Meg Sefton's Blog, page 65

Dirty Bird

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Sorrowful Tree’s Soul by Natalia Drepina, Deviant Art

Now Katinka was the most efficient housewife in the village. Before the sun had risen overhead, she had finished the laundering and had set the bread out to rise. Her kitchen and rooms sparkled, and the hearth cracked with a bright well fed fire. It was her habit to air her home in the spring as she worked. One day, in flew a brown striped bird with a pink beak and a white breast. The tiny lark perched upon the back of a dining chair.

He then said: “You will have to do something about that husband of yours, Stefan, surely is cheating on you with the great and beautiful Georgeta, and everyone knows it. They talk of her beauty and her youth and how tasty she must be and how your husband is enjoying the fruits of two trees.”

“He is not, you naughty bird!” said Katinka, grabbing a broom and chasing the bird around her little wooden house.

But the bird escaped her broom; he perched himself out and landed long enough to chirp about the various sexual feats of Katinka’s beloved.

When she finally managed to oust him, she sat on her chair beside the hearth and cried. She cried so much that she made a salty soup with her tears, which she then put in the garden for the deer.

That night, in their marital bed, Katinka asked her husband, “Have I ever given you cause to be unfaithful?”

“No, of course not, my love,” Stefan assured her. “There is none more beautiful in all of the world to me. You are the only one of more heart, now and forever. You should not trouble yourself with such things.”

The next day, Katinka was hanging out fresh laundry. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted a brown striped bird bounding from branch to branch. Finally, it landed in her basket.

“I hope those wet clothes soak you so that you are damp and miserable,” said Katinka.

The bird only cocked its head to one side as it looked at her.

“Do you not remember that you were the bearer of evil news regarding my husband?” she said. “It was a falsehood. Were I not a kind woman, I would crush you and bake you into a pie.”

“At this very minute,” said the bird, “the king has entered the palace, the rowing has commenced across the moat, the snake is crawling its way to its hiding home.”

“That’s it!” cried. She threw a blanket over the basket, trying to catch the nasty animal, but it spirited away to the forest.

This encounter left her breathless and visions of what the animal was alluding to drummed through her head. How could it be possible? She believed her husband in everything he said. She was a good wife to him and had never even burned a piece of toast. And she was still one of the most beautiful women of the village, no small thing for a woman of her age, only a year younger than Stefan himself.

She made him ciorba that night for dinner, his favorite. She took extra care with the ingredients, adding the kefir that brings the tartness to the dish and whets the appetite. She wore a frock that complimented her figure and brought out the rosiness of her complexion. She brushed her hair a hundred times and wore her best combs. When she served Stefan the ciorba, she took care to bend so that he saw the beauty of her bosom and would catch the sweet scent of her perfume.

“You are beautiful tonight, my queen, and you have prepared my favorite meal for me. Whatever is the occasion?”

Katinka only smiled and sliced a generous piece of lipie for his plate. She watched him consume his dinner and then he took her to bed. They were happy as a man and wife and she could not be more satisfied that all was as perfect as the day they wed. “Nasty old bird,” she thought. “Tomorrow he will be bird pie, bird stew, bird bread. What is the meaning of all of his chatter?”

The next day she had to go to market. She was out of milk and butter and flour and she wanted to buy a string for his little bird neck. She would catch him and feed him to her husband who would be none the wiser. That would teach him.

On passing through the market she chanced upon the lovely Georgeta who was buying a wheel of cheese. She had the chance to observe the lass who seemed sweet and innocent enough, not at all the picture of debauchery painted by the filthy bird. It was just birds like this, thought Katinka, who created so much misery in the world. How many tears have I cried over his lies? I tell you, one teaspoonful is too much.

She built the bird a snare and to lure him, a mound of seeds. The next day, she found him in her trap, proving he can only be the bird brain she thought him to be.

When she pointed this out, he said, “But I have done nothing against my nature, Katinka. I have sung what is in my heart to sing. I have eaten the seed that my stomach craves. Mark my words: By next moon, you will be out in the cold and a new bird will fluff her feathers in your nest.”

And with that, Katinka wrung his little neck and put him into a pie and baked him in the oven, so displeased was she with the little thing. “I just hope the taste is not as bad as his words,” she thought. But the taste was as succulent a pie as she had ever made and her husband praised her and stuffed his face. He was passionate in bed with her that night, more passionate than he had ever been and she was pleased as a wife and could not help but smile at the memory of it the next day.

She found she missed the creature, however, oddly enough, missed the way his accusatory remarks had stirred her. Her life felt flat, somehow, plain. When her husband came home she was as dull as a worn pan. “What has happened to you?” he said and for many days thereafter he inquired after her missing beauty, charms, youthful demeanor. “Where is my fair bride?” he said one day and it struck her that he saw only the surface for he did not ask: “How is the heart of my beloved?”

And so doubt struck her for the first time since Stefan had declared himself her faithful husband. The bird had sung one note which now reverberated louder in her mind since taking the little creature’s life for their dinner. Stefan seemed to sing several notes which clashed: One a denial of his trysts, another his claim of an exclusive love for her, and yet a third his concern with appearances only and not the depths of her heart. This made it impossible for her to see him with a singular heart. What had happened to her dear, loving husband?

That night she collected tears silently by the bowlful and put them in the garden and the bowls outnumbered the deer necessary to take away her pain.

First published in One Thousand and One Stories

Birthday Post: Mary Wollstonecraft at the Kitty Cat

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the prostitute by Joana Coccarelli, flickr

It’s my birthday! I am 51, one year over the half century mark, and I’m not quite sure how I survived, but here I am and thank you for joining me.

There are some pieces I’ve written in my life that have gotten me into trouble with my conservative Christian subculture. I was born into this subculture and I married into it, though now I find myself on its fringes, and am no longer attached to it through matrimonial ties. That being said, the deeper values I’ve tried to convey in my fiction are those of the human spirit, those of faith, hope, and love.

I channeled Flannery O’ Connor’s Wise Blood for the general feel of some of this. She is my hero though I don’t think she would have any truck with a piece involving the time travel of an 18th century feminist to a whore house in current day Nevada. She had a great deal to say about the nature of fiction in her brilliant Mystery and Manners. She brought her Catholic faith to bear in the development of her esthetic and her argument for the use of the world we apprehend through our senses, the world we engage with every day.

I got the idea for the setting from the HBO special called Cathouse. Of all the places Christ himself would have been, it would have been among people who sell themselves or who are sold. Barring that, I placed Mary Wollstonecraft here, authoress of Vindication of the Rights of Women. She herself was a fairly liberal person in her time and I was happy to see her getting along so well with the ladies of the Kitty Cat once they sat down to tea. The end notes refer to sections I lifted from Vindication so that Mary and her new friends could have a chat about issues that concern them.

