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Within A Forest Dark

~ fiction and reflections by Margaret Sefton

Within A Forest Dark

Tag Archives: midlife

Awkward

14 Wednesday Oct 2020

Posted by Margaret Sefton in flash fiction, original short story, writers in quarantine, Writers of Central Florida

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midlife, short fiction

Awkward by (jennyY), flickr

It was an awkward situation. He was much older and shorter and frailer than he appeared in the dating profile photo. He had sounded taller somehow with a kind of Texas swagger. When they met, however, the cowboy politician twang she imagined was something like a male version of Spongebob’s Sandy the Squirrel.

They met in the parking lot of a huge chain restaurant, with huge Chinese concrete dragons flanking the door. His assumption was that she had never eaten anything exotic or been anywhere and he was to show her what was what. She hadn’t disabused him. Secretly, she wondered if there was something a little bit masochistic about her: Let’s see how stupid this can get. Depressingly, years ago, she had sat with her ex-husband and their old couple friends in the kitchen at a special table, to be waited upon and served by the head chef. She kept this to herself as well.

As it turned out, he had all along, through their talks online, made a plan to create an unbreakable bond of sympathy between them: their shared illness, their previous bout of cancer. As soon as they were seated, he spoke in detail of his health status just last year, the necessity of a colostomy bag for a time, the impossibility of dating during treatment. He shared that they might have something in common.

First five minutes, she thought. She felt a little sick, felt she had in fact very little in common with this person who shared such personal things with her straight off with little to no compunction.

This was akin to him assuming that she had never been anywhere or eaten anything but burgers when in fact she had been many places in the world and cooked and eaten quite a bit. He was presumptuous and bossy, ordered for them even though she had said she wanted salad. He ignored her and ordered just what he was planning to, for him and for her. She was tired within the first ten minutes but she supposed his mentality was since he was paying, this was his show. It was old school.

They sat at a large half moon booth, at first at opposite ends so that she couldn’t hear him well, and he was the only one who was talking. She scooted closer when he did not which was awkward because she was aware of what the fine knit summer dress showed off as she bumped and jiggled along. It wasn’t tight or revealing, just flowing over her and not disguising her lack of tone. This is what it is to be dating at midlife. Embarrassing.

As the food arrived and they ate, there were more surprises: His life as a car transporter which afforded him travel to every state, famous people he had met, trips to Vegas, pictures he pulled out and began to show her one of which included a picture of a lady prostitute friend and her pimp. And he spoke of his grown daughter he had poisoned with information about her mother, his ex-wife.

All she could think about was her dog and how to get back to her.

He had also, like a few other men she had known, formed an over the top quick familiarity with the waitress. She had observed this strangeness in her new dating life, how some would take advantage of paid help – in restaurants and stores to flirt and speak endlessly of their lives, to try and win approval and interest or simply smiles, laughs. And when this happened, she was invisible. Or was that the whole point? She inserted herself with this one. Turns out, the waitress’s father was a pastor just like her own and both had been good men. They talked a long time too and joyfully, she thought, without him. There was no one else in the restaurant at that hour.

He was annoyed. He hated Christians and Christianity. A bunch of superstitious claptrap.

She thought of her dog again. The style the groomer gave her hair around her face was called “Teddy Bear:” round, soft, and full, round eyes. She kept her groomed so she could always see those expressive eyes.

“I’ve got to get home to my dog,” she said. “I know she’s going crazy.” She had driven across town though there was a location closer to her apartment, one she had suggested, but meeting where they did, so far away for her, had been one more way of showing who’s boss, to meet where he lived.

Unfortunately, he spoke on for a bit longer, asked her a couple of questions, discovered her employment status was “drawing on alimony,” told her “it was time to grow up.” At the car he made a crude joke about sometimes dating simply for the sex and not marriage, referring to her unemployed status. She gave him a quick hug which he said surprised him, he wasn’t even going to do that, feigning innocence, an old trick she was beginning to recognize. Her hug was goodbye and thank you for lunch though you threw your money away.

At home, with her dog on the couch, she was so grateful for the sun streaming through the window and gleaming off her glass side tables, the plantings around her patio, the huge palm tree, the sounds of birds and dogs and children, people walking by speaking various languages. She decorated in blues, reds, grays, and floral patterns. She would rather die than be without color. She couldn’t quite describe how she felt, only she was happy to be there.

She was most offended by his “it’s time to grow up” statement though the piling on of all of it from the instant of their meeting had numbed her, a kind of self negating abuse that felt familiar.

Months later, and no more dates with anyone, thankfully, but with the onset of the pandemic, she realized he wasn’t all wrong about her need for a job. As she had learned from other dates and other midlife steadies: Everyone taught her something.

The Steinway

14 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by Margaret Sefton in original short story

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affair, midlife, piano

Susan Sermoneta, flickr

Susan Sermoneta, flickr

This Valentine’s Day, I am engaging in a writing mini marathon. I am exploring the joys and trials of love.

But sometimes love isn’t always what it is portrayed to be in popular culture. My brilliant friend Terin Miller offered his insights when I was bemoaning my own challenges in this department. I said on a public post, somewhat facetiously, that writing is really my only one true love. And here was his response: “If you love anything, truly, it is romantic. Not mellow-dramatic, false, or artificial. Do not confuse pathos or even desire with romance. Real romance involves your heart. Not just your brain. Or even just your hormones. There is nothing wrong with loving writing. Or words. Or love. Or language. It is a means of expressing romance with life.”

What is your romance with life? Is it the love of your children? Your partner? Your pet(s)? Your garden? Your love for making dishes or going out with friends? Your travels? Pastimes?

My story of the man with the Steinway was written about twelve years ago. It is in some ways a junior effort though in some ways I think it is just as strong if not stronger than other work to date. And it never published. But I like it anyway. Like a love, it is graced with flaws. But I only have rose colored glasses for my man with the Steinway piano. The piece is a longer work to be savored at leisure. Happy Valentine’s Day.

The Steinway

I found the Steinway in a consignment shop. It was dull, black, the paint rubbed off on the corners, a few scratches here and there. The logo was written out in gold letters below the symbol of the pedal lyre. I bought it because of its resemblance to the piano of my childhood.

As boys, my brother Greg and I had both taken piano lessons. My early attempts were halting and clumsy and eventually ceased altogether when the reward and punishment system my mother had set in place for me became ineffectual: five pennies for each fifteen minutes of practice, three pennies subtracted for every day of missed practice.

