if that weren’t enough, her cracker-jack ability with the words which came rolling off of her, spinning out as a beautiful vine of roses from fertile soil, as if there were never a phenomenon more natural.

The market supports and encourages those of her ilk, who take beautiful cover photos, who will not make waves, whose writing, above all free of what may disturb or unsettle, or at least not to an inordinate degree. You can see how, my readers, this may be a problem for me, admitting already as I have that I am: a) jealous, b) covetous, c) ambitious, and d) of the murdering persuasion as it applies to the murdering of one’s literary “child.”

You can only imagine my narratives. You can only imagine my look behind the podium given what you can guess of my age, given what I covet enough to abolish. Other writers would not be as forthright as I. I have seen many a female writer who will swear they have never felt competition with any other female writer and yet they cut and undercut other women like a scythe mowing a hayfield. It happens. Men don’t know it. They are the compassionate hunters who can’t believe some woman has sent them out to cut out a heart.

So here was how I murdered her, so to speak, my gorgeous literary darling:

1) The corset binding. I forced her to gaze upon what was inconsequential to the writing itself: Her looks. I emphasized over and over how beautiful she was while she drew herself to the mirror and away from her desk. I cinched in her waist and she was mesmerized by her own proportions. By my manipulation of her waist size, she almost ran out of breath as she was overcome by a sense of the futility of self-expression in light of her growing dedication to her physical form.

2) The poisoned comb. I infected her thinking with faint praise, going in deep to kill the root that would poison the bloom, once and for all. If this had been successful, she would be like the women who yearn to write but who finally give up because of self-doubt.

3) The poisoned apple. At this point, she had found others who were wise to me, clever girl, so this step was the trickiest of all. I was determined that she must see me eating from the same fruit, as it were, and so I told her: “You can be a writer and have it all. Don’t listen to what people say about giving up the life of wife and mother to dedicate oneself to one’s art. Choose as I have chosen. See, I have done so, and it hasn’t killed me!”

These are only half-truths because my children are estranged, my husband sleeps on the other end of the house, my career consists of shredding up budding artists at the women’s college to whom I feed poisoned apples. My creative output consists in enumerating these tales of my passions, my crimes, but I’ve found the market responds, for grist and the gristle can be literature as long as it’s beautifully spun. The market eats almost anything in a pretty package, and Anoushka does too, chomping down on the succulent flesh of my tempting suggestions, taking the bait, wedding a man who loves only her beauty. After a while, he can’t even stand the sound of her voice.

shoe and line

Tags

absurdism, acceptance of death, children

A tiny shoe sat beside the white line of the road. It sat breathless as the cars whooshed past. Will someone stop to pick it up? Is the lady standing at the bus stop waiting for her opportunity to cradle it in her hands, to kiss its soft tongue?

– My life has not begun said the shoe to no one in particular. I am not ready to die. He thought of his troubles as he lay beside the painted white line.

– I have it worse, said the line. I have never been in contact with a living being.

What a ridiculous white line, thought the shoe at the same time recognizing his dependence. No one would run over him since he was close.

– Why would you need what I have? said the shoe. You never die. You are renewed with white paint. You help the cars, the beasts.

– You have held a place of privilege, said the line. Now you will see what it’s like to be the rest of us.

– What are you talking about, the rest of us?

– The anonymous. The merely dutiful. Or worse, the forgotten. You’ve thought yourself special, I can tell.

– I have not.

– You’ve thought yourself indispensable. Now you’re like trash. You think that woman over there wants you because some other woman has? The first woman in your life only wanted you because you helped her son. That other woman over there is old. You probably remind her of something painful, like a child who has grown and gone astray or a child she has lost.

– How do you know so much? You’re a line.

– I’ve seen enough.

– You’ve seen the bottoms of tires.

– I’ve seen people die.

– Then that makes you the font.

– Of what?

– Wisdom, you idiot. It’s a cliché. When you’re out among people, you hear these things.

– See the specialness creeping in again.

– I have no such pretentions. I’m about to be squashed, besides.

– And then you’ll only experience what the rest of us feel, the random nature of life. How some are chosen to be one thing and some another. How some live on, some die.

– You make me feel so much better.

At that moment, the lady from the bus stop rescued the shoe. There had been a break in traffic. She sat on the bench and cradled it in her palm.