This piece was first published in Serving House Journal. I feel I finally hit on how to publish this when I found a place that was engaged with the discussion of ideas. My work is fantastical, not necessarily the work of “real life” even in its less time travely bits. One editor at a journal who rejected this said the following: “I doubt you’ve even gone to a whore house. You don’t know anything about it.”  Ha. Ok. But my work is fantastical and still a good world in and of itself, one I have created whole cloth. I am glad this found a home.

The gorgeous collage is one I found on flickr and now wish I could put on my wall. What lush colors. Celebratory. Exactly how I want my work to feel. Enjoy.

 

Mary Wollstonecraft at the Kitty Cat

Mary Wollstonecraft and her thoughts about equality had little to do with Peggy Shams, the madam of Kitty Cat Ranch, the provider of what her customers affectionately called tenderloin, nice gams, a fresh piece of meat. Peggy had never heard of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, a late eighteenth century document setting forth a cogent argument for the education and humane treatment of women.

Though Peggy had been an ardent student of history as a girl, she had ironically and unfortunately missed the reading and study of this very piece of literature. And yet, when Mary introduced herself at the doorway of Peggy Sham’s empire, requesting tea, Peggy thought: “This is a strange one, but who am I to turn her away? What right do I have to exclude someone based on the century one comes from, the clothing one dons, the way one talks?”

Peggy had no idea that this woman would have torn her whorehouse to pieces with a few deft strokes of her pen. She was only all too anxious for a closer examination of the convincing virginal getup, the elaborate folds of the dress lifting in the Nevada breeze. The woman’s ladylike composure against the burnished yellow haze of the desert and the lilt and play of dirt devils was exquisite, breathtaking in its unexpected juxtaposition.

“Please, yes, do, come in,” said Peggy, squeezing her own hands together as if to wring from her body knowledge of proper etiquette. “We haven’t started our tea hour yet, but do have a seat and I’ll call the girls out.”

The woman drifted into the room and seated herself upon the Victorian fainting couch Peggy had just purchased. This, thought Peggy, was a fortuitous sign. At the very instant she, Peggy Shams, madam of Kitty Cat Ranch, was trying to bring decency to the flesh trade and thus ensnare a wider range of customers, a real lady, a class act, was sitting on her sofa, a diamond offered up to her on velvet.

“In tea, my dear,” she heard herself saying, “What is your pleasure?”

“Oh, most certainly Earl Gray,” replied the woman as she removed her gloves.

Wasn’t she a specimen, thought Peggy excitedly as she ransacked her brain, trying to remember what her last name was exactly. Mary Woollycroft, something like that, something Mayflowery, very Plymouth Rocky, starchy pilgrim.

“Kitty Cat Ranch is a fascinating moniker for a tea room,” said the woman. “Though feline animals are indeed often associated with women, it is good, I believe, to keep the tea room free of unaccompanied male intruders, as their presence can disrupt intelligent, enlightened conversation among female companions.”

“Er, yes,” said Peggy. She would have to be careful with this one. She sensed, oddly enough, she was only there for the tea. “This intelligent and enlightened conversation you’re talking about – I have always thought that the girls here could learn from someone like yourself, you know, a real lady who is also well spoken.”

“Oh, you are an educational establishment as well as a tea room? What a fine idea!”

“Well, on Wednesday afternoons, we have tea, girls only,” said Peggy, pulling out the electric pot she would use to warm the water. “The rest of the time we educate, especially the ones with no experience. This pertains mostly to the young men. The girls themselves are usually quite knowledgeable.”

“I am glad to hear of your educated women,” said Mary. “I cannot say enough for the acquisition of knowledge for the improvement of the status and character of our sex.”

“Do you mind, ever so much, if I took a look at your frock?” said Peggy, extending her dimpled hand and pulling her guest up to a standing position. This was a vision in white, this angel adorned in gossamer folds of fabric which flowed out from a satin empire waist – the waist, so concealing, yet so feminine – the folds so airy they formed a meringue around the sweet arms and shoulders and the skirt as long and drifty as a bride’s.

The purple carpet of the Kitty Cat has never been caressed by anything so pure. This was a sign that all of her business plans and strategies were accurate, that America was ready for a new kind of whore, a new kind of fantasy. “Virgin in the parlor, whore in the bedroom,” she blurted out as if an eruption had occurred in her brain.

“What?” said Mary, looking alarmed, taking a step back from her hostess.

Peggy placed her hand over her mouth as if to restrain a mild attack of mid-afternoon reflux.

“Oh excuse me please! It must be my tummy,” she said.

Mary retired to her place on the couch while Peggy clomped across the parlor to a door painted purple. “I will summon the girls.”

The office was a room walled off from the parlor by painted particle board with a cracked door and a pass-through window where customers paid for services rendered. Peggy pressed a worn black button which activated a shrill bell and then she returned to the parlor. She could hear the tread of the girls in their platform pumps, those gargantuan elevated shoes whose effect was to slow the girls down, to make movement and freedom impossible, to give the body the appearance of length, to signify the identity and class of the wearer.

“No more!” said Madam Peggy. She managed to pull off the exclamatory remark as a cough.

There must be some other way, she thought to herself, some other seductive yet more virtuous footwear that would thrill the hearts of men without solely reminding them of corruption. The kinds of people who expected her girls to wear this gear were the kind she didn’t want to deal with anymore. She pictured all those sleazebags: beefy gods with woefully outdated mullets, drunken pond scum with money to burn, virgin dorks, sad, horny couples. “Phew” she said, as if coughing out these bodies from her very own mouth.

“Would you care for a piece of licorice?” said Mary from the parlor. “It seems you have a case of mild dyspepsia and I find the confection to be of utilitarian value in addressing this bothersome ailment.”

“Oh, no thank you. I must ready the parlor for our repast.” Peggy thanked Jesus for the movies her mother used to make her watch, movies based on classic books by Henry James, Jane Austen, Marcel Proust. That’s how she knew about a “repast,” though she wished she could look it up real quick, to see if she had used the word properly.

From her post at the tea table, Peggy observed Mary’s face as the scantily clad girls filed in. They wore flowered hats, fishnet stockings, silk corsets and garters, patent platform stilettos, push up bras and boas. The woman didn’t blink. When the girls had all seated themselves, Mary commenced speaking.

“I regret I may be sorrowful company for your merry gathering,” said Mary. “I confess I am downcast over inequalities between men and women, inequalities I wrote about over two hundred years ago. I see the licentious dressing which the sensualists are bribing you to wear for their own pleasures. I have witnessed how, in times past, such attention to sensual pleasure disables the development of the nobler sensibilities and inhibits the enhancement of the powers to reason.”(1)

The girls stared at the strange little woman from under the plastic flowered brims of their bonnets.

“You know, Ms. Woollycroft,” said Peggy, “I have often thought to myself – haven’t I girls? – that we could learn to be a little more modest, like Mary is suggesting here, and maybe read some more on our off hours, you know, get educated.”

She handed a cup of Earl Grey to Mary and plopped in three lumps of sugar, an uncharacteristically generous serving, and a dollop of full cream.