For a while, I managed to play half-heartedly and make a modest amount of money without giving up baseball. However, I eventually shut down, and I think what did it was not just my realization I was bored (the incentive-based program reversing itself), but the repeated scene of my brother, leaning forward, his left foot back, in proper position, his fingers delivering notes into the air, liberating them from the strings – legato, staccato, tenuto – while my mother, as if in loving adoration and response, rolled out apple pies, Chicken ala King, rump roast, Beef Wellington, biscuits with sweet cream butter.

He could play up to six hours a day. This bath of notes had a way of silencing us, trapping and gentling us as if we were caught and fattened in a web. We had a wrap around porch and when it was warm, we sat outside in the swing and the rockers or else my sister and I played checkers at the card table while my father read the paper and waited for dinner. Sometimes my father and I took our gloves and threw a baseball, but no matter where we went on our property, we could still hear my brother playing.

My father never said anything and neither did I, and he never complimented my brother and this gave me a sense of peace, as if Greg was not better than my sister and me. But I stopped playing the piano anyway. My brother didn’t have a jar of pennies as incentive to practice. Early on, he told our mother to take his jar away, he didn’t need it, he played for himself only and earning pennies for something he already liked to do was pointless. This pronouncement of both supreme freedom from monetary incentive and from the ordering of the household promoted him, in my mind, to the status of a god and I knew that, in this area at least, I was merely human.

The Steinway arrived on a hot October Florida day. It entered my house shrouded in a faded purple quilt and bound with rope. The plastic wheels of the cart, large as plates, shushed and squeaked over the carpet. It was lowered by four men and exhaled a breath of discordant notes. The men unbound the rope and removed the quilt. It sat before me, a black, hulking presence absorbing light, a contrast to the French antique sideboard which my wife Lena had placed there as a complement to our dining table.

I sat down before it and opened the cover to reveal the keys, the ivory now yellow and dull, but classic, rare. I struck a key and a string responded in a tired way and then I struck the C major chord, the only one I remembered, and a cacophony of complaints issued forth, the notes warping and wavering.

I began to doubt my earlier certainty that it was fate that I should have this dusty instrument in my house, that I should tune it and learn how to play it. My current mid-life desire to try again that which had eluded me before, but which was attractive nonetheless, was perhaps another incarnation of all that was wayward and impractical and ridiculous in me.

“Why can’t you choose something a normal man would do?” said my father, of my decision in a major and I knew what he meant: business, engineering, law. My brother, had he been able to make money as a pianist, would have been exempt. By the time of my decision, he had already failed.

“Your poems were sweet when you were young, Richard,” said my mother. “But how are you going to raise a family?”

They needn’t have worried. I became a normal man. Though I majored in creative writing to spite them (and to their credit, they paid my tuition), I failed to write anything beautiful or insightful, failed to earn anything from my writing at all.

Instead, I sold real estate and got married and had a family. Now I live in Orlando, Florida where my wife is an attorney. For years, while my parents were still alive, they could say at church “Richard sells real estate.” I would stay up deep into the early hours of the morning, wrestling in weakness with grievances and fears, whole dark selves frozen.

I closed the piano lid. The tuner could be called tomorrow. I had found a good one through a woman who teaches at the college, a woman who was going to offer me beginning lessons. I was tired. Now with the Steinway sitting mute and solid in my living room, I felt my weight slipping downward as if succumbing. I climbed the stairs to the bedroom.

The palm-shaped blades of the fan in our bedroom spun lazily. I closed the blinds, but didn’t take the decorative pillows off the bed. My wife was always after me to put them back on after I had removed them and so they would stay. I lay among the beaded fabrics and the decorative feathers and felt myself drift into sleep.

When I awoke, the house was dark. No one was home. I had arranged for the kids to go to their friends’ houses after school in case the piano was delivered late. I had an hour to listen to the blade of my knife slice through the flesh of vegetables, to get the water up to a boil, to open wine.

My wife Lena had been extremely successful right out of law school, had had the type of intelligence and prowess that had landed her a job with a prestigious firm. On my worst days, I felt outstripped, but consoled myself with the flimsy theory that successes happened at different times and that right now, the children needed me.

My role was to shop and make meals, to pick the children up after school and secure their clothing and school supplies. Emily, our eleven year old, was a budding ballerina, and Giles, nine, liked sports, almost any sport, but he liked it in an easygoing, rather than competitive way.

Emily was her own self-disciplined being, and reminded me of her uncle and mother both. I often told her her uncle would be proud to see her dancing to many of the musical pieces he had learned to play. This seemed to please her and she smiled with her mother’s beautiful mouth and her mother’s green eyes sparkled back at me.

She often gave me a hug because she believed I was sad when I mentioned her uncle. By now, she knew he had felt the pressure and recurring physical pain of performance and had died from an intentional overdose. Though my brother had died in this way, I knew him to be the greater man, and I’ll admit a part of me was glad he was not alive to prove it.

When Lena got home and saw the changes I had made to accommodate the piano, she registered her protest. “You have moved the sideboard under the window. That’s not a good place. It’s about a million miles from the dining room table.” We had a large front room that accommodated both a dining room and living room area. We had never been able to agree upon the division and arrangement of tables and chairs.

“I made chicken. I think you’ll like it.” I handed her a glass of chilled white wine. “Try this Pouilly Fuisse.”

“The lamp you put on it doesn’t go. It’s not a lamp for a sideboard.”

“You can get us another.” I took the wine from her and slid my hands over the silk of her blouse. I felt the metal clasp of her bra.

“That piano is hideous.”

“Where is Lena?” I said, and kissed her on the cheek. It is a game we used to play when we were first married and I believed myself capable of loosening her to laughter, to good humor.

“Lena is here, but don’t think it’s going to happen, not now.”

I pulled her to me and kissed her full. I felt with my fingers along her neck and shoulders, searching for the places I knew were sensitive.

“The kids will be coming soon,” she said, turning, bowing her head. She pushed against my shoulders and eased herself down to the floor. She seemed weaker, more diminutive, without her heels, her stockinged feet flat against the tiles.

When my lessons began, I came home from work during my lunch hour to practice. I began to like the freedom and solitude to work as slowly as I needed to. One afternoon, as I was playing a scaled down version of a Chopin piece, composed for beginning students, I detected movement on the porch.

“Come in,” I said, from my bench, certain it was someone we knew who was politely waiting until I finished playing to ring the doorbell. It was Carrie Stewart from down the street. Her family and mine had been a part of each other’s lives for many years, and in fact Lena and Carrie’s husband, Gray, had gone to high school together.

“Can I listen?” she said.

“Sure. But there’s not much going on, I’m afraid. A whole lot of bad playing.”
She sat. She chose my grandmother’s channel back chair. This had always been a favorite of mine, but I was intent on not commenting or engaging in conversation. If this was how she saw fit to waste an hour, I would not make myself responsible for her entertainment.

