Meg Sefton's Blog, page 62

Schifosa

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Misha Solkonikov, flickr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Billy’s Boots

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Rebirth of Cool, Mod and Skinhead Clothing, Dublin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Billy!” he heard Brother John call, but he was soon at the highway and couldn’t hear them at all.

 

 

 

 

 

Hare’s Bride of Big Pine Key

 

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Hare’s Bride by Ellen Cornett, Grimm Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The hare’s bride by shwippie, deviant art

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

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

 

 

Tiny Hands Nation

 

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Hand in hand, Mano en mano, de main en main, Miguel Tejada-Flores, flickr

There was once a troll man, half troll half human, who was a very unhappy little man. He had grown up around giant trolls but he himself was small, and he had such small, small hands so that everyone commented, even as he got older. He felt so keenly his deficiencies that he vowed always to overpower others by demeaning them, just as he had been demeaned. He found, to his tortured crooked heart’s delight, his tactics succeeded with his marks, and they grew ever smaller, at least for a little while. They spluttered about, angry, defending themselves. He only laughed along with others whose spiritual deformity brought them out of the wordwork to participate in crimes.

The twisted thing took advantage of a generous and spirited country and demeaned everyone along with the support of bullies. The beautiful things about the country – its gorgeous invitations to those seeking shelter – were soiled by the meanness and depravity of a man simply too weak to admit how small his small hands made him feel. He studied the small hand men ways – their treatises and warfare, their bellicose suppression of their citizens, the way even with small hands, they could bring a shadow of darkness and pollution on a susceptible population made gullible by their weakened understanding of themselves and their inability to feel how great they were already.

He created an army of the dispossessed using the language of the dispossessed. He used this language to create an illusion that he understood, an illusion the dispossessed bought into, that if they only yelled and chanted for him and showed the toxic troll he was their friend he would bring them power. This is how he did it, what he said in his words to them: “Look at my hands, he said, they are small, I understand you, don’t I?” And those who had felt overlooked at last felt seen, though by a grand wizard but it was of no matter. It was a joyous occasion. So they all made tshirts printed with tiny hands clapping and wore them proudly.

When you hate yourself, you put people in cages, that’s what you do. And when you hate yourself you divide a free people off from each other and create a bifurcated nation: the purple people being a combo of red and blue –  two colors of the national flag –  are the shit while all others being yellow, red only, brown, and so on are just not quite as purple, you know? Just not quite up to being in the Tiny Hands Clapping Nation. In fact, the name had been changed from We Are All Free People Here to Tiny Hands Clapping For Purple People.

A few brown people however, women, in fact, considered by Troll Tiny Hands to be a threat to his plans to embolden hatred, reminded the world of the greatness of what had been the We Are All Free People Here Nation.

It still remains to be seen what will become of the imperiled free state, but three heroines stand larger than a tiny troll with tiny clapping hands and those who would clap alongside. In fact their voices were followed up by more hatred from the troll because unfortunately for trolls, who tend to be very stubborn, they just aren’t very creative. Or brave.

 

ladybug

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bang pu by Roberto Trombetta, flickr

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

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

via lady bug

lady bug

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bang pu by Roberto Trombetta, flickr

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

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

via lady bug

Fairy Tales & The Stewardship Of Nature

I have written a retelling of Baba Yaga, set in modern day Florida. My use of Eastern Orthodoxy as the setting for the tale and their traditions and heavy reliance on the natural world for ritual and beliefs made a good backdrop for the entry of the Baba Yaga.  A young woman ventures from her home in Florida where her grandmother has shown her the bounty of nature and its healing properties and uses in religious practices and goes out into the wild woods of Florida, a wilderness with which I feel an affinity, being that I am practically native.

When I had finished writing the story, I realized I wouldn’t have been able to write it had I not helped myself as well as the reader become fully immersed in the natural world. We are just not as well versed in so many aspects of the outside world, nor are other readers. Context becomes vital in order to grasp the full meaning of what it means to encounter a witch in a story and not via a movie screen or video game.

I intend to write another draft of my story this fall and hopefully eventually publish it. I have a private online writers’ group I started this summer called Word Warriors. I plan to share my story in a couple of weeks. Let me know if you would be interested in participating in a three to four month intensive in the coming months, fall and winter. I hope what I learn from my feedback with my group is what I can use to improve my project and continue re-envisioning it.