The line looked on. He was jealous of the shoe, but he would not admit it. To admit his jealousy would not change his duty to be a line. Some thrive on admiration for simply being what they are.

– Special boy, he muttered to himself, but his whisper was drowned by shushing of tires.

First appeared in The New Absurdist

How to Love an Octopus

 Glowing Octopus by ccarlstead, flickr

Book passage to the South Pacific  where Jacques Cousteau made his mark. When you charter your boat to find your octopus you will discover, in fact, that they use the same tanks, much of the same equipment, designed by the inventor of the Aqua-Lung. His name and methods are sacrosanct. He has shown you this way to love. Watch and listen. Ask questions. Pay attention. Be aware. This is the mark of the lover.

While you wait for passage discover what it’s like to be an octopus by learning to breathe underwater. Enroll in a scuba class.  Begin to learn now that to prepare to meet an octopus you will have to learn a way that is the opposite way of being terrestrial. Your feet are crazy long, you have no peripheral vision, and your breathing makes you sound like a monster. To enter a portal requires transformation and patience. You will also learn of possible injury from the process of the dive and even death, and yet, you do it for love.

Sit on the edge of the chartered Opunohu boat in the blue crystalline waters off the coast of Moorea. Hold your mask as you flip backwards off the edge into rolling waves. At last, you have entered your own sweet blue planet, the tropical reefs of French Polynesia, in search of your love, the Giant Pacific Octopus. At last you will have an encounter with an alternate reality, another form of consciousness.  At last you will reach across the vertebrate divide to know and be known.

Like all who are pursued and truly desired, your octopus will be illusive. Know that and be patient. She is the master of disguise and changing skin. She is invisible though right before you. She is silent, immobile, watching you as you move over the reef looking for her. You may find evidence of her dinner of scallops and if you are so lucky, an arm full of suckers protruding from her den. If you are polite, and move away, she may come out to greet you the next time you visit. Your acceptance of her need for privacy strengthens her to be brave. If you are slow in your motions and patient on your subsequent visits, she may even take your arm and show you around. She may even introduce you to her friends.

A lover bears gifts. Do not visit bereft of certain tokens of affection. Toys are gifts for an octopus, for the intelligent creature loves a challenge. Do not bore your octopus! Several examples of good toys are as follows: screwtop jars, bottles, plastic screw apart Easter eggs or balls, various video cameras she will enjoy dismantling and dragging into her den. Do not arrive without a crab in a jar or a piece of shrimp in a Mister Potato Head or a lobster in a trap. Watch her with admiration as she springs her food from the trap and devours it, tasting it as it passes from sucker to sucker and into her mouth in the center of her warped star figure.

When you have formed a bond of trust with the object of your love, submit yourself to her curiosity.  Do not shudder as those naturalists and artists of the past. Surely this is not in the lover’s nature, to be repulsed. Instead consider the light suctioning kisses a sweet tasting of your skin, her silken tendril arms moving over your arms and shoulders the gentle exploration of new love, the rapid changes in skin color pleasurable blushes, the pulse of ink and exit a flirtation, the regard of the dark slit eyes the all knowing all loving gaze of the divine.

You could keep a lover if you wish. Some do. In a large fish tank emulating the ocean. She will want to be by the television. And if she can, she will get out and eat the leftovers on the counter and sink. She will crawl onto your shoulder and head and watch tv.  She will cheer on your team. She will watch your favorite shows. If you feed her, if you entertain her, if you love her, she will never leave.

 

This loosely references the work of Sy Montgomery, and in particular, The Soul of an Octopus. The documentary Aliens of the Deep was also a helpful source.

 

 

Sabina

Tags

anxiety, cancer, divorce

Unknown by Edward Zulawski, flickr

At five in the afternoon in December the dark skin of night closes in over day. Across the street from Sabina’s townhouse the last glimmer of gold, the fire sky, simmers through the pines, the scrub oak, the palms, and she wishes to hold onto that moment of the final sun forever, a diamond in her hand, its flash, its promise. But of course there is no stopping the night. It shuts down a liveliness in her as if it were the coming of age itself, as if it were death itself come unbidden.

He would have called her melodramatic, “he” being her ex, of course. She would have said she was merely acknowledging her reality, this sense of being subject.