I played my scales and simple pieces calmly and slowly. I remembered my brother, his back erect, and as he grew, his shoulders broad, his body a square within the larger square of the piano, his fingers working through the lines, stumbling, repeating, slowing, then smoothing the line down like a brook works over a pebble.

The waltzes and scherzos and sonatas adapted for beginning piano players were simple straightforward pieces, but over the months with Carrie as my audience, I learned to coordinate both hands, to refine the sustenance of the notes by use of the pedals, and to control the volume by the amount of pressure I applied to the keys.

There were nuances I had not taken into account when I had first learned the piano, nuances that I had not thought were important to learn. Certainly I had offended the ears of my teacher, but I was trying to take greater care.

Carrie maintained her place behind me at the same time every day, slipping out at some point near the end of the hour. Maybe she waited on the porch until I was finished, until she heard me shut the music back into the piano bench. The vain part of me wanted to believe this. But then just as likely, she could have been listening as she walked home, the music drifting out over the street, following her.

One day, after several months of attending my practices, she rose and stood near the piano. I stopped playing. She let her fingertips drift over the keys. “It takes so much faith, to do what you’re doing” she said. “We know what our lives are by now, and still you’re doing this thing.”

“I’m just playing scales.” I took care not to look at her, to not make contact. She should not read too deeply into anything, must not read anything at all.

“You don’t have to do all this. I think it’s wonderful.” And she left, closing the door behind her softly as she did every day.

I didn’t want to ask her what she getting out of listening to scales and something dull and repeated or a song practiced over and over, until mastered. I didn’t want to feel responsible for her feelings and the significance she was placing on what I was doing.

For once in my life, something as intriguing as a woman was concentrating my energies, moving me through my day. And yet, her presence there, day in and day out, was liberating me from previous anxieties about my inadequacies. When I made so many mistakes, especially when I was first learning a piece, her lack of response, her lack, even, of a sound, was confirmation that mistakes were not as terrible as I had believed them to be when I was a boy.

Eventually, she began to tell me things on my practice days, and I became a sort of confessor for her. She was careful not to talk too much so that I still had the majority of the hour to play. And in the years I had known her, she had never been the kind of woman to burden people with too much of herself, but these things she said made me feel more intensely for her, though I loved my wife.

Perhaps I was a kind of priest because my relative silence and remove did not discourage her, did not tend to influence her to look upon me coldly, but spurred her on, somehow, to be open and honest. She may have sensed that I did not want to hurt her, but that I did not mind her being there either, that I was concerned for her in a way that would not lapse into romance.

One day I thought it might be a good idea to clarify things with her. I turned to her on my bench. She was working on her needlepoint, a pastime that seemed ancient. I sometimes caught glimpses of her handy work as she left the living room – lush nosegays of roses, filigreed crosses, an autumn harvest.

“I don’t think it would be a good idea to read into anything here,” I said.

“What do you mean?” She looked at me with an even gaze and yet her lids had fluttered when I spoke, either at my tone or her surprise at what I said, or maybe just the surprise of the break in our usual routine.

“I mean that this could become something.”

She bent her head to her work. I watched her find the place for her needle. Her composure held. I returned to my music.

As time went on, I began to play longer and longer into the day. I found ways to arrange my schedule to accommodate the longer practice hours. It went on for two years like this, with Carrie as my audience, and at some point, her confessions seemed to revolve around her suspicions that my wife Lena and her husband Gray might be having an affair.

Gray and Lena had gone to high school together and had partied with the same crowd, and now they worked in the same firm. We had been friends with them for a long time, although in the last year or so, I noticed Gray had become more proprietary with my wife as we sat together at the kitchen table.

They told inside jokes and he flirted with her. When this first began happening, I would slip into the role of an observer, frozen in my anger and alarm, plotting what I might do if he should take it further. Carrie would slip out to our living room, which was quiet and formal in a way that she might have found comforting. I avoided following her, although I knew I would rather avoid this exchange at my own table.

I stayed instead, feeling my presence there was essential. If I kept the topic on high school reminisces, Gray would be gone soon, purring out of the driveway in his Porsche, his wife tucked away in her bucket seat, buckled down.

I was sorry I could not reassure Carrie that her suspicions about Gray and Lena were ill-founded. What I was witnessing in my own house had become cause for alarm. I was perplexed about how to handle it. I felt that Gray may be just trying to bait me into acting defensively and I didn’t want to play into his hand.

If it turned out this was more than a game, played out for my irritation, and that Lena and Gray were having an affair, I wanted every opportunity to retaliate bodily and his presence and provocation provided the perfect occasion and excuse.

When Lena and I first entertained them socially when they moved into the neighborhood we seemed to be well matched and enjoyed each other. Our children enjoyed being together and we often traded off weekend cookouts at each other’s houses.

Gray and I had something in common with our interest in baseball and other sports. Our sons both played on the same Little League team. Carrie was bolder in those days too. At dinner, she would join in our conversation and Lena would ask her questions, drawing her out and making her feel comfortable.

And then, things started happening between us until the patterns were beyond anyone’s willingness to assert control or make changes. Perhaps things started when Gray was hired at Lena’s firm and Gray and Lena spent more of our couples’ dates discussing their cases, switching the pairing off and leaving Carrie and I alone together.

Gray also had become almost surly, though he had always been loud and jocular. It was the drink, most likely, and we all, except Carrie, started drinking as if the world was going to curl up and swallow us whole the following morning.

I began to play the piano while Lena and Gray drank and talked about work. Carrie would follow me to the living room, bringing her needlepoint. She would bring it in her purse as if she anticipated a need for it. At some point, I gave up my role as observer, protector.

I considered the possibility that my wife may be baiting me too, that she wanted a reaction to this animal pawing at her and licking his chops. If so, I disappointed her many times. I wondered how I could find out if they were having an affair, whether I could ask her directly, whether she would be honest with me.

Our relationship had become brittle, though I desired deeply that it would not be so. I did not know how to approach it without breaking things altogether. I suppose I hoped, futilely, that whatever dalliance was taking place under my own roof was nothing but a game, or, if it went further than this, was something Lena would get over like a bad virus.

The situation seemed to bear down upon me as swiftly and as certainly as a train on its appointed track. It kept me up late at night, wondering what to do, checking through Lena’s purses and briefcase and clothing for evidence. When I had tired of my search, I sat before the Steinway and laid my hands on the keys, their enamel off-white like teeth. I imagined myself playing as I moved my fingers across their surfaces.

“What are you doing?” said Lena, finding me one night in the dark, sitting before the piano. She snapped on the overhead light.

“I think it’s obvious. I’m laboring in obscurity.”