Then she scrambled to her office and wrote, on a piece of paper: “Finishing school; purification of footwear; virgin whore – theme, incorporation of?” The girls lined up at the tea cart to fill their cups. Peggy scrambled back out to the parlor and snatched away the sugar and cream.

From her office where she was stowing away the fattening items in a mini-fridge, she heard one of the girls, nicknamed Army Amy, speaking to Mary Woollycroft. “You need one of these newfangled things I ordered from TV, Ms. Mary.” Army Amy was their oldest “girl.” She was a veteran of the Persian Gulf War. She had been a nurse and she was pretty in a tanned, toned, bottle-blond type of way. “I got a new contraption that will give you orgasms like you wouldn’t believe,” said the Army nurse “It will sure take away those blues we’re talking about. I had four orgasms – four, count them – before coming to work today.” The girls who were listening to this clapped and laughed.

Peggy hightailed it out of the office. Many of the girls were in various states of sloppiness, having thrown off the refined postures of “high tea day.” They slouched, their legs were spread. A couple of them who were bending to laugh were gathering their breasts into their bras. “Ladies!” said Peggy, her fury manifesting itself in the hardness of her eyes.

There was a silence, and then Mary, who sat in the center of the room, started to speak as if addressing a room of women gathered for a formal lecture on some topic.

“I should like to steer clear of an error in talking to all of you, an error which many respectable writers and speakers have fallen into. That is, that of addressing women as ‘ladies.’ I would prefer instead to address you as ‘women’ in order to avoid portraying us all as the frivolous sex, to be ridiculed or pitied by the men who endeavor by satire or instruction to improve us. (2) A gentleman drinking spirits at a taproom in town directed me to your establishment as a place to have tea today, but now I see I have been led here  by Providence for some higher purpose. If this purpose is not achieved in the course of one afternoon, and something tells me it will not be, I will return until all have all been enlightened as to the cause of our discontent as women and of our failure to improve our status.”

“I mean no frivolity in my use of the term ‘ladies,’ Ms. Woollycroft. I mean no insult,” said Peggy. “I was thinking of gracious women who take tea and mind their manners.”

“Manners and morals are so nearly allied,” said Mary, “that they have often been

confounded; but, though the former should only be the natural reflection of the latter, yet, when various causes have produced factitious and corrupt manners, which are very early caught, morality becomes an empty name.”(3)

“I get it,” said a long, lean blond stretched out across a faux leopard skin chaise lounge. “The manners you don’t like are the ones we fake at these fucking tea parties.”

Mary raised her brows at this, fixing a steady gaze on Peggy, as if some sort of explanation or apology would be forthcoming.

The girls all doubled over in raucous joy. They’ve never had someone to ally with them against Madam Peggy, except Kansas, the long, lean blond who just attached the f-word to this girls-only, cocaine and alcohol free social event with their frumpy overseer, squashy as a dumpling. The only reason Kansas got away with anything is that she made the most money for the Ranch. She cost $1500 an hour and up while the others’ rates hovered somewhere around one thousand.

Madam purpled. She could not let the girls see how this antique broad’s trump had infuriated her.

“It is acknowledged that the female sex spends many of the first years acquiring accomplishments,” said Mary. At some point, thought Peggy, it would be time for all of them to get their asses back to work. “Meanwhile,” said Mary in a sonorous, oblivious tone which crawled around on the sensitive patches of Peggy’s brain, “strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty and to the only way women can rise in the world – by marriage. And this desire makes mere animals of them, when they marry, they act as such children may be expected to act: they dress, they paint, and nickname God’s creatures. Surely these weak beings are only fit for the seraglio!”(4)

“Goddamn, I knew I was in the right place!” said Kansas. The girls fell out again. A spring was coming unwound in them and a couple of them bounced on the couch and a few had to rise to stretch out from laughing cramps. Army Amy blew tea through her nose.

“This is not a Turkish seraglio!” said Peggy, pounding a fist on the back of a storage bench where they kept the chains, in the off chance a man wanted to be enslaved. “I offer health care to you girls! I listen to your problems! I treat you like a mother would her very own children!”

“If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of patriotism,” said Mary, “their mother must be a patriot and a lover of mankind.5 Such language as I have heard today from these women does not reflect even a respect for self. I blame this on poor instruction.”

“I do love mankind,” said Peggy. “And I am a patriot, to the last!”

“Furthermore,” said Mary. “Women, intoxicated by the adoration which men, under the influence of their senses pay them, do not seek to obtain a durable interest in their hearts or to become the friends of the fellow creatures who find amusement in their society.”(6)

“Our former manager, Rusty Felton,” said Kansas, “we were all friends with him. Me especially.”

“Our tea is running overtime today.” said Peggy, glaring at the girls and avoiding eye contact with Kansas. This had not gone quite like she had expected, although she was still undecided about what had happened. She felt uncomfortable, unsettled, and reached for a little container of nitroglycerin spray she kept in her pocket to ward off oncoming angina. She didn’t know if she had heart trouble, really, or if it was anxiety. She covered both with an amply supplied medicine cabinet.

Madam clomped back to the office and pressed the bell, signaling the girls it was time to go back to work. Customers would be arriving soon and the girls were to go to their rooms to ready themselves. Peggy sat at her desk, staring at the notes she had scribbled earlier. She craved something sugary.

Before the nighttime desk clerks arrived, she would hide herself beside the filing cabinet and eat a candy bar, catching the nuts in her skirt, cramming bits of chocolate into her mouth with her nails. She heard the tread of the girls’ heavy footsteps. She heard the creak of the fainting couch as Mary rose to leave.

Peggy rushed to see her guest out, not quite sure why she was so anxious to see her again, to reassure herself of the continuance of their relationship. “Are you going to come again sometime, Ms. Woollycroft?”

Mary nodded, her cool blue eyes appraising her but not unfriendly and she turned and stepped out into the desert of Nevada, reddened by the setting sun.

In the darkness of her room that night, Peggy plopped down on a squeaky cot she inherited from her grandmother. She felt her body melt into the thin mattress and drift as she heard her granny’s speeches in her head.

“You dress like a whore!” she had said when she was alive, when she, Peggy, was young and played poker at her Daddy’s bar where she scammed men out of their money. “You look like a hooker! Go get that willow branch, go get me that switch. I won’t rest until I’ve applied it to your bottom. I won’t rest until I’ve raised the guilt in you like a welt. I made mistakes with your Mama, but I won’t make them with you!”

On Sunday mornings, the old woman dragged her to church to have Satan taken out. When Peggy prayed out loud that Satan would come out all by himself so she didn’t have to go, her grandmother ordered her not to blaspheme: “Not on my time, you don’t. Not on my watch!” Her granny saw something deep in her, something dark and inextricably wound around her heart, a blackness like a tumor.

When the old woman died, it was like all the life and starch were taken out of Peggy. She dropped out of high school and spent the rest of her senior year lying on her mother’s hip, while her mother watched the classic movie channel and ordered pizzas. Finally, her mother said she couldn’t support her anymore. It was hard enough to squeak by on what she was getting from alimony payments. Peggy left home and started hooking and making lots of money. Later, she became a madam.

