Thoughts and dreams of Marissa have plagued me since I was nine. In elementary grades we took turns beating each other up in the coral rock playground with palm trees, and in middle school we continued the ritual. But for me, by then, it was a cover up. I didn’t want anyone to know I liked her. Sometimes someone else would beat her up, and I wanted to save her. That’s what I really longed to do, but Sam Walters just wasn’t brave enough back then.
Things changed in ninth grade when she showed up the first day of school in my all male auto-mechanics class.
At Key West High in 1964, girls studied Home Economics. Learned how to sew and cook. They didn’t enroll in shop class. She took the leers and jock jokes in stride, mostly ignoring them.
Then one day, one of the guys took apart and put back together a 1955 Chevy Bel Air engine, but couldn’t get it started. The teacher was in the hall talking to a coach as we witnessed Marissa lift up the hood, and make adjustments. She slammed the hood, and slid into the front seat behind the steering wheel. The engine backfired a billowing black exhaust, then roared to resurrection. United, we stood, awed.
After that, I started following her home after school. I just waited by the flagpole with other kids until I saw her heading home. We lived walking distance to school and across from each other on Staples Avenue so it was easy to lag behind, far enough she didn’t notice me, close enough to check her out. Black waves in a high pony tail swung shoulder to shoulder in rhythm with her hips. Occasionally, she paused and shifted the weight of her books and notebook to the opposite arm. With each pause, my heart throttled with fear she’d turn around. She never did though.
Watching her at night was easier. Our second-story bedrooms faced the street lamps and she never drew the curtains even to sleep. If her room was lighted, I shrouded my face in the heavy folds of drawn drapery to spy through an opening large enough only for my eyes. Hours passed. In the mornings, my body ached, stiff from standing in that position so long.
Mornings, days, months passed this way into December. Everyone at school was looking forward to Christmas break. Excitement stung the cool air that blushed our cheeks and sped up our expectation of life without classes. On the last day of school, as I waited by the flag pole, Marissa, instead of heading home, locked eyes with mine like a nautical captain sure of the right course into the horizon and headed straight for me.
“Sam,” she said, her mouth flashing uniform, pure white teeth.
I hugged the flagpole like a ship’s mast, my heart its sails. The sand under my sneakers started to sink. Does she know? Is she mad? Is she going to slap me?
“Will you walk me home?”
I was still trying to read her.
Then she laughed - plaintive organ notes resonating through the air between us. My heart lifted. I thought of World Literature class – Odysseus, sirens – and knew I was lost.
“You’d think I asked you to walk me to Miami. We do walk the same way, you know.” Her eyes, dark sapphires, revealed nothing, but the eyebrows above them, arched with knowledge. Here it comes I thought.
Then she handed me her books and I fell into step beside her, literally. I walked right out of one of my sneakers. We both laughed, and then she bent down on one knee to tie the sneaker lace. Other students stared - girls with raised brows, pursed mouths, and guys smirking macho-stud approval. Shame and exhilaration coursed through me. I felt like a child with my mother and a man with a lover all at the same time. Marissa rose from the ground toward me, brushing her hands together.
“Thank you,” I stammered with the urge to kiss her.
“De nada.” She smiled at me.
“What?”
“Spanish. For, it’s nothing.”
As the school grew smaller behind us, the sun sank larger ahead of us. It didn’t feel like nothing to me. We walked. I listened. She talked. Every once in a while, she swung her head sideways, looked up at me and asked, “What did I just say?” Most of the time I could tell her, but sometimes she caught me and must have known I was just a happy fish netted in the sound of her voice.
“You want to come in?” she asked as we stopped in front of her house.
“Is that Jeff under the car hood?” I motioned to the side yard where underneath the Chevy’s chassis appeared two legs in dark trousers.
“Yep, that’s my brother.” She started up the steps. “Taught me everything I know about cars.”
The inside was an architectural mirror of my house and others along the street. I felt at home and disoriented at the same time. Both our houses had dark wood floors, but everything was reversed with different furnishings and wall colors. The light was brighter, the colors bolder there.
In the white kitchen, her mother beat ingredients into a pie mold. “This is Sam, Mama. From across the street. Sam – you can call her Mama Dolores. I’m her tiger cub.” Marissa motioned me to a stool and then leaned across me, grazing my face with her hair and my arm with a breast. The gesture was noted by Mama Dalores who nodded at me and handed the bowl to her daughter.
“For you and your friend, Sam.”
Marissa pushed the bowl in front of me, then plopped onto my lap to feed me.
“Careful young lady, someone might get the wrong idea.” Embarrassed, I laughed, hoping Mama Dolores would see my respect for her daughter.
Mama Dolores looked at me strangely. “Don’t you worry none bout Missy Mae. She’s fifteen last week. I’ve schooled her. Ain’t no double standard for her. She can take what she wants. Be anything she wants. Same as any man can.”
I glanced surreptitiously at the mother in between the spoon dripping lemon-coconut I dutifully swallowed like a chick in a nest, except the school yard conflict of mother-lover was back, but this time hardened uncomfortably between my legs. I excused myself to the toilet and applied a solution to the problem. When I came out I spied a tale-tell wet spot. I was too embarrassed to go back into the kitchen, so I yelled through the hall that I had to leave - my mother’s expecting me. Mama Dolores padded patiently down the hall.
“Missy Mae’s in her room. Upstairs. Go on up. She’s expectin you.”
“I can’t. Could you just tell her I said goodbye?”
Her eyes found the wet spot then shot back up at me. “I’ll tell her.”
I rushed through chores and supper to get back to Marissa. In the bathroom upstairs I shaved what few blond whiskers had sprouted since the last mow and slathered my dad’s Old Spice across my neck and shoulders. I ran to my room and changed the guilty pants to clean ones. I raised my hand to catch the fan light string and glanced out my window. My body froze. All the hair on my arms and back tingled, rose. I jerked the string down; blackness flooded the room until there was no doubt of what I saw. Someone stood just beyond Marissa’s bedroom window, back arched, pulling her against him. Her hands embraced his face, then her fingers raked through his hair as his mouth covered hers, her pelvis thrust forward until she bent gracefully back like a vine. I was fluid. Sweat crept across and down my body. Water pooled in my eyes – a blessed blur. When it cleared, I refocused and saw her bedroom curtains closed for the first time.
I tried not to watch for the closing of those curtains during the rest of Christmas break. I failed. They closed with alarming regularity that bounced me back and forth between despair, jealousy and rage. In January, when we returned to school I switched from auto mechanics to shop class and avoided any hall, locker, or cafeteria area where I might run into her. On a few occasions, a glimpse of her – head back in laughter, shy promising smile offered to anyone but me - invaded my walled vision, but I quickly averted my eyes, moved out of view, a breathless swimmer fighting deep, swift currents of memory.
In the spring, I tried out for Junior Varsity football and made the team. The rest of the year was a jock dream that kept me from thinking too much about her. At least until summer practice. Coach worked us so hard we started turning on each other like snakes, spitting our venom for him upon each other.
I guess what happened was inevitable, perhaps even odd it didn’t happen sooner. During summer, to save money, the school turned off the hot water heater for locker room showers. The water whipped our bodies, a cold burn, ice sticking to skin. We howled the injustice. One lone howl shifted to a moan followed by a second answering moan, mimicking a girl’s orgasm. One after another, the remaining howls patterned into a group chant.
“Missy Mae. Missy Mae, Missy Mae…”
The concrete maze of showers concealed identities, but I knew my team mates’ voices. Primal instinct fulminated in four words.
“Stop, god damn it!” I slammed my faucet shut.
All sound trailed to silence interspersed with faucet drip. Whispers. Ghosts. Advance to low voices. I opened my faucet, plunged my head and mind into the ice flow.
“Jesus, Walters. What the fuck’s up with you?”
I kept my head up, eyes closed, bracing the cold stream off my chin.
“She’s not like that,” I said.
Tim Albury laughed. “Get yer head out of the ice, Walters. We don’t usually call her Missy Mae, cuz we know damn well she will.” Laughter ricocheted around me. In seconds, I was on top of him, slamming his head against the concrete floor. Jagged nails clawed my skin, hundreds of fingers shuffled across my body, gripped, pushed, pulled me from him. To help even the score, they let him have one punch at me.
The ring of confederate jasmine flowers in her hair wilted by the time I found her sitting on my front porch floor. Wisps wafted amidst long twirls of dark hair. A white peasant top draped toast-colored skin, and dangled bare her shoulder serving as head rest. Tiers of sky-blue Batik circled then flowed along the curve of her knees hiked above bare feet, red toenails. Her eyes, like the ocean, revealed only a surface of the world within. I was grateful to smell Jasmine along with the blood crusted in my nose.
“Why?” was all she asked.
I just looked at her and blinked back the boy in me.
She took my hand and led me across the street, onto her porch, through the screen door, up the stairs, into her bedroom that was like mine, yet hers. She motioned me to sit on the bed, then stepped back out and shut the door. Not much differed from the nocturnal spy view from my bedroom window.
Except for a vanity with three mirrors and upturned feet. It flanked her window so I’d never seen it. Curiosity pulled me to it. My eyes, hands embraced every object – silvered comb, brush, hand-mirror, glass-stopper bottles filled with gold or white liquid (each one a scent of her remembered from auto mechanics), two books – Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, a book of poems by Adrienne Rich - and a school library copy of Atlantic Monthly. When I picked up the magazine it opened to a dog-eared page titled, “Whatever Happened to Women’s Rights?” I closed it to replace it in the exact spot, then paused at what rested there, unlocked, waiting, a red velvet diary.
I heard a toilet flush somewhere and pipes rumbled, whistled me to hurry. Nausea roller coasted my belly as my fingers shook through pages of guys’ names and notes. A floor board groaned outside – my insides pounded like the Tell-Tale Heart - the doorknob turned. Football practice paid off. I tackled the bed from ten feet. Poking his head and an outstretched hand through the door was Jeff.
“Missy Mae asked me to give you this.”
“Thanks.” Shaking, I took two white aspirin from his hand. He opened the door wider and with his other hand offered a glass of water.
I took it, swallowed the pills, drained the glass, and gave it back to him.
“Thanks.”
“Yeah, well, it should help the soreness.” He shrugged and looked down at the floor.
“How’re you doing?” I asked.
He looked up then, grinned at me, saying, “Better than you probably.”
When he’d closed the door, I turned to make sure the diary and magazine were in their place, but the room played tricks. The sun was setting, casting rays of gauzy, iridescent light into the room, perfume bottles became prisms and when the door opened again, I looked up, and all of the light stored up in the room flew toward her.
I gaped as she came toward me, light shimmering against her white satin kimono, its sleeves wide and long on her arms stretched out to me, sapphire eyes both a plea and a promise. But then she turned to the window, raised both arms toward the sky and closed the ivory curtains.
They came together like the pages in her diary flooding the room and my heart with darkness. All those names.
By the time her body lay next to mine, I was shaking uncontrollably. Her voice and hands tried to soothe me.
“It’s okay. I know how you feel. I’ve always known.”
“You’ve always known?” I asked. Her nose and mouth nuzzled into my neck. My body and mind raged against each other.
“How you felt about me. It’s why I picked you.”
“Picked me?” In a flash, I knew I could forgive her. Forget. Put all those names behind us. My shaking stopped and I stroked her face, her hair. I drew the glossy, perfumed length of curls across my face, then gathered the ends like a bouquet and kissed it with the greatest tenderness I’d ever known.
“To be the first,” she whispered.
I lifted my head, foggy with desire.
“You should have been the first,” she cooed.
“First” plunged me back into the ice flow of water in the locker room today.
“Why not the only?” I asked. “From here on out.”
Her giggle reminded me of the guys’ laughter in the locker room. Only I felt much more foolish now. Angrier.
“Like you would be with only me forever? Sam, we’re so young. We’ve got our whole lives in front of us.”
Suddenly I realized that I could never be more than a name on her list. That some unknown man in the distant future would marry the only girl I’ve ever loved. I hated him. And I hated her for using me until he comes along.
I pushed her away and stood up. “I can’t do this, be this…nothing to you.”
I crossed to the door as she sat up, her mouth open as if to say something, her eyes large, but not with surprise.
“I thought my whole life was in front of me, with you.” I opened the door slowly, wishing she would stop me. Say I was her whole life too. But then I finally had to close the door.
***
In truth, after all these years, I was curious. Curious about Marissa and the man she finally married.
Recently widowed, I’d returned home, hoping to find Marissa at our class reunion. She wasn’t there. That’s why I said yes to my mother’s invitation to come for lunch with Dolores.
Some months ago, while I browsed the book shelves of a used book store in the theatre district, I discovered a copy of Rich's Diamond Cutters and Other Poems. When I opened it, I was stunned to read Marissa’s name on the inside cover. Then I remembered it as one of the items I’d seen on her vanity. I leafed through it, then scanned the table of contents. One poem’s title struck a chord of memory with me. “Aunt Jennifer's Tigers.” I remembered Marissa saying she was her mother’s tiger. The last stanza jumped out at me because of the ink pen marks. I wondered at its meaning for Marissa if she was the one who had circled and underlined the lines.
“When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud, and unafraid.”
I wondered if the Aunt represented Marissa’s mom. If Marissa, by being her mom’s tiger, was supposed to live life prancing, proud, and unafraid, whatever that meant. I also wondered at how this book had traveled all the way from Key West to a used book store in New York, to me. Of course, I bought the book that day, then brought it back with me this summer to Key West.
The book was in my hand, a gift for Mama Dolores. I thought a memento from the past might be meaningful for her. She had stopped driving after the doctor diagnosed her with a touch of dementia. Since then, her son, Jeff, and my mom have taken turns looking in on her every day. Jeff’s wife does Dolores’s shopping and cleaning while Jeff, a shrimp boat captain, gives my mom fresh seafood for cooking Dolores’s meals and cleaning up afterwards.
I arrived early. My three light knocks bounced the unlocked screen door. It whined slightly as I opened it, but the parlor appeared empty. I paused in the hall before walking inside, all the while listening to kitchen sounds of lids clanged back on pots and pans, water running and the opening and closing of a refrigerator, all the while searching, hoping to find something. I didn’t know what. Pictures maybe. I knew Marissa had no children, but she’d married a Brazilian poet and they lived in Rio de Janeiro. The bold colors had faded or peeled and the brightness was defeated by dark green pull down window shades. Mold and dust reigned. From a dark corner of the room a rocker creaked.
Her voice hissed low and pierced the air causing me to flinch. “I know you.” Dolores teetered toward me. “I know who you are – you and my momma. I remember. She said an American sailor would love me special cause I was a virgin. But you didn’t. You ran around with every girl in Havana, then promised me a different life in Key West. But you got tired of coming home to babies, so you left. You used me up and went on your merry way. You get on outta here. Get!” She shook her cane at me.
Within moments, a sliding glass door of memory exchanged thresholds of time in her eyes. Their gloss hardened to disinterest.
“I tole you no double standards for Missy Mae. Didn’t I?”
Gooseflesh quivered across my chest, arms and belly. Heat flushed my torso and face.
“She got the same right as any man. Her own power. Same as you. Now go on.”
I dropped the book and gasped for air in a space that suddenly seemed a sealed vault of time. I fled. I left my mother there without saying goodbye or why I was leaving. How could I explain? How could anyone explain my discovery of such bitter understanding of Marissa in Dolores’s confusion of me with her ex-husband? I bolted back through the screen door, from damp darkness into a sauna of sun. My lungs ballooned. My sprint slowed to a brisk walk.
A red convertible whizzed past. Sandy dust whirled an image in front of me on the sidewalk. Black waves of a high pony tail swinging shoulder to shoulder in rhythm with her hips. She paused and shifted her red diary to the opposite arm. My body seemed to lift from the ground, reaching, stretching, straining to catch up. To convince her that not all men break vows. To give me the chance to prove it to her. I remembered the velvet cadence of her voice – its promise, the silk of her hair teasing my skin, her eyes fluttering wide with acceptance. And then she disappeared. A statue, I stared in disbelief at my outstretched hands, cupped as in prayer, spilling over with nothing.
Retired high school teacher, Vicki Riley is working on a collection of short stories and a screenplay set in Key West.
Vicki lives with her husband and Yorkie, Garbo (for Greta Garbo) in St Cloud and Cape Malabar, Florida embracing small town life that resembles what she remembers of her youth.
“Writers are a blend of loves. Vocabulary, sentences, maybe grammar, the written word always, but then personality shapes our writing subjects: politics to gardening. My personality gravitates to the heart, to people and to Key West where I lived thirty years and which remains the haunting “home” of my soul. Much of what I write is somehow embedded with a tribute to the past and hope for the future. Minority or women’s struggles ride the arcs of my stories. Characters abound in Key West, so mine reflect that unconventional, singular spirit of the island.”
Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition Winners and Honorable Mentions
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Sunday, October 2, 2011
2011 Honorable Mention: "Anomaly" by Fran Haley
There’s too much whiteness in this room.
A white linen tablecloth shrouds the table. Two white tapers stand guard; in the candlelight Mother’s treasured Lenox china reflects a maddeningly holy glow. Forks are laid with precision on the left, glasses exactly above the tips of knives on the right. I thought I could catch a few precious minutes of hush in here while David and his brood are in the kitchen, oohing, aahing, sampling and plattering the usual traditional fare. I can’t take their bustling or the loud clinking of dishes. No sanctuary for me, not here, not anywhere. Even my knuckles are white from gripping the back of the chair. Muscles contract,my head throbs, I can barely breathe, yet the serene candle flames don’t even flicker.
Curious.
“Daniel! Here you are.” It’s Mother, coming through the doorway with a tea pitcher in one hand and an ice bucket in the other. Act normal! I take the ice and fill the glasses so she can pour the tea.
Might as well be liquid sugar. Dad couldn’t get enough of it. I recall Thurber’s Princess Lenore, who fell ill from a surfeit of raspberry tarts; it’s a wonder we all haven’t died of sugar surfeit.
In come my nieces, Caitlin and Gracie, with sweet potato and green bean casseroles. Little Nate, age five, is right behind them with the plate of devilled eggs. One is missing. Nate’s cheeks are bulging, his mouth too full to chew; it’s like I’m seeing his father at that age again:
Do you think it’ll snow so we can play on the sled, Daniel?
No, silly, it never snows at Thanksgiving. You gotta wait ‘til after Christmastime for that. Are you still eating? What’s in your mouth?
Debbled egg. I got another one in my pocket for you—here!
The memory is almost warming but evaporates as David, paunchy and balding, strolls in with the enormous browned bird. How many of us does Mother think she’s feeding? We’re three down from previous years.
We go through the motions. We sit, and I feel five pairs of eyes on me. Expectant. It’s time to return thanks and, being the firstborn, the intended bearer of my father’s legacy, I’m normally the one to offer it at our gatherings.
