Meg Sefton's Blog, page 15

In the Hills of Tennessee

When my son was 16, I took him to a summer camp in Tennessee. But first, we spent July 4th in Tellico Plains which a vacation website describes as a “vintage mountain town in East Tennessee, at the gateway to the Cherohala Skyway and the Cherokee National Forest.” As I recall, it was indeed vintage and I was glad I had stocked a cooler full of supplies before entering this part of the country. I was also grateful for a sturdy four-wheel drive SUV for, after having dropped my son at camp, I had a terrifying moment of having to weather a flooded road to get to my cabin, tucked deep into the woods. It was an early single mom experience. When I was young, I embraced wildness and adventure and feats of derring-do. Let’s just say life has schooled me in the ways of caution. I love this little gem of a song by Jimmie Rogers. Be well on this Sunday.—Margaret

To the U.N. Committee on Alternative Fuel Sources

Woman by oudjat45, flickr

Check out my flash fiction piece published today in Shambolic Review, originally published in S/tick. While you are there, check out the work of Marty Shambles, a master of sardonic fiction. I hope you are having a good Friday—Margaret

A Mother Speaks to a Stone

Bokeh Tomb Stone by Markus Kniebes, flickr

To read my flash fiction piece, “A Mother Speaks to a Stone,” check out my post on Medium today I hope you are having a good Thursday—Margaret

Patrick’s Day

St Patrick’s Day – The Old Crown – High Street Deritend, Digbeth – Irish flags, Elliot Brown, flickr

Tonight, I watched the movie Patrick’s Day. It dramatizes a Nurse-Ratched style relationship between a mother and her mentally ill son. Blessedly, it is the son’s love for another woman, a romantic relationship, that begins to shake his mother’s domineering hand.

It is a wrenching movie at times, though again, a bit dramatic. Electroconvulsive therapy is portrayed as a horrendous instrument and in the movie, is used as a tool of control, whereas in IRL, it helps people at the end of the line who often have no other options. I’ve heard it’s more patient-friendly (At one time, yours truly was presented this depression-busting option as a way through a medication-free pregnancy, but I felt fortunate I did not require it, regardless of reassurances.)

Though the finer points of mental illness and treatment may have been stretched a bit, I thought it a great movie about mental illness, and a great movie in general. Movies have only touched the tip of a very big iceberg when it comes to exploring mental illness as a fictional subject. Sometimes the movies that are made follow a kind of morbid trope. For example, we have seen a Nurse Ratched before, though the Nurse-Ratched-type mother in Patrick’s Day inspired some pathos. (The mother of Patrick’s Day also reminded me of Frances Farmer’s mother in Frances.) It’s a big bravo for the movie that the plot continued to spin out, using character change and development to level up as it were. Ergo, it is a step beyond the grimness of Cuckoo, Frances, Girl Interrupted, etc.

I’m interested in finding out other people’s opinions of the portrayal of illness and caregivers in this and other movies. I hope for continued dialogue, and of course, more movies.

Buenas noches, mis amigos.

Margarita

Rare Beasts

Roses by Patrick Ahles, flickr

Have you seen the movie Rare Beasts? It’s fun and quirky. Roger Ebert says “I can’t make heads or tales out of this bleak black comedy about a single mom dating a borderline incel coworker who craves the status of marriage but seems to hate women and wants none of the work involved in actually making a relationship.” Oh, Roger. Take a breath. And like, laugh? The movie is hilarious. Its greatness is its lack of predictability. Here, have a rose. RIP. We miss you—Margaret

Get Off Your Knees — It’s the Archaic Revival

To read the full piece, go to the “view original post” link below. If you’re on WordPress, follow the blog! Some great gems there.

Erik Rittenberry

Art: Justin Estcourt

The long night of human history
is drawing at last to
its conclusion.

— Terence McKenna

Look at how politicized
we’ve all become
these days.

Look at the barbed wire
and the needless shit
that surrounds our
unpoetic lives.

Look at the vast idiocy
we see in the cities and
on our screens.

Look at us —
inattentive drudges,
heavy on information yet
starved of intuition and
insight, paralyzed by
irrational fear.

Hardly anyone thinks or feels
outside the group or the party
or the race or the nation
they belong to.

Critical thinking is irreparable
and our readymade opinions
are quite expected
along with the synthetic
desires we hold.

Even the most intelligent minds
among us lean towards conformity —
particularly when their careers
and reputations depend on it.

Institutional compliance
trumps truth-seeking.