And so she plowed through on this Monday, with her experience, in this melodramatic frame, wondering this: What to provide her son for his dinner when he begins his week with her. When the earth shuts down, this is no small task. The weeks her child is with his father she eats only leftovers, scours the crisper and cabinets for anything that would serve as a food source. She is juggling bills and doctors and medicine and a crumbling house and car. She eats things past their due date, sometimes way past. One time she got sick.

When it is time for her son to spend Christmas week with her she knows if she appears desperate or unorganized, she risks losing contact. She must address her responsibilities as dark skies threaten to sap her and so she takes a risk: She texts her son asking him for to pick up carryout on his way home from soccer practice.

“Does your ex think you unfit to parent?” This from her therapist months ago when Sabina was ordered to come off of a controlled substance for anxiety. She was strung out and barely able to carry a thought from one sentence to the next. She sometimes forgot words altogether. And yet this one word rammed through her: unfit. The word reverberated in her skull with no pill to protect her. This seemed unfair, outrageous, even, that she is both required to be free of a substance and then criticized for her withdrawal. After all, she and her eighteen year old had been through worse – the threat of her death and chemo treatments – and come out together, it seemed.

She left her therapist, sent her a text and asked her about that word – “unfit” – but then didn’t really try to understand her therapist’s return text, just told her she wasn’t going to see her anymore. Sufficiently vague. And when the sky fell early the following winter, there was no pill to guard against the effects of that hour of darkness.

Though she could speak this December, “unfit” would never leave her. And it unnerved her that her ex might see the text to her son to help her secure food. Would he see this as “unfit?” It is amazing how many things come out in a divorce, over a conference table, a smooth blond wood surface in a room across the street from the fountain Sabina described in her first published piece which her then husband proudly framed for her and hung on their wall. And yet, years later, at the mediation: All the small slights, the things told in confidence, trotted out, the hurts.

But there is also this: Had she not bought real maple syrup for her husband and son when she was married? And after the divorce, when she bought an imitation brand to save money so she could buy pancake mix too, and health insurance, her son spoke of his friend’s house, where he ate “real syrup.” This became for her a secret symbol of families who had not been broken, and almost all families in her son’s conservative Christian school were still intact, a school where Sabina now felt like a pariah though she had once felt close to many of the women, where she had even been involved.

Somehow Sabina knew the Jesus of the Christian school would have actually been eating imitation syrup with the tax collectors and sinners, the broken, the unwashed people scrounging to eat in the face of powerful ruling religious classes.

And at the outset of her son’s soccer season this year, coinciding with early darkness and regrets, her son greets her after a game on the sidelines and calls another woman his mom. Why do all the dramas of our lives get enacted on fields? Is there so much intensity there, invisible, that we slip into it whether the field be in the shape of a rectangle or diamond? And though there are things that are redeemed, there are also things lost on fields never to be found again.

Still, Sabina’s contest has always been with the sky, not a person nor a disappointment related to a person, not a field nor a disappointment related to a field. And so, she faces the murdering night on this Monday of Christmas week, waiting for her son to bring sustenance, determined to serve pancakes with syrup even if she must boil brown sugar and water over a meager stove for want of money, the little bit of money having been transferred to the carryout and the stores for the gifts under the tree.

First published in Writing in a Woman’s Voice

the entomologist’s daughter

Tags

earth, entomology, science kids

Little Girl by Lynette Zozette, flickr

She laid a dime next to the tiny white snail eggs, laid it right there in the dirt at the bottom of the terrarium. She and her brother had named their snails Harold and Maude, with prompting from their mother who now watches with wonder her daughter’s delicate fringe of lashes, the fall of auburn hair, the small fingers once smaller but still delicate.

“Shall we take a picture?” says the mother, which had been the plan all along, but in the quiet morning with the sun streaming through the window and the tank with the beta fish, the golden pathos stems gracing the water, the stick insect clinging to a shelf beside the cat, it is nice to say the words, to recognize the steps of recording and observation and perspective for others and as a reminder to the self: This is what once was.