During the ten years she waited for her boss to leave, or die, she sat at her kitchen table over microwaved dinners, dreaming of starting a gentlemen’s club, a really classy one, with no poles or elevated dance floors, and no garish furniture like the eyesore of a purple leather sofa that snaked its way through the parlor. The club would be named something different, she didn’t know what, but it would be graced with deep leather seats, mahogany tables, and long, luxurious white curtains like the ones in some of the more expensive night clubs in New York and Los Angeles.

The girls would wear modest clothes, would look like girlfriends or even potential brides.

“Virgin whore,” she said, thinking of Mary Woollycroft. With this thought came the memory of the woman’s accusations: that Peggy was running a Turkish seraglio; that she did not respect the girls because she called them “ladies;” that she was unpatriotic, which to Peggy was the very worst of denouncements. She was no one if not a lover of America, a free country allowing voters to do whatever the hell they wanted and allowed her to run a business.

“Mary Woollycroft is the resurrection of my grandmamma,” thought Peggy in the darkness of her trailer on the edge of the desert. A shyness crept over her then, a necessity for cover so deep she lifted the mattress of her bed and crawled onto the springs. She pulled the mattress over her and felt the weight of it press into her like the weight of a man, something long since forgotten.

At six a.m. her alarm went off. Peggy lifted off the mattress part way.

At first, she could not remember how she had got like that. Had someone come in? Had she hidden? Had someone tried to smother her? She tried to get up, but her robe caught on a spring and she had to tear it to pull it loose. She felt like she had been smashed in by a fence post.

Then she remembered the previous night’s memories of her granny. She shivered as if the woman was tromping down the hall, waiting to snatch her out of her room and drag her down to the pastor who would clunk her on the head. Satan and Granny had been neck on neck. If it hadn’t have been for Granny, there wouldn’t have been Satan, and if Jesus hadn’t come, Satan would have laid low too.

Peggy lay on top of the mattress and listened to the wind whip around the sides of her house. She felt free and clean, swept out and ready for the next thing, and she thought of the sounds of her office – her very own office, with no one to boss her around or gross it up. She thought of her adding machine, its comforting clicking, the coffee machine – its dripping and wheezing – the odd beeps and hisses of the credit card machine.

What did her grandmother know, really, what did anyone know? Wasn’t her grandmother dead? Weren’t her bones lying in a casket? Did her mouth speak? Did her hand flail with a switch?

When Peggy arrived at the Kitty Cat, she came upon Mary Woollycroft in the parlor drinking tea.

“It’s good to see you, Ms. Woollycroft,” she said. “But this is a busy day. Maybe you can come see us again next Wednesday on our tea day, 4 p.m. sharp. We would love to have you and the girls enjoyed you immensely.”

“Thank you,” said Mary. There was something in her face that was different. She didn’t look as abstracted and checked out. Her eyes glittered intensely and her jaw had a set look.

“Yes, we’re getting all new furniture, a new look, a new name,” said Peggy. “Lots of hard work to do, not much time for chitchat I’m afraid.”

“Thank you for your invitation for next week, but I think I’ll stay,” said Mary. She sipped her tea.

Peggy stared at her.

“You have not represented yourself genuinely,” said Mary, nestling the cup in its saucer. “You have led me to believe you are helping these women.”

“That is exactly what I am doing,” said Peggy. Her heart was racing like it used to when her granny yanked her out of bed.

“You are not being of assistance to any of them in the least. I have spoken with some of the women pursuant to their arrival this morning and have learned that you are contributing to the demise and slavery of a significant portion of our numbers. You should know your history, Ms. Shams. If you did, you would know who I am and why I have chosen to remain.”

“I know my history better than anyone.” “You speak another untruth, Ms. Shams.”

Peggy sighed and clomped off to her office. She was sick of this tiresome broad, just as sick as she was of her vinyl pumps sliding off her heal. It was time for leather, all new leather everything – leather shoes, leather purse, leather wallet, leather coat, leather desk chair. She threw her notebook down beside the phone. She had sketched out some nice dresses for the girls, retro sixties, sexy housewife. When the girls came in, she had them come into her office so she could measure them.

“What’s this for?” said Kansas. “Your own good,” said Peggy.

“I got the whole industry for my own good. I can call your old boss and get the fuck out of here.”

“Do you see how they treat me, Ms. Woollycroft?” Peggy shouted to the woman through the open door. She was sure Mary was listening. “And me, taking care of them and all and making sure they never want for anything.”

“You’re some kind of sugar teat, all right,” said Kansas. Kansas bent down to Peggy’s face, for the older lady was on her knees getting a measurement of the working girl’s slim hips. The smoothness of the girl’s sex-enhanced skin brought beads of sweat to Peggy’s little soft mustache.

“Now you listen here, you mother fucking bitch,” said the girl through clenched, pearly teeth. “Don’t touch that woman. If she wants to drink tea the whole goddamn day, you give her tea. And if she wants to talk to us, you better let her talk. And if she doesn’t like you or agree with whatever it is you’re doing here, whatever it is you got going up in that little noggin” – Kansas wrapped on Peggy’s forehead with her knuckles – “you fucking deal or I’m outta here.”

Kansas stood and made a sharp one eighty turn as if she had come to the end of a modeling platform and was heading back down the runway.

Peggy fell back against the file cabinet, her legs spread before her, her knees puckering beneath her tan stockings. “Slut!” she screamed inside her head.

She would never get anywhere if she had this to work with, this disrespect, so much hatred and ingratitude. She would have to work fast and hard to get her new concept underway, but she knew she could do it.

The words “Manifest Destiny” were taped to the inside of the handle on her phone. She knew she had the skills for something great. She knew she had business acumen, vision, toughness. And besides that, she had the right beliefs. She knew there was no evil, only God, and He had ordained this for her, this new kind of vision, had laid it out like a map. Men needed this guilt-free service, and in its wake, marriages would flourish. This was something God could get into. He was a Utilitarian, if nothing else.

It would take a year of going along, business as usual, keeping the girls happy and healthy and fed, and then she would hire young, attractive, smooth-talking recruiters and cull the colleges for students, kids desperate enough to sell their bodies to pay for their tuition and designer clothes. She would build a nest for them, with furniture they recognized, and a place where decent men would feel comfortable. She would make it like home, a home for everyone.

Ms. Shams.” A voice croaked from the parlor. “I would like some more Earl Grey tea.”

They were out of Earl Grey, thought Peggy. How had they run through it so fast? The old bag had messed with her head so much she must have made too many pots. But Peggy remembered Kansas’ snarling threat. She had to keep this prima donna of theirs happy.

“I’ll get us restocked, don’t you worry Ms. Woollycroft,” said Peggy, pulling herself up from the floor. “I just have to run to the store. It’s a pretty good ways down the road, so I’ll be back in about an hour.”

“Oh, and some more cream,” said Mary.