“It’s three in the morning.”

“I know. I couldn’t sleep.”

“You never sleep.”

“That’s not true.”

She retied the sash of her robe. What I had loved about her was her use of extremes, to see only “never” and “always.’ I had considered this a sign of passion, that along with other things. What I had come to realize was that she had an unwillingness to admit that adversity was usually not a permanent condition. Her pronouncements on the state of things were informed by whatever her needs were at the present moment and she had little patience in waiting for tides to turn.

“I’m going to warm some milk,” she said, retreating through the door to the kitchen. “Want some?” I followed.

She poured milk into a saucepan and turned up the fire on the eye. She stirred it until it steamed and then poured it into two mugs and added some sugar. She sprinkled some cinnamon on top. She had created this drink for my insomnia, using the ingredients her mother used to add to her Cream of Wheat, but when she made it for me this time, she was rough with the stirring and then slung the spoon into the sink.

“Do you remember when we went to Tarpon Springs?” I said. “You know, when your Mom was alive and took the kids?” This was a trick I had used to bring her back to me, to soothe her anger, or get her to keep talking so I could get to what was bothering her. I brought up old memories, or even recent ones, neutral things to discuss.

I had learned that small things such as her careless handling of a utensil, the closing of a door just a bit more firmly than usual, the whip of a hot sheet fresh out of the dryer – that these all meant something, and that it was my job to figure out what the meaning was.

“Do you remember that bar shaped like a boat and that huge fish tank?”

“All I remember was that sorry museum about the history of sponge diving.”

“Yeah, like JC Penney manikins wearing Greek costumes and sponge diving gear.” I did my best stiff manikin pose.

She snorted, and took a careful sip. “You were like an idiot with those sponges for the kids, buying them all shapes and sizes, and then they hardly looked at them.”

“I’m a good idiot.”

I was the clown. I had to not mind. There was something to uncover, but by the time I had thought of the next thing to say, she had put her half-empty mug in the sink. I reached out and felt the silk of her nightgown peaking out under the robe.

“I remember all that stuff,” she said, as she leaned with her hip against the edge of the counter. “But I think we have other things to talk about, like how much money we need, like how crazy it is you’re spending so much time on that thing in the living room.”

“What do you want me to say? We’re just in a bit of a dry spell, and what does it hurt, learning to play the piano?”

“We’re always in a dry spell. Emily needs braces and we need the porch fixed. I’m embarrassed to have friends over now because a part of it is sagging. Summer camps need to be paid for, next year’s school tuition.”

“Calm down. It will work out, it always does.”

“I feel overwhelmed and you just seem so calm all the time. I don’t know what to say anymore.”

She whipped past and I made an attempt to grab her arm, to draw her to me and assure her, but her body eluded me.

I climbed the stairs to our bedroom. “Lena,” I said, when I had closed the door. It was dark and she was already under the covers. “I need to know something, and I want you to be straight with me. Are you having an affair?” I sat on the edge of the bed, bracing myself.

In the shadows I saw her rise up from her pillows. “What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. You and Gray. Maybe there is something going on that you should tell me.”

“Oh my God. Don’t project your guilty conscious onto me!”

“Guilty?”

“Now who’s playing stupid? You and Carrie. I know that she comes over here every single day.”

“Nothing is going on,” I said, standing. “Nothing.”

“Don’t get your knickers in a wad. I don’t have time for this. I have a huge case tomorrow. Please.” She arranged her pillows and settled back into them.

I slept on the couch that night. The next day, I had a call to make at Claudia’s, my piano teacher. When I pulled up to her antebellum mansion on Princeton Avenue, I noticed that it looked as old and tired as I felt. And yet it was a rare commodity in this city bent on making everything new.

We usually met at the college for piano lessons, but when she learned that I was a realtor, she invited me to her house, which she wanted to put on the market. Though the house and yard needed restoration, it was the kind of house that would sell well with just the right buyer.

However, I learned right off that she already had already sold the house for me for a cool 1.8 million and I would get 50,000 for doing nothing but filling out the paperwork and showing up at the closing. She didn’t want to talk about it.

She wanted to talk about our piano lessons. I crossed a knee over the other as I sat in the armchair by the fireplace. My heart was flipping. I would not let her know that I could not think about the piano.

“I want you to play this nocturne by Chopin,” she said, getting up, and picking up a piece of sheet music, Chopin’s opus 9 no. 1. “After you learn the piece, learn the notes, when you begin to put yourself into it, there are special instructions you must regard. You must listen to me, or you’ll mess it all up.” She slapped the music, as if I’d already done something to shame the piece.

She went to the piano and laid her hands upon the keys, pulling her fingers down over them. And then, she began to play somewhere in the middle range a soft piece that had the effect of a dream spun by gossamer threads, complex, interwoven.

“It is important in the nocturne,” she said, continuing to play, “To think about pulling from the keys as much beauty that there is. Think about yourself as the artist. You are to bring speech, a song from the strings. You must give of yourself,” she said, leaning into the piano and closing her eyes. “You must give all of your body, all of your attention like an artist bringing to being a beautiful painting stroke by tiny stroke. These notes of Chopin’s each have been placed with much care. We see, when we hear it played well, with love, the ideal beauty that is Chopin’s.”

When she had finished her instructions, I thanked her and left. I stood at the iron fence which separated the yard from the busy street just beyond. I had done research on the property and had learned that the original boundaries had encompassed acres upon acres of pasture and orange groves.

I remembered our trips to Mt. Dora when I was a child, our sacks filled with oranges, our scratched and sticky fingers peeling back the skin, my tongue breaking through the juicy filaments of the flesh.

A line of anise flanking the fence swayed with the breeze from the passing cars. I imagined the destination of the drivers and their occupants: the grocery store, pharmacy, movie theatres, malls.

There was no one at home. Lena had left a note on the kitchen counter: “Kids spending the night out. Fridge bare. Carrie and Gray coming at 7. Picking up steaks.” It was still an hour or so before my wife would be home and we’d need to get ready for company.

I sat down to the piano with nocturne. A note fluttered down from the pages. It was written in Claudia’s scrawl: “We are born knowing everything and spend the rest of our lives remembering what it is we already know.”

I put the note on top of the piano. Claudia often wrote cryptic notes in my music for me to puzzle over later or discuss. I moved my hands over the keys, but I knew, from the notation, that it would take me months to learn just the basics of the piece and that it would take much longer to play it in the way Claudia described.

And yet, I didn’t worry. Something about the note that was sitting on my piano assured me. The piece would come in time. I had to trust my body and my fingers to follow through and eventually learn the correct movement as I played it again and again.