The daughter nods and takes the camera from her mother. She looks through the viewer and aims, clicking to capture an image of the tiny eggs in the soil. A butterfly dances by, a tortoiseshell they were housing in the cool of the old fashioned larder. “Quick,” says the daughter, “let’s open a window!” And the mother cranks the window over the fish bowl and they gently coax it to fly through. It flies out over the spring grass peaking through wet dead leaves. It flies through trees, their branches pushing out green buds.

for my friend Jen

skin

Tags

countercultural, strange fiction

the enemy within unleashed by Arne Halverson, flickr

This must be the least favorite part of your body,” said the manicurist, rubbing a rose scented cream into the woman’s hand. The manicurist’s eyes traveled up to the woman’s neck and rested on her face. “In fact, your neck and whole right side is damaged.” The manicurist gave her some cream to take home.

The manicurist was not exaggerating. On the back of her wrist was a long purple scar where she had surgery to remove a ganglion cyst. It looked like some kind of upside down suicide attempt. There was a puckered white patch on a knuckle where she burned her hand ironing her husband’s shirt on his first day of work. Her pinkie had suffered third degree burns from the hot glue gun when she was helping her son make Gandalf for a Tolkien diorama. There was a slash on her neck where her thyroid had been removed. There was a sprinkling of hypopigmentation on the right side of her face, a result of pregnancy that no amount of makeup could hide.

She used the cream. It worked. She looked nothing like herself. She freaked out. She slashed the back of her wrist and the base of her neck. She burned her knuckle with an iron. She covered her pinkie with hot glue. She dotted her check with household bleach. She took herself to the emergency room and said she had been tortured, and no, she did not know her assailant.

First appeared in 52/250

r.e.m.

Tags

childhood trauma, dream

Notes of ink, Cheryl Brind, flickr

In the grey green woods at dusk, the smell of smoke and crackling of fire, we all make our way silently through the trees their dark musky bark, the brown smell of the humus undergrowth. There is a choir singing green notes and purple, round and droll, heavy, singing hymns I know from childhood, yellow girlhood, people dressed in white their clean smell dull as a communion wafer. At last we arrive at a large man seated at a long table, a man pressed from a jello mold. He accepts the bowls of soup we bring him each of us offering a deep brown fragrant bowl we have filled from a moaning cauldron. This man we have come to worship and serve.

Pick up the hymnal I am told, the red ones with a musical staff the long line of a funeral procession, the notes like mourners marching. I don’t want to sing the songs I once loved in yellow pink girlhood for now the songs have gone grey and dank as wet stone.

There is a car on the edge of the woods whose engine makes a sound like red, like let’s go, but there’s nowhere for me to sit. My happy parents, their laughter orange and dancing, their clothes sweet and tart as lemonade, and cool as an orangesicle, look at me while I beg them in black frantic panic tones jagged as razor wire to take me with them. The car speeds away, dirt rising in its wake like miniscule dust fairies ascending and falling to the ground again, silent as rain, quieter even, a dry feeling like white.

the banishment window

Tags

hypocrisy, satire

Window by John Akuppa Wigham, flickr

Say your prayers at the banishment window. Whisper your secrets to me at the banishment window. I will wait for you mornings, at dawn, at evenings, dusk, at the banishment window. I will hear your pleadings to join us, your proof of your reform, but the extent of your involvement will take place at the banishment window. On my side of the banishment window, there is a place for me to sit, but on your side, only rough wall, where you stand, where you will always stand when you see me until we bury you in the potter’s field.

You might wear our clothes, but the extent of our talk will be at the banishment window. You might secure our degrees but don’t think you can fancy talk your way past the banishment window. Have children if you like but they will stay with you out there at the banishment window. Your spouse too: banishment window. In fact, let us know if you’re bringing a whole family and friends, and we’ll have more listeners at the banishment window. But just because there might be more people out there than in here, don’t think you can outnumber your way past the banishment window. When we speak Christ into your life we will meet you at the banishment window. When we curl our lip at your choices or the color of your skin, for sure it will take place at the banishment window.

Sometimes creatures, sometimes fire, sometimes winds, sometimes floods, sometimes people off of their heads out there might take you down whole on the other side of the banishment window. Could you just keep it down, please. Just keep it down ok? We’re trying to pray in here. How do you think our prayers will be made effectual if you keep interrupting us? Chillax and we’ll meet you at the banishment window in the morning.