Here is an excerpt from this wonderful blog post….I am so glad I discovered this blog tonight. I hope you will explore it. Peace.

“Recently I read Sara Maitland’s book From The Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairy Tales where she writes, ‘Forests to the [early] Northern European peoples were dangerous and generous, domestic and wild, beautiful and terrible. And the forests were the terrain out of which fairy stories, one of our earliest and most vital cultural forms, evolved. The mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils of the forest are both the background to and source of these tales…’”

 

 

Into The Forest Dark

Fairy tales are filled with the dark forest. One of the very first fairy tales that I can recall having been read to me was that of Hansel and Gretel, whose very father takes them deep into the forest to leave them there to die. Forests run throughout all of the Northern European fairy and folk tales. These forests are places of peril and triumph for the protagonists. Maria Tatar, the German folklore and children’s literature scholar at Harvard University, wrote, “Forests are sublime and dangerous, full of mystery, magic, terror, and monstrosity; an enchanted place where anything can happen. On one hand, [the forest] is a site of threats, the precinct of monsters—the wolf waiting for Red Riding Hood, the witch for Hansel and Gretel, the briars covering Sleeping Beauty’s castle—but it’s also a place where abandoned children can take refuge: Snow White flees to safety in the forest…

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Chipped Plate Day for Mr. Namaste

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lemari makanan by Dzulhaidy Abdul Rahim, flickr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Namaste, she thought.

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

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

What had she left undone? Everything, it seemed.

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

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

 

Loon

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Jor Di, flickr

It was the Fourth of July. Daryl and I were on a road trip in the Florida Panhandle with Daryl’s brother Jimmy and Daryl’s friend Cliff who brought his girlfriend Caroline, someone I also knew from college. It was about a five hour drive from Orlando, and there was drinking and reminiscing and moments of silence sitting in the surrounding presence of old songs from playlists, music we knew from high school and college. We had all gone to high school together and then the University of Florida where many of our classmates went.

The guys were Sigma Chi. I was a little sister. And Caroline was Sweetheart. All the guys in the fraternity then and even now at reunions and games make a big deal out of how Caroline was even more beautiful than their most legendary Sweetheart, Faye Dunnaway.

When we got to St. George’s Island, Cliff and I went down to the beach. We vowed to unpack the car later. We were buzzed and didn’t want to do anything so sober minded.

“I’ll fall asleep in my clothes, I don’t care,” said Cliff, smiling with that signature grin of his, those perfect white teeth, those dimples.

We plopped onto our low beach chairs and opened cans of beer as the sun set over the water.

The others were up at the house. They were unpacking the car like responsible adults. They threatened that our clothes wouldn’t be there later when we came up for the night. We may find them scattered on the beach for the sea turtles to use for their nests.

I knew my husband Daryl wouldn’t mind spending time with Caroline while I was down on the beach with Cliff. He had always had a thing for her. As far as a I knew he had never done anything about it. And then he married me. Sometimes I think it made it even more exciting to him to fantasize about the thing just beyond reach. In that way, we each allowed each other some latitude. I think he knew how I felt about Cliff though I wished sometimes he showed jealousy, just a little. Daryl said I was a girl most guys considered a friend.

“Look at that duck,” I said, pointing to the waves. A large dark bird floated over the green gray surf. It had a long neck and beak. Its call was high pitched and strained. “What’s  a duck doing out there?”.

“That’s not a duck, you goof, it’s a loon,” said Cliff.

It landed on the beach. The sun set behind it and the spray from the waves hung in the light.

“Lordy,” said Jimmy who had come down from the house. His feet were pressed into the soft sand beneath his weight, his calves bowed back, knees buckled. He drank straight from the Maker’s Mark, holding the neck just below the red wax at the lip. “What the hell?” It would be a long night with Jimmy.

The bird pushed itself up with one foot and lurched forward. The other leg was curled against its body, as if it were maimed or deformed. The creature flopped forward then rolled back onto its good foot. Every few feet it sat and cocked its head, surveying the beach and waves.

“Where’s Daryl?” I said.

“With Caroline still,” said Jimmy. I was sure they had no clue.

I stood and wobbled a bit in the soft sand.