There’s nothing normal about me now.
I feel hands reaching for mine, Nate’s little pudgy ones and David’s too-soft ones which make my insides writhe like spirochetes. How could you, Sabrina? I flinch at my brother’s touch but I manage to sit rock-still even though I want to fling him away and shout God, David, be a man!
They’re waiting. I’m supposed to pray, God’s supposed to hear. Once I was sure he did.
I bow, my eyes not fully closed—I can still see Mother’s Opal Innocence gleaming up at me in derision:
For each new morning with its light,
for rest and shelter of the night,
for health and food,
for love and friends,
for everything Thy goodness sends,
Amen.
“Amen,” chorus three little voices. Mother smiles at me, misty-eyed. David’s eyebrows are raised. He recognizes Emerson, of course, literary expert that he is. If he’s such a phenomenal professor, why can’t he find another job?
Who am I to talk?
David stands to carve the hulking bird carcass. The senselessness of it all makes me want to hurl my plate Frisbee-fashion through the bay window, but I can’t in front of the kids so I sit and make a conscious effort to unclench my jaw. I stare at the dismemberment of the creature, feeling a kinship with the hollowed-out dead thing at the end of the line, where scavengers await to pick the last of flesh from the bones in this oh-so-civilized setting. I must endure this thlipsis of meaninglessness just a little longer. Survival of the fittest, wouldn’t you say, kindred turkey? Maybe you never had a chance to fly away, you Frankenstein fowl, but I, the true modern Prometheus, do, and it’s all that buoys my soul.
My soul. I suppress a wild urge to laugh. David hacks away at the bird; suddenly, I know why the candle flames don’t flicker when I walk in or out of a room:
I’m already dead.
Will my image soon vanish from the photos Caitlin took with her digital camera?
I pass the potatoes, the cranberry sauce. I chew, swallow. Conversation drifts around me. As long as there are no jarring sounds, I know what they’re saying without really hearing them. White noise..
Jen would still be here, if not for me. Sabrina would be gone with or without me—do American transplants celebrate Thanksgiving in Australia? Do they put kookaburras on spits? Dad’s the only one who earned the right to be gone and he didn’t choose it. I have a choice; unlike Sabrina and Jen, I’m not running from anybody, least of all myself.
I make my own appointments.
Not even the chains I’ve forged can hold me.
“Uncle Dan?” A voice jolts me back. Gracie, standing at my elbow. Little Sabrina. “Are you ready for dessert, Uncle Dan? We made your favorite!”
“Of course, honey,” I hear myself answer. I fake a smile.
Mother is visibly pleased. She’s too thin. She worries too much. She still emanates elegance, although her regal posture is considerably stooped now. She’s the Opal Innocence plate with the fine cracks running through it, the one she sets at her own place so no one else will have to have it.
Why do these things matter?
Gracie goes to the kitchen and promptly returns with a slice of triple chocolate bundt the size of my head. I say, “That’s too big a piece for me, Young Grasshopper.”
The children giggle.
It’s Gracie’s voice but Sabrina’s wide, entreating eyes: “Pleeeease?”
“All right! I give up. You win.”
This cake is too rich; the only saving grace is that the dark chocolate chips cut the overpowering sweetness with a needed shard of bitter.
“So, Daniel,” says my brother, leaning toward me while his offspring help Mother clear the table, “what are your plans?”
I freeze.
“My plans for …?”
“Filing your papers. The sooner you get it done, the quicker you can put it all behind you. It’s the inevitable, you know.”
I relax.
“I’ve taken care of it.”
He’s surprised. “When did you see your attorney? Does Mother know? She hasn’t mentioned it.”
They think I can’t think for myself any more. I ran my own multimillion-dollar business from the time I was twenty-six without their help and I don’t need their help now that it’s gone.
“I went last week and started the process. The office will call when the papers are ready to sign.”
He regards me somewhat dubiously but I continue savoring my cake, stretching it out, making it last.
Endure. Transcend. It won’t be long now.
“Which process, exactly?” he probes.
I take my time chewing, swallowing, chasing the cake with a swig of tea, not nearly so sweet after such decadence.
“Here’s the thing: It’s kind of hard to serve separation papers on a woman when you don’t know where she is. She doesn’t stay in one place very long.”
“How can you file for bankruptcy without her?”
I let a long, heavy pause hang there before I look straight into his eyes. “What about you? Divorce final yet?”
And a Happy Thanksgiving to all.
“Dan.” I can hardly bear the gentleness in his voice, so Motheresque. I’d rather he punched me in the face—hard. C’mon David—let me have it—
I throw a sucker punch: “Any new job prospects?”
“Actually, yes, a couple.…”
Something about going overseas, he’s in demand by Japan, China, and the Arab Emirates. He could teach for a year, leaving the kids with Mother until he gets on his feet and the universities here start hiring again. I could interrupt and ask him—again—why tenure didn’t save him except that I don’t want to hear him drone on, when he stops and sighs:
“I can’t go through with it, though.”
“Go through with what?”
“I can’t leave the kids. No matter how I explain all the reasons I need to do this, it just comes down to my leaving them like Sabrina did. I won’t put them through that.”
“What are you going to do, then?
“I don’t have much choice. The unemployment helps but I have to sell the house. Mother wants us to stay here until something opens up.”
I can’t control myself any longer; I burst out laughing.
David coming to live here.
Poetic justice.
He doesn’t know how to react to my laughter but then again, no one knows how to take me these days.
I wipe my eyes. “Yeah, well, it’s a good thing I added that extra bedroom when I built this place, huh? Mother and Dad said one guest room would be enough but remember how Sabrina said there should be two, for when Jen and I have kids and all the grandchildren want to stay at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house at the same time?”
“Dan…”
“No worries, baby brother. Even if bankrupt builders don’t get unemployment like terminated teachers do, I can take care of myself.”
I neglect to say that, until the 5,000 square foot monster beach home I shared with Jen sells—if and when it ever does in this economy—I have eighty-six dollars to my name.
More than what I need to close this last deal.
* * *
FINALLY.
Gluttony and tryptophan do me a favor; everyone goes to bed early. When I’m sure they’re all asleep, I slip on my coat with Dad’s keys and a flashlight in the pockets.
I put his old F-150 in gear and push until it’s far enough away to crank.
His shotgun’s in some blankets under the seat.
I drive through the darkness, past streetlights, neighborhoods, on to the highway. What are you driving now that the Range Rover has been repossessed, Jen? You can’t live on your credit cards much longer. Nothing’s left to pay them with. The bills are still coming; for a while I tracked your movements that way..
Go after her, Daniel. She’s in so much pain.
What’s the point, Mother? I’m the one she’s running from.
The last time I headed to Dad’s old cabin at Serendipity Lake, I’d just met you, Jen. Dad took me fishing in an effort to help me gain clarity about the future. He knew I was struggling with my calling in life. Out in the rowboat on the placid water, I asked him: How do I know I’m meant for the ministry, Dad? How did you know?
He thought a minute before answering. I just knew, like I know my own name. I couldn’t do anything else, Daniel— it was meant to be. You have so many gifts, Son— you can do anything you want. As much as I’d like to see you at seminary and ordained, I can’t tell you what to do. That’s between you and God.
That’s what I wanted, Dad. I wanted to be complete like that, like you.
You know I came away determined to follow your pastoral footsteps. That was before the
church told you, after twenty-three years, that they no longer needed your services, that they were ready for a younger man with “more creative ideas.” You stepped down far more graciously than I ever could.
And where were you, DAVID, brother mine, when Dad had his first heart attack the following month? Finishing that almighty doctorate Sabrina was determined you should have. Getting her pregnant. The rest of us weren’t a blip on your radar, were we? My quitting seminary for a full-time job in construction was supposed to be temporary:
Mom says you’ve got your hands full but we could use your help, Dave. I’m slapping beams twenty-four/seven. With Dad’s hospital bills, it’s still tight.
No worries, Dan. I’m going to do my part as soon as I finish this dissertation….
We need your help now, man.
If were you, Danny Boy, I would have started my own company by now.
This from a man who’s never done a day’s manual labor.
Pure spite led me to create my company; the contracts flooded in for several years before the industry tanked and it all dried up overnight.
My personal monsoon.
It wasn’t really the money that mattered. The solitary thing I’m proud of is building that house for Mother and Dad. He lived there a year before his heart gave up.
I haven’t been able to stomach a churchyard since the day we buried him.
It’s uncommonly cold tonight. I’m dimly aware of some advisory on the radio. I reach to turn up the volume when something large darts in front of the truck. I slam on brakes, screeching tires and swerving. A deer, of course; I should have been watching.
Between the moon and the flashlight I find the cabin easily. I carry the blankets and Dad’s shotgun with me. I find the key on his key ring and the old door scrapes open.
A powerful mustiness welcomes me. The flashlight reveals some firewood by the hearth, right where Dad left it on his last visit. The wood is dry; it’ll still burn. In a little bit my fire is crackling and popping sparks up the chimney.
I watch the jumping flames. I know how this will play out. David will swear he saw it coming. Sabrina will think it’s because of some secret torch I carry. Jen, wherever you are, you’ll believe it’s because I lost the business and the money, being convinced that’s where my heart lies. Anything and everything will catch the blame, except the truth:
I’m choosing this because I can.
Mother, you’re the hardest. Don’t blame yourself. You can’t fix this. Focus on David and the kids. I’m trusting you’ll find the path to peace; you always do. I’ve made sure you’re taken care of and when you’re gone, leave the house to David; he’ll be taken care of, too.
What a neat package for you, Dave, as usual. Consider it my atonement.
There’s no atoning for the rest of it.
When can we have a baby, Daniel?
Soon, Jen, soon … I promise.
My sweet, loving girl, if you would listen: You’re right, I’m not the man you married. I didn’t understand until last week, when I was showing the house to the one potential buyer so far. I opened the closet in the bedroom you wanted for a nursery and found it crammed, top to bottom, with new baby things. Little clothes hanging from the racks, price tags still attached. I put you off because, to me, bringing a child into this world is—well, inconceivable. And the helplessness of infants terrifies me. How can I admit that to any sensible person? You’d be an amazing mother. I thought the cars, clothes, the big
house would compensate. I thought you’d eventually give up on the baby—not on me.
I’m so sorry, Jen.
And you don’t know about Sabrina, my Pandora.
She walked out on David right after you left, Jen. Found an apartment and called me to come see her; said we needed to talk.
I never should have gone.
Why hide it now? She was a fire in me from the day David brought her home from college. When she married him, I tried to hate them both. You were the only thing that helped, Jen. You and David never knew how she showed up at my sites, how I had to avoid her.
It only happened that one time, after you were gone.
I was weak. She wasn’t. She meant to have her way.
Daniel, my not loving him isn’t your fault.
You loved him once.
I thought I did, in the beginning. It’s been you for years. Jen’s not coming back, Sugar; you just made me yours, at last.
Are you some kind of spider that devours its own? Jen would’ve thought of the children. Caitlin, Gracie, and Nate deserve better. I’m not serving them up on a platter just to satisfy my pheromones. Understand, Sabrina: This isn’t about David. I don’t love you. I’m already on my own road trip to hell; you just bought your own ticket, honey.
This is why I laughed so hysterically when you said she’d flown one-way to the Land Down Under, Dave.
My brother’s wife. What would my father say?
I can’t tell you what to do. That’s between you and God.
Well, Dad, I think this one’s up to me. If God’s really there, he hasn’t intervened so far; why would he bother now?
The fire is dying and I don’t add wood, because the room is becoming gray with the first traces of dawn.
It’s time.
I take the shotgun and go outside—I’m not going to ruin the cabin. I need to be in the lake so that when I fall, the water will close over me, absolve me, dissolve me. I shall feed the fish for a long, long time, if they don’t die of me first.
The air is biting cold and if I didn’t know better, I’d think it was about to snow.
Do you think it’ll snow so we can play on the sled, Daniel?
No, silly, it never snows at Thanksgiving. You gotta wait ‘til after Christmastime for that.
I walk the old path until the trees thin and water spreads out before me. Serendipity Lake is as smooth and clear as a mirror, reflecting the gray morning. The silence is so deep. What profound stillness; Nature’s holding her breath before the world wakes up.
An unexpected pang: Dad, I miss you desperately.
Something brushes my cheek and I wipe it away. The leaves are not as vivid as I thought they’d be. The colors are muted, darker than I remember. I’d imagined a brilliant blue sky for the occasion, not this milky cloud cover. Something touches my other cheek—a snowflake?
There’s a sound in the distance, faint but familiar.
I listen.
It grows a bit louder.
Dogs. They’re on the trail of a deer, no doubt. Someone got an early start this morning. I expect the sound to fade momentarily, but it grows louder still. The blood’s pounding in my veins — do it, DO IT! — but I won’t have a bunch of well-meaning Good Samaritans finding me and trying to bring me back.
I’ll have to wait until they pass. I’ve waited this long; I can manage a few more minutes.
I don’t want to be seen. I make for the cabin; as I move through the woods, the baying grows closer.
I rest the gun against the wall on the cabin’s front stoop. It’s hard to tell, but I think the dogs are getting nearer; it sounds as if they are headed this way.
In fact, one of them is barreling out of the woods right now.
It’s a small, odd-looking dog. Wait … that’s not a dog; I cannot believe what I’m seeing ….
A bit of a blur, but I think it’s a fawn. At the completely wrong time of year for fawns. I’ve never heard of one being born this late—that’s the point of hunting season; mothers aren’t taking care of their young anymore. But it’s definitely a fawn, terrified, running for its life. It tries to cut away to the right but the dogs are closing in from all sides—I can’t see them yet, but they can’t be very far behind.
The fawn arcs back to the left and streaks straight for the cabin.
It’s going to be trapped.
Without thinking, I step forward. The creature comes skidding to a halt five feet in front of me, realizing that a man and a house are in its way and it can go no further.
It screams, the horrible cry of an animal that knows it’s at the end of the line. It looks at me, quivering violently, and I see the veins throbbing in its neck. A very young fawn; I can see its spots through the snow—snow!—now pouring down like a benediction.
None of this is supposed to be happening.
I have the power to make my own choices; this little deer can’t. It’s deer season, this fawn’s too young, the dogs are too close—it doesn’t have a chance.
It takes a faltering step toward me and I’m frozen, in awe, as the dogs come into the clearing with deafening bays, closing in on the prey.
A kinship and a fury suddenly flood me—who dares destroy this helpless anomaly?
But there’s no more time to think as the fawn crouches and springs, with the last burst of its strength, through the swirling whiteness and into the sanctuary of my open arms.
*************************************************************************************
Fran Haley is an educator with a lifelong passion for reading and writing. She loves symbolism and experimenting with different genres and voice. Her stories are typically born from a single image and fleshed out from there. Fran believes that the experiences of ordinary people make the most extraordinary stories; for example, the first house she remembers living in was a morgue. As for her current home, Fran’s husband and two sons keep it overflowing with laughter. She would like readers to know that her eastern North Carolina roots run deep and that there’s nothing in the world that compares to the taste of a scuppernong grape.
A white linen tablecloth shrouds the table. Two white tapers stand guard; in the candlelight Mother’s treasured Lenox china reflects a maddeningly holy glow. Forks are laid with precision on the left, glasses exactly above the tips of knives on the right. I thought I could catch a few precious minutes of hush in here while David and his brood are in the kitchen, oohing, aahing, sampling and plattering the usual traditional fare. I can’t take their bustling or the loud clinking of dishes. No sanctuary for me, not here, not anywhere. Even my knuckles are white from gripping the back of the chair. Muscles contract,my head throbs, I can barely breathe, yet the serene candle flames don’t even flicker.
Curious.
“Daniel! Here you are.” It’s Mother, coming through the doorway with a tea pitcher in one hand and an ice bucket in the other. Act normal! I take the ice and fill the glasses so she can pour the tea.
Might as well be liquid sugar. Dad couldn’t get enough of it. I recall Thurber’s Princess Lenore, who fell ill from a surfeit of raspberry tarts; it’s a wonder we all haven’t died of sugar surfeit.
In come my nieces, Caitlin and Gracie, with sweet potato and green bean casseroles. Little Nate, age five, is right behind them with the plate of devilled eggs. One is missing. Nate’s cheeks are bulging, his mouth too full to chew; it’s like I’m seeing his father at that age again:
Do you think it’ll snow so we can play on the sled, Daniel?
No, silly, it never snows at Thanksgiving. You gotta wait ‘til after Christmastime for that. Are you still eating? What’s in your mouth?
Debbled egg. I got another one in my pocket for you—here!
The memory is almost warming but evaporates as David, paunchy and balding, strolls in with the enormous browned bird. How many of us does Mother think she’s feeding? We’re three down from previous years.
We go through the motions. We sit, and I feel five pairs of eyes on me. Expectant. It’s time to return thanks and, being the firstborn, the intended bearer of my father’s legacy, I’m normally the one to offer it at our gatherings.
There’s nothing normal about me now.
I feel hands reaching for mine, Nate’s little pudgy ones and David’s too-soft ones which make my insides writhe like spirochetes. How could you, Sabrina? I flinch at my brother’s touch but I manage to sit rock-still even though I want to fling him away and shout God, David, be a man!
They’re waiting. I’m supposed to pray, God’s supposed to hear. Once I was sure he did.
I bow, my eyes not fully closed—I can still see Mother’s Opal Innocence gleaming up at me in derision:
For each new morning with its light,
for rest and shelter of the night,
for health and food,
for love and friends,
for everything Thy goodness sends,
Amen.
“Amen,” chorus three little voices. Mother smiles at me, misty-eyed. David’s eyebrows are raised. He recognizes Emerson, of course, literary expert that he is. If he’s such a phenomenal professor, why can’t he find another job?
Who am I to talk?
David stands to carve the hulking bird carcass. The senselessness of it all makes me want to hurl my plate Frisbee-fashion through the bay window, but I can’t in front of the kids so I sit and make a conscious effort to unclench my jaw. I stare at the dismemberment of the creature, feeling a kinship with the hollowed-out dead thing at the end of the line, where scavengers await to pick the last of flesh from the bones in this oh-so-civilized setting. I must endure this thlipsis of meaninglessness just a little longer. Survival of the fittest, wouldn’t you say, kindred turkey? Maybe you never had a chance to fly away, you Frankenstein fowl, but I, the true modern Prometheus, do, and it’s all that buoys my soul.
My soul. I suppress a wild urge to laugh. David hacks away at the bird; suddenly, I know why the candle flames don’t flicker when I walk in or out of a room:
I’m already dead.
Will my image soon vanish from the photos Caitlin took with her digital camera?