To the UN Committee on Alternative Fuel Sources

Tags

feminism, satire

It has been well known for quite some time that on the outskirts of Munir, a city that could well be considered a test city for its heretofore untapped source of fuel, the bodies of the useless women currently are housed. We use the term “bodies” to denote that for all intents and purposes, such women as these are barely alive by today’s standard of living and for all intents and purposes will soon be dead, either through despair or other natural causes induced by such. And we say “useless women” to mean that such unfortunates have no use in our mainstream consumer society and must therefore be removed in order to fulfill their highest potentialities: The usage of their bodies as an alternative fuel source, their heroic sacrificial contribution to our community.

We have found marginalized groups have the highest wattage output per kilogram and though findings remain uncertain, we surmise this must have something to do with the epic operation of the soul that is crushed and aggrieved. Having observed the transfer of energies of suffering beings into ghost forms upon death, we are determined to tap into this energy surplus and use it to the good use of the operation of our fair city.

Our future alternative fuel source are the bodies of women who die naturally in our community center designed to house them, women who have lived well past their prime, those women who, in life, have been neglected by husbands, who, by sheer neglect or harsher means, express their displeasure as well as women considered burdens by their offspring where once they were considered vital sources of nurture. These women have cadavers that will burn most efficiently and we will see to their disposal as we honor them for such, giving flags and medals and ceremonies for families, large mass punch and cake gatherings with balloons.

Unless such women have managed to overcome the barriers against them and build a world for themselves based on talents apart from chasing male providers’ affections and the nurturance of children, midlife women often find themselves at a place we provide: A death house we call Sunny Meadows to signify heaven though we do not by any means indulge in the practice of euthanasia. In addition, we attempt to meet the essential needs of our residents of Sunny Meadows while practicing restraint in the spiritual fulfillment mandates for housing a human being, realizing the energy potentials would be compromised should happiness be complete.

We are not beyond taking women or any beings for that matter who, lost to despair, are searching for a place to exist, beings who have lost functionality in our free market including but not limited to politicians and activists labeled “nasty,” beauty queens labeled “pigs,” actresses labeled “overrated,” pre-menopausal women who bleed, violated women labeled “liars.” We anticipate the bodies of all such marginalized women and others whose psyches are crushed by the current oligarchy will make excellent sources of fuel in our alternative energy program and we anticipate in fact an uptick in fuel reserves to get us through times of famine, that is, more benevolent future regimes, should that eventuality become realized.

When evil flourishes, either privately on the personal level in homes – between family members, a husband and wife, children and parents – or when it flourishes in our public sociopolitical  machine, we are operating in the black and so we say, unofficially, of course, may evil reign, yet it always does. It is simply a matter of degree and so this method of securing this previously untapped fuel source is flawless.

Published in S/tick

For Kimberly Townsend Palmer

Quiet Zones

Tags

cancer, friendship, race

A person should know she was she was driving over the train tracks, should be able to feel it under the wheels, Monique told Carl as she packed her white hat back into its box. Carl was sitting in her bedroom watching her as she changed her clothes.

“Three deaths, baby,” she said to him about recent train related incidents. The city had installed rubber casings on the tracks so drivers hardly registered the feel of the rails. The point was to make it easier on everyone’s suspension. Trains had been silenced too. No more trains blowing at the crossroads. And now people had died or been hurt because they didn’t know they were on the tracks. There had been no warning, no communication from the train.

She remembered with a shiver having barely escaped an oncoming train when she was with Aimee one afternoon. They were taking their sons and their classmates on a field trip. They had not known they were crossing a track, had not heard a train, until they were just past. Looking back on that day, she realized someone must have driven through the gates and broken them. Probably some drunk rich white kids because it was only in wealthy neighborhoods that “quiet zones” were established.

She had not told Carl about that day with Aimee. And now the silence with which Aimee eventually accepted her death from cancer seemed like that smooth ride over the tracks. She cried hot tears and Carl nuzzled her hair. She talked through things with Carl again, things she had said before, that Aimee hadn’t wanted any of them beside her when she was at the end of her illness, not even her husband and children. She wanted no one to see that last husk of what she had become. She had wanted to go quietly, without a fuss. Monique had not been allowed to be with her either. Aimee’s body had been cremated and put into a box.

Aimee was the only white woman Monique had ever been close to. She had been a pistol right after the diagnosis, had believed God would heal her because she wanted it that way, had come to her son’s baseball games hobbling on feet blistered by chemo. But when it was clear she would not live she instructed Monique to wear her Easter hat to the funeral. Aimee had always told her there were doves on Monique’s Easter hat, but they were simply high peaks of white chiffon. Monique had honored Aimee’s wishes and had worn the hat but she vowed to herself, while she sat in the white people’s church, not to make any more white friends.