I had heard and seen my brother learn challenging pieces over and over again, and though he was a quicker study, what had mattered, it seemed, was a trust that any piece could be mastered eventually. Claudia’s encouragement was to trust a native instinct, something we are born with, but have forgotten because of doubt and fear.

I put the nocturne away for a moment and pulled out an adaptation of another Chopin piece I had recently mastered. I imagined Lena picking up the steaks at the grocery and I imagined the piece guiding her home to me. I wanted it to be for love for her that I was learning to play the piano. I wished it impressed her that I played because I had run out of things to do.

I imagined, in my mind’s eye, her pulling those shapely legs into her car and placing the steaks onto the seat. My father had warned me about her: “It’s in the eyes,” he said. “Restless.” This was two months before he died, when I took her to see him. He was in the hospital, recovering from a heart attack. This was all he could bring himself to say about her.

I called the kids where I guessed they might be staying for the night, and they treated me like some sad sack they had to reassure before they could get back to the popcorn and movies and video games or whatever it was they were doing. Our presence together on the nights when Lena worked late was essential to me, somehow, and without them, I felt vulnerable, like a wild animal without its pack. It assured me to hear their voices on the phone, even to hear their exasperation with me.

After playing the piece through several times, I broke down and opened a bottle of wine, lit candles and turned on the local jazz station. Lena would be home any minute and I knew what it took to get my wife in bed and I was fooling myself with Chopin and quiet songs. I drank a couple of glasses of wine. I had been too soft, too forgiving. I had earned half a year’s salary in one day, goddammit.

“Welcome home,” I said when she walked through the back door. I took the grocery bag and put it in the refrigerator. I handed her a glass of Cabernet.

She was wearing her cream blouse printed with gold rings and horses, a classic blouse she wore with pearls and a navy wool skirt. She knew how to dress for the judge and the jury, was an expert in personas and angles and argumentations.

I kissed her mouth. Her lipstick tasted like cake.

“What’s all this?” she said. The candles and the jazz playing on the sound system were unusual occurrences.

“Fifty thousand dollars,” I said. The power of this truth made my mouth water. I wanted to rip the silk shirt off of her. I wanted to scatter the pearls to the far corners of the kitchen.

“Wow!” she said, giving me an enthusiastic hug around the neck. “That’s what you made?” I nodded and she took a sip of wine, watching me.

“It was a 1.8 million dollar sale.” I took the glass from her and drew her into an embrace. I kissed her.

She pushed off from my chest and touched her lips to mine with an emphatic peck.

“I want to take a bath,” she said.

I nuzzled her hair.

“Could you run a vacuum?” she said.

She twisted in my arms. I let her go.

I turned my back to her and opened the cabinet for a glass. I poured a scotch. She grabbed the bottle of wine and climbed the stairs, her feet padding on the carpet. I heard the pipes click with the rush of water into the tub.

I should have gone upstairs. I should have taken what was mine. I should have wreaked havoc at the first suggestion of a “vacuum.” The urge to empty the contents of the vacuum cleaner bag onto Gray’s usual chair shot through me, but then Gray and Carrie were at the door as I was suctioning up debris in the hall.

“Isn’t this a sweet picture,” said Gray. “An enlightened male. You’re making me look bad, man.”

“I think you’re doing just fine on your own.”

“All right, you prick, where’s the liquor?”

“It’s a full moon tonight,” I said. “The jackal’s here.”

“Cut it out, Richard!” said Lena, shouting down from the top of the stairs. She had bathed quickly. “Help yourself to the drinks everybody, I’ll be down in a minute.” Gray went to the basket on the countertop where we kept a jumble of liquor choices. I watched Carrie’s eyes following him.

Lena came down and kissed everyone.

“Well,” I said. “Now that I’ve done my duty for a bit, I’m going to sit down to the piano.” I raised my Scotch to everyone as I backed out through the door.

“A toast, everybody,” said Lena. “My husband just made a $1.8 million sale.”

As I left the room, I heard her explaining my windfall. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to embrace her. But as I walked away, I knew she was being my public Lena. She was loving me with the only resources she had left, with a cushion of people between us and no expectation of sex, just my appreciation and adoration.

I opened an intermediate piano book and began playing one of the pieces I knew well. I would play until I was calm. I would play until I couldn’t hear Gray yammering.

We often cooked out when they came over, so I knew it was only a matter of time before Lena and Gray went outside with their drinks to preheat the grill. In the meantime, I would build a wall of notes between myself and the things I didn’t want to confront.

I heard Carrie slip through the doorway off the hall and sit in her seat. Lena shouted out that she and Gray would be sitting on the back porch. It was quiet now in the house, except for the piano. The sun had gone down and the light over the music reflected brightly off the paper. I imagined Carrie in the gray light behind me. I played almost every piece I had mastered.

When I had played myself out, I laid my fingers upon the keys. “The thing about music, as about anything beautiful or grand,” said Claudia to me once, “is that it must end.”

As I sat there, hunched over on the seat, I smelled air from outside. Gray and Lena must have left the door open. It was difficult for me to move. The furniture sat about me like stones. Something, I felt, had shifted. Something had changed in the atmosphere. I sensed it was the kind of change that occurs after an act of violence or a cataclysmic natural event. There was no escaping it, this discovery of whatever it was.

“Does it seem really quiet in here?” I said to the darkness, to Carrie, unable to think of anything else to say.

I heard her rise from her seat and come up beside me. I felt her hand, light as a girl’s, on my shoulder.

I stood and turned to face her.

She kept her place beside the piano, her face illuminated by the piano light. “I have been coming to see you for a very long time.”

I was silent.

“Do you feel something for me?”

I picked up her hand. It was small and delicate in mine, like a small bird. I caressed it and held it to my mouth. I held it against my cheek. I said nothing.
She yanked her hand away. Tears streamed down her cheeks and she swiped at them. She turned and left for the kitchen and I followed, wanting to hold her to reassure her, but knowing I should not, that this would only prolong what was inevitable.

I opened the door and we went out onto the back porch. There was a large moon in the sky. The steaks lay cold and hardened in their fat on the China plate near the grill. On the silvered lawn, there was no sign of Gray or Lena. Shadows from the oak cast illusive shapes. The oleander at the boundaries of the yard danced, their flowers nodding. An overripe globe fell from the orange tree. A gasp cut through the wind, and then a tiny cry, private and raw. Gray’s body was pressed against my wife. They were standing against the oak, on the far side of the trunk. I could see them now, their bodies separating from what was a dark space though they remained entangled.

I stepped out into my yard. I sprinted to the tree and yanked Gray from my wife. He stumbled and fell while Lena collapsed as if she had a cramp. Carrie ran up behind me and grabbed my arm and I threw her off. She fell to the ground. I stood, watching Gray struggle to rise, but I couldn’t leave Carrie there on the grass.