Son of a – Peggy thought. “OK!” she said. She grabbed her purse and stepped outside, onto the threshold. She slammed the door on the vision of Mary in her parlor. “Bitch!” she said out loud.

“God bless you!” said Mary, through the hollow vinyl door.

“Damn,” she said, more quietly now as she crunched along the sidewalk of pebbles. It was an hour until they opened and she would just get back in time to start dealing with the customers and then she would have to put up with this woman whom she’d invited to come back and hang out. What had she been thinking? And why had Mary become one big stubborn demanding heifer?

She peeled off from the gravel lot onto the road. The five o’clock sun stabbed murderously at her eyes. Peggy lowered the sun shade.

When she got to the store, she was a perspiring mess. The air had gone out on her, and Peggy added “new car” to her mental to-be- purchased list, along with leather accessories, a bed fit for a queen, a truckload of rocks. She paid for the tea and cream. She had just enough cash left over for a snack at the ranch, for a candy bar and coke from the machines plastered with signs that read “Client Use Only.”

On the drive back, she spied a familiar looking man in black, loping along the shoulder. She pulled up to him. Perhaps he was heading to the Ranch and if he had been drinking at all, could be easily conned once she showed him the girls and got him into negotiating prices for services. When she had come alongside of him, she recognized the side of his puffy face and the Johnny Cash getup he liked to don on Friday nights, including a black leather hat. It was the former owner, Rusty Felton.

“Well, Russ,” she said, “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Give me a ride,” he said. He was breathing hard, with his mouth open, and he squinted as if walking was giving him pain.

“Where you going?”

“Kitty Cat.”

“You a paying customer?”

“Sure.”

Peggy’s chest tightened as he crawled into the passenger seat. He didn’t buckle up, but she didn’t say anything. She couldn’t give a flying fig. She pulled onto the highway.

“What brings you back?” she said after a long pause. The sky was a violet purple now with streaks of red and pink. There was nothing out here but dirt, sky, and a range of faraway mountains.

When he didn’t answer, she looked at his face. He had aged, in just two weeks. Less sex, she thought. A man like that, having been bolstered so long by a satisfied appetite collapses in on himself.

“I thought you had some hot offer outside Vegas,” she said.

“Fell through,” he said, looking out the side window.

Peggy pulled up behind a huge dark dump truck whose contents were covered by a vinyl tarp. It was going about 35 miles per hour and in front of that was an RV. She had spotted the RV a mile or so back on a curve. She was trying to judge whether she could get around both of the vehicles and get safely back on her side of the highway in time.

“You get some fancy visitor at the Kitty Cat yesterday?” he said. “A gal in some old timey get-up came into the bar where I was. She was looking to have tea and I sent her your way. I hope you took care of her.”

“So who you going to see at Kitty Cat?” she said, ignoring his question. She swerved out from the dump truck, but then had to swerve back into her lane again to avoid an oncoming semi.

“Kansas.”

Peggy pressed in the lighter. This called for a cigarette. “You can’t afford her, Rusty.” “I’m gonna to take her with me.”

“What?” Peggy slammed on the breaks just in time to avoid hitting the dump truck which had stopped suddenly. The RV in front of it had slowed to pull off onto a county road. Peggy’s bumper had missed the dump truck’s worn black fender by a foot.

The dump truck burbled up to a start and lurched ahead. Peggy followed, not bothering to pass now. She returned the case to its safekeeping by her breast.

“Listen, if you think she’s going with you, you’re crazy,” she said. “You’ve got nothing for her.”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” he said, as if he had not been severely insulted. “I got love.” He rolled his window down partway and the dry breeze ruffled his thinning hair.

“Oh my God!” said Peggy. “Oh Lord help us!”

“That’s right,” he said, sitting up on his seat and turning toward her. “I want to love Kansas, love her like she’s never been loved, in a decent way. We were just talking about it on the phone.”

Kansas was supposed to be getting ready for her clients, and here she was, talking on the phone to this putz. It was that Woollycroft broad with all her speechifying and pretty ways. She had set this up, the bitch. As soon as this thought launched itself, Peggy felt a rush of fire on her flesh. Grandmamma! I’m sorry Granny, she almost pleaded aloud to the hot wind.

“We’re going to get married,” Rusty went on. “We’re going to start all over and have a normal life. She’s never been loved for who she is. She’s giving me the chance to do this, and she loves me too. Did you ever think you’d hear me say that, bad as I am? Did you ever think I could love someone and they could love me?”

“This is outrageous! Oh this is just hilarious!” She pulled hard on her cigarette and spewed a plume of smoke. She tossed it out the window and sparks flew past. She jammed the lighter back in. She tore at the top button of her blouse and jammed her hand into her bra, searching for the cigarette case. The lighter popped back out and she held it to her cigarette and breathed heavy on its tar-filled offering.

“She doesn’t love you and you don’t love her,” she said, smoke coming out of her nostrils and the sides of her mouth in little bursts. “You want to know why? Let me tell you why. There is no love, that’s why!”

And then the black hull of the dump truck was upon them in the headlights and there was a screech of metal and the sound of a million tiny stones falling from the truck ahead like coins from a slot machine. They fell into the car, mixing with bits of glass from the windshield. And then they filled Peggy’s mouth, her eyes, her blouse. They made a pillow for her head and a leg rest for her feet. They were pink, roseate, striated with gray.

Rusty fell out of the car. The rocks, having pressed down on the door handle in some fortuitous way, and Rusty, being that he was unbuckled, rolled over the shoulder of the road and onto the dry, barren earth. He jumped up and stood for a moment, shaking nervously. Yet he was strangely calm, as if he had not just been in a crash and nearly lost his life.

And then it dawned on him that the former owner’s presence at the scene of the accident might look suspicious, might look like he was trying to get his old job back. A rolling tumbleweed gave him opportunity. He grasped hold of it and, using it as a shield, effectual enough in the partial darkness, crept toward the Kitty Cat.

Endnotes

1 Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Project Gutenberg Etext

– No. 3420.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

Thousand Page Book of Grim Facts

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Experiment by Still EPsiLon, flickr

Mark had never met a girl like Trina. He was new to school, Bradford Middle School, to be exact, and she friended him first, in the cafeteria, sitting beside him when he was sitting alone, her nails colored with a chipped black polish he noticed first thing, not looking up at first, her hands gripping her tray as he looked up from his book, trying hard not look a loser who was doing what he was really doing: Reading a book during lunch. My name is Trina she said and he said My name is Mark. And he got a full look of her hair and face, her kohl lined eyes, deep glossed lips, the nest of black hair springing up evenly around her head and dotted with stars and little falls of tinsel, he couldn’t tell exactly, he had never seen anything quite like it. She wore fingerless gloves, a torn jacket, a lace skirt, boots.

“You gotta stay away from that Potts girl,” said his grandma when he got home and told her about his first day. He was at the table with the same book he had been reading at the cafeteria: The Thousand Page Book of Grim Facts. His grandfather had given it to him not long after his father had died and Mark and his mother came to live with them in Starke, Florida.