First appeared in Trainwrite

Butter Witch: Irish folklore in Appalachia(Happy St. Patty’s)

Tags

butter churn, folklore, St. Patty's, witch

temporalata, witch hut 1, flickr

On Saturdays, Mama set me down in front of the churn. On summer days, she set me on the porch to look out upon the woods, to look for fairies and woodsprite, to keep the woodland green at bay, she said, lest it overtake the house and we be lost. On winter days, I set inside not far from the stove but far enough that a witch’s spell that come down through the flue would not frustrate my efforts. The spell would come on account of Ms. Maybre, Mama would say, the spinster, who casts spells such as that of the butter witch. On account of that happening, we gotta stick the poker from the fire in the butter and break the witch’s back and get the butter going again.

I always wondered if she meant Ms. Maybre would have a broken back. But Ms. Maybre did seem to be the type of lady to be a witch and because of that, the Dempsey kids loved to play some tricks, just to get her ire going. Which is probably why we got butter spells going on us. We pulled tricks like stringing up a can of water over her door, dressing her cats up in the rags mama kept for washing down the house, hanging ghosts up in her yard from torn sheets, tying a scarecrow around the broom she kept by the door like it was flying it like a witch.

Mama said the inside of her house smells like a musty smoke house from the solid pig fat she buns as candles. She had been there once to check on her, witch or no witch she told us, and Daddy, at the dinner table. She hadn’t seen Ms. Maybre for weeks. It was her Christian duty, and there was Ms. Maybre, half naked from the waist up, drinking from a mason jar in front of the fire. Mama says she was drinking the moonshine she made from the pressure cooker on the stove with the copper wire run through, she was drinking the devil’s drink.

“Ms. Maybre,” said Mama to the old witch, “I worried about you when I haven’t seen you none, at all, not even to see you get your mail at the end of the road.”

“I drank the potion and went up the chimney. I flew over Grandfather on my corn broom with my red cap.” (Grandfather was a mountain not far from where we lived.)

She talked like the devil, said Mama. She was frothy with spirits. Mama put a shawl around her and laid her out on a cot she kept beside her stove. She set beside her and put a cold cloth on her head but hours later, Mama had fallen asleep for when she woke, there was no Ms. Maybre, only a cat, black as midnight, staring at her with white eyes, white as the yarrow she kept in a jar on the table in summer.

What Mama had concluded was that the cat was Ms. Maybre. “I swanee, I never seen nothing like this cat. It knew me inside out, like a person would. I held my cross around my neck,” and at this time in the story, she would show us how she clutched at the cross pendant Daddy gave her, “and I backed out the house.”

One Saturday, I gave baby Emma the handle for the churn. We call her baby Emma because even though she is grown up a bit, and in grade school, she is still the baby. I say to baby Emma, “On St. Patty’s, an old witch sends a butter spell down the flue and breaks up the churning. You let me know if the fat won’t come together and we’ll break a witch’s back.”

I left because I wanted to meet my friends at Sliding Rock.

When I came home, Emma was setting in the rocker next to the fire. Her normally blond hair was  black and her brown eyes were white and she looked old and blind. She cried and pointed at me because I had left her alone. Mama and Daddy had gone into town, she said, and everyone else had gone away. The butter wouldn’t churn and she didn’t know how to break the witch’s back.

My heart was racing, I stoked a fire in the dying wood stove. What had happened to Emma? I jammed a poker into the coals. I pulled the paddle out of the churn and thrust the poker inside. It hissed and a whippoorwill lapsed into its nighttime song, almost in relief. Emma’s hair returned back to its soft blond and her lovely eyes the deep brown of a pond in moonlight. I held her tight and asked her to forgive me. She just nodded, but said nothing. “I’ll make you honey toast. And milk,” I said. “Let’s not worry now,” which is something Mama often said although it never often worked. I was surprised to hear myself saying it.

By the time Mama and Daddy got back with goods from town, the butter was churned and dinner set out. My other brothers and sisters were there too, in response to the dinner bell I had rung for them, summoning them back from adventures in the woods.