“Whoa there,” said Cliff.

I steadied myself for the climb up to the house, humiliated by my own body but trying not to think about it much. I found Daryl and Caroline sitting on the deck, eating chips and dip, their feet pressed against the slats of the rail as if they were twins taking comfort in their mirroring behavior.

“Honey, you’ve got to try this dip Caroline made,” Daryl said to me. “It’s amazing. What is it?” He looked at Caroline for confirmation. “Buffalo Chicken dip? You cook it in the slow cooker. Genius, right?”

I didn’t answer and I didn’t step out onto the deck as if doing so would make me complicit with something. I could care less about the dip. If I had a chance later, I would throw it in the ocean.

“There’s a loon on the beach,” I said. “Maybe we should call the county.”

Daryl got up and slipped on his loafers. He stood, straightening his clothes, readying himself to play hero. “You sit here,” he said, indicating his chair.

“Dip?” said Caroline. Her impossibly long and tanned legs were now crossed elegantly at the knees.

“No thank you,” I said. Why we had all these people here with us was beyond my grasp. I’m pretty sure it had been Daryl’s idea. And I didn’t like to be with him when he was bored. It reminded me of all my failures.

I heard Daryl in the kitchen flipping through the phone book.

“I thought it was a duck at first,” said Caroline, “but then it was so fat.”

The sun was low, just a sliver of orange. The bird came closer to the beach chairs and Jimmy began making trumpet noises with his mouth. He often did this to tease our dog or draw attention to funny people and situations.

“No one’s answering,” said Daryl. “I say let nature take its course.”

I took the phone book to one of the bedrooms and slammed the door. I found a woman who would come get it. She said it happens all the time. The loons get caught in a storm during their migration and can’t make it to a place where they can rest.

The bird had made its way to the brambles between the houses. I was worried it might make it to the road. I emptied the outside trashcan so I could use it as a container. As I approached, it lunged at me and tried to peck me with its long beak but I managed to get the trash can over its body.

When the bird woman arrived, she put her gloved hand into the overturned trash can and coaxed the loon into the metal cage. She lifted the cage onto the truck. When she got in and closed the door, I wanted to call out to her. I wondered what it would be like to drive around all day saving birds.

I fell asleep that night, fully clothed, reading in bed. I got up early the next day, before anyone. If we had been at home, Daryl would be up checking stock quotes, flipping on CNN. He hardly spoke to Caroline, hardly looked at her. That night he curled up with me in bed, nuzzling his nose in my hair like he used to. There was something to his intentional neglect of the object of his lust and his uncharacteristic attention to me, or at least this was uncharacteristic as of late. Probably it was guilt and probably guilt for nothing other than his errant thoughts and fantasies. I didn’t really care to get into it.

The next day the ocean was flat calm like a tray, the air still and close. Daryl was being solicitous, had offered to pack the car. I stood by the water. He would chatter all the way home as if we were acquaintances. He started acting this way after he began working late, after the doctor told us we couldn’t have a baby.

I stood on the beach at a line of foam. I wondered what it would feel like to move into that amniotic brine, to have the lips of the water enclose my skin and hair, to swim out past the waves and the sandbar until I floated out over the abyss.

A version of this first appeared in 971 MENU

Fourth of July: I don’t know how to write this and I don’t know how to pray

 

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Beach by Barbara Ann Spengler, flickr

Beach

Layers of colors stripe the ocean – a worn flag, dun colored and opaque as my mother’s cameo. The sea crashes and spreads against the sand. The receding wave pulls my chair as I write in my notebook.

A gull pitches upward, a fish in its beak, fleshy, flashing white. In air, the gull tips his head to take the living food into his throat.

A piece of brown seaweed, a remnant of maiden hair, lies among the white shells.

A wave cracks and unfurls like a whip. The tiny shells cry as the water rustles through their bodies.

A toddler, her hair pulled to the top of her head with a soft fabric band, her tangerine beach top a perfect triangle, releases her mother’s grip and in her plastic beach huaraches, stomps toward the water in an awkward lock step, her arms plump like ripe fruit, extended from her body for balance. She moves toward the the green curling sea.

Prayer

Queen Mother Mary of the Sea do you watch over a Protestant at your skirts, ignorant except in the beauty of the day, the knowledge that death roils in in the strand where the water is deep, the color turns dark?