“Why do I have to stay away from her, grandma?” Mark had wanted Trina to come over next day. They were going to go over The Grim Facts book.

“Cause she and her Mama are witches. Live out there in the woods under the oaks in their car with the alligator and bear. Homeless but want for nothing. Special powers n’ such. Devil stuff.”

“Leave him ‘lone, Violet,” said Grandpa. “He can have any friend he wants over here. Jesus got not truck for bias.”

Grandma clucked, shuffling around her kitchen, like she did when she wanted to talk back to Grandpa but he had given her an unassailable position. She was nothing if not religious.

Mark took advantage of the moment to take his cookies and milk to his room along with the Grim Facts. He sat down with his stash on the floor and spread it out before him. The Grim Facts book: The best present he had ever been given. The things no one else had said when his father had died. It was not like he couldn’t look some things up on line. But to have them printed on paper and given to him was like Grandpa having taken the time to give him a perfect Hallmark card. No one had wanted to talk much about the truth of how his dad died except Grandpa. “May you always know the facts, son,” Grandpa had written on the inside cover. “Love, Grandpa, Christmas 2017.”

An excerpt from Sea Worthy magazine was found in the chapter in Electric Shock Drowning: “Captain David Rifkin and James Shafer conducted extensive testing of all aspects of ESD for a Coast Guard study in 2008, including exposing themselves to low-level currents in fresh water. ‘Anything above 3 milliamps (mA) can be very painful,’ Rifkin said. ‘If you had even 6 mA going through your body, you would be in agonizing pain.’ Less than a third of the electricity used to light a 40-watt light bulb — 100 mA — passing directly through the heart is almost always fatal.” *

That day at the lake in Arkansas, Labor Day weekend, was the worst in Mark’s life. He and his family were having a picnic with their dog Chip. A young girl had jumped into the water off the end of the dock and was screaming. His father jumped in to help her and both of them died because of electricity leaking from a boat. A man pulled their bodies out with a long hook grounded with a rubber handle so as to not be electrocuted himself. They were laid on the shore and people tried to help with mouth to mouth and chest compressions. But Mark knew inside his father was gone. He looked nothing like himself, so passive and lifeless. That was not his father at all.

It was like his dad to be thinking only of someone else, this young girl who was in pain and frightened. Mark touched the entry of this description in the Grim Facts book. It was getting a little worn looking where he touched it. He tried to imagine what it would have been like for him, this experience of being shocked and in pain, but he couldn’t force himself to. Something stopped him from thinking about it all the way though in the chapter the levels of pain were clearly outlined per milliamp, every milliamp right up until death.

Maybe another time he could force himself to imagine it fully. It had only been a few months since this had happened and many days it didn’t even seem real. Sometimes he thinks his dad would never have guessed he and Mom and Chip would be living with Grandma and Grandpa in Starke, old death town, he would say, because of the infamous three legged electric chair at the prison. His dad would probably have laughed at the irony of their situation.

Would his dad’s spirit fly down from his grave in Pine Bluff to watch over them? Mark believed this every night though nothing about his current beliefs supported much in the way of ghosts and spirits. Nor were witches or any special powers they may have a part of his belief system which is why he ignored what Grandma said about Trina and her mom. Just an old lady scare tactic to get people to stay away from the fringes and go to church. Then Mark felt guilty for feeling unkindly to her. Her cookies were really good and crispy, just the way he liked them.

Trina was making a regular habit of coming over after school. She seemed to like his Grim Facts book and was able to talk about the Starke electric chair chapter, having been a resident of the area for an undetermined amount of time. To compensate her for her invaluable anecdotal contributions, Mark had his grandma make them sandwiches, which also gave his grandma the chance to see nothing untoward was happening in her house while his mother was away at work. Grandma could come into his room, unannounced, and put her mind at rest. And Trina, Mark suspected, was hungry. She always seemed to be, as she shoveled bits in with her fingers with the chipped nails.

“You get to see some things in the woods here,” said Trina, looking at the picture of Raiford Prison, home of Old Sparky. “Spirits so restless and they like to shake you to death. Meanest lady I ever met, met her as a spirit, she killed four men, including her husband and son, wandering around the cemetery where they put her ashes after they fried her brain good on Old Sparky.”

This was a little rough talk for where Mark came from, but it didn’t bother him. Most people were so proper Mark felt he could never see clearly enough to decide how he felt about everything, what he was thinking, what questions he may have. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said.

“You come to the wrong town, then,” said Trina. “There’s a whole society of them here. They believe in you,” she said, and smiled, a piece of pimento cheese having stuck to the corner of her mouth. “You kill people, they’re gonna hang around some.”

“Let’s write to Wayne Doty,” she said, feeling freshly inspired and pulling a pen from the cup of writing utensils on his desk. Wayne Doty had recently been in the news for requesting to die by the electric chair. “Don’t you want to know what he’s thinking?”

Mark conceded it would be interesting research and so they wrote:

Dear Mr. Doty,

We are writing this letter to you to ask you a question. Could you help us? We are doing a project on execution. We don’t know of anyone who has died by electrocution. Why are you asking the state to die by electrocution? Are you worried about execution or being electrocuted? Are you worried that what happened to Pedro Medino or Tiny Davis might happen to you?

Thank you for answering our questions.

Sincerely,

Curious students at Bradford Middle School

They felt it best not to use their names of course, not even first names. And being so anonymous allowed them to be a little braver and ask about botched electrocutions – fire springing from Pedro’s head and Tiny, profusely bleeding. Doty was not a man you wanted to rile and had a reputation for being extremely dangerous. They mailed it using Trina’s mother’s mailing address she kept with a friend. Mark’s grandma would have hit the roof.

In a couple of weeks they got a response:

Dear curious students of Bradford Middle School,

I am honored by your curiosity and happy to answer all your questions about my personage. I wish I had me some children of my own but being what I am, I know it is best I remain a single, fatherless man. I want you to obey your Mamas and your Daddies and even though my Daddy was bad seed, there is lots of good out there for you to listen and obey, so do what Mr. Doty says, ok.

It is my right as a citizen of these United States to chose the means by which I die. Ain’t no one else killed who I killed but me and I regret I killed but I pro’lly kill again given who I am and that I ain’t never had no love from family and killing comes natural.

What I seek little chillrun is to help the families of the people I killed feel at peace. Also what I want is the release of spiritual freedom. I want to feel the spirit lifting from me at last, releasing me from the world, and I want to seek that by means the state can kill me most expeditiously, through the electric chair, even if it is not a perfect means. I want to let go, finally and most completely.

Your friend,

Wayne Doty

They were reading this at the house where Trina and her mother received mail and bathed and cooked their dinners. They were sitting in the afternoon light of the living room with the Thousand Page Book of Grim Facts. Mark had turned to the chart for the effects of AC current on the body in fresh water:

Probable Effect On Human Body

1 mA – Perception level. Slight tingling sensation. Still dangerous under certain conditions.