That night, sleeping under the eaves in the room I shared with my sisters, something woke me. A crooked old woman stood in the door frame. Was that Ms. Maybre? She made no sound, but glided to the head of my bed. She reached a claw down to my mouth and put her other claw to her pursed lips, instructing me to be quiet and still. Her finger smelled like the burning embers from the fire. She lifted it then and swiped through the air. I felt a whoosh and closed my eyes. When I could open them again I saw the roof was no more and I gazed up at black sky full of stars. She put her finger back down on my lips to quiet me and gave the shushing sign with the other hand. She then pressed her charred fingers down on my eyelids until I knew nothing but black.

The next morning at the mail boxes down the road, Ms. Maybre gave me a knowing look. I couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t the same woman as the night before. I kept to myself like the good girl I had read about in a book as a child. I never knew that girl to be me but I certainly wasn’t a no-count either.

– for Valerie Willis

 

 

 

white buffalo calf woman

Tags

cherokee, lakota, womens stories

Feathers, braids, and beads by Nic McPhee, flickr

In the Lakota legend of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, a beautiful apparition wearing a white buckskin dress decorated with porcupine quills approaches two men. She carries a pipe bag embroidered with the symbol of the four directions. One man, upon seeing her, expresses a desire to lay with her but the other man advises care and respect due to her sacred nature. However, the greedy man gets exactly what he wants until there was nothing left of him but a pile of bones in the grass. The White Buffalo Calf Woman explains to the remaining man that what his lustful companion had yearned for was only her beauty. His demise lay in his unwillingness to know her spirit.

My grandmother would sit before the fire in our house which backed up to the Wekiwa state park in Apopka Florida and tell me and my twin sister this story over and over. The purpose of this story has not always remained clear. When we asked her, finally, why she was telling us this story once more she explained: There are many interpretations and uses of the story, she said, but you should learn that a man should show respect for a woman’s spirit. The Buffalo Calf Woman gives us strength even though she came to the Lakota.

And then my grandmother laid down upon the couch because she liked to be near the stove where she makes little corn cakes for us, cakes she feeds us with squash juice and honey when we come home from school. Often my grandmother reminds us of our heritage: We are descended from a relative of Georgia Rose, a full Cherokee, who married a Seminole.

In our room at night, we talk about this story Grandma tells us and try to discern what it must be saying. No man seems to care about us. There are many men who have said they want to lay with us and we are only fifteen. There are many guys our age who want this and older guys too and when they admit it to themselves they want not just one of us but both at the same time. A couple of men have tried to pimp us out. They are greedy, like the lustful man in the story, and they do not know what is inside, our spirit. They want what they want.

Still our grandmother has taught us a lot and we try to listen to her. My mother married a white man much to her disappointment and now that my mother has cancer, Father is gone, gone, off to Texas without a penny left to give his dying squaw, to save her life.

We have crosses and dreamcatchers, Native American dances and hip hop, prom and religious ceremonies, native costumes and Juicy Couture. Grandmother holds it all together and yet she grows weaker. “You girls are going to have to handle the guns and take care of this place. You are going to have to drive and share the car and take care of your mother. As for your father, girls, I will have to say: It is expected.” She lay her head down at last as if that final confession had taken her last breath.

That night, my sister and I built a fire in the fire pit. We put on our ceremonial dresses and braided our hair and interwove feathers. We put paint on our faces and burnt bundles of sage. We had done this many times, when we were bored, lonely, when grandmother had to go to the hospital, when our mother was diagnosed, when our father left us alone and our mother wouldn’t get off the couch for days. It was what we knew, this turning slow circles in the way we had been taught, but slower. We danced a man’s dance but in a woman’s way. We were turning and we were thinking through our plan. Here was the story of the hunt, the way the weapons were prepared, the way we were to feed our family, this is how it would happen, how the buck would be approached, how it would die and we would live. We had talked over it in the moonlight shining through our bedroom window, the feathers in our dream catchers caught lightly by air blowing through the vent.

“Come to Wekiwa State Park,” we said to the men in online exchanges. “Walk to Sand Lake and sit there and wait until the park closes. We will meet you at midnight. We will build a fire and make you feel good.”