I pass the potatoes, the cranberry sauce. I chew, swallow. Conversation drifts around me. As long as there are no jarring sounds, I know what they’re saying without really hearing them. White noise..
Jen would still be here, if not for me. Sabrina would be gone with or without me—do American transplants celebrate Thanksgiving in Australia? Do they put kookaburras on spits? Dad’s the only one who earned the right to be gone and he didn’t choose it. I have a choice; unlike Sabrina and Jen, I’m not running from anybody, least of all myself.
I make my own appointments.
Not even the chains I’ve forged can hold me.
“Uncle Dan?” A voice jolts me back. Gracie, standing at my elbow. Little Sabrina. “Are you ready for dessert, Uncle Dan? We made your favorite!”
“Of course, honey,” I hear myself answer. I fake a smile.
Mother is visibly pleased. She’s too thin. She worries too much. She still emanates elegance, although her regal posture is considerably stooped now. She’s the Opal Innocence plate with the fine cracks running through it, the one she sets at her own place so no one else will have to have it.
Why do these things matter?
Gracie goes to the kitchen and promptly returns with a slice of triple chocolate bundt the size of my head. I say, “That’s too big a piece for me, Young Grasshopper.”
The children giggle.
It’s Gracie’s voice but Sabrina’s wide, entreating eyes: “Pleeeease?”
“All right! I give up. You win.”
This cake is too rich; the only saving grace is that the dark chocolate chips cut the overpowering sweetness with a needed shard of bitter.
“So, Daniel,” says my brother, leaning toward me while his offspring help Mother clear the table, “what are your plans?”
I freeze.
“My plans for …?”
“Filing your papers. The sooner you get it done, the quicker you can put it all behind you. It’s the inevitable, you know.”
I relax.
“I’ve taken care of it.”
He’s surprised. “When did you see your attorney? Does Mother know? She hasn’t mentioned it.”
They think I can’t think for myself any more. I ran my own multimillion-dollar business from the time I was twenty-six without their help and I don’t need their help now that it’s gone.
“I went last week and started the process. The office will call when the papers are ready to sign.”
He regards me somewhat dubiously but I continue savoring my cake, stretching it out, making it last.
Endure. Transcend. It won’t be long now.
“Which process, exactly?” he probes.
I take my time chewing, swallowing, chasing the cake with a swig of tea, not nearly so sweet after such decadence.
“Here’s the thing: It’s kind of hard to serve separation papers on a woman when you don’t know where she is. She doesn’t stay in one place very long.”
“How can you file for bankruptcy without her?”
I let a long, heavy pause hang there before I look straight into his eyes. “What about you? Divorce final yet?”
And a Happy Thanksgiving to all.
“Dan.” I can hardly bear the gentleness in his voice, so Motheresque. I’d rather he punched me in the face—hard. C’mon David—let me have it—
I throw a sucker punch: “Any new job prospects?”
“Actually, yes, a couple.…”
Something about going overseas, he’s in demand by Japan, China, and the Arab Emirates. He could teach for a year, leaving the kids with Mother until he gets on his feet and the universities here start hiring again. I could interrupt and ask him—again—why tenure didn’t save him except that I don’t want to hear him drone on, when he stops and sighs:
“I can’t go through with it, though.”
“Go through with what?”
“I can’t leave the kids. No matter how I explain all the reasons I need to do this, it just comes down to my leaving them like Sabrina did. I won’t put them through that.”
“What are you going to do, then?
“I don’t have much choice. The unemployment helps but I have to sell the house. Mother wants us to stay here until something opens up.”
I can’t control myself any longer; I burst out laughing.
David coming to live here.
Poetic justice.
He doesn’t know how to react to my laughter but then again, no one knows how to take me these days.
I wipe my eyes. “Yeah, well, it’s a good thing I added that extra bedroom when I built this place, huh? Mother and Dad said one guest room would be enough but remember how Sabrina said there should be two, for when Jen and I have kids and all the grandchildren want to stay at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house at the same time?”
“Dan…”
“No worries, baby brother. Even if bankrupt builders don’t get unemployment like terminated teachers do, I can take care of myself.”
I neglect to say that, until the 5,000 square foot monster beach home I shared with Jen sells—if and when it ever does in this economy—I have eighty-six dollars to my name.
More than what I need to close this last deal.
* * *
FINALLY.
Gluttony and tryptophan do me a favor; everyone goes to bed early. When I’m sure they’re all asleep, I slip on my coat with Dad’s keys and a flashlight in the pockets.
I put his old F-150 in gear and push until it’s far enough away to crank.
His shotgun’s in some blankets under the seat.
I drive through the darkness, past streetlights, neighborhoods, on to the highway. What are you driving now that the Range Rover has been repossessed, Jen? You can’t live on your credit cards much longer. Nothing’s left to pay them with. The bills are still coming; for a while I tracked your movements that way..
Go after her, Daniel. She’s in so much pain.
What’s the point, Mother? I’m the one she’s running from.
The last time I headed to Dad’s old cabin at Serendipity Lake, I’d just met you, Jen. Dad took me fishing in an effort to help me gain clarity about the future. He knew I was struggling with my calling in life. Out in the rowboat on the placid water, I asked him: How do I know I’m meant for the ministry, Dad? How did you know?
He thought a minute before answering. I just knew, like I know my own name. I couldn’t do anything else, Daniel— it was meant to be. You have so many gifts, Son— you can do anything you want. As much as I’d like to see you at seminary and ordained, I can’t tell you what to do. That’s between you and God.
That’s what I wanted, Dad. I wanted to be complete like that, like you.
You know I came away determined to follow your pastoral footsteps. That was before the
church told you, after twenty-three years, that they no longer needed your services, that they were ready for a younger man with “more creative ideas.” You stepped down far more graciously than I ever could.
And where were you, DAVID, brother mine, when Dad had his first heart attack the following month? Finishing that almighty doctorate Sabrina was determined you should have. Getting her pregnant. The rest of us weren’t a blip on your radar, were we? My quitting seminary for a full-time job in construction was supposed to be temporary:
Mom says you’ve got your hands full but we could use your help, Dave. I’m slapping beams twenty-four/seven. With Dad’s hospital bills, it’s still tight.
No worries, Dan. I’m going to do my part as soon as I finish this dissertation….
We need your help now, man.
If were you, Danny Boy, I would have started my own company by now.
This from a man who’s never done a day’s manual labor.
Pure spite led me to create my company; the contracts flooded in for several years before the industry tanked and it all dried up overnight.
My personal monsoon.
It wasn’t really the money that mattered. The solitary thing I’m proud of is building that house for Mother and Dad. He lived there a year before his heart gave up.
I haven’t been able to stomach a churchyard since the day we buried him.
It’s uncommonly cold tonight. I’m dimly aware of some advisory on the radio. I reach to turn up the volume when something large darts in front of the truck. I slam on brakes, screeching tires and swerving. A deer, of course; I should have been watching.
Between the moon and the flashlight I find the cabin easily. I carry the blankets and Dad’s shotgun with me. I find the key on his key ring and the old door scrapes open.
A powerful mustiness welcomes me. The flashlight reveals some firewood by the hearth, right where Dad left it on his last visit. The wood is dry; it’ll still burn. In a little bit my fire is crackling and popping sparks up the chimney.
I watch the jumping flames. I know how this will play out. David will swear he saw it coming. Sabrina will think it’s because of some secret torch I carry. Jen, wherever you are, you’ll believe it’s because I lost the business and the money, being convinced that’s where my heart lies. Anything and everything will catch the blame, except the truth:
I’m choosing this because I can.
Mother, you’re the hardest. Don’t blame yourself. You can’t fix this. Focus on David and the kids. I’m trusting you’ll find the path to peace; you always do. I’ve made sure you’re taken care of and when you’re gone, leave the house to David; he’ll be taken care of, too.
What a neat package for you, Dave, as usual. Consider it my atonement.
There’s no atoning for the rest of it.
When can we have a baby, Daniel?
Soon, Jen, soon … I promise.
My sweet, loving girl, if you would listen: You’re right, I’m not the man you married. I didn’t understand until last week, when I was showing the house to the one potential buyer so far. I opened the closet in the bedroom you wanted for a nursery and found it crammed, top to bottom, with new baby things. Little clothes hanging from the racks, price tags still attached. I put you off because, to me, bringing a child into this world is—well, inconceivable. And the helplessness of infants terrifies me. How can I admit that to any sensible person? You’d be an amazing mother. I thought the cars, clothes, the big
house would compensate. I thought you’d eventually give up on the baby—not on me.
I’m so sorry, Jen.
And you don’t know about Sabrina, my Pandora.
She walked out on David right after you left, Jen. Found an apartment and called me to come see her; said we needed to talk.
I never should have gone.
Why hide it now? She was a fire in me from the day David brought her home from college. When she married him, I tried to hate them both. You were the only thing that helped, Jen. You and David never knew how she showed up at my sites, how I had to avoid her.
It only happened that one time, after you were gone.
I was weak. She wasn’t. She meant to have her way.
Daniel, my not loving him isn’t your fault.
You loved him once.
I thought I did, in the beginning. It’s been you for years. Jen’s not coming back, Sugar; you just made me yours, at last.
Are you some kind of spider that devours its own? Jen would’ve thought of the children. Caitlin, Gracie, and Nate deserve better. I’m not serving them up on a platter just to satisfy my pheromones. Understand, Sabrina: This isn’t about David. I don’t love you. I’m already on my own road trip to hell; you just bought your own ticket, honey.
This is why I laughed so hysterically when you said she’d flown one-way to the Land Down Under, Dave.
My brother’s wife. What would my father say?
I can’t tell you what to do. That’s between you and God.
Well, Dad, I think this one’s up to me. If God’s really there, he hasn’t intervened so far; why would he bother now?
The fire is dying and I don’t add wood, because the room is becoming gray with the first traces of dawn.
It’s time.
I take the shotgun and go outside—I’m not going to ruin the cabin. I need to be in the lake so that when I fall, the water will close over me, absolve me, dissolve me. I shall feed the fish for a long, long time, if they don’t die of me first.
The air is biting cold and if I didn’t know better, I’d think it was about to snow.
Do you think it’ll snow so we can play on the sled, Daniel?
No, silly, it never snows at Thanksgiving. You gotta wait ‘til after Christmastime for that.
I walk the old path until the trees thin and water spreads out before me. Serendipity Lake is as smooth and clear as a mirror, reflecting the gray morning. The silence is so deep. What profound stillness; Nature’s holding her breath before the world wakes up.
An unexpected pang: Dad, I miss you desperately.
Something brushes my cheek and I wipe it away. The leaves are not as vivid as I thought they’d be. The colors are muted, darker than I remember. I’d imagined a brilliant blue sky for the occasion, not this milky cloud cover. Something touches my other cheek—a snowflake?
There’s a sound in the distance, faint but familiar.
I listen.
It grows a bit louder.
Dogs. They’re on the trail of a deer, no doubt. Someone got an early start this morning. I expect the sound to fade momentarily, but it grows louder still. The blood’s pounding in my veins — do it, DO IT! — but I won’t have a bunch of well-meaning Good Samaritans finding me and trying to bring me back.
I’ll have to wait until they pass. I’ve waited this long; I can manage a few more minutes.
I don’t want to be seen. I make for the cabin; as I move through the woods, the baying grows closer.
I rest the gun against the wall on the cabin’s front stoop. It’s hard to tell, but I think the dogs are getting nearer; it sounds as if they are headed this way.
In fact, one of them is barreling out of the woods right now.
It’s a small, odd-looking dog. Wait … that’s not a dog; I cannot believe what I’m seeing ….
A bit of a blur, but I think it’s a fawn. At the completely wrong time of year for fawns. I’ve never heard of one being born this late—that’s the point of hunting season; mothers aren’t taking care of their young anymore. But it’s definitely a fawn, terrified, running for its life. It tries to cut away to the right but the dogs are closing in from all sides—I can’t see them yet, but they can’t be very far behind.
The fawn arcs back to the left and streaks straight for the cabin.
It’s going to be trapped.
Without thinking, I step forward. The creature comes skidding to a halt five feet in front of me, realizing that a man and a house are in its way and it can go no further.
It screams, the horrible cry of an animal that knows it’s at the end of the line. It looks at me, quivering violently, and I see the veins throbbing in its neck. A very young fawn; I can see its spots through the snow—snow!—now pouring down like a benediction.
None of this is supposed to be happening.
I have the power to make my own choices; this little deer can’t. It’s deer season, this fawn’s too young, the dogs are too close—it doesn’t have a chance.
It takes a faltering step toward me and I’m frozen, in awe, as the dogs come into the clearing with deafening bays, closing in on the prey.
A kinship and a fury suddenly flood me—who dares destroy this helpless anomaly?
But there’s no more time to think as the fawn crouches and springs, with the last burst of its strength, through the swirling whiteness and into the sanctuary of my open arms.
*************************************************************************************
Fran Haley is an educator with a lifelong passion for reading and writing. She loves symbolism and experimenting with different genres and voice. Her stories are typically born from a single image and fleshed out from there. Fran believes that the experiences of ordinary people make the most extraordinary stories; for example, the first house she remembers living in was a morgue. As for her current home, Fran’s husband and two sons keep it overflowing with laughter. She would like readers to know that her eastern North Carolina roots run deep and that there’s nothing in the world that compares to the taste of a scuppernong grape.
Monday, August 29, 2011
2011 Third-Place Winner: Soul Kisses by John T. Biggs
Soul Kisses
Reality starts like the migraines Jeorgia used to have before the accident. A little throb behind her left eye, a hint of nausea, visual distortions; one second Jeorgia’s gone, and the next she’s here. This time she’s sitting on a man’s lap. Someone she doesn’t remember, but a kiss will change all that. Jeorgia’s body never forgets even though her brain is broken.
Jack Winston.
Bits and pieces fit together, but not enough to understand what she’s doing on Jack Winston’s lap. She never really knew him. Never really liked him much, even though he’s tall and strong and kind of cute. She remembers speaking to him once, a two-word conversation at her senior prom.
“Okay Jack,” she told him, when he asked her to dance. But that dance never happened because someone better came along and drove Jeorgia away in his BMW 328i sedan.
Zachary Anderson, quarterback, homecoming king—may he rest in peace—took Jeorgia to a place with lots of trees and privacy, and promised to change her life forever. Which he did, right after she lost her virginity and a pair of garnet earrings in the back seat of his Beemer. The sex was over just when things were looking up.
She told Zack, “I don’t think we did it right.”
He said, “Maybe next time,” and gave her what he must have thought was a dramatic look—the kind James Dean used in East of Eden, just before he said: “Only the gentle are ever really strong.”
Or maybe that was Rebel Without a Cause. Or maybe something else, because those old black and white movies all run together in Jeorgia’s mind. So does all the time that passed since Zack crossed the centerline into a pair of headlights that were too far apart to belong to a car.
Zack said, “Shit,” right before the crash. Maybe that was his last word ever. Jeorgia can’t be sure, but “Shit,” is a better thing to say than, “Okay Jack,” which was mainly what Jeorgia had been saying ever since the accident.
She’d tried to say other things, but they all came out, “Okay Jack,” until recently. Now that she thought of it she’d been talking quite a bit lately, and even though she made no sense, anything was better than, “Okay Jack.”
“Shit!” Maybe swearing was a sign of things to come. Better things. Although from the look on Jack Winston’s face, it definitely killed the mood.
“Shit!” She said again, exactly the way Zachary had. A touch of surprise, a touch of fear, the touch of airbags swelling out of hidden compartments.
Jeorgia hops off Jack Winston’s lap and he doesn’t try to stop her because he’s so shocked to see her acting like a real live girl instead of an animated sex toy—a Stepford wife. Jeorgia saw that movie on the Sci-Fi Channel once, but never thought she’d be one.
Right after the accident she was a Stepford daughter, then her parents handed her off to Jack Winston, who knows a lot more about sex than Zachary did.
Jack knows how to move and how to talk and how to make sure Jeorgia finds her way to “orgasm land,” even in her mixed up state of mind. He’s really good at it because that’s all they have between them and because Jeorgia won’t judge him. Because Jeorgia’s brain won’t do judgments anymore.
Jack Winston is gentle, even if he isn’t really in love. A man can’t love a girl without a brain. Can he?
“Only the gentle are ever really strong.” There’s nothing left for her to say.
Jack looks nervous, the way he did in high school, so Jeorgia climbs onto his lap again and puts her lips onto his.
Her tongue finds Jack’s doubts, and steals them one by one, like a clever pickpocket. Kissing leads to other things, and Jack is just as good at other things as Jeorgia remembers. But she doesn’t remember very long. Fog settles in, and everything she says comes out, “Okay Jack,” no matter how hard she tries. It will stay that way until she has another headache.
***
Being out of it is like watching a giant flat screen TV while someone else has the remote control and insists on running through all seven hundred channels. The battery must be running down, because Jeorgia feels a familiar little pain behind her left eye, and the channels fly by slower and slower until she’s in a room where she’s been a few times before.
It’s a small concrete room without windows. There’s a metal table in the center, and the smell of men who don’t shower very often. One of those men is sitting at the metal table talking to Jack. He has crude tattoos all over his hands, and probably on his arms too, but those are covered by a blue jump suit that has Oklahoma Dept. of Corrections stenciled across the front. The man has chains around his wrists that attach to a metal loop on his side of the table.
“Sure is a pretty girl.” He’s talking about Jeorgia because she is the only girl in the room.
“How’d you get a girl like that, Jack?” The man drums his fingers on the metal table; the chain noise doesn’t bother him.
“Brain damaged,” Jack tells the man, as if Jeorgia isn’t there.
Because usually I’m not. So Jack doesn’t know how cruel it is to talk about her that way.
“She’ll be there when you kill me?” The man runs the tip of his tongue over his lips, tasting molecules of Jeorgia like a snake.
“Always bring her to the executions,” Jack says. He stands several feet away because the man looks too dangerous for his chains. “Got nowhere to leave her.”
“Pretty, pretty, pretty.” The man drums his fingers again.
“Never had me a girl as pretty as that,” he says. “Would have killed her if I did.”
Jeorgia turns away but she can still feel the chained man’s eyes—clear and cold, like little vials of refrigerated poison. She doesn’t mind when the cosmic channel surfer starts up again and takes her out of this little room.
Going.
Going.
Gone.
***
The little pain behind Jeorgia’s left eye moves back like the ocean at low tide and leaves her in another ugly room with fluorescent lights that won’t stop flashing. She stands behind a gray concrete wall with a one-way mirror at eye level that gives her a perfect view of the dead man on the gurney.
Three sides of the execution chamber are walls of Plexiglas. Jeorgia can see the witnesses in the double row of cinema style chairs watching the man be dead.
Jack pushes a button and black curtains slide into place. The show is over. Nothing left to see.