“Shit,” said Gray. “Give it a rest.” He pulled up his pants which had been at his ankles. He rubbed his fist against his lip. He told Carrie to go to the car.

Lena wrapped her mussed up clothes around her. She scurried inside.

Gray walked through my house. I followed. He sat on the steps of my front porch and tied his shoes. I wanted to rip his hair out at the root. I wanted to smash his forehead against the porch railing.

“Now let’s just check facts,” he said. “Carrie comes to your house – your house – for no apparent reason other than to listen to you play scales and tinker with a few little pieces on your piano. OK, now, if I had any other wife, I might have deep, deep suspicions. But Carrie, oh please,” he snorted.

“So I have no reason to worry, you know? But the thing about it is, Bach, that two weeks ago, I had to leave work and pick up one of our kids from school and take him to the ER. You see, that’s because he broke his arm on the playground and no one could find my wife. That’s because she was with you. So you see what my problem is? Do you see why I can’t have this? You blow my mind, you fucking weirdo. What the hell is wrong with you?” He stood and walked down the steps.”

“So this is your excuse?”

“You need a touch of reality, dude.” He turned to face me and as he did so, he was smiling. “Your wife is well known. Do you know what I mean?” he said and turned back to his car, back to his wife who was witnessing this from the passenger seat.

I punched him in the back. He tripped down the sidewalk, raising his hands as if in surrender.

After the Porsche had roared away, I turned off the lights and climbed the stairs. In the bedroom, Lena lay facing the window. She was too still to be asleep.

“I heard you,” she said. “You and Gray.” She rolled over and sat up. Strands of hair were matted to her face.

I opened the chest of drawers and pulled out a t-shirt.

“You know, now would be a good time to say something,” she said.

I couldn’t breathe.

“Just so you know,” she said, “Since you apparently aren’t going to ask, we did it because we had been drinking and I felt like it and I had forgotten all about you. We didn’t even think you’d be coming out. You and Carrie.”

As I dressed, I felt a stiffness in my body, but I would not look at her, would not acknowledge her.

“Gray told me she’s been coming over to listen to you play piano. He says she’s not capable of an affair. I’m sure you wish I were more like her, more, let’s see, what’s the right word, simpler, self-effacing. But you know what, it doesn’t matter. Hell, I don’t even give a shit anymore. I don’t even want you. I haven’t wanted you for a long time.”

She flung herself back on the bed and pulled up the covers. I slammed the door shut and the window rattled down the hall. I slept in my son’s room. I thanked God he and his sister were with other people for the night.

I had a thought that perhaps every parent has at least once, but that I’ve had many times recently: That our children would have been better served by others. I continued to have this thought as Lena moved out and we began divorce proceedings and custody battles.

A few weeks before my divorce was final, I mastered that nocturne, the one by Chopin.

Ms. Myska tries for love

23 Friday Nov 2018

Posted by Margaret Sefton in original short story

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Tags

midlife, online dating, woman

Mme E. by Emmanuel25, flickr

Mme E. by Emmanuel25, flickr

It had become Ms. Myska’s tradition to allow herself one month of the year to date through the interwebs. Signing up on a dating site involved a creating of a profile which she completed with relish and a certain glee, hoping her prospects would catch her tongue in cheek style, her humor, her joie de vivre. She spoke of her love for art, for the beauty of nature, the necessity of good stand up comedy, her passion for the eating of chocolate hazelnut spread, the patting of her soft dog while enjoying the breeze on her porch. Her initial offering netted an overall positive response and she was off to the races.

This particular month, in the month between Halloween and Thanksgiving, her first date was a military man who had exciting, interesting things to tell her over their salmon and broccoli: his work in search and rescue, his knowledge of Chinese and Russian intelligence, his concern for a wave of immigrants about to cross the border. But he also told her how easy it was for him to pick up women, how he could sit at the bar and they would just flock to him. There was no one at this restaurant bar. Eighties rock music reverberated throughout the empty chain restaurant dining room and the salmon was a little bit dry though she discretely slathered it with butter sauce. The barkeep was drying glasses and putting them away for the night. Ms. Myska’s date had lied about his age. He was actually more than a few years older than she. She could see it in his hair and frame and hands.

The military man convinced her before their second date to take down her profile and date him exclusively, that he was a great catch and well worth it. Another man she had been messaging on the site, a man slightly unhinged but who had been entertaining her nonetheless, got angry with her when she told him she was deleting her account for someone else. He flung a tirade of angry texts at her, telling her she had betrayed him though they had never gone out. He predicted that by the third date, she would be moving her stuff in with this person and making wedding plans. Ms. Myska’s heart began to race. She had no intention of moving in with anyone. And here’s the other thing: She was no good with a stranger’s anger, not this explosive and intense kind of anger, and seemingly without much foundation.

Because of dealing with this other man’s angry texts and the doubts it raised in her, she was late to her second date at another chain restaurant/bar and almost didn’t go. But she made it with apologies. Almost as if the dating gods had turned against her for this, the charm had drained from the military man altogether. His face appeared weary and drawn. His age was more revealing in the light. And she listened to a one hour tale about his lucky numbers and how he intuits them and uses them to bet and play the lottery, how lucky he is as if he were pretty much invincible. She supposed in a certain light on other dates this show of bravado sealed it for the uncertain as if he were a magic lucky teapot. The determinism of the numbers crushed her as did his seeming unwavering faith in himself. The fried chicken pieces at this second restaurant, a different restaurant than the first but almost interchangeable in a way inspired in her the following image: A very long tunnel with small round doors in the walls, each containing a lecture, a bland restaurant item, an angry political person, a disappointed man.

The next day she broke up with him over text. They had only seen each other twice. He called her a child for not breaking up with him face to face and he implied she was one of these “crazy ass women” he’d been seeing as of late. She asked him how insults fit into his self-presentation as a gentlemen. Then the doors to that particular slammed shut. Wham.

Her next prospect was an elementary school cafeteria manager who after one date convinced her to take her dating profile off the website, the profile she created after the military man dressed her down like the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. She and the cafeteria manager went out for tapas at a Brazilian restaurant. She liked the way they spoke fluidly of food and recipes and restaurants and ingredients. She liked his hands, nice, big, warm looking, and his height. They laughed and talked and went for ice cream. They hugged when the date was over. They hit it off so they both took down their profile.