That was all we said. Well, we made arrangements for letting them know what they were getting and for how much. We found the men to be pliant, but not all of them followed through, and some of them, when they followed through, would not drink with us and so it wasn’t safe to continue and we disappeared into the woods, leaving them stranded. But somehow, we would make them pay, pay for what they are doing to us, what they are doing to my mother through my father and his white man Porsche while my mother is left with the cost of radiation, chemo, surgery.

We got better at it. Drinking became part of the deal. No man liked being called a woman and so we goaded them: Drink, drink, we said. And then we slipped Mama’s oxy, powdered, into their beers. And then we danced, turning, slowly around the fire, circling, ever closer, putting the buck in our sites. We kissed each other and he began to drink. We touched each other and started taking off each other’s clothes. Drink, drink, we said. Yet when these men stood to touch us, they would lurch back and collapse. It was the drug, taking effect. We would wait until they were immobile and then we dressed. The fallen man would keep long enough for us to raid his wallet and run away, through the moonlight, through the woods once inhabited by natives who fed on alligator, through the fields now deserted.

On these nights, a woman rose up out of the grasses. Her hair was white and adorned with feathers and she wore a white calf skin dress. She was mother to us every night and we made our escape.

soulmates

Tags

alien abduction, mental illness

Valerie Everett, flickr

 

He was at it again, thought Sylvie, her husband talking of Her, the alien, the dream alien, and this of all times, with dinner guests to witness it, this being Thanksgiving no less, the table set the day before, the house cleaned last Sunday, the afternoon light bending in perfect golden shafts over their cleared place settings, the room smelling of warmth, mellowed perfumes, buttered dishes, wine, coffee. A pale pink rose petal had fallen from a low bunch of flowers gathered in a centerpiece and was tinged a slight brown against the cream fabric. Almost nothing was amiss.

Their guests were young, coiffed, and beautiful, supremely educated, their clutches firmly settling into the world. When they were at Abbie and Jake’s house this past summer, Sylvie had overheard her young handsome husband Brad speak of an alien having visited him in a dream to extract his semen. It was such a brief conversation sliver that folded back into the larger noise of the party that it did not hit her, the cut of it, until she turned the lock to Abbie’s tiny half bath, and then she felt her head turn heavy and she sat upon the commode, gripping the sink. Had he really said that? She asked him about it on their way home. He just shook his head, his eyes glazed over, but for Brad that could mean he just didn’t want to talk about it.

And now here it was again.

“She was there, beside me, last night. Sylvie was asleep and I tried to wake her.”

“Oh yeah, I’m sure man, I’m sure you tried to wake your wife to tell her about the sexy alien babe,” said Jake. “You must be a baby daddy by now. They got your semen last summer.”

“What? What is this?” This from Rakesh who taught at the college. He and his fiancé were holding hands under the table but let go at this unexpected turn. They were newly arrived from India.

“We grow ’em rare over here,” said Jake.

“There are gods, there are other beings,” said Rakesh, trying to be helpful. “Perhaps this is what is happening to you.”

“I don’t know,” said Brad. “I’m just saying, this woman was with me last night, an alien. This was the same one from before.”

“Why I never heard – ” said Abbie. “Sylvie, is everything all right?”

The room was starting to shift a bit, Sylvie could feel it, they leaned in, their elbows pressed hard against her table, the floor length curtains sentries, the chandelier oppressive.

Sylvie tilted a dinner knife, unused and abandoned, so that it reflected Brad’s image. His head appeared football shaped, his neck bulbous.

“This feeling I have, it is like a unification,” he went on. “It is beautiful. I feel whole. I have a second life in that place. It is my real life, my actual life, my soul.”

“For fuck’s sake, man,” said Jake. He had known Brad since they were children. They ran an accounting firm together.

Sylvie retreated to the kitchen. Abbie followed. She held Sylvie for a while. She then poured her friend a glass of water. She asked Sylvie some questions, none of which Sylvie could answer. The dinner guests trickled away and Sylvie managed not to cry, not even for Abbie. Sylvie prevented Jake from calling the hospital. Abbie and Jake finally went home.

Sylvie sat up in bed that night while Brad drifted off. The shifting shadows from the trees outside created dark spaces and light. “Be gone,” she said, touching Brad’s forehead while she spoke, for she loved him no matter the alterations of his attractions, adventures, grotesqueries. “Be gone,” she said. “Mine.” And there was not a sound but the shifting leaves.