“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here,” Jack says to no one in particular.
He always says that. Every time he kills a man. Four times now. Jeorgia looks into his eyes to see if it bothers him.
No one home in there.
“Medical Examiner will take it from here,” Jack says. “Shouldn’t be too hard to determine cause of death. You think?”
He’s trying to be funny. Telling execution jokes to his brain-damaged wife. It doesn’t matter what he says, because Jeorgia’s sense of humor went down a neurosurgeon’s suction along with the piano lessons, and the names of all fifty states.
For the moment, she remembers everything in crisp detail, like a fresh ice sculpture. Her perfectly balanced state of mind won’t last long, but while it’s here she’s angry. Because Jack Winston made her kiss a condemned man goodbye, just before the curtains opened so the witnesses could watch him die.
The taste of the man’s last meal lingers on her tongue. A foot-long chilidog with sides of potato salad and onion rings. Robert David VanGorder ate his final meal in three minutes flat. Like a hungry dog. Like a man who couldn’t wait to kiss the prettiest girl he’d ever seen right before he died.
Why do they all eat chilidogs? There had been three of them before, and Jeorgia kissed them all.
“Soul kisses,” she tells Jack. “Their souls all taste like Wolf Brand Chili.”
Jack says nothing.
After every goodbye kiss, Jeorgia comes back to life a little more—a few new words, a bit more coordination. Memories of things that might have happened to her, or someone else, because when a mind returns from nowhere, nothing is for sure.
What had she given the condemned men? What had she taken from them in return? Was it a fair exchange? She puts her arms around Jack Winston and pulls him toward her. She puts her lips over his, and pushes her tongue into his mouth.
Cilantro and onion from the luncheon special at Adelitas Cafe—and something sweet and satisfying that Jeorgia can draw out with the slightest effort. But she lets it go, because Jack meant no harm when he brought her to his executions and let her kiss the men he was hired to kill.
Jack is sweet and gentle in his ignorance, and Jeorgia loves him just a little, the way she loves the headaches that bring her out of nowhere.
***
Jeorgia’s mother doesn’t come around much any more.
“Too hard,” Mom says. “Too painful. Too many memories.” She drags the back of her right hand across her forehead to show how broken up she is about having a brain-damaged daughter married to an executioner.“How are you sweetheart? How is my little girl?”
Mom brings nutritional supplements and best wishes from her prayer group that is keeping God abreast of all the Jeorgia news. She talks about Jeorgia’s high school friends, who wonder how she’s doing, and her old male admirers, who are all a lot more successful than Jack. She talks about her husband the judge, and being president of the Junior League, and the famous relatives she’s found on the Internet since her last visit.
Jeorgia looks her mother in the eyes until Mom stops talking.
The quiet helps Jeorgia cope with the world, which is spinning too fast to sort her thoughts. Her heart rate increases slightly as interesting new mother-thoughts take shape inside her patchwork mind. Her salivary glands go on high alert, like they used to do when she opened a box of See’s Chocolates.
Not quite hunger, but close.
Jeorgia doesn’t know exactly what comes next, but she can hardly wait.
“Louise.” She’s never said her mother’s name before, not in Mom’s presence. The word hangs in the room like a bad odor.
“Louise.” Jeorgia smiles, like a child who’s uttered an obscenity.
“Call me Mom, sweetheart.”
Jeorgia says, “Louise,” again—the goofy sounding name that belongs to the president of the Junior League, the wife of a prominent seventh district judge, the mother of a daughter who used to be something special but now is special needs.
“Sometimes she gets like this,” Jack tells his mother-in-law. “I think it’s a sign she’s coming back.”
Coming back from where? Jeorgia doesn’t know, because a girl who comes back from where she’s been doesn’t bring memories. When she’s there, she can’t remember here. When she’s here, she can’t remember there.
Jeorgia adjusts the angelic expression she’s practiced in front of the bathroom mirror. Some angels are good and some are not so good, but they all have the same face.
“You’re very pretty,” she tells her mother, without adding, “for a woman your age,” as people sometimes do.
Mom smiles at the compliment, but keeps it insincere, in case her brain-damaged daughter has remembered how to make cruel jokes.
Jeorgia brushes a hand through her mother’s hair, artificially colored blond to match her senior high school picture. The same style too, stiff with spray, shaped by a stylist from Dallas who charges five hundred dollars for the effort. He’s muscled Mom’s hair into a shape that’s shiny and stiff and completely out of place, like the chrome bulldog on the hood of a Mac truck.
“Pretty, pretty, pretty,” Jeorgia tells Mom as she leads her to the sofa in front of the entertainment center. Louise hasn’t been called pretty for a while, so she sits besides her daughter and listens while Jeorgia tells her: “Never had me a girl as pretty as that.”
Jack starts to say something to Jeorgia’s mom. Tell her where Jeorgia heard those words. Tell her to get up and walk away. But he can’t think how to put it without sounding crazy.
Jeorgia places her lips over Mom’s and doesn’t stop when Mom tries to pull back. And she tries to pull back pretty hard, because kissing Jeorgia like this is way too weird for the president of the Junior League. But what is a mother to do when her addled daughter tries to kiss her on the lips and includes tongue in the bargain?
Jeorgia has a memory that might have once belonged to a serial murderer, who liked his girlfriends dead.
When you’re making women do what they don’t want:
Keep them guessing . . .
About your plans . . .
Until it’s much too late . . .
Mother Louise’s soul doesn’t taste like chilidogs, but Jeorgia finds other flavors:
From Mom’s college years—the eighteen-year-old scotch and the twenty-year-old boy, and the abortion no one knows about.
The pool man last week who was Hispanic and illegal. Here today and gone tomorrow, so it wasn’t really cheating.
Mom’s secrets taste like Citrus Altoids—sour and curiously strong.
There aren’t many left when Jeorgia pulls away.
Jack shakes his mother-in-law’s arm gently and asks, “Are you all right?”
When mother Louise doesn’t answer, Jack asks Jeorgia: “Is she all right.”
“She’ll come out of it in a little while.” Jeorgia savors her newly acquired Junior League vocabulary. She kisses Jack on the cheek; pleased to see he doesn’t pull away.
“I saved plenty of room for desert.”
"Soul Kisses" will be published in the autumn edition of Storyteller Magazine. We thank Regina Williams for her kind permission to publish Mr. Biggs' winning story.
Reality starts like the migraines Jeorgia used to have before the accident. A little throb behind her left eye, a hint of nausea, visual distortions; one second Jeorgia’s gone, and the next she’s here. This time she’s sitting on a man’s lap. Someone she doesn’t remember, but a kiss will change all that. Jeorgia’s body never forgets even though her brain is broken.
Jack Winston.
Bits and pieces fit together, but not enough to understand what she’s doing on Jack Winston’s lap. She never really knew him. Never really liked him much, even though he’s tall and strong and kind of cute. She remembers speaking to him once, a two-word conversation at her senior prom.
“Okay Jack,” she told him, when he asked her to dance. But that dance never happened because someone better came along and drove Jeorgia away in his BMW 328i sedan.
Zachary Anderson, quarterback, homecoming king—may he rest in peace—took Jeorgia to a place with lots of trees and privacy, and promised to change her life forever. Which he did, right after she lost her virginity and a pair of garnet earrings in the back seat of his Beemer. The sex was over just when things were looking up.
She told Zack, “I don’t think we did it right.”
He said, “Maybe next time,” and gave her what he must have thought was a dramatic look—the kind James Dean used in East of Eden, just before he said: “Only the gentle are ever really strong.”
Or maybe that was Rebel Without a Cause. Or maybe something else, because those old black and white movies all run together in Jeorgia’s mind. So does all the time that passed since Zack crossed the centerline into a pair of headlights that were too far apart to belong to a car.
Zack said, “Shit,” right before the crash. Maybe that was his last word ever. Jeorgia can’t be sure, but “Shit,” is a better thing to say than, “Okay Jack,” which was mainly what Jeorgia had been saying ever since the accident.
She’d tried to say other things, but they all came out, “Okay Jack,” until recently. Now that she thought of it she’d been talking quite a bit lately, and even though she made no sense, anything was better than, “Okay Jack.”
“Shit!” Maybe swearing was a sign of things to come. Better things. Although from the look on Jack Winston’s face, it definitely killed the mood.
“Shit!” She said again, exactly the way Zachary had. A touch of surprise, a touch of fear, the touch of airbags swelling out of hidden compartments.
Jeorgia hops off Jack Winston’s lap and he doesn’t try to stop her because he’s so shocked to see her acting like a real live girl instead of an animated sex toy—a Stepford wife. Jeorgia saw that movie on the Sci-Fi Channel once, but never thought she’d be one.
Right after the accident she was a Stepford daughter, then her parents handed her off to Jack Winston, who knows a lot more about sex than Zachary did.
Jack knows how to move and how to talk and how to make sure Jeorgia finds her way to “orgasm land,” even in her mixed up state of mind. He’s really good at it because that’s all they have between them and because Jeorgia won’t judge him. Because Jeorgia’s brain won’t do judgments anymore.
Jack Winston is gentle, even if he isn’t really in love. A man can’t love a girl without a brain. Can he?
“Only the gentle are ever really strong.” There’s nothing left for her to say.
Jack looks nervous, the way he did in high school, so Jeorgia climbs onto his lap again and puts her lips onto his.
Her tongue finds Jack’s doubts, and steals them one by one, like a clever pickpocket. Kissing leads to other things, and Jack is just as good at other things as Jeorgia remembers. But she doesn’t remember very long. Fog settles in, and everything she says comes out, “Okay Jack,” no matter how hard she tries. It will stay that way until she has another headache.
***
Being out of it is like watching a giant flat screen TV while someone else has the remote control and insists on running through all seven hundred channels. The battery must be running down, because Jeorgia feels a familiar little pain behind her left eye, and the channels fly by slower and slower until she’s in a room where she’s been a few times before.
It’s a small concrete room without windows. There’s a metal table in the center, and the smell of men who don’t shower very often. One of those men is sitting at the metal table talking to Jack. He has crude tattoos all over his hands, and probably on his arms too, but those are covered by a blue jump suit that has Oklahoma Dept. of Corrections stenciled across the front. The man has chains around his wrists that attach to a metal loop on his side of the table.
“Sure is a pretty girl.” He’s talking about Jeorgia because she is the only girl in the room.
“How’d you get a girl like that, Jack?” The man drums his fingers on the metal table; the chain noise doesn’t bother him.
“Brain damaged,” Jack tells the man, as if Jeorgia isn’t there.
Because usually I’m not. So Jack doesn’t know how cruel it is to talk about her that way.
“She’ll be there when you kill me?” The man runs the tip of his tongue over his lips, tasting molecules of Jeorgia like a snake.
“Always bring her to the executions,” Jack says. He stands several feet away because the man looks too dangerous for his chains. “Got nowhere to leave her.”
“Pretty, pretty, pretty.” The man drums his fingers again.
“Never had me a girl as pretty as that,” he says. “Would have killed her if I did.”
Jeorgia turns away but she can still feel the chained man’s eyes—clear and cold, like little vials of refrigerated poison. She doesn’t mind when the cosmic channel surfer starts up again and takes her out of this little room.
Going.
Going.
Gone.
***
The little pain behind Jeorgia’s left eye moves back like the ocean at low tide and leaves her in another ugly room with fluorescent lights that won’t stop flashing. She stands behind a gray concrete wall with a one-way mirror at eye level that gives her a perfect view of the dead man on the gurney.
Three sides of the execution chamber are walls of Plexiglas. Jeorgia can see the witnesses in the double row of cinema style chairs watching the man be dead.
Jack pushes a button and black curtains slide into place. The show is over. Nothing left to see.
“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here,” Jack says to no one in particular.
He always says that. Every time he kills a man. Four times now. Jeorgia looks into his eyes to see if it bothers him.
No one home in there.
“Medical Examiner will take it from here,” Jack says. “Shouldn’t be too hard to determine cause of death. You think?”
He’s trying to be funny. Telling execution jokes to his brain-damaged wife. It doesn’t matter what he says, because Jeorgia’s sense of humor went down a neurosurgeon’s suction along with the piano lessons, and the names of all fifty states.
For the moment, she remembers everything in crisp detail, like a fresh ice sculpture. Her perfectly balanced state of mind won’t last long, but while it’s here she’s angry. Because Jack Winston made her kiss a condemned man goodbye, just before the curtains opened so the witnesses could watch him die.
The taste of the man’s last meal lingers on her tongue. A foot-long chilidog with sides of potato salad and onion rings. Robert David VanGorder ate his final meal in three minutes flat. Like a hungry dog. Like a man who couldn’t wait to kiss the prettiest girl he’d ever seen right before he died.
Why do they all eat chilidogs? There had been three of them before, and Jeorgia kissed them all.
“Soul kisses,” she tells Jack. “Their souls all taste like Wolf Brand Chili.”
Jack says nothing.
After every goodbye kiss, Jeorgia comes back to life a little more—a few new words, a bit more coordination. Memories of things that might have happened to her, or someone else, because when a mind returns from nowhere, nothing is for sure.
What had she given the condemned men? What had she taken from them in return? Was it a fair exchange? She puts her arms around Jack Winston and pulls him toward her. She puts her lips over his, and pushes her tongue into his mouth.
Cilantro and onion from the luncheon special at Adelitas Cafe—and something sweet and satisfying that Jeorgia can draw out with the slightest effort. But she lets it go, because Jack meant no harm when he brought her to his executions and let her kiss the men he was hired to kill.
Jack is sweet and gentle in his ignorance, and Jeorgia loves him just a little, the way she loves the headaches that bring her out of nowhere.
***
Jeorgia’s mother doesn’t come around much any more.
“Too hard,” Mom says. “Too painful. Too many memories.” She drags the back of her right hand across her forehead to show how broken up she is about having a brain-damaged daughter married to an executioner.“How are you sweetheart? How is my little girl?”
Mom brings nutritional supplements and best wishes from her prayer group that is keeping God abreast of all the Jeorgia news. She talks about Jeorgia’s high school friends, who wonder how she’s doing, and her old male admirers, who are all a lot more successful than Jack. She talks about her husband the judge, and being president of the Junior League, and the famous relatives she’s found on the Internet since her last visit.
Jeorgia looks her mother in the eyes until Mom stops talking.
The quiet helps Jeorgia cope with the world, which is spinning too fast to sort her thoughts. Her heart rate increases slightly as interesting new mother-thoughts take shape inside her patchwork mind. Her salivary glands go on high alert, like they used to do when she opened a box of See’s Chocolates.
Not quite hunger, but close.
Jeorgia doesn’t know exactly what comes next, but she can hardly wait.
“Louise.” She’s never said her mother’s name before, not in Mom’s presence. The word hangs in the room like a bad odor.
“Louise.” Jeorgia smiles, like a child who’s uttered an obscenity.
“Call me Mom, sweetheart.”
Jeorgia says, “Louise,” again—the goofy sounding name that belongs to the president of the Junior League, the wife of a prominent seventh district judge, the mother of a daughter who used to be something special but now is special needs.
“Sometimes she gets like this,” Jack tells his mother-in-law. “I think it’s a sign she’s coming back.”
Coming back from where? Jeorgia doesn’t know, because a girl who comes back from where she’s been doesn’t bring memories. When she’s there, she can’t remember here. When she’s here, she can’t remember there.
Jeorgia adjusts the angelic expression she’s practiced in front of the bathroom mirror. Some angels are good and some are not so good, but they all have the same face.
“You’re very pretty,” she tells her mother, without adding, “for a woman your age,” as people sometimes do.
Mom smiles at the compliment, but keeps it insincere, in case her brain-damaged daughter has remembered how to make cruel jokes.
Jeorgia brushes a hand through her mother’s hair, artificially colored blond to match her senior high school picture. The same style too, stiff with spray, shaped by a stylist from Dallas who charges five hundred dollars for the effort. He’s muscled Mom’s hair into a shape that’s shiny and stiff and completely out of place, like the chrome bulldog on the hood of a Mac truck.
“Pretty, pretty, pretty,” Jeorgia tells Mom as she leads her to the sofa in front of the entertainment center. Louise hasn’t been called pretty for a while, so she sits besides her daughter and listens while Jeorgia tells her: “Never had me a girl as pretty as that.”
Jack starts to say something to Jeorgia’s mom. Tell her where Jeorgia heard those words. Tell her to get up and walk away. But he can’t think how to put it without sounding crazy.
Jeorgia places her lips over Mom’s and doesn’t stop when Mom tries to pull back. And she tries to pull back pretty hard, because kissing Jeorgia like this is way too weird for the president of the Junior League. But what is a mother to do when her addled daughter tries to kiss her on the lips and includes tongue in the bargain?
Jeorgia has a memory that might have once belonged to a serial murderer, who liked his girlfriends dead.
When you’re making women do what they don’t want:
Keep them guessing . . .
About your plans . . .
Until it’s much too late . . .
Mother Louise’s soul doesn’t taste like chilidogs, but Jeorgia finds other flavors:
From Mom’s college years—the eighteen-year-old scotch and the twenty-year-old boy, and the abortion no one knows about.
The pool man last week who was Hispanic and illegal. Here today and gone tomorrow, so it wasn’t really cheating.
Mom’s secrets taste like Citrus Altoids—sour and curiously strong.
There aren’t many left when Jeorgia pulls away.
Jack shakes his mother-in-law’s arm gently and asks, “Are you all right?”
When mother Louise doesn’t answer, Jack asks Jeorgia: “Is she all right.”
“She’ll come out of it in a little while.” Jeorgia savors her newly acquired Junior League vocabulary. She kisses Jack on the cheek; pleased to see he doesn’t pull away.
“I saved plenty of room for desert.”
"Soul Kisses" will be published in the autumn edition of Storyteller Magazine. We thank Regina Williams for her kind permission to publish Mr. Biggs' winning story.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
2011 WINNERS AND HONORABLE MENTIONS
Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition 2011 Winners and Honorable Mentions
1,289 Entries
FIRST PLACE: $1,500 and publication in Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts
Darci Bysouth
Edinburgh, Scotland
“Hold”
SECOND PLACE: $500
Jennifer R. Adams
Birchrunville, PA
“Girl on a Balcony”
THIRD PLACE: $500
John T. Biggs
Okalahoma City, OK
“Soul Kisses”
HONORABLE MENTIONS (in no particular order):
1) Megan Doyle Corcoran
Wellington, New Zealand
“Only the Scars Are Right”
2) Fran Haley
Zebulon, N.C.
“Anomaly”
3) Karen Turner
Mornington, Australia
“Crazy Cat Lady”
4) Vicki Riley
St. Cloud, FL
“De Nada”
5) Elaine Murphy
Vancouver, B.C.