Then he didn’t call her. Confused and puzzled, she confronted him. He responded he was following some sort of “rule” for not calling her. He was angry she was upset. And he seemed angry by the second date over delicious blackened fish sandwiches. She was trying to be cheerful and funny but she felt his scowl and withdrawal and later that night it depressed her and she broke up with him. She kept remembering the way he walked to his car after their meal like he was leaving a house on fire when really nothing was burning. She was only standing beside him waiting for a reassuring hug or something to clear away their early days of trouble. Down this corridor there would be the mournful tears of someone crying for the love she could have given but it was unwanted. She broke up with him in the middle of the night when she knew he would be asleep.

She met a man on a motorcycle. They met out for oysters. He had a heavy silver skull ring for each finger and a salt and pepper goatee. He smiled at her and they sat at the bar chatting comfortably. She hadn’t planned on it but she asked him to take her around town on the back of his Harley. She didn’t even have a helmet which is as bold as Ms. Myska had ever become with her own safety.

It was an inky, starry night. She knew instantly she loved him or could love him.

A few days later his mother died after a long and painful illness. Ms. Myska felt him slip away into things he must handle, though she tried to help him best she could and she tried to be supportive. She went to the funeral home, leant an ear and what she believed was her sympathy. She liked the way he included her right away. She liked the way he took her out and seemed to want to know some things from previous experiences in her relationships. Knowing him and the people he rode with was like knowing a larger family.

But there was another side that snuck in too, a sadism that caught her mouse heart off guard though she tried to chalk it up to his grief. In the short amount of time a bond formed, maybe it was she in her sympathy, a chance to be useful in a way she wanted to be, useful and helpful and good. She had given a lot of herself, her feelings, her care. She was, she thinks now, a bit of an idiot but in the moment that this happens, this bonding, her dedication always seems to be for some cause, as if love were a god to be served exclusively and everything and everyone is sacrificed on the altar. With the last and final man for the year, it had something to do with the rumbling of the motorcycle, her body pressed up against him, her arms around his waist, his little hat, the rock music, Tom Petty, the air.

But eventually after she had done what she could and what she thought she should do out of respect for his grief, he hated her too.

Ms. Myska deleted her account.

The deeper truths are in the green dark mystery of the woods across the street. You cannot give up pursuing this mystery, not even for a moment, she thought, in the quiet, no military histories on tv, no man banging around making something in the kitchen, no full set of skull rings falling on her black iron Neiman Marcus side table she bought from ebay. How the woods have missed her, the sky. Her dog’s small dark and bright eyes, watch her and wait for the moment she will tear her eyes from the lonely and dissatisfied and take her for a walk.

lips

25 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by Margaret Sefton in original flash fiction

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Tags

cancer, dating, midlife

amadeo-muslimovic-599781-unsplash

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.

 

 

static

01 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Margaret Sefton in original flash fiction

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

fiction, flash fiction, midlife

outing-p-676-1885

Outing p. 676, 1885, flickr

At the posh Mexican restaurant where her writer friend would be lecturing Ms. Myska ordered a margarita but in “not too crazy a glass, please.” The other women in attendance thought that amusing. Ms. Myska thought the likelihood of accidents quite strong especially since attendees were sitting in rows of chairs and not around tables and she only imagined herself tipping a top heavy vessel. Besides, she had grown, she suspected, somewhat queer in her manners, having sequestered herself for so long, and probably rather queer in speech too, hence the laughter.

And yet, there was the long lost friend, acquaintance really, that despite Ms. Myska’s hesitation to get out again and risk embarrassment, she was determined to see and show support for her friend’s literary efforts. Ms. Myska felt, after the sickness that nearly took her life, she had become a bit of an animal, a rodent, really. She had also grown depressed. She had also developed deep worries for her son. Many days she was speeding to catch up after all that had felled her. She was amazed someone could come out with a book, was a bit jealous perhaps, her own efforts having spun into tiny stories of which she was proud, but her attention on more meditative projects had proved itself to be as brief as a turn of the second hand.

A powerful woman stood as master of ceremonies, someone Ms. Myska had known in what felt a former life, a woman who, having been exposed to a Ms. Myska story, let her have it when asked for a critique. “There is so much static in your story,” the woman had said, “that when you read it out loud, I just want to plug up my ears with my fingers like this,” and she demonstrated what she meant by plugging up her ears and squishing her eyes together. It made Ms. Myska sorry and yet she revised the story and gave it to a small journal who quietly published it, having found it acceptable to the eyes at least. Still, the rift was beginning to form between Ms. Myska and her city, and that was one of the points of contention. Of course she wanted to belong and was moved very deeply in a way that negatively affected her mood after that point. Was she fooling herself? Ms. Myska would always ask that question. And yet she wrote anyway and rarely asked anyone what they thought after she read her work out loud.

“Energy vampires” the lady master of ceremonies, the representative of establishment literature, was saying at the front of the room while the audience settled, “are people we want to avoid. People who complain, people who are passive aggressive, people who drag us down.” The margarita was just the right balance of sweet and tart and salt, which Ms. Myska didn’t mind flicking her tongue to the edge of the glass to taste. She didn’t even mind if someone saw. The lady was thin and wiry, a fairly attractive person for about seventy whereas middle aged Ms. Myska had become a bit more plump and matronly, something the MC hinted at when Ms. Myska re-introduced herself to her secret long lasting nemesis: “You look so different,” the wiry lady had said, “I hardly recognized you.”

The MC woman had apparently moved on from teaching writing to some kind of coaching which taught every moment was a chance to live up to one’s fullest potential. As part of the introduction she was giving a snapshot of how she could help everyone move to the light, which was what, apparently, Ms. Myska’s novelist friend had done under the tutelage of the grand MC.

It would always be thus, thought Ms. Myska, thinking of the chips and salsa she had seen someone order at the bar. It had looked so delicious she had wanted to place her own order for the conference room but then she would have to juggle too many things without a table and then people would really look.

The sweet face of her friend made her happy she had come. At last her friend spoke of her twenty five year effort to produce her successful work.

After the event, when Ms. Myska arrived home she found she had forgotten to take the dog out and so she had had an accident and so she took her out and gave her a snack. The sink was full of dirty dishes and her son had called from his father’s, wondering if he could speak to her on the phone before he went to bed. Clothes were strewn everywhere, old projects still waiting.

Still, she was home. It was all her own.

Wild Tales: In Defiance of Sense

21 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by Margaret Sefton in memoir

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Tags

fairtyale, midlife, storytelling, woman's story, women

east of the sun and west of the moon 2

Image from page 18 of “East of the sun and west of the moon : old tales from the North” (1922) Authors: Asbjørnsen, Peter Christen, 1812-1885 Moe, Jørgen Engebretsen, 1813-1882 Dasent, George Webbe, Sir, 1817-1896 Nielsen, Kay Rasmus, 1886-1957

 

Sometime after the original publication of this blogpost, I was thrilled to be able to use it to participate in a conversation regarding audio books with Tony Huang’s Metacircle. To see some this conversation, including the Chinese translation, and track other exciting endeavors at Metacircle, go here.