Is there room in your brood for all motherless, for the adopted, for the beggars, the homeless roamers, searching for rooms, the next beautiful room, the whitest sand, the pink cloud dimpled sunsets spread to receive?

Is this our worship? Is this the only way we know? Is this what is left us in our near nakedness except the masses of bodies as they come, the weak-kneed, the fleet? Is this all we we know, forever walking down a long white beach, talking to strangers, accepting kindnesses like birds accepting bread?

Will you watch over me Mother Mary, watch over me into my fragility, watch over the birth of what I did not believe in, watch it become as solid as a flame that melts the bitterness of my heart? Will you watch me as the beauty of your grace becomes what is visible before my eyes?

Is this seaweed at my feet not the pieces of hair from maidens but your reddish brown tresses and are the shells the broken jewels of your necklace?

Will you save me in my hour of need, a Protestant, a sinner?

Mother

What did I want to do in that sailboat so far away from my mother when I was a girl, what did I hope, in the launching of it that I would accomplish, so far out from the shore, with the dolphins, the small rainbow sail snapping in the breeze, the wind on the surf side a fickle father, girding, prodding, forgetting, remembering, pushing out, always out?

I hoped my mother would worry. This is what I wanted, yes, I know that now, but she, always tanned and assured, a firm believer in Providence, was confident in larger forces, in fate, and in her daughter, who knew how to tack and come about and find a breeze and cinch a sail and use a rudder. Even when the undertow threatened to keep me off shore, she knew me to be in tune with these forces as well, to ride with them, and not fight to trust and not panic.

This is what I must believe when I disappeared from her sight for what seemed like hours, when I held to the wooden boat and cried, when the waves pounded over the sides and I was self-concerned: I must believe my mother had a handle on these things.

In my drama as a girl, what I wished her to be was a mother who panicked when I was pushed further and further along the beach as I held the boat together and fought the undertow. I was a wishful thinker and did not see the good in what I had, nor can I now, sometimes, the good in having a mother who sees no level headed sense in panicking over a capable child.

Laughing gulls

Black heads, black as coal, differentiated colors as neat as if dipped in paint. Grey body like a formal waistcoat. Wings tipped black. A chorus keening and feeding in the shallow receding tide. Several run and launch, followed by the rest.

Swimmers

Three swimmers in a row in the green sea, churning water to sparkling white.

Man

He, as old as a weathered channel whelk and as hunched and thin. He walks the shore looking for things to put in his baggie or is he hoping for help from the young beauty throwing a frisbie to her friend who looks at him sympathetically, who is probably wondering if he will tip, face first, onto his hat bill into the sand of the sloping shore, his brittle bones cracking there among the wreckage of shells?

Tidepools

Where are the tidepools I lay in as a girl, which beach, and how should I find them now? Is it only my imagination they have disappeared? Maybe I no longer know how to look for them. It seems no beaches in my adult life have been as prone to sea water dividing off from itself, beaches where the ocean behaves on its own accord, parts staying behind to linger in the sun, staying behind for the pleasure of the young, forming small lakes for children.

Stilt House

And where is the house at the end of shoreline where my sister and brother and I laid our sunburnt bodies on hammocks while breezes rocked us? At night, inside the house after dinner, while the ocean crashed and storm raged, my father and mother and brother and sister and I danced to music and then we laughed until hilarity overtook us and we cried.

Brother

And what is the best way for the family to forget the brother, now dead, who played in the stilt house? Is it to stop talking about him, rid themselves of his belongings, cease to visit the spot where he died, cease to visit the spot where he lived, cease to visit the ashes sealed behind a stone, cease to imagine would he would be like, look like, had he lived until now, cease to mention what he was like, cease to talk about him to your children, forget his friends, destroy his writings, tell yourself his laughter never was, tell yourself in fact the life and death cycle of one person is the same as the ocean at your feet, breaking and seething over the shells? Tell yourself there is no differentiated sound in all of the universe, nothing that is individual? All are one and everyone is the same and that includes the inanimate, the insensate, preconscious, unconscious, and the dead? And there is no beginning and no end and no personality and no grief and no loss and no pain? That we have all dreamt this life ourselves, this reality,  and almost nothing exists unless so chosen?