“November 25th”
6) Douglas Bruton
Scotland
“Godforsaken Stone Gilbert”
7) Kari Baumbach
Edina, MN
“Lepidoptery”
8) Tom Deegan
Tipperary, Ireland
“Magpies”
9) Leah Kaminsky
Austin, TX
“And How the Algae Twines”
10) Megan Ainsworth
Florence, MS
“Lucky’s”
11) Mahalia Solanges
Lauderhill, FL
“Vague in Conversation”
12) Matthew Merkl, M.D.
Holmdel, N.J.
“CLAY”
13) Kay Cruse
Menomonie, WI
“The Bunker”
14) Waimea Williams
Kaneohe, Hawaii
“What You Find and What You Keep”
15) Jeffrey L. Schneider
Ellenville, N.Y.
“A Pair of Soup”
16) Todd Flynn
Ainsworth, Nebraska
“The Roofer Marking Time”
17) Paul Michel
Seattle, WA
“Big Night”
18) Olesya O. Maximenko
Moscow, Russia
“Purple”
19) Ames John Gigounas
Brooklyn, N.Y.
“Water”
20) Hal Ackerman
Los Angeles, CA
“Leash”
21) Alex Carrick
Toronto Ontario, Canada
“Caboose Follies”
22) Ladee Hubbard
New Orleans, Louisiana
“There He Go”
23) Dana Fitz Gale
Missoula, MT
“Schooling”
24) Athena Abrams
Boulder, CO
“The Thirteen-Lined Ground Squirrel”
25) Ayodi Chrispinus Handa
Goodnews Mission, Nairobi, Kenya
“The Blind Love”
26) Kate Zahnleiter
Queensland, Australia
“Lullaby for the Living”
27) Abdul Adan
St. Louis, MO
“SAMAN”
28)Eileen Sutton
New York, N.Y.
“Dear Mr. Doctorow”
29) Dwaine Rieves
Washington, D.C.
“The Eager Eagle”
30) Sarah Bowman
Port Townsend, WA
“The Lords of Life”
31) Lesley Truffle
Victoria, Australia
“The Secret Game”
32) Steve Fayer
Boston, MA
“The Diver’s Game”
33) Margaret Lawrence
Culpepper, VA
“But Not to the Swift”
34) Douglas Bruton
Scotland
“The Bed Lucy Made, and She Lies in It”
35) Rachel S. Thomas-Medwid
Georgetown, MA
“Snip It”
36) David E. Lee
Jacksonville, FL
“Dreams Come True”
37) Vickie Weaver
Haverstown, IN
“The Shootist”
38) Benjamin Doty
St. Paul, MN
"Trains"
39) Kyria Amtsfeld
Berlin, Germany
"Ra's ahl gul"
40) Jordan E. Rosenfeld
Morgan Hill, CA
"Final Billing"
41) David Holloway
St. Louis, MO
"A Head in My Garden"
42) Adam Stanley
Rome, GA
“Eucharist”
43) Laura Borden
Merseyside, UK
“Ðogwood”
44) John-Paul Cirelli
New Port Richey, FL
"Pasteboard Masks"
45) Helen Sedwick
Santa Rosa, CA
"Bourbon and Pipesmoke"
1
Thursday, February 17, 2011
SOUP: by Natalia Sarkissian: 2010 Honorable Mention
Mrs. Croftway stood at the sink, peeling potatoes for supper; Vichyssoise was the verdict. But without cream. No chicken stock. No leeks either. Just pepper and the half cube of bouillon left over from yesterday. Mel always fussed over the lack of ingredients, craving comfort. But that was the problem, wasn't it? That's how they had ended up here, in this crummy trailer park. She, peeling, boiling, mashing, liquefying; devising undeserved rewards for his crooked handiwork. Mel thinking up new names for the thin white liquid that resulted and cooking up illicit get-rich-quick schemes that flopped.
The wind blew garbage around. Wild dogs had been out last night and had ripped through black plastic garbage sacks. Sand hissed and she imagined it flying through the cracks in the double-wide where the silicon had dried and shrunk and no longer kept the outside completely out. Little mounds of sand would be piled on the linoleum when the wind stopped.
She would sweep it. Tidy, she was. She wished she could sweep up the shards of broken dreams. Pick'em up. Glue'em together. Start over again.
Mrs. Croftway sighed and pushed a faded lock of brown hair out of her eyes. The curl stuck to her forehead. The air conditioning had died. No money to fix it. The lights sputtered dimly—low wattage bulbs—and she had trouble seeing. No money to pay for electricity or repairs either.
She laughed—a mirthless sound.
Mel was up the road seeing about a job that involved driving a truck-load of hot cars over the border. Luxury cars for South America.
“No risk,” said Mel in the phone to someone the other night, “this new technique makes it easy to substitute registration numbers with ones that are impossible to trace.”
Mrs. Croftway, eavesdropping, wasn't sure. With Mel everything tanked. This illegal car deal would fizzle, backfire, blow up, like everything else. But, what if it didn't?
Well, she'd have to make sure.
She’d loved him but he used love up.
Some years earlier, a muscular man with blond hair and green eyes walked into the diner in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where she waited on customers at the counter. She noticed him, right when he came in. His white shirt stretched so tight across his strapping chest she couldn’t help but wonder why the buttons up the front stayed buttoned.
When he chose an emptied stool in her station, her ears turned red. He studied the menu she gave him, then a short while later, wagged a stubby finger with a too short fingernail.
“The special,” he said.
“Yessir,” she said. “Rare or medium?”
“Honey, I like my meat tender.” His lips opened and a set of perfect teeth—a set she wouldn’t mind having herself—grinned up at her. “Nothing stringy, nothing chewy, nothing tough. No ma'am,” he said.
“Rare, then,” said Mrs. Croftway, scribbling, setting her lips down so he couldn’t see how her incisors stuck out in front.
“You're blushing,” he noted.
“Am not,” she said, shaking her head, fanning her ears. “It's the weather.”
“Sure, doll. By the way, Mel Burrow’s the name.” He reached, took her hand, managed to rub a surprisingly soft thumb over it before she jerked free.
Drinking cups of coffee, ordering extra dessert, he lingered. Then at ten, when she pulled a gray sweater over her avocado uniform, grabbed her purse, and left, he followed a hundred feet back, whistling. Down Main, past Roosevelt, by the park and then left on Hoover. She walked at a brisk pace. She knew she ought to take a detour, go to the drugstore on Lincoln and call a cab so he wouldn't see where she lived. Instead, she kept on, opened the gate at 236 Hoover, walked up the sidewalk and, under the safety of the porch light, watched him stroll by.
“Night,” he smiled, tipping his crew cut as he passed.“Hope I didn’t scare you. Just wanted to see you home, safe.”
But safe she wasn't. When she got the door unlocked Richard stood on the other side.
“Who the hell was that?” he asked, grabbing her hair and yanking her in.
“Stop it,” she cried, her arms flailing, “you're hurting me.”
He twisted her arm and breathed all beery on the back of her neck.“Who was that?”
“No one!” she cried. She rubbed her wrist when he released her.
Upstairs, while water filled the stained tub, she studied herself in the misting mirror. Only twenty eight yet her long black hair was graying and violet smudges circled her eyes.
The next night, when she showed up for her shift, Mrs. Croftway found Mel already there, reading the menu at the same spot along the counter.
“I'll have the special but with some juicy tomatoes.” He grinned, slapping the red menu on the speckled formica in front.
“Don’t think we got any of those,” she said, swallowing.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said when she brought cutlery and a napkin. “Waiting on dirty old men.” He waved at the singles strung along the counter.
On her way home, she heard him behind her again. But this time, when she turned left onto Hoover, she ran. Down the street, through the gate, up the steps. Lungs heaving, she found Richard snoring on the sofa. Up in the bathroom she chewed on her fingernails while hot water ran into the tub.
“I'm going places,” Mel promised two nights later. “I want you with me.”
“You're crazy,” she shook her head. “You don't know me. And I’m married.”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding at her name tag, “Mrs. L. Croftway. But you're not happy hon, are you?”
She flittered about, serving coffee and cutting pie. This cocky stranger with the good smile tempted her. Things in her seven-year marriage to Richard had crumbled beyond a simple fix. She’d stuck by because she’d thought she could cure his drinking. Habit entered into her commitment. Guilt too. And she thought a hunk of love was left. Richard had saved her when self-doubt brought her close to doing something stupid. He’d happened across her car in the woods—the motor running—rapped on her window, rousing her, and insisted on taking her to the emergency room. After, he’d stuck around and a year later, married her, buck teeth, gangly arms, broad shoulders and all. But that had been years ago.
When she got home after her shift, Richard hit her.
“I saw you,” he slurred, standing over her where she lay stunned on the living room rug. “I came for some of that beef soup I like. What did I see through the window? My wife shaking her ass at a stranger.”
Habit. Guilt. Love. It all flew out the window with the molar he dislodged. She ran out and found Mel loitering; Mel grabbed her and they left.
They flew to Houston and moved into a small apartment. Mel started bringing in the cash and Mrs. Croftway had her molar replaced. She bought some clothes. Nice shoes. A red leather purse. Soon they moved to a bigger apartment and Mel got her a gold-plated Seiko followed by a fancy ring with a real zircon. He wanted to get married then, but she’d never got around to divorcing Richard. Once burned, twice shy, she figured, when she thought about it.
After two years, Mel got busted over a real estate swindle near Galveston. Mrs. Croftway was shocked. Imagine thinking Mel's business legitimate. She set her lips back down over her teeth. She might now wear better clothes and fancier jewelry, but she was still the same dumb, gangly, big-shouldered, buck-toothed girl she’d ever been.
Mel did several years while she found a kitchen job at Pine Creek Country club, scrubbing carrots, peeling potatoes, chopping onions. He loved that she worked at the club and told her so when she visited him in jail.
“Sling that hash, but keep your eyes open. Get addresses. Make contacts. Watch'em. See who's sleeping and fucking around. Who they're doing it with. Get a camera. Take pictures. Opportunity will strike. Information,” he grinned, “can make folks rich. This is the Information Age. So, baby, let’s cash in.”
“You crazy? Isn't this being recorded?”
Mel looked up at the camera and winked. “Kidding,” he said, leaning into the mike.
Mrs. Croftway frowned and nibbled a cuticle. She wasn’t cashing in. She liked reading cookbooks, pouring over fancy food magazines and then improvising, her heaven-sent gift, as it turned out.
At first, the assistant chefs laughed at the tall, awkward, thirty-two-year old novice with the too-short sleeves, Louisiana twang and serious demeanor. She never talked, never smiled, always kept her mouth shut. But when she whipped up a creamy Béarnaise sauce without a recipe and a buoyant artichoke-scampi soufflé of her own devising, both within her first month, they stopped heckling. Promoted Assistant to an Under Chef in record time, she perfected her knowledge of the arts of vegetables. Soon after, she moved up another notch and crafted soup, then mastered fish and finally moved on to pastry.
How she loved that white kitchen in the oasis of primordial green in humid Houston! Why, she could escape to mysterious India at lunch on the pungent wings of dal and curry and lentils, and then at dinner, turn around and swim to sunny Sicily, the island’s exuberance captured with a medley of silver anchovies, glossy eggplant, salty capers and homemade pasta. She could pare pumpkin and flay ginger, sauté them, purée them with a dollop of cream, garnish with a fried scallop, creating a soup that reminded her she could travel through old American terrain—pumpkin and ginger—but always fashion something new. Likewise, she could knead golden butter with powdery flour, spin gossamer sheets of dough, wrap each around single ripe peaches sprinkled with pine nuts and amaretto cookie crumbs, and thus venture beyond the confines of traditional pie to create marvelous new forms and heavenly new tastes. She took to humming as she worked, happy at the pleasure she dished and served up, happy at the smiles of content, happy at these simple yet ample rewards for her honest labor.
Glowing, she started to dread visits to the man who would ruin her education. She visited less and cooked more. Gradually, the idea of opening a restaurant took root. She scrimped, bought a used Chevrolet, a third-hand trailer and braces for her teeth. She saved the rest of her money, stashing it between the bedroom wall and insulation of the trailer and later, under the back seat of the car, making a mental note to take time to open a bank account in her own name.
Mel, when he saw her at the visitor’s table, blanched pure white. It was his birthday and some vestigial sense of duty charged her with making the trip to jail. She went reluctantly after a four-month absence, a cookbook about soups from all nations a gift under her arm.
“How long you got them wires on your teeth for? Make sure they’re gone when I get out,” he said after a while.
With a hello like that, she should have known he was in a fine ornery fix. But she told him about her dreams anyway. And Mel hated the idea of the restaurant business.
“Sugar, don't want to struggle to get by,” he drawled into the intercom. “We'll be rich soon, doll, soon's I get out. Then someone else'll be making the grub and getting greasy. Not my baby.” He pushed the cookbook around in front of him. “Why'd you bring me a cookbook about soup?”
“I don't get greasy,” she replied, picking at her white cotton sleeves, wishing they hid her knobby wrists, “and it's not just grub.” She tried to tell him with the book—about making something good from next to nothing, about hard work and just rewards—but he wouldn't understand.
Sometime later, Mel got out. Stupid, but she let him move in. When she thought about it, she decided it must have been the force of habit and guilt, like before, with Richard. She didn't love him anymore. At least not in that trusting way like back when she thought he was going to solve her problems. While he was locked up she’d started learning she could fix things herself.
A series of ridiculous schemes, each more risky than the one previous, ended Mel back in jail, convicted of larceny. Outwardly, in the courtroom, Mrs. Croftway shook her head and mourned the lengthy sentence but inside, she was relieved. When she heard that a restaurant near the corner of 6th and Congress in Austin needed a chef, she sent an application. She was hired right away; a Pine Creek patron recommended her.
Although she hated leaving Houston, she loved putting serious geography between her and Mel. Soon the Austin restaurant was doing big business. A food editor visited and Mrs. Croftway's picture appeared in The Statesman with the caption, “Up and Coming Chef Wows Politicos.”
She hadn't told Mel where she'd gone, but afterwards a letter arrived.
“I'm proud of you,” he wrote. “You did good. They write you got talent. Wow! I got to hand it to you, you’re smarter than me. I miss you. Come see me? Love, Mel. PS: Your picture was beautiful. You got some smile there, doll.”
It was surprising, but as she read his letter, a pain in her ribs choked the air right out of her. She figured it was loneliness, all the long hours with no time and no inclination to build a social life. Her father told her she’d never get a good man unless she was soft and alluring and how could someone with her body ever be soft and alluring?
Putting the letter on her bureau, she meditated. Prison had changed Mel for the better. He'd admitted she was right. He said she’d got talent. He’d called her beautiful. Yes, she thought, inhaling. She missed him too.
A week or two later, she took a day off and drove to Houston. She hadn't seen him in months and months and was unprepared. Muscle had expanded to a coat of fat, the thatch of gold had receded to two pale patches surrounded by shiny baldness, he'd lost half an incisor. His eyes sparkled though; he was glad to see her.
“Well, aren't you pretty,” he said.
She blushed.
“Ain't you sweet?” His eyes danced like they had the first night she’d met him all those years before. “You look like that little girl from Lake Charles when you blush.”
When he said that her big body melted and somehow she almost felt dainty again. It had been some time since she’d let herself feel dainty.
Over the next few years, she made frequent trips, sometimes bringing him marshmallow bars or brownies although once she got special permission to bring him a thermos of lobster vichyssoise, a recipe she’d devised for a state senator.
“You cooking for senators?” asked Mel, opening and sniffing the steam that curled out. He took a sip. “This stuff’s got sherry innit, don’t it? Been a long time since I had any sherry.”
As he went on, smirking and slurping, mumbling about sherry and senators and her living the good life, she realized she’d made a mistake. With Mel, you stuck to basics. Now there was something magnifying the greedy folds on either side of his mouth, turning his face sour.
Like before, when he got released, Mel moved in; for the first time in decades she went to Mass and lit a candle, asking for things to work out.
Two days later she had no job.
She was certain he was the one who'd made that anonymous call. The one that turned her boss squeamish. The call where her ties to the criminal world —to Mel— were exposed.
The caller claimed she eavesdropped and passed on information.
“It's not true,” she told her boss, “I just want to cook.”
“I've got important clientele,” the boss said. “They'd stop coming in a second if they knew about your boyfriend. We'll pay you two month's salary. By the way, yesterday was your last day.”
Mel denied it, naturally.
“Gee, doll,” he murmured, “I’m broken up. Who would do such a thing? I done my time, no sense making you do some too.” He smiled. His half tooth glinted.
She could see that the thief hadn’t stopped stealing.
No help for it. No moaning and whining. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps. Even though she gave herself these little pep talks, she couldn’t seem to get out of bed in the morning. So when he suggested El Paso, she said yes. They parked the trailer north of town and she got a job at a lackluster diner where she figured she wouldn't outshine him.
“Until you get back on your feet,” she wheedled, hoping Mel wouldn't ruin this for her too. She whispered a little prayer. “God, please help me,” she said.
The diner did brisk business once she started.
She couldn't help concocting dishes with wondrous names to treat the tired truckers on the route. Soon they came flocking. Word of mouth, buzz, chatter, and the ladies came too. She worried she was playing with fire, still she couldn't stop pouring her heart into food. She hoped that luck—not something about which she knew much—would help. She prayed word wouldn't reach Mel. “God, please?” she said.
“Tagliatelle, boys, Tallya-tell-ay! Homemade-pasta-with-sautéed-mushrooms-and-venison, from Italy,” she sang one night, carrying platters to three enthusiastic truckers heading to Mexico. “Weiner Schnitzel and Canederli from majestic Bavaria, ladies,” she cried one lunch to plump, happy members of Mossyknoll Baptist, “are fancy names for chicken-fried-steak and cinnamon dumplings.”
And then a masterpiece, her chocolate-almond Charlotte.
“French-food-meets-American-genius,” she laughed, giddy, when serving the steamy chocolate mound to the owner. She hovered, an anxious butterfly, watching him chew and swallow, deriving immense pleasure from his small smiles and quiet moans.
Mel walked in while she fluttered around the boss. Shoulders tight, head low, Mel slurped at the spicy shrimp bisque she handed him but didn’t empty his bowl. Throwing a twenty on the counter, he left. Mrs. Croftway watched him through the circular window in the kitchen door, her bony hands bunching the plaid apron around her neck.
When she got off, he was waiting in the parking lot inside the Chevy. A stack of cash sat beside him. He'd found it; the back seat was propped open.
“Louise,” he reprimanded in a scary voice.
“I was saving it for us,” she lied, crying.
“Where's the rest?”
“Rest?”
“You don’t expect me to believe this measly-assed chunk of change is all there is, do you? I'll find the rest if I have to tear car and trailer apart. So you'd best tell me. And tomorrow. No more cooking for other men. You hear me, Louise Ann Croftway?”
When they got home she showed him where the second bag of money was, hidden in the wall below wiring and insulation. The next day she quit the diner. Looking up at the cloudy sky, she asked, “Why? Why couldn’t I just say no?”
Months went by. Her restaurant money was spent. She peeled potatoes for soup. He christened it with names from the soup cookbook, making small amends for broken dreams.
Like tonight. Vichyssoise. But with no leeks, nor cream, nor chicken stock.
The wind howled, the garbage blew. A gaunt face with long stringy hair stared up from the depths of the pot while she stirred it. You got a gift, its eyes said. Your life’s your own.
A dog barked and Mrs. Croftway jumped.
“Damn!” she cried. “You’re right! Louise Ann Croftway gets off for good behavior,” she banged her fist on the table. “This Vichyssoise sentence is hereby commuted!” Her voice echoed inside her tin box home.
She knew what to do. Reporting him, she’d be free.
She untied her apron and drove into town to find an unvandalized phone booth. Sitting in the Chevy, waiting for a man ahead of her to finish talking, she planned her call to 911 to report stolen cars carted off to Mexico by a fat bald man. Chuckling, she envisioned Mel's face when he opened the note (no return address) she would send him after he was locked up:
Sugar, I am broken up. Someone nasty fingered you. Who would do that to such a sweetie? Enjoy the soup you get in prison. And know that out here I'm loving mine. Mine has real cream in it. Because I still got some of the cash I worked hard for to pay for the pleasure.
“Lady?” A gaunt man with stringy hair had hung up the phone, stepped out of the booth and knocked on her window. “You’re free to go,” he said, nodding at the dirty glass cubicle.
Mrs. Croftway jumped again. The face she’d seen in her soup, now leaning at her window. Bunching her coat in her hands, she watched him limp off.
Yes, she decided after the night swallowed him. Free to go. She was free. Always had been. She’d just lacked the nerve.
Stretching her arms in front of her, she studied the wrists and hands that protruded. Large and bumpy, yes. But Strong. Capable. No longer awkward. Hadn’t been awkward for years. So why the hell had it taken her years to find out?
Shifting the Chevy into reverse, she felt light.
Someone Else would take care of Mel. She knew that now. She had a gift; no sense spoiling it with revenge.
Turning around, she considered. She didn’t need anything at the trailer. Not her cookbooks, nor her fancy food magazines, not even her favorite whisk with which she’d whipped life and air into even the thinnest of soups. No. What she needed she already had in her head and her arms and her hands.
Merging onto the highway, then passing a slow-moving truck, she laughed. Sewed into the lining in her purse: the key to the safety deposit box in Austin where she’d deposited a bunch of the money she’d made as a high-flying chef. The previous two stashes—the ones that had satisfied Mel—decoys. She’d been stupid and slow—about Richard, about Mel, about what she thought was love, even about her own body and self—but with food and money? In those two departments no one could call her dumb.
Stepping on the gas, Mrs. Croftway headed southeast toward far-off lights, still laughing, her pretty new teeth shining in the moonlight, her broad hands with their prominent knuckles and wrists firmly planted on the steering wheel.
Natalia (Natasha) Sarkissian was born in Michigan and grew up in California, West Virginia, Portugal, and New York. She holds a BA and MA in art history, an MBA in international finance and an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has worked as a curatorial assistant, a management consultant, a teacher of English as a Foreign Language, and always, as a writer. She received Honorable Mentions in both the 2009 and 2010 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competitions and won The Huffington Post Election Day Story Contest (2008). Several essays appear in Numero Cinq, an online literary magazine where she has been named a Contributing Editor. Her articles and essays on art and finance have been published in the US and Italy by the University of Texas Press and IPSOA publishers. She reads for Hunger Mountain, the Vermont College of Fine Arts Journal of the Arts. Currently finishing her novel (A Visitor’s Guide to Titti’s Men) and working on a book of interlinked short stories (Riviera Red), she divides her time between Italy—where she lives with her husband and two teenage sons—and the United States
This is an expanded version of Natalia Sarkissian's 2010 Honorable Mention, SOUP
The wind blew garbage around. Wild dogs had been out last night and had ripped through black plastic garbage sacks. Sand hissed and she imagined it flying through the cracks in the double-wide where the silicon had dried and shrunk and no longer kept the outside completely out. Little mounds of sand would be piled on the linoleum when the wind stopped.
She would sweep it. Tidy, she was. She wished she could sweep up the shards of broken dreams. Pick'em up. Glue'em together. Start over again.
Mrs. Croftway sighed and pushed a faded lock of brown hair out of her eyes. The curl stuck to her forehead. The air conditioning had died. No money to fix it. The lights sputtered dimly—low wattage bulbs—and she had trouble seeing. No money to pay for electricity or repairs either.
She laughed—a mirthless sound.
Mel was up the road seeing about a job that involved driving a truck-load of hot cars over the border. Luxury cars for South America.
“No risk,” said Mel in the phone to someone the other night, “this new technique makes it easy to substitute registration numbers with ones that are impossible to trace.”
Mrs. Croftway, eavesdropping, wasn't sure. With Mel everything tanked. This illegal car deal would fizzle, backfire, blow up, like everything else. But, what if it didn't?
Well, she'd have to make sure.
She’d loved him but he used love up.
Some years earlier, a muscular man with blond hair and green eyes walked into the diner in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where she waited on customers at the counter. She noticed him, right when he came in. His white shirt stretched so tight across his strapping chest she couldn’t help but wonder why the buttons up the front stayed buttoned.
When he chose an emptied stool in her station, her ears turned red. He studied the menu she gave him, then a short while later, wagged a stubby finger with a too short fingernail.
“The special,” he said.
“Yessir,” she said. “Rare or medium?”
“Honey, I like my meat tender.” His lips opened and a set of perfect teeth—a set she wouldn’t mind having herself—grinned up at her. “Nothing stringy, nothing chewy, nothing tough. No ma'am,” he said.
“Rare, then,” said Mrs. Croftway, scribbling, setting her lips down so he couldn’t see how her incisors stuck out in front.
“You're blushing,” he noted.
“Am not,” she said, shaking her head, fanning her ears. “It's the weather.”
“Sure, doll. By the way, Mel Burrow’s the name.” He reached, took her hand, managed to rub a surprisingly soft thumb over it before she jerked free.
Drinking cups of coffee, ordering extra dessert, he lingered. Then at ten, when she pulled a gray sweater over her avocado uniform, grabbed her purse, and left, he followed a hundred feet back, whistling. Down Main, past Roosevelt, by the park and then left on Hoover. She walked at a brisk pace. She knew she ought to take a detour, go to the drugstore on Lincoln and call a cab so he wouldn't see where she lived. Instead, she kept on, opened the gate at 236 Hoover, walked up the sidewalk and, under the safety of the porch light, watched him stroll by.
“Night,” he smiled, tipping his crew cut as he passed.“Hope I didn’t scare you. Just wanted to see you home, safe.”
But safe she wasn't. When she got the door unlocked Richard stood on the other side.
“Who the hell was that?” he asked, grabbing her hair and yanking her in.
“Stop it,” she cried, her arms flailing, “you're hurting me.”
He twisted her arm and breathed all beery on the back of her neck.“Who was that?”
“No one!” she cried. She rubbed her wrist when he released her.
Upstairs, while water filled the stained tub, she studied herself in the misting mirror. Only twenty eight yet her long black hair was graying and violet smudges circled her eyes.
The next night, when she showed up for her shift, Mrs. Croftway found Mel already there, reading the menu at the same spot along the counter.
“I'll have the special but with some juicy tomatoes.” He grinned, slapping the red menu on the speckled formica in front.
“Don’t think we got any of those,” she said, swallowing.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said when she brought cutlery and a napkin. “Waiting on dirty old men.” He waved at the singles strung along the counter.
On her way home, she heard him behind her again. But this time, when she turned left onto Hoover, she ran. Down the street, through the gate, up the steps. Lungs heaving, she found Richard snoring on the sofa. Up in the bathroom she chewed on her fingernails while hot water ran into the tub.
“I'm going places,” Mel promised two nights later. “I want you with me.”
“You're crazy,” she shook her head. “You don't know me. And I’m married.”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding at her name tag, “Mrs. L. Croftway. But you're not happy hon, are you?”
She flittered about, serving coffee and cutting pie. This cocky stranger with the good smile tempted her. Things in her seven-year marriage to Richard had crumbled beyond a simple fix. She’d stuck by because she’d thought she could cure his drinking. Habit entered into her commitment. Guilt too. And she thought a hunk of love was left. Richard had saved her when self-doubt brought her close to doing something stupid. He’d happened across her car in the woods—the motor running—rapped on her window, rousing her, and insisted on taking her to the emergency room. After, he’d stuck around and a year later, married her, buck teeth, gangly arms, broad shoulders and all. But that had been years ago.
When she got home after her shift, Richard hit her.
“I saw you,” he slurred, standing over her where she lay stunned on the living room rug. “I came for some of that beef soup I like. What did I see through the window? My wife shaking her ass at a stranger.”
Habit. Guilt. Love. It all flew out the window with the molar he dislodged. She ran out and found Mel loitering; Mel grabbed her and they left.
They flew to Houston and moved into a small apartment. Mel started bringing in the cash and Mrs. Croftway had her molar replaced. She bought some clothes. Nice shoes. A red leather purse. Soon they moved to a bigger apartment and Mel got her a gold-plated Seiko followed by a fancy ring with a real zircon. He wanted to get married then, but she’d never got around to divorcing Richard. Once burned, twice shy, she figured, when she thought about it.
After two years, Mel got busted over a real estate swindle near Galveston. Mrs. Croftway was shocked. Imagine thinking Mel's business legitimate. She set her lips back down over her teeth. She might now wear better clothes and fancier jewelry, but she was still the same dumb, gangly, big-shouldered, buck-toothed girl she’d ever been.
Mel did several years while she found a kitchen job at Pine Creek Country club, scrubbing carrots, peeling potatoes, chopping onions. He loved that she worked at the club and told her so when she visited him in jail.
“Sling that hash, but keep your eyes open. Get addresses. Make contacts. Watch'em. See who's sleeping and fucking around. Who they're doing it with. Get a camera. Take pictures. Opportunity will strike. Information,” he grinned, “can make folks rich. This is the Information Age. So, baby, let’s cash in.”
“You crazy? Isn't this being recorded?”
Mel looked up at the camera and winked. “Kidding,” he said, leaning into the mike.
Mrs. Croftway frowned and nibbled a cuticle. She wasn’t cashing in. She liked reading cookbooks, pouring over fancy food magazines and then improvising, her heaven-sent gift, as it turned out.
At first, the assistant chefs laughed at the tall, awkward, thirty-two-year old novice with the too-short sleeves, Louisiana twang and serious demeanor. She never talked, never smiled, always kept her mouth shut. But when she whipped up a creamy Béarnaise sauce without a recipe and a buoyant artichoke-scampi soufflé of her own devising, both within her first month, they stopped heckling. Promoted Assistant to an Under Chef in record time, she perfected her knowledge of the arts of vegetables. Soon after, she moved up another notch and crafted soup, then mastered fish and finally moved on to pastry.
How she loved that white kitchen in the oasis of primordial green in humid Houston! Why, she could escape to mysterious India at lunch on the pungent wings of dal and curry and lentils, and then at dinner, turn around and swim to sunny Sicily, the island’s exuberance captured with a medley of silver anchovies, glossy eggplant, salty capers and homemade pasta. She could pare pumpkin and flay ginger, sauté them, purée them with a dollop of cream, garnish with a fried scallop, creating a soup that reminded her she could travel through old American terrain—pumpkin and ginger—but always fashion something new. Likewise, she could knead golden butter with powdery flour, spin gossamer sheets of dough, wrap each around single ripe peaches sprinkled with pine nuts and amaretto cookie crumbs, and thus venture beyond the confines of traditional pie to create marvelous new forms and heavenly new tastes. She took to humming as she worked, happy at the pleasure she dished and served up, happy at the smiles of content, happy at these simple yet ample rewards for her honest labor.
Glowing, she started to dread visits to the man who would ruin her education. She visited less and cooked more. Gradually, the idea of opening a restaurant took root. She scrimped, bought a used Chevrolet, a third-hand trailer and braces for her teeth. She saved the rest of her money, stashing it between the bedroom wall and insulation of the trailer and later, under the back seat of the car, making a mental note to take time to open a bank account in her own name.
Mel, when he saw her at the visitor’s table, blanched pure white. It was his birthday and some vestigial sense of duty charged her with making the trip to jail. She went reluctantly after a four-month absence, a cookbook about soups from all nations a gift under her arm.
“How long you got them wires on your teeth for? Make sure they’re gone when I get out,” he said after a while.
With a hello like that, she should have known he was in a fine ornery fix. But she told him about her dreams anyway. And Mel hated the idea of the restaurant business.
“Sugar, don't want to struggle to get by,” he drawled into the intercom. “We'll be rich soon, doll, soon's I get out. Then someone else'll be making the grub and getting greasy. Not my baby.” He pushed the cookbook around in front of him. “Why'd you bring me a cookbook about soup?”
“I don't get greasy,” she replied, picking at her white cotton sleeves, wishing they hid her knobby wrists, “and it's not just grub.” She tried to tell him with the book—about making something good from next to nothing, about hard work and just rewards—but he wouldn't understand.
Sometime later, Mel got out. Stupid, but she let him move in. When she thought about it, she decided it must have been the force of habit and guilt, like before, with Richard. She didn't love him anymore. At least not in that trusting way like back when she thought he was going to solve her problems. While he was locked up she’d started learning she could fix things herself.
A series of ridiculous schemes, each more risky than the one previous, ended Mel back in jail, convicted of larceny. Outwardly, in the courtroom, Mrs. Croftway shook her head and mourned the lengthy sentence but inside, she was relieved. When she heard that a restaurant near the corner of 6th and Congress in Austin needed a chef, she sent an application. She was hired right away; a Pine Creek patron recommended her.
Although she hated leaving Houston, she loved putting serious geography between her and Mel. Soon the Austin restaurant was doing big business. A food editor visited and Mrs. Croftway's picture appeared in The Statesman with the caption, “Up and Coming Chef Wows Politicos.”
She hadn't told Mel where she'd gone, but afterwards a letter arrived.
“I'm proud of you,” he wrote. “You did good. They write you got talent. Wow! I got to hand it to you, you’re smarter than me. I miss you. Come see me? Love, Mel. PS: Your picture was beautiful. You got some smile there, doll.”
It was surprising, but as she read his letter, a pain in her ribs choked the air right out of her. She figured it was loneliness, all the long hours with no time and no inclination to build a social life. Her father told her she’d never get a good man unless she was soft and alluring and how could someone with her body ever be soft and alluring?
Putting the letter on her bureau, she meditated. Prison had changed Mel for the better. He'd admitted she was right. He said she’d got talent. He’d called her beautiful. Yes, she thought, inhaling. She missed him too.
A week or two later, she took a day off and drove to Houston. She hadn't seen him in months and months and was unprepared. Muscle had expanded to a coat of fat, the thatch of gold had receded to two pale patches surrounded by shiny baldness, he'd lost half an incisor. His eyes sparkled though; he was glad to see her.
“Well, aren't you pretty,” he said.
She blushed.
“Ain't you sweet?” His eyes danced like they had the first night she’d met him all those years before. “You look like that little girl from Lake Charles when you blush.”
When he said that her big body melted and somehow she almost felt dainty again. It had been some time since she’d let herself feel dainty.
Over the next few years, she made frequent trips, sometimes bringing him marshmallow bars or brownies although once she got special permission to bring him a thermos of lobster vichyssoise, a recipe she’d devised for a state senator.
“You cooking for senators?” asked Mel, opening and sniffing the steam that curled out. He took a sip. “This stuff’s got sherry innit, don’t it? Been a long time since I had any sherry.”
As he went on, smirking and slurping, mumbling about sherry and senators and her living the good life, she realized she’d made a mistake. With Mel, you stuck to basics. Now there was something magnifying the greedy folds on either side of his mouth, turning his face sour.
Like before, when he got released, Mel moved in; for the first time in decades she went to Mass and lit a candle, asking for things to work out.
Two days later she had no job.
She was certain he was the one who'd made that anonymous call. The one that turned her boss squeamish. The call where her ties to the criminal world —to Mel— were exposed.
The caller claimed she eavesdropped and passed on information.
“It's not true,” she told her boss, “I just want to cook.”
“I've got important clientele,” the boss said. “They'd stop coming in a second if they knew about your boyfriend. We'll pay you two month's salary. By the way, yesterday was your last day.”
Mel denied it, naturally.
“Gee, doll,” he murmured, “I’m broken up. Who would do such a thing? I done my time, no sense making you do some too.” He smiled. His half tooth glinted.
She could see that the thief hadn’t stopped stealing.
No help for it. No moaning and whining. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps. Even though she gave herself these little pep talks, she couldn’t seem to get out of bed in the morning. So when he suggested El Paso, she said yes. They parked the trailer north of town and she got a job at a lackluster diner where she figured she wouldn't outshine him.
“Until you get back on your feet,” she wheedled, hoping Mel wouldn't ruin this for her too. She whispered a little prayer. “God, please help me,” she said.
The diner did brisk business once she started.
She couldn't help concocting dishes with wondrous names to treat the tired truckers on the route. Soon they came flocking. Word of mouth, buzz, chatter, and the ladies came too. She worried she was playing with fire, still she couldn't stop pouring her heart into food. She hoped that luck—not something about which she knew much—would help. She prayed word wouldn't reach Mel. “God, please?” she said.
“Tagliatelle, boys, Tallya-tell-ay! Homemade-pasta-with-sautéed-mushrooms-and-venison, from Italy,” she sang one night, carrying platters to three enthusiastic truckers heading to Mexico. “Weiner Schnitzel and Canederli from majestic Bavaria, ladies,” she cried one lunch to plump, happy members of Mossyknoll Baptist, “are fancy names for chicken-fried-steak and cinnamon dumplings.”
And then a masterpiece, her chocolate-almond Charlotte.
“French-food-meets-American-genius,” she laughed, giddy, when serving the steamy chocolate mound to the owner. She hovered, an anxious butterfly, watching him chew and swallow, deriving immense pleasure from his small smiles and quiet moans.
Mel walked in while she fluttered around the boss. Shoulders tight, head low, Mel slurped at the spicy shrimp bisque she handed him but didn’t empty his bowl. Throwing a twenty on the counter, he left. Mrs. Croftway watched him through the circular window in the kitchen door, her bony hands bunching the plaid apron around her neck.
When she got off, he was waiting in the parking lot inside the Chevy. A stack of cash sat beside him. He'd found it; the back seat was propped open.
“Louise,” he reprimanded in a scary voice.
“I was saving it for us,” she lied, crying.
“Where's the rest?”
“Rest?”
“You don’t expect me to believe this measly-assed chunk of change is all there is, do you? I'll find the rest if I have to tear car and trailer apart. So you'd best tell me. And tomorrow. No more cooking for other men. You hear me, Louise Ann Croftway?”
When they got home she showed him where the second bag of money was, hidden in the wall below wiring and insulation. The next day she quit the diner. Looking up at the cloudy sky, she asked, “Why? Why couldn’t I just say no?”
Months went by. Her restaurant money was spent. She peeled potatoes for soup. He christened it with names from the soup cookbook, making small amends for broken dreams.
Like tonight. Vichyssoise. But with no leeks, nor cream, nor chicken stock.
The wind howled, the garbage blew. A gaunt face with long stringy hair stared up from the depths of the pot while she stirred it. You got a gift, its eyes said. Your life’s your own.
A dog barked and Mrs. Croftway jumped.
“Damn!” she cried. “You’re right! Louise Ann Croftway gets off for good behavior,” she banged her fist on the table. “This Vichyssoise sentence is hereby commuted!” Her voice echoed inside her tin box home.
She knew what to do. Reporting him, she’d be free.
She untied her apron and drove into town to find an unvandalized phone booth. Sitting in the Chevy, waiting for a man ahead of her to finish talking, she planned her call to 911 to report stolen cars carted off to Mexico by a fat bald man. Chuckling, she envisioned Mel's face when he opened the note (no return address) she would send him after he was locked up:
Sugar, I am broken up. Someone nasty fingered you. Who would do that to such a sweetie? Enjoy the soup you get in prison. And know that out here I'm loving mine. Mine has real cream in it. Because I still got some of the cash I worked hard for to pay for the pleasure.
“Lady?” A gaunt man with stringy hair had hung up the phone, stepped out of the booth and knocked on her window. “You’re free to go,” he said, nodding at the dirty glass cubicle.
Mrs. Croftway jumped again. The face she’d seen in her soup, now leaning at her window. Bunching her coat in her hands, she watched him limp off.
Yes, she decided after the night swallowed him. Free to go. She was free. Always had been. She’d just lacked the nerve.
Stretching her arms in front of her, she studied the wrists and hands that protruded. Large and bumpy, yes. But Strong. Capable. No longer awkward. Hadn’t been awkward for years. So why the hell had it taken her years to find out?
Shifting the Chevy into reverse, she felt light.
Someone Else would take care of Mel. She knew that now. She had a gift; no sense spoiling it with revenge.
Turning around, she considered. She didn’t need anything at the trailer. Not her cookbooks, nor her fancy food magazines, not even her favorite whisk with which she’d whipped life and air into even the thinnest of soups. No. What she needed she already had in her head and her arms and her hands.
Merging onto the highway, then passing a slow-moving truck, she laughed. Sewed into the lining in her purse: the key to the safety deposit box in Austin where she’d deposited a bunch of the money she’d made as a high-flying chef. The previous two stashes—the ones that had satisfied Mel—decoys. She’d been stupid and slow—about Richard, about Mel, about what she thought was love, even about her own body and self—but with food and money? In those two departments no one could call her dumb.
Stepping on the gas, Mrs. Croftway headed southeast toward far-off lights, still laughing, her pretty new teeth shining in the moonlight, her broad hands with their prominent knuckles and wrists firmly planted on the steering wheel.
Natalia (Natasha) Sarkissian was born in Michigan and grew up in California, West Virginia, Portugal, and New York. She holds a BA and MA in art history, an MBA in international finance and an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has worked as a curatorial assistant, a management consultant, a teacher of English as a Foreign Language, and always, as a writer. She received Honorable Mentions in both the 2009 and 2010 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competitions and won The Huffington Post Election Day Story Contest (2008). Several essays appear in Numero Cinq, an online literary magazine where she has been named a Contributing Editor. Her articles and essays on art and finance have been published in the US and Italy by the University of Texas Press and IPSOA publishers. She reads for Hunger Mountain, the Vermont College of Fine Arts Journal of the Arts. Currently finishing her novel (A Visitor’s Guide to Titti’s Men) and working on a book of interlinked short stories (Riviera Red), she divides her time between Italy—where she lives with her husband and two teenage sons—and the United States
This is an expanded version of Natalia Sarkissian's 2010 Honorable Mention, SOUP
Sunday, December 12, 2010
"Namesake" by Amy Hillgren Peterson: 2010 Honorable Mention
Gemma Galgani moved.
Sunset made the peace yellow walls blush pink with what seemed to be anticipation. They were beginning domestic relations with the four Galgani-Pierces. Mason threw cans of Schlitz to Ned, Kelly, Bruce, and Will. He'd seduced them with promises of beer and ribs in exchange for their bodies' exertion.
The point, Gemma concluded as she hammered brads into the drywall, was that she could move a dozen neighborhoods away from 7720 Knollwood Lane, but the tender beauty of her lost loved ones' eyes would follow her as long as she framed them in, slipped them under glass, and lived with them. She also realized, sick of smelling her own sweat, that the blessing would follow her, too.
"Mom," Henry breathed. "Mom, who's that?”
He picked up Aurelia in his brown-red hands, and the sweaty slickness of them couldn't hold the frame, and with a lunge and slide, Gemma rescued her mother in time.
"Henry, you know who this is. It's your grandmother."
"She doesn't look like a grandmother."
"She was young."
"Was she being your mother then?"
"She never stopped."
"Even though she died?"
"That's right."
"She'll always be with us?"
"Henry, you know this."
"It's hard having only one live grandmother."
"We survive."
"I'm going back outside."
Aurelia, forever thirty-six, said nothing. She insisted, her smile capturing the photographer's imagination, that life, however troubled, and death, had a joyful marriage and an unforgettable new beginning. She already looked content on the west wall. Gemma knew she'd be looking for Genevieve to the east.
Genevieve would wait. Charles insisted on the space above the buffet on the northeast. In gray scale his hair and eyes created caverns of black on the photograph. He didn't wear tribal costume in the candid shot, but grinned with irony in front of a local museum display of an immaculate, bleach-white tepee and wax figures of relaxed, unblemished Santee who could never have hunted anything, not even the bison standing still through the magic of taxidermy.
Life is dirty, Charles told Gemma and Genevieve inside the tepee. "If you haven't been covered in it by the end, you've wasted the gift, and it disappears into the wind, hoping your descendants will have more honor."
Gemma's memory soared through a wind tunnel, careening past the tepee to Genevieve's hand reaching for hers, the two of them on the front seat of the Malibu, of Charles driving into the sangria sunset, in laughter never seeing the edge of asphalt and the oak standing in a carpet of Jerusalem artichokes.
Instantly, Charles was gone.
Genevieve persevered for four months. "I'm ready," she said, and before Gemma could object, she closed her eyes, one blue and one brown, slowly, and whispered, "Forever."
Then,as Gemma cried, "No!", Genevieve told her, "Stars."
The night five years after Genevieve's funeral, Gemma woke with a gasping scream and saw the night sky's stars through her hand. Not through the spaces between her fingers, but through a window that didn't belong. Then a drip landed on her chest. Clammy.
Scream.
"What is it?" Mason clapped on the lamp.
"My hand," Gemma whispered.
"What did you do?" Mason asked, “What did you do?” He repeated three times with a burgeoning anxiety.
"Nothing. I didn't do anything." Blood made a splashing pattern on the white sheet. "It just happened."
"It's like...that thing. The blood. Of Christ. The cross."
"Stigmata." Gemma was calmer.
"But we're Lutheran."
"I don't know why it would happen to me."
Mason picked up his i-Pad and typed furiously. Back in his element, he applied logic like gauze to the bewildering wound.
Three-ten a.m. The single conclusion: it's apparently a blessing to be a victim soul. And the wound would probably go away. Something about the Pope.
Sleep.
Gemma stood inside the newest house. She sought to light it before everyone started bumping into each other, and the dog.
She found a switch for the dining room that provided enough light to set Genevieve on the east. Aurelia was radiant, beaming at her daughter with sparkling, heavily made up eyes, pouty lips and impossibly youthful skin.
The commute from the new house was forty minutes longer, even on a clear day. The hospital pharmacy rushed.
"Glad you're here," Dylan, the lanky pharm tech greeted her. "We were about to go under."
Jane, the head pharmacist, silently loaded an I.V. drip.
"Where can I jump in?" Gemma asked.
Jane handed her a pile of paper prescriptions. "You can enter these."
The white slips of paper soaked crimson and Gemma sank to the floor.
"Gemma!" Dylan yelled. "What happened?"
"What is that? Paper cut gone wild?" Jane was gifted at turning Gemma's work issues into a joke.
"It's stigmata." Gemma panted as she held her wounded hand against her chest where blood gurgled over her black sweater and grey lab coat.
The phone shrieked. Dylan beat on the computer that had locked up and Jane frantically wiped at the saturated prescription slips. Dylan buzzed in Dr. Kotor, who rushed to Gemma's side. The pain retreated, blood slowed, and before Dr. Kotor's astonished eyes, the wound disappeared.
"What was that?" Dylan asked.
"I read about this during my sub-i," Dr. Kotor said.
"You're a dermatologist," Jane pointed out.
"This is a break in the skin, is it not? Dr. Kotor said.
"Yeah!" Dylan said. "What causes it?"
"There are some things," Dr. Kotor replied, "and as a scientist, I used to reject this, but there are some things that science and reason fail to explain."
"Epic fail," Dylan said.
Gemma's head spun, separate pinwheels dizzying each quadrant of her brain.
"I'll drive you home," Dr. Kotor said.
"I live out in Hamish now."
"You moved again?" Dylan looked astonished.
Jane was silent.
Gemma woke up in her bed. Dr. Kotor must have carried her there because the last thing she remembered from the front seat of the apple green Prius was Dr. Kotor saying, "Some things are too mighty for science and reason. You can keep your mind clear and still open your imagination to wonder."
Mason came home, saw Gemma, and left her in bed. He made spaghetti and meatballs for the boys. He brought her a plate. She picked at it, looking vacantly out the window. "Now everyone knows," she said to Mason.
The phone rang.
There was a knock at the door.
Gemma's i-Phone chimed in with a text.
Henry answered the phone downstairs.
Gemma opened her text. It was from Dylan.
"Channel 7. Now!" It said.
Gemma grabbed the remote and switched on the TV. She heard Mason saying, "No, no. We don't want any interviews," just as she saw her own face in her hospital staff picture on the screen.
"A pharmacist at the hospital, Galgani experienced what officials are calling a stigmata at work this afternoon."
Henry climbed up on the bed. "What's a stigmata?"
"It's..." Gemma had no words.
"Does it hurt?" Henry asked.
"Sometimes."
"Why do you have it?"
"I don't know."
"Are you a freak?"
"No."
"Then why is it on TV?"
"I guess," Gemma sighed. "I guess people are curious because it's different. It doesn't happen every day."
"Can a doctor fix it?"
"I don't think so."
"Can I be on TV?"
"Probably not."
Mason came in. "You go to bed," he said to Henry.
"I won't be able to sleep. There's reporters all over."
"They're going away."
"Is this why we move all the time?" Henry asked.
"It's part of it," Gemma admitted.
"That's stupid."
"Why?" Gemma asked.
"Because you can't run away from yourself." Henry leaped off the bed, nearly knocking Gemma and Mason's wedding picture off the wall. He scrambled out the door, across the hall, and slammed the door to his room, closing it behind the wise dreams he was about to dream.
"Do I need to call the real estate office in the morning?" Mason asked.
"No. We're staying."
Amy Hillgren Peterson is a writer in the Lakes area of Iowa. In addition to short fiction, she writes theatrical plays and essays. To make a living she writes PR documents, grant proposals and collaborates on memoirs and other books. She's been married to Ed for 18 years and is the mother of two sons and a daughter. Her websites: http://themoreyoushowme.com/ and http://amyhillgrenpeterson.webs.com/
Sunday, October 24, 2010
"Tan Shoes and Pink Shoelaces" by Kimila Bowling: 2010 Honorable Mention
Fate penciled me in that afternoon. I merely showed up, and the ability to differentiate reality from fantasy revealed itself. At seven I didn’t understand this developmental leap, nor was I conscious a cognitive enlightenment had occurred. I simply knew special wasn’t special anymore.
My final day of blessed ignorance to the actualities of life began in our nook and cranny kitchen on the east side of Scobey, Mississippi. I sat at the dinette in the nook eating a peanut butter-plastered pancake. I’d yet to dress for the day.
A bad case of the “Arthur” had Granny Tulley stoved-up. She’d called earlier in the morning to relay this information and report cheese and crackers had sustained her for the past two days. Although everyone knew a woman of Granny’s proportion could never be satisfied with meager morsels of Ritz and cheddar, Momma succumbed to the woman who described childbirth as a near-death experience and went to her mother’s aid; thus, keeping a daughter’s conscious clear.
Dad entered the cranny portion of the kitchen scuffing his bare feet across the linoleum.
“We’re on our own, kid.”
He scratched the back of his head and shuffled a tight one-eighty to keep his rhythm.
“Get dressed. I need to go to Jax’s.”
On his way out, he slid the newspaper off the counter and poked it under one arm.
I abandoned my breakfast and high-kneed a skip to my room.
By the time we pulled in front of Jax’s, which by the way took up space in downtown Scobey, the sun could see its reflection on the side of the water tower, and it looked as if we had arrived too late. For what, I didn’t know. But the line at the movie house stretched half a block, and the Assembly’s bake sale had dwindled to a few pies.
When Dad’s soles hit the graveled and tarred surface, he squinted and butted the side of his hand along the top of his eyebrows. He let his eyes bounce along the sidewalks where they eventually settled on Laura Jean Dell.
“How’d you like to see a movie?” he asked, dragging me to the freckled-faced teen.
He handed me two dollars after promising Laura Jean five if she’d see me to The Fontaine Theater. She agreed, liberating Dad and sentencing me to a double matinee featuring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon. Three hours passed before I saw daylight again.
Upon leaving The Fontaine, Laura Jean took me aside then bent over until our eyes met.
“Go get your Dad. He promised me five dollars.”
I could smell the teenage girl’s cinnamon clove gum as I watched her jaw slid to one side every time she squashed it between her teeth. While balancing on my right leg, I scratched the back of its calf with the top of my left sandal.
“Can’t you come with me? He’s just over there.” I pointed across the street to Jax’s.
“I’ll walk you across the street but I can’t go in. My mom says I’ll get a bad reputation if I’m seen going in there.”
I thought about what she’d said then asked, “What about mine?”
“You’re not old enough to get one,” she said.
My elder’s logic made sense. So I skipped across the street.
Inside Jax’s, cirrus layers of lingering tobacco smoke obscured the already insufficient lighting. Pool balls clacking against one another and the random launching of cuss words created momentary breaks in the chatter and laughter. I kept one hand on the door, self-appointing it home as one would in a game of hide and seek, until I found Dad. He was leaning on a pool stick, holding a bottle between his thumb and forefinger. I went to him.
“Dad,” I said tugging on his britches leg, looking in the vicinity his eyes would be if he were to look at me.
“Hey, kid. Movie over?” he asked. He checked the time before finding my gaze.
“Yeah, and Laura Jean wants her money.”
He handed off the pool stick then took my hand. As we walked to the door, he guzzled the last drink from his bottle before leaving it on the bar. After Dad paid Laura Jean, we crossed the street and ventured into Pryce’s Grocery and Dry Goods. By now, movement on main street had become sporadic, and old men had begun trickling into the store as slowly as leaves falling from a border oak in mid-September. Their seats, stacked wooden crates, formed the customary circle for their afternoon gathering. Some packed a jaw with tobacco while others rolled a smoke. Success of the American Legion team started the powwow early.
Lunch had come and gone, and neither Dad nor I had eaten anything, at least nothing worth mentioning. Dad asked Mr. Pryce to fix him a bologna and hot pepper cheese sandwich, and after several minutes of deliberation, I settled on pickle loaf with mustard, voicing a preference to having the condiment spread on both slices of bread. Mr. Pryce took note. Dad then chose an RC. I favored a grape Nehi.
I didn’t remember Dad saying go. I didn’t know we were racing, but as Mr. Pryce handed me my sandwich, Dad poked his last bite into his mouth. He chased it with a drink and was looking in one of the glass cases which lined both sides of the register before swallowing either.
Mr. Pryce left his domain behind the meat counter to join him. On his way, he lifted his apron with one hand then individually twisted each finger of the opposite hand into the stained fabric. He continued the process as he stood across the glass case from Dad.
After a few bites of pickle loaf and a bottle of Nehi, I felt full. As I wiped mustard off my chin, I decided to linger at the front of the store. Items in the glass case held Dad’s interest, and the old men, who once looked harmless, had traded baseball and a friendly slap on the back for the rising cost of seed and keeping one’s hands to oneself.
At its brightest, the sun spotlighted the best Pryce’s had to offer. Now, its diminishing rays had to stretch to reach the display window, resulting in a partially drawn curtain of darkness. Offstage, a pair of watches – one for a lady, the other a man – passed their time on a piece of black velveteen. Still on stage, a headless mannequin modeled a lace-collared blouse with a floral print skirt. In a sunlit corner, a six-tier pyramid of Libby’s canned vegetables displayed a sign naming it the special of the week. But center stage. Center stage held the answer to coping with the rise in seed prices, Annette’s answer to persuading Frankie to take her to the beach party, and Momma’s answer to squashing Granny Tulley’s power of conviction. The main attraction was a pair of tan shoes, size eleven. A bargain at $7.50. Especially, since they came with pink shoelaces.
Dad had remained focused on the trinkets in the case. As I closed the distance between us, he made his decision and indicated so by pointing. Mr. Pryce retrieved the item, placed it in a small box, then they slid in unison to the register.
“Dad,” I said as I bounced on my tiptoes. “The shoes.”
I tried to take his hand, but he lifted it out of my reach. My fingers found his back pocket where I tugged each syllable.
“Pleeease, Dad-dy. The shoes in the win-dow. They’re just my size.”
Mr. Pryce’s hand hung by its fingertips on the register’s handle as he looked toward me, then at Dad, and repeat the process several times. His pause compelled me to clasp my hands under my chin and look up. As Dad smiled at the man behind the counter, he shook his head. When I heard the register’s drawer open, I realize my shameless display of desperation had gone unheeded.
Outside, Dad opened the driver’s side door of the truck and waited. Unwanted tears came but I didn’t swipe. My hands stayed prisoners in my pockets until I crawled in the truck.
We didn’t turn toward home but continued down the street passed Jax’s and The Fontaine.
“This isn’t the way home,” I said before sitting on my knees, choosing to watch where we’d been instead of where we were going.
Dad pulled his visor down then opened his window. My hair twirled around my face as a willow in a windstorm. I tucked it behind my ears; however, more strands than not continued to wave.
“I need to take care of something. You don’t mind do you?”
My shoulders said they didn’t care before I rested my chin on the back of the seat. From the corner of my eye, I watched him take a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He shook up a Benson and Hedges, threw the pack on the dash, then pushed in the lighter. As he waited for it to pop, he asked, “How about some music?” He smiled and beckoned me to his side with a head gesture.
The lighter clicked before I could answer, and within seconds, I could see smoke swirling above his head. When I turned and sat close to him, he took this for a yes and turn the radio on.
The Beatles and Dylan took us as far as the first left, directly passed the mill. Patty Page sang until we reached the fork in the road, then Neil Diamond ushered us to the Charlton’s mailbox and up their driveway.
The paint on the house reminded me of a half-scaled crappie, and the one dangling shutter of a hook in its bottom lip. No automobile sat beside the house. No one played in the yard. No dog lay on the porch and no one came to the door. The only declarations of occupancy were the open front door and the laundry hanging from the clothesline alongside the house.
Before Dad went to the door, he placed a kiss on my cheek. I found it odd he entered without knocking. More so when he let the screen door slap against the wooden frame.
I spent time watching the breeze swing the clothes on the line. One of the unmentionables conveyed the owner’s shared liking for my favorite color, red, indicating her appreciation for the unorthodox. She would surely sympathize with me on my recent disappointment in Dad for denying me the last pair of shoes I would ever ask for.
Time had passed since I’d enjoyed the grape Nehi, and last year when Granny Tulley started blaming her occasional accidents on a stretched bladder, I no longer waited until squirming or crossing my legs became necessary. A refusal to risk a regression to where I wet myself had become the rule.
Honeysuckle blossomed a few feet beyond the row of laundry. I pushed open the truck’s door and slid from the seat. After confident the foliage provided ample coverage, I prepared myself and squatted. My eyes watered as relief came to my bladder, and I assured myself serious expansion had been averted.
When I started back to the truck, the colorful undergarment waved, proudly displaying itself, imitating a flag flying high, nobly symbolizing what it represented. I thought they came in one color--white, the color of Momma’s. Wary, nevertheless intrigued, I reached to touch it, but Dad’s voice passing through an opened window pulled my attention toward him.
“Come on,” he said. “give me more time.”
A woman answered. “I’m tired of waiting.”
“Here sweetheart,” Dad again. “I bought you something.”
The woman squealed then thanked Dad with the recognizable slurps and smacks dads and mommas were suppose to share.
“A little more time?” Dad said.
Enough had been heard. Too many things had been exposed. I retreated but in my haste, a pair of woman’s slacks levitated in front of me. Tangled in britches and stumbling, I groped the air for something, anything, to keep me upright, but all my outstretched fingers snagged was one of the red bra’s shoulder straps. I then heard the wooden clothespins give to the added weight and snap from the line. Closing my eyes, I braced for the fall.
Dad must have heard the commotion because when I opened my eyes, he was looking down at me.
“What are you doing?” He took his hands off his hips and extended one to me.
Ignoring his offer, I got to my feet and brushed passed him. “I had to pee.”
He stayed on my heels until we neared the truck where he double-timed his pace and opened his door for me.
Side-stepping the usual routine, I marched to my side and climbed in. He kept silent as he sat behind the wheel and turned the key. After backing out of the yard, he proceeded down the driveway. This time turning toward home.
With the sun now to our backs, he slapped up his visor then cranked his window, leaving a smoker’s crack. I sat close to my door letting the space between us provided an invisible barrier. A barrier a single word could crumble. An emotional safeguard I knew wouldn’t last.
“Are you all right?” he asked before searching the dash for his pack of cigarettes. After finding them, he lit one and returned the pack to his shirt pocket.
“Fine,” I said. But I wasn’t.
The radio crackled between bouts of music. Instead of tuning in on a station, he clicked it off. While holding the wheel and cigarette in one hand, he reached over and skimmed his fingertips down my hair. I kept my eyes on the road and pulled away. An unspoken answer to his unspoken question.
He switched his driving hand and drew a long pull off his cigarette, but before the cherry dimmed, he snapped his back straight and gripped the wheel at ten and two.
“Hey,” he said, hitting the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “How about we stop at Pryce’s and get you those shoes?” He shook his head in an effort to convince us both he’d found the answer.
“Yep. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll go back. We’ll go back and get those shoes.”
He turned to watch the road before he accelerated, unaware I no longer shared his newly found optimism of the shoe’s powers or his desire for something new and unique. I now craved pancakes, peanut butter, and a pretense of reality as I fostered a hatred for those shoes and the type of girl who would wear them.
By the time we passed the city limit’s sign, the vining morning glories twisting around its wooden post had lost their day’s blooms. The vapor lights lining the streets had completed their evening ritual of flickering on and off; a momentary period of indecision usually resulting in illumination and a lulling hum.
I looked at him because as yet, he hadn’t turned on the headlights. However, I found myself unable to turn away as he maintained a position so close to the wheel he could’ve used it for a chin rest. Further inspection brought me to a pulsing ball of jaw muscle and a perpetual trail of sweat running along the front of his ear. I then noticed his stare which never wavered from the road. I saw a man determined to change the course of a storm, and his refusal to accept the finality of time. I, on the other hand, had resentfully accepted both.
Kimila Bowling - Biography
My father had a Kraco eight-track in his grasshopper- green Ford pickup. When I would go with him, he’d play my favorite song, “Tan Shoes and Pink Shoelaces,” and I did want a pair of those shoes.
As time passed, I grew up and realized tan was sort of bland and pink clashed with my skin tone. I also discovered you’re supposed to duck while riding in a grasshopper- green truck.
Trying to move forward with my life, I attended a program to become a court stenographer, but I found the dialogue between the attorney and witness boring. It was a constant struggle not to embellish testimony during transcription. I then went through a delusional phase and attended cosmetology and manicurist school. I can’t do hair. I can’t do nails, but I can buy hair products wholesale.
I did, however, work in the insurance industry for fifteen years but kept my storytelling alive while tracking wanted clients for a bail bondsman.
My final day of blessed ignorance to the actualities of life began in our nook and cranny kitchen on the east side of Scobey, Mississippi. I sat at the dinette in the nook eating a peanut butter-plastered pancake. I’d yet to dress for the day.
A bad case of the “Arthur” had Granny Tulley stoved-up. She’d called earlier in the morning to relay this information and report cheese and crackers had sustained her for the past two days. Although everyone knew a woman of Granny’s proportion could never be satisfied with meager morsels of Ritz and cheddar, Momma succumbed to the woman who described childbirth as a near-death experience and went to her mother’s aid; thus, keeping a daughter’s conscious clear.
Dad entered the cranny portion of the kitchen scuffing his bare feet across the linoleum.
“We’re on our own, kid.”
He scratched the back of his head and shuffled a tight one-eighty to keep his rhythm.
“Get dressed. I need to go to Jax’s.”
On his way out, he slid the newspaper off the counter and poked it under one arm.
I abandoned my breakfast and high-kneed a skip to my room.
By the time we pulled in front of Jax’s, which by the way took up space in downtown Scobey, the sun could see its reflection on the side of the water tower, and it looked as if we had arrived too late. For what, I didn’t know. But the line at the movie house stretched half a block, and the Assembly’s bake sale had dwindled to a few pies.
When Dad’s soles hit the graveled and tarred surface, he squinted and butted the side of his hand along the top of his eyebrows. He let his eyes bounce along the sidewalks where they eventually settled on Laura Jean Dell.
“How’d you like to see a movie?” he asked, dragging me to the freckled-faced teen.
He handed me two dollars after promising Laura Jean five if she’d see me to The Fontaine Theater. She agreed, liberating Dad and sentencing me to a double matinee featuring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon. Three hours passed before I saw daylight again.
Upon leaving The Fontaine, Laura Jean took me aside then bent over until our eyes met.
“Go get your Dad. He promised me five dollars.”
I could smell the teenage girl’s cinnamon clove gum as I watched her jaw slid to one side every time she squashed it between her teeth. While balancing on my right leg, I scratched the back of its calf with the top of my left sandal.
“Can’t you come with me? He’s just over there.” I pointed across the street to Jax’s.
“I’ll walk you across the street but I can’t go in. My mom says I’ll get a bad reputation if I’m seen going in there.”
I thought about what she’d said then asked, “What about mine?”
“You’re not old enough to get one,” she said.
My elder’s logic made sense. So I skipped across the street.
Inside Jax’s, cirrus layers of lingering tobacco smoke obscured the already insufficient lighting. Pool balls clacking against one another and the random launching of cuss words created momentary breaks in the chatter and laughter. I kept one hand on the door, self-appointing it home as one would in a game of hide and seek, until I found Dad. He was leaning on a pool stick, holding a bottle between his thumb and forefinger. I went to him.
“Dad,” I said tugging on his britches leg, looking in the vicinity his eyes would be if he were to look at me.
“Hey, kid. Movie over?” he asked. He checked the time before finding my gaze.
“Yeah, and Laura Jean wants her money.”
He handed off the pool stick then took my hand. As we walked to the door, he guzzled the last drink from his bottle before leaving it on the bar. After Dad paid Laura Jean, we crossed the street and ventured into Pryce’s Grocery and Dry Goods. By now, movement on main street had become sporadic, and old men had begun trickling into the store as slowly as leaves falling from a border oak in mid-September. Their seats, stacked wooden crates, formed the customary circle for their afternoon gathering. Some packed a jaw with tobacco while others rolled a smoke. Success of the American Legion team started the powwow early.
Lunch had come and gone, and neither Dad nor I had eaten anything, at least nothing worth mentioning. Dad asked Mr. Pryce to fix him a bologna and hot pepper cheese sandwich, and after several minutes of deliberation, I settled on pickle loaf with mustard, voicing a preference to having the condiment spread on both slices of bread. Mr. Pryce took note. Dad then chose an RC. I favored a grape Nehi.
I didn’t remember Dad saying go. I didn’t know we were racing, but as Mr. Pryce handed me my sandwich, Dad poked his last bite into his mouth. He chased it with a drink and was looking in one of the glass cases which lined both sides of the register before swallowing either.
Mr. Pryce left his domain behind the meat counter to join him. On his way, he lifted his apron with one hand then individually twisted each finger of the opposite hand into the stained fabric. He continued the process as he stood across the glass case from Dad.
After a few bites of pickle loaf and a bottle of Nehi, I felt full. As I wiped mustard off my chin, I decided to linger at the front of the store. Items in the glass case held Dad’s interest, and the old men, who once looked harmless, had traded baseball and a friendly slap on the back for the rising cost of seed and keeping one’s hands to oneself.
At its brightest, the sun spotlighted the best Pryce’s had to offer. Now, its diminishing rays had to stretch to reach the display window, resulting in a partially drawn curtain of darkness. Offstage, a pair of watches – one for a lady, the other a man – passed their time on a piece of black velveteen. Still on stage, a headless mannequin modeled a lace-collared blouse with a floral print skirt. In a sunlit corner, a six-tier pyramid of Libby’s canned vegetables displayed a sign naming it the special of the week. But center stage. Center stage held the answer to coping with the rise in seed prices, Annette’s answer to persuading Frankie to take her to the beach party, and Momma’s answer to squashing Granny Tulley’s power of conviction. The main attraction was a pair of tan shoes, size eleven. A bargain at $7.50. Especially, since they came with pink shoelaces.
Dad had remained focused on the trinkets in the case. As I closed the distance between us, he made his decision and indicated so by pointing. Mr. Pryce retrieved the item, placed it in a small box, then they slid in unison to the register.
“Dad,” I said as I bounced on my tiptoes. “The shoes.”
I tried to take his hand, but he lifted it out of my reach. My fingers found his back pocket where I tugged each syllable.
“Pleeease, Dad-dy. The shoes in the win-dow. They’re just my size.”
Mr. Pryce’s hand hung by its fingertips on the register’s handle as he looked toward me, then at Dad, and repeat the process several times. His pause compelled me to clasp my hands under my chin and look up. As Dad smiled at the man behind the counter, he shook his head. When I heard the register’s drawer open, I realize my shameless display of desperation had gone unheeded.
Outside, Dad opened the driver’s side door of the truck and waited. Unwanted tears came but I didn’t swipe. My hands stayed prisoners in my pockets until I crawled in the truck.
We didn’t turn toward home but continued down the street passed Jax’s and The Fontaine.
“This isn’t the way home,” I said before sitting on my knees, choosing to watch where we’d been instead of where we were going.
Dad pulled his visor down then opened his window. My hair twirled around my face as a willow in a windstorm. I tucked it behind my ears; however, more strands than not continued to wave.
“I need to take care of something. You don’t mind do you?”
My shoulders said they didn’t care before I rested my chin on the back of the seat. From the corner of my eye, I watched him take a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He shook up a Benson and Hedges, threw the pack on the dash, then pushed in the lighter. As he waited for it to pop, he asked, “How about some music?” He smiled and beckoned me to his side with a head gesture.
The lighter clicked before I could answer, and within seconds, I could see smoke swirling above his head. When I turned and sat close to him, he took this for a yes and turn the radio on.
The Beatles and Dylan took us as far as the first left, directly passed the mill. Patty Page sang until we reached the fork in the road, then Neil Diamond ushered us to the Charlton’s mailbox and up their driveway.
The paint on the house reminded me of a half-scaled crappie, and the one dangling shutter of a hook in its bottom lip. No automobile sat beside the house. No one played in the yard. No dog lay on the porch and no one came to the door. The only declarations of occupancy were the open front door and the laundry hanging from the clothesline alongside the house.
Before Dad went to the door, he placed a kiss on my cheek. I found it odd he entered without knocking. More so when he let the screen door slap against the wooden frame.
I spent time watching the breeze swing the clothes on the line. One of the unmentionables conveyed the owner’s shared liking for my favorite color, red, indicating her appreciation for the unorthodox. She would surely sympathize with me on my recent disappointment in Dad for denying me the last pair of shoes I would ever ask for.
Time had passed since I’d enjoyed the grape Nehi, and last year when Granny Tulley started blaming her occasional accidents on a stretched bladder, I no longer waited until squirming or crossing my legs became necessary. A refusal to risk a regression to where I wet myself had become the rule.
Honeysuckle blossomed a few feet beyond the row of laundry. I pushed open the truck’s door and slid from the seat. After confident the foliage provided ample coverage, I prepared myself and squatted. My eyes watered as relief came to my bladder, and I assured myself serious expansion had been averted.
When I started back to the truck, the colorful undergarment waved, proudly displaying itself, imitating a flag flying high, nobly symbolizing what it represented. I thought they came in one color--white, the color of Momma’s. Wary, nevertheless intrigued, I reached to touch it, but Dad’s voice passing through an opened window pulled my attention toward him.
“Come on,” he said. “give me more time.”
A woman answered. “I’m tired of waiting.”
“Here sweetheart,” Dad again. “I bought you something.”
The woman squealed then thanked Dad with the recognizable slurps and smacks dads and mommas were suppose to share.
“A little more time?” Dad said.
Enough had been heard. Too many things had been exposed. I retreated but in my haste, a pair of woman’s slacks levitated in front of me. Tangled in britches and stumbling, I groped the air for something, anything, to keep me upright, but all my outstretched fingers snagged was one of the red bra’s shoulder straps. I then heard the wooden clothespins give to the added weight and snap from the line. Closing my eyes, I braced for the fall.
Dad must have heard the commotion because when I opened my eyes, he was looking down at me.
“What are you doing?” He took his hands off his hips and extended one to me.
Ignoring his offer, I got to my feet and brushed passed him. “I had to pee.”
He stayed on my heels until we neared the truck where he double-timed his pace and opened his door for me.
Side-stepping the usual routine, I marched to my side and climbed in. He kept silent as he sat behind the wheel and turned the key. After backing out of the yard, he proceeded down the driveway. This time turning toward home.
With the sun now to our backs, he slapped up his visor then cranked his window, leaving a smoker’s crack. I sat close to my door letting the space between us provided an invisible barrier. A barrier a single word could crumble. An emotional safeguard I knew wouldn’t last.
“Are you all right?” he asked before searching the dash for his pack of cigarettes. After finding them, he lit one and returned the pack to his shirt pocket.
“Fine,” I said. But I wasn’t.
The radio crackled between bouts of music. Instead of tuning in on a station, he clicked it off. While holding the wheel and cigarette in one hand, he reached over and skimmed his fingertips down my hair. I kept my eyes on the road and pulled away. An unspoken answer to his unspoken question.
He switched his driving hand and drew a long pull off his cigarette, but before the cherry dimmed, he snapped his back straight and gripped the wheel at ten and two.
“Hey,” he said, hitting the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “How about we stop at Pryce’s and get you those shoes?” He shook his head in an effort to convince us both he’d found the answer.
“Yep. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll go back. We’ll go back and get those shoes.”
He turned to watch the road before he accelerated, unaware I no longer shared his newly found optimism of the shoe’s powers or his desire for something new and unique. I now craved pancakes, peanut butter, and a pretense of reality as I fostered a hatred for those shoes and the type of girl who would wear them.
By the time we passed the city limit’s sign, the vining morning glories twisting around its wooden post had lost their day’s blooms. The vapor lights lining the streets had completed their evening ritual of flickering on and off; a momentary period of indecision usually resulting in illumination and a lulling hum.
I looked at him because as yet, he hadn’t turned on the headlights. However, I found myself unable to turn away as he maintained a position so close to the wheel he could’ve used it for a chin rest. Further inspection brought me to a pulsing ball of jaw muscle and a perpetual trail of sweat running along the front of his ear. I then noticed his stare which never wavered from the road. I saw a man determined to change the course of a storm, and his refusal to accept the finality of time. I, on the other hand, had resentfully accepted both.
Kimila Bowling - Biography
My father had a Kraco eight-track in his grasshopper- green Ford pickup. When I would go with him, he’d play my favorite song, “Tan Shoes and Pink Shoelaces,” and I did want a pair of those shoes.
As time passed, I grew up and realized tan was sort of bland and pink clashed with my skin tone. I also discovered you’re supposed to duck while riding in a grasshopper- green truck.
Trying to move forward with my life, I attended a program to become a court stenographer, but I found the dialogue between the attorney and witness boring. It was a constant struggle not to embellish testimony during transcription. I then went through a delusional phase and attended cosmetology and manicurist school. I can’t do hair. I can’t do nails, but I can buy hair products wholesale.
I did, however, work in the insurance industry for fifteen years but kept my storytelling alive while tracking wanted clients for a bail bondsman.
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