5 mA – Slight shock felt; not painful but disturbing. Average individual can let go. However, strong involuntary reactions to shocks in this range may lead to injuries.

6-16 mA – Painful shock, begin to lose muscular control. Commonly referred to as the freezing current or let-go range.

17-99 mA – Extreme pain, respiratory arrest, severe muscular contractions. Individual cannot let go of an electrified object. Death is possible.

100-2,000 mA – Ventricular fibrillation (uneven, uncoordinated pumping of heart). Muscular contraction and nerve damage begin to occur. Death is likely.

2,000+ mA – Cardiac arrest, internal organ damage, and severe burns. Death is probable.

Source: OSHA

“Look at this,” he said. He pointed out the chart. “They say Dad experienced about 100 milliamps.” He felt himself a little unmoored at this point, as if he didn’t have a body. He stared at the space ahead, an empty bookshelf. Where were the books? What was this place?

Trina took the book from his hands and put it beside her on the floor. “Maybe we should think about other things,” she said. And she leaned over and pulled Mark’s face close to hers. She kissed him, holding his mouth on hers. He felt her nails on his neck and breathed in her outdoor smells – sunshine and sky and oak leaf. Her gloss tasted like strawberry.

When she sat back in the patch of sunlight he noticed the trails of miniscule particles floating in the beams slanting down through the window. It was something he had never noticed before. Maybe that’s all spirit is, he thought, maybe there is some left when we move, we go from place to place, when we die, a trace. He wanted to kiss her again. She felt very much alive. He tasted the faint note of berry on his mouth. The gloss was sticky and sweet and would surely linger through the fading day.

He tasted berry on his lips that night when he met Trina at the entrance to the Florida State Prison Cemetery. He couldn’t be sure, but as they held hands and looked at the gate he could have sworn he saw wisps of beings traipsing among the graves as if waiting for a bell to chime and the doors to swing wide and let them loose into the night.

* “ESD Explained,” by Beth Leonard. http://www.boatus.com.

The Steinway

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Susan Sermoneta, flickr

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

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

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

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

The Steinway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That piano is hideous.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can I listen?” she said.

“Sure. But there’s not much going on, I’m afraid. A whole lot of bad playing.”

She sat. She chose my grandmother’s channel back chair. This had always been a favorite of mine, but I was intent on not commenting or engaging in conversation. If this was how she saw fit to waste an hour, I would not make myself responsible for her entertainment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I mean that this could become something.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s three in the morning.”

“I know. I couldn’t sleep.”

“You never sleep.”

“That’s not true.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m a good idiot.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Guilty?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I kissed her mouth. Her lipstick tasted like cake.

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

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

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

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

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

“I want to take a bath,” she said.

I nuzzled her hair.

“Could you run a vacuum?” she said.

She twisted in my arms. I let her go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lena came down and kissed everyone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I stood and turned to face her.

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

I was silent.

“Do you feel something for me?”

I picked up her hand. It was small and delicate in mine, like a small bird. I caressed it and held it to my mouth. I held it against my cheek. I said nothing.

She yanked her hand away. Tears streamed down her cheeks and she swiped at them. She turned and left for the kitchen and I followed, wanting to hold her to reassure her, but knowing I should not, that this would only prolong what was inevitable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So this is your excuse?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

I couldn’t breathe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dark Hearts

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heart by goandgo, flickr

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

Dark Hearts

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

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

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

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

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

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

And at that point, Vicky enacted her plan.

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

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

The boys nodded and laughed with their newly minted voices.

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

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

They started quaking and laughing nervously.

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

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

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

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

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

“You were out,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

Amy

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Bright side by Ben Raynal, flickr

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

— Raymond Carver

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

Amy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s get married,” he said.

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

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

Valentine’s Sugar Water Love

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A Bird in a Gilded Cage by Jeanne, flickr

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

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

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

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

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

 

Mrs. Pompidou

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honesty by only alice, flickr

Mrs. Pompidou was troubled again. The traffic jams in her hair were becoming quite the nuisance. When Mr. Pompidou passed, it was quite beside her to know how to deal, what with all the gridlock among her roots, the accidents on the bridges and arches of updos whose structures were collapsing under her aged, weakening hair. She needed a miracle, she needed a sculptress with an investment in lacquer and confidence in engineering with a certain “je ne sais quoi” to ease her troubled mind. She missed her beloved Henry who would wrap her hair in the evenings and help her sit upright in bed in the mornings, blowing on her curls and byways to get the traffic flowing again, making appointments for her when it was time for repair. She had found little respite from her sense of loss and spent some time in the mornings by her rotating fan, remembering his gentle ministrations.

She was 80 she didn’t mind telling Molly Popkins who wheedled and fussed over her at the Curling Salon. Dear Molly, whose hair was more like a train slightly derailed, one half of her hair cut short and the other suspended in free fall, a giant blue waterfall. Mrs. Pompidou had read in the magazine she picked up from the grocery every week that there was a lot less respect for symmetry in hairstyles these days. “It’s too matchy match” complained the world super model whose middle aged body looked more like a woman of 20, the middle aged model who donned her belly button in a very public self-promoting lingerie clothing line. “Matchy match” had become an anathema though Mrs. Pompidou had grown up in an age of classic architecture, an age in which jarring others with a sense of disproportion was impolite at best, insane at worst.

Yet Leyla Pompidou has decided to disturb the salon with her own sense of immediacy, of a worsening crisis on her head. There was a part of her that was even a little happy to create her own train wreck when she showed up unexpectedly, her rusting Chevrolet sputtering forth protest, and Leyla, tiny body and all purse, nails, and hair, clomping across the hot Florida asphalt in her cream block heels. She liked the effect it created when she pulled the door to its fullest, hyperextending it as if it were a double joint, stirring the bells to jangle in shrill alarm.

This was critical, the way she entered, the way they all started, for her hair could never be allowed to relax and they should all be on alert. She had felt the ghost of her Henry speaking to her from his portrait over the mantel, telling her to please stay the Leyla he had always known, his “petite chou” and she would be damned if she was about to let him down now. It was in her hair, French tips, and screaming orange lips she would remain despite the waterfalls around her, the sloppily drawn glosses, unnatural colors, despite Molly Popkins’ lectures. “It is time for a change, Mrs. Pompidou,” she would say and so Leyla was deeply suspect of the sink, deep conditioning treatments, long toothed combs like saber tooth tigers threatening to take her starch.

She was able to freshen her French tips with Mrs. Byrd while she waited for Molly to help her, Mrs. Byrd who understood, whose age Leyla guessed to be around sixty and whose husband had died trying to trap nonnative game in the Everglades. Mrs. Byrd understood the importance of classic beauty in the face of the wilderness, in the face of changing times. She spoke under her breath about the changing shapes and colors of nails, for the worse, she said, the colors of bruises and burned suns, shapes like sickles.

“Let’s wash your hair today,” said Molly when Mrs. Byrd had done and Leyla was clawed and properly manicured.

“I object, you know that ma belle.”

“It’s time,” said Molly and she called for an assistant to help, to help seat Leyla in a reclining chair by a sink and assist Leyla in staying still for the procedure.

“Oh no, oh no!” said Leyla. “My Henry would not approve! Oh how you are treating me! He will blow through this door tonight and destroy everything! You are warned!”

And then she felt the trickle of warm water work like fingers through her roads and beltways, her tall buildings and tenement blocks. She heard the cry of her people as they were funneled down the sink, though some managed to make it out of the flood altogether and bounce upon her shoulder and down upon the floor, scattering and skittering hither and yon across the floor.

“I am worried about you Mrs. Pompidou,” said Molly Popkins. “There could be bugs in here. At Curls we want to help you. Don’t you think that’s what your Henry would have wanted?”

“Oh not like this, not like this!” Mrs. Pompidou began to worry about the glue on her lashes. Just how undignified was she becoming? And to suggest she had bugs in her hair! To even think such a thing! Henry had always attended her appointments, to make Mrs. Pompidou happy, to take her out for dinner afterwards, and a trip to her favorite consignment store for a few antique baubles. Henry, so stately and strong, sitting, waiting for her with his legs crossed, wearing his smart suit, his Wall Street Journal snapped out and open before him. He owned some cane fields and they had wanted for little though they were by no means rich. Yet he would never have stood for this. And who would rebuild what they had built together – the updos upon updos, the fragile intricate weave delicate and strong?

They sat her up and put a towel to her head. “Henry, Henry!” she said extending a pointy nailed finger to indicate some man framed by the window beside the door. Molly motioned the man over and Leyla saw it was only a boy waiting for his mother, a long tall teenage boy she knew from church. “It will be alright, Mrs. Pompidou, it will be alright even though Henry is with God now. You’ll see.”

“Oh you young people know nothing!” she snapped, though she instantly felt guilty and so patted the young man’s hand in reassurance. “Of course you’re right, and how silly of me, a crazy old woman. You see, I’ve just lost all my people. I’ve lost all my roads and infrastructure.”

“Shall we rebuild, then?” said Molly, hopefully, and she began to blow out Mrs. Pompidou’s clean hair while the boy returned to his chair. Molly embarked on the process of cement, of lacquer, of shoveling up, dry setting, soldering. She built mile after mile. She stood on a block to reach the top, to create spires, curls, finials, flowers. It wasn’t the same as when Henry had lived and yet when she returned home again and set a cup of warm tea before his portrait, she felt a warm flush in the house, a glow, his approval.

She had forgotten her bauble. She rushed off in the Chevy.

Rhonda

This post contains mature subject matter.

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skeleton by Maria Teresa Adalid, flickr

Marie spends her days drawing blood from women whose veins hide behind layers of subcutaneous fat, cells furiously hoarding water. The women come to The Clinic to finally and once and for all time Lose Weight.

Marie wears the soft dusty rose scrubs of nurses and staff, a pair of scrubs which are now deliciously loose against her skin. Though they are a few sizes smaller than when she first started working there, her progress is ongoing, even though she has surpassed her initial Goal. Soon it will be time to order a pair in a size she hadn’t worn since the eighth grade. She feels light and frail and powerful all at once.

She has only been working as a phlebotomist for a few months and whenever she makes a successful blood draw on the first try, she relishes the prospect of telling The Doctor who never seems to tire of hearing of her accomplishments, however small. Like when she finally made Goal Weight.

When they rang the bell for her after Weigh In that Best Day of All Days, signifying her Victory, all of the staff and other patients came out of cubbyholes, offices, and the officer manager played Alicia Keyes over the sound system the song “Girl on Fire,” the music video on every screen and the staff sang it for her loudly and cheerfully, arm and arm. The Clinic manager handed her a gift basket of candle, water bottle, diet powdered instant soups and lemonade.

But the best part of all, The Doctor gave her a huge hug after their exit interview. It was long and warm and sweet, and he held her tight against him like this was the reward for finally having A Body, A Real Body. On her way out she had almost gotten to her car but decided to come back and asked to speak to the doctor. She explained she was recently divorced but had trained as a phlebotomist in order to support herself. She wasn’t sure what made her flush more in front of him: That she had confessed to being recently divorced or that she was so bold in propositioning herself for a job. In a few weeks, there was an opening.

In the first few days, whenever she had made a successful first draw, she met him between patients with the vial of blood though he had told her repeatedly to take it directly to the lab. He still smiled at her anyway and took care of it himself, the contents of that draw necessary to understand clients’ status in the world of Health and Happiness.

Soon she would understand what to do with the blood and the true nature of his feelings, he told himself. He was used to crushes and usually found if he gave someone a little attention first he could gently transition them into realistic expectations. Perhaps it was how vulnerable they had been with him, coming to him as they were initially in their distress, and allowing him to help. He found it created a bond which he didn’t find altogether unpleasant but there were moments of discomfort.

“Thank you,” he would say gently and touch her on the elbow which unbeknownst to him she had creamed with a $150 jar of stem cell moisturizer, wrapping it in plastic wrap for absorption, preparing for the following day when he will touch her there. “Just remember to take this directly to the lab next time,” and he would smile, disengaging himself.

“You like that doctor,” says her roommate, Rhonda, who is a skeleton. “You got the hots for him.”

Rhonda lives in the closet beside Marie’s front door. She likes the confinement when alone but bursts out as soon as Marie crosses the threshold. She is not too bad looking as far as skeletons go. She has some of her long blond hair and she had Marie buy her false eyelashes and a padded bra.

Some of Marie’s boyfriends have enjoyed having sex with Rhonda. You would think this would not be the case since she is all bone, but it just goes to prove the very thing Marie’s mother has told her all along: Men just want something to rub up against.

When Rhonda has seduced her dates into the bed, Marie waits until their groaning ceases. She waits in the kitchen while she writes in her food diary what she has eaten and how many minutes she has exercised and at what intensity level and whether the exercises were cardio or anaerobic.

Always the men who have fallen for Rhonda’s ploys and dirty invitations, who have fallen into bed with her, leave with their eyes downcast. They do not come into the kitchen to say good bye to Marie. Their self-abasement saves Marie the trouble of having to break it off with them.

“You want to screw him,” says Rhonda of Marie’s feelings for Dr. Wideman. This is after Ricky had fled the apartment, practically in tears. Marie is pretty sure he’s never had sex with a skeleton. She’d known him since grade school. He’s even been a student at the seminary.

“I wish you’d stop seducing my friends.” She checks her Maintenance Plan. It is time for a boiled egg. “Would you like an egg?”

Rhonda is smoking her Pall Malls. “I’d like a stack of pancakes with bacon on top and syrup drizzled all over.”

Marie puts on the coffee. She slips in some decaf though Rhonda would want the straight stuff but she wants to go to bed. She’d been noticing the deepening of the lines around her eyes and mouth when she stayed up for one of Rhonda’s chats.

“I want you to go to this man tomorrow and I want you to say ‘I want to fuck you,’ just like that, right into his ear