Social media algorithms
nurture our biases and
predispositions, managing
our will and amplifying

View original post 642 more words

Flight north

Vintage cast iron Dutch oven by Bruce, flickr

Janneth rolled back her screeching patio door to the mild night, to a pleasant weather belying the human realities of plague, of economic and political collapse. On her hip, she held baby Isla who played with her bright yellow necklace. The bauble had been an impulse purchase during her now extinct state of existence. The little red-headed wonder put a beaded strand into her mouth and Janneth’s heart skipped a bit, grateful for this tiny source of joy.

Guntar had awakened them with repairs to his vehicle, a noise that in an earlier time would have annoyed her to the point of submitting a written complaint to the apartment management. And now, she wondered if he knew she was the cause of them shooing him away to the outer edges of the lot for his nighttime maintenance, somewhere remote (Yet now, with management seemingly shuddered, he was apparently taking liberties.)

She wondered if he was someone to be relied upon, someone to graciously receive a request for assistance. She had never noticed a spouse or girlfriend. Maybe he had been the kind of son to be helpful to his mother or father even later in his life. While she listened to his work, she cooked a bread round on her camp stove which she kept on her porch, her new makeshift kitchen. She would heat the bean soup as well. She hadn’t been camping since she purchased the stove several years ago ahead of an anticipated category 3 hurricane. She and her family had lived through Hurricane Charley but had been weeks without power. She had a fear of a return to that helpless sense. And now, Isla depended on her. Her father would be proud, that she was surviving. She only ever wished she had as much faith.

Isla’s father had left to find his parents, to help them, and he had not returned. In the distance in the direction of the theme parks where Janneth had worked as a creative director, a dark cloud of smoke plumed out over the trees, obscuring the stars. Something in the pit of her stomach warned her it was time to leave. Weeks before, there had been talk on the internet of people fleeing further north, into Canada. It would not be safe here much longer for those who did not have a bunker and an endless supply of resources and weapons.

She held Isla on one hip and with her other arm, lifted the pot of soup and the warm bread. Guntar was bending intently over some project when she approached. She tried to make her presence obvious so he wouldn’t be startled. To her, his truck looked like it could go anywhere. Most days, he had parked it in the lot where it sat unabashedly caked with mud. Now, it couldn’t look more appropriate.

She hoped to appeal to some sense of a protector instinct. When she asked him what his plans were, having laid the fragrant food offering beside his bent knee, he seemed willing enough to share that he was leaving, traveling farther north and over the border.

I think that is very wise, she said.

Next day, she was glad she had added the last of the whiskey flavored coffee to the bean soup for he softly knocked on her door.

Do you need a ride? he said.

And she tried to hide her brimming eyes as she turned to let him in.

Doll King

The Doll King by Bradley Felton, flickr

There was once a doll king who ruled a large portion of the country’s population. People who believed the doll king to be alive and full of agency and not merely a doll, lived by innumerable absurdities without being aware. Believers spoke the doll king’s language; they adopted its speech patterns and thoughts. Though in reality, a doll is inanimate, it lives in the imagination of those who grant it special power, who give it words, thoughts, and desires.

When the doll king worshippers weren’t looking, when they were all asleep, the doll king’s head would get twisted around by the wind when the dead thing sat under the tree outside. Its hair shifted to reveal another face and then fell into place to hide the remaining faces. By quarter turns, it could reveal one of four faces, and yet, all the faces were versions of the same expression: anger. This phenomenon added to the impression that the doll was indeed alive and always angry. Ergo, people did what they could to appease the doll king and thrashed those who did not believe, those who did not worship and appease.

One night, people lay before the doll little notes, written confessions regarding those in their past they had loved more than the doll king, things they had believed in before they knew of the doll’s existence, acts they had committed contrary to the doll’s wishes which had to do with love, freedom, and compassion. Before the angry doll king’s face, they built a little fire and burned up all they had loved. They danced around the fire and humiliated and disgraced themselves in order that they might elevate the doll king whom they praised as the almighty, powerful, and knowing one.

It is said some who confessed around the fire died later that night by tiny daggers in the throat, inserted by the doll king, for they were never seen again. It is said he scrambled up their walls, into their windows, and across their beds, and sliced open their jugulars.

It is said others were allowed to live but were largely ignored, for who can ignore better than a doll king? Who can better scorn and mock than a doll king with four angry faces? He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of killing them. He would forever make them suffer before his stern, uncompromising visage.

White Sauce

hibachi by Alex Dodd, flickr

Today, on my way home from my booster shot on the other side of town, I drove by a sushi restaurant where I used to pick up food for a man I dated. I would get food for his family on my way over to his house. It was their favorite place, and the order was always the same: hibachi chicken or steak with lots of noodles. They used to like the “white sauce” on their marinated meats and noodles. They used it until everything was drowning in it.