 

Divorce, cancer, bipolar, single parenthood, failed dating relationships: All of these mishaps and more have become a part of my midlife experience. Fear for my life, feelings I do not fit into religiously conservative circles, the occasional pain of being “different,” concern for my child, an acknowledgment I may not find the next special someone, a realization my romanticism and sometimes my perfectionism rule out a “modern” relationship in which texts serve for conversation, people can be swiped away by a finger running across a digital screen, and porn has dictated that women look twenty five and behave as objects: I have been touched by all of these things and sometimes they have ruled over my ability, once sharpened by more frequent use, in letting go and forgetting troubles.

On a lonely night the other night, suffering still from a failed relationship – Was it me or was it him? Who knows. What a bother, what a pain. I will never do this again. etc. – I turned to Libri Vox, a recent discovery. I have not been one to turn to this way of imbibing my literature but I have recently discovered the beauty of having a portable narrator spin me a yarn while I lie on my bed. My narrator, I have discovered, is good for a walk with the dog, a car ride across town, the grocery store, a dish cleaning session in the kitchen, and more. If I release myself to the voice, I don’t feel as lonely. In fact, I sometimes find myself to be quite thrilled by it. Here is a volunteer, somewhere from around the world, doing their level best to put the literature of the world out there for listeners to enjoy. The experience feels personal and immediate and sometimes, just the thing.

Recently, I started listening to fairy tales, and the other night when I was suffering I began The Blue Book.

I have always been a person driven to extract meaning from texts or to gravitate toward texts whose purposes are didactic or could be construed as such, somehow, with the right manipulator, you know, someone like me. Yet in listening to what I sense are many of the “untamed” fairy tales – those who have not been given an obvious “lesson” – I am completely charmed. These speak back to someone like me with my heavy hand, my heavy pencil who is just dying to construct an analysis. They speak back to me and tell me to be quiet. They speak back to me and tell me to let them stand on their own. Though fairy tales, at the time of their development, may have used a number of conventions, to my modern ear, these stories seem to insist on their freedom from convention. Like a person who is not bound to convention, bound to explain themselves at every turn, worry about the impression they make, a fairy tale often seems to live in complete freedom.

I like to imagine that I, an ordinary woman, have something to share with the women who, over the centuries, created these stories together as, over time, they told these over fires and in the midst of chores, when they were resting. I like to imagine these stories, begun in the minds of women while they were about their repetitive labor, were told to others and the work of the storytellers’ imagination was supplemented by the imagination of her sisters when they retold the stories to others – their families, other women, their children. Over time, the inventing and sharing created stories smooth as pebbles or rough hewn but originating from the same rock.

I like to imagine these wild tales connect me to those who invented them in that though we now have more luxuries and in many ways, a different worldview, we are in search of the wild beyond the hard work and the worries, the will to survive. We seek rest and invention, re-invention and creativity and beauty. Of course this goes for men as well as women but there is a homespun quality, a stark quality that speaks of a woman’s voice in many of the tales. Some have been recast by male writers who have collected them and written them down. Some have a more embellished voice. Some have been stripped of racier elements, harsher elements. Some have an appended lesson. Some seem overly romantic versions of their grittier sisters. I sense in the realism and absurdism of the wilder tales a woman’s voice of what it means to be a woman in a man’s world and how one must resolve to be resilient, resourceful, wise, cunning, full of spirit.

I like to think I might understand, finally, something about fairy tales because on the eve of my forty eighth birthday I think I finally understand the value of wildness, individuality, a free spirit. It is in the story of Job confronting God in all of his sufferings and God providing no direct answer, no direct reason, only a catalogue of his wonders. God, an unpredictably free spirit and vast, full of love and mystery. It is like that, she said (Me, speaking to you, of God, of suffering, of that which we cannot predict or control, of the wildness of spirit embodied in the most unpredictable of tales, and at last, all of our own divergent tales and voices.) A person who is 48, 49, 60, 35, 18, 70 or whatever age who has encountered a wild wood in their experience, a menacing troll, an embittered stepmother, a greedy lover, a witch, an empty misleading temptation has encountered the tale of their lives. Most of us have encountered quite a few of these and more.

When I was a girl, my family went on “Toad’s Wild Ride” at Disney and from that time on, the memory of it was invoked to describe any particularly wild driving experience or traveling experience or anything unpredictable at all. To me, this is the essence of a fairy tale: A wild ride. We have television shows in the modern world which serve as the evening fires and narrators both but they are dim reflections of the tales of our ancestors who faced life in the teeth. When we can let go of our demand for logical sequences, we can more fully face life as it really is, ripping away the scrim that protects us from realities. When we let go of our demand for logical sequences, we can more fully enter a dream state, we can be taken, captured, enchanted, relieved for a moment of our defenses and need for control.

I felt lonely one night and so I turned to The Blue Book on Libri Vox and I allowed someone I didn’t know to tell me a story. I tried receiving it as a child and thought I did not accomplish this perfectly as my mind drifted back to my worries or I began to “not see the point.” I began to realize I wasn’t “doing it right.” There is a way to relate to that which is wild and unpredictable. It is allow yourself to be unpredictable too. Stop making so much sense. I wonder if there is freedom in that.

 

 

 

Margaret Sefton

Margaret Sefton

Margaret’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cowboy Jamboree, Corvus Review, The Journal of Radical Wonder, Shambolic Review, The Chamber Magazine, Tiny Frights, Demonic Household, Use Your Words, S/tick, A Thousand and One Stories, Flash Frontier, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Blue Fifth Review, Bizarro Central, Honey Pot, Alyss, Best New Writing, The Dos Passos Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, Still Crazy, Asylum Ink, Quail Bell, Danse Macabre, Dark Sky Magazine, Chrome Baby, The Strange Edge, Beakful, Serving House Journal, Corium Magazine, Double Room, Emprise Review, Connotation Press, Atticus Review, Apocrypha and Abstractions, DecomP, The Quarterly Conversation, Get Lit: Round One Flash Fiction, A-minor magazine, Wufniks, 971 MENU, Trainwrite, State of Imagination, Pure Slush, Dark Chaos, Blink Ink, 52/250, Kaffe at Katmandu, Relief, and Colored Chalk. She received her BA in Literature from Wake Forest University, her MA in Adult Education from Denver Seminary, and her MFA in Fiction from Seattle Pacific University. Many of her stories are set in Florida, a place she has considered home since girlhood. Her work may also be found on Medium and Simily.

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