The man was nice enough, but he had issues, like the kind where humor escaped him, but he tried out comedic material he had observed from television: comedy trope-type bits. It never went well. And all I felt was pain. Inside. Like, what am I doing? My therapist used to tell me in my midlife dating, I seemed to pick men I could feel superior to. What exactly was she saying? I think I knew, but I don’t really want to know. I was a bitch.

He was fairly successful as in having a job only someone with a master’s could have. So who was I? And he drove a big red Chrysler. And he supported and raised two daughters. And he took me to New York. Still, all those cups of white sauce. All those poor jokes. (Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week.)

It was the beginning of the end when he started snubbing me, failing to invite me to his office Christmas party. It was also the beginning of the end when I saw him observing his daughter once. I couldn’t quite make out the nature of the gaze. I had my limitations too. I found it unsettling, but I was also prone to an overactive imagination. So I have been told.

He took me with his daughters to help the oldest pick out a dress for her prom. She admitted to me in the dressing room that her father had never provided her with the means to buy a bra. At the department store, I had her father buy her one. And I had her father buy her a beautiful dress, maybe more “adult” than he had planned to, but it was totally appropriate given her age. The next day, I gave her a purse and dress sandals from my closet. For Christmas, I gave her younger sister a flattening iron, hair products, and lessons from my hairdresser. If this was going downhill, I was going all out.

A fatal blow came when he told me his daughter had pretended to be a “gangster” and had laid the Chrysler passenger seatback to almost fully reclined. Something odd. What female had been sitting/lying there? What had happened in the driveway in the car? The rushed, unsolicited explanation was suspect.

I don’t remember how it ended exactly. But I burned my bridge when it was over, making use of some of my suspicions and questions in a thinly disguised fiction which I posted it in an obscure place online. Still, we were social media followers of each other and so he shot me an angry email. I replied that no one would know who I was talking about if anyone even read it in the first place. I had not used names. And none of my friends had even met him, not to mention family. But for sure I had been a bitch. I told him that for him, I would do something I never do for someone else: take down a story. I was still being a bitch. Apparently, it never ends.

It pained me to drive over to that end of town tonight, a place of such reminders. But I needed a booster shot to stay ahead of a mutating virus. So much of my licentious, post-divorce-angry-bad-decision-life lies to the north of me where white sauce is slathered on dishes for obese Americans.

For a while, I had thought I liked being with his family. With everyone I dated, I tried hard to figure out the picture with me in it. How would I feel? What role would I play? Would I be happy? In the long run, I could never form a picture. Maybe I was just play-acting. I was lost.

He probably knew I patronized him. He was smart enough to know that.

I hope those girls are ok.

Last night I had a dream of a man who caught me observing wedding preparations I wasn’t invited to. Somehow, the washing of long strands of hair to be woven into a horse’s mane was a ritual that was involved. If everyone in the preparation party participated, the mane would have been washed a thousand times, some sort of symbolic number. We were seated in a kind of a rotunda, a place of worship. The man was about to “turn me in” for being an interloper but said to me I seemed to be so curious, I might as well have been a part of the ritual. He invited me to go with him and his two boys to lunch. Although I was supposed to meet my sister, I said yes. I figured that somehow, it would all play out.

When I woke, I felt rested. But I don’t know what it is supposed to mean. I am still in a dark wood in the middle of my life.

The perils of risk

Reflection of Figures on Small Bridge, Arne Halvorsen, flickr

I have been bragging about how I have been submitting to journals the last couple of weeks. But then again, I’m experiencing how hard it is to submit to journals for any length of time and pursue it conscientiously. I used to send stories out scattershot, more or less, not because I wanted to waste anyone’s time, but because I really didn’t know how to discern which stories would match with which markets. Or, I just didn’t want to feel too much. I could always blame rejection on my ignorance and so I wouldn’t have to feel as bad.

I know more now. And the possibilities don’t look as plentiful; and my voice, range, and writing interests have narrowed. I am glad I know myself more as a writer, that I have “found” my voice and the scope of my style and genre, but this sometimes makes me feel more limited in terms of direction and choices.

I have also been trying to figure out how I might package and promote a collection of dark microfiction, how I might find a possible publisher. Hopefully, there’s a market that would be interested in my particular, and peculiar, collection. At a time when I had more money and the world wasn’t what it is now, I would fly to attend conferences to discover markets and publishers.

Over the years, I have changed in my writing and thoughts about writing, as well as what I value as a person. When I was a newer writer, the world was almost overwhelming because I was stymied by seemingly endless choices and I wasn’t as sure what direction would feel most natural. After I have made a number of choices and made my way down a path, the way has started to seem more predestined. I’m not sure all my choices have left me with the best possibilities. And it’s not cool in America to talk about limitations, but these could also be coming into play.

But, I’m going to be ok for now with living my life and doing the best I can with what I have and staying off of social media when those little feelings of inadequacy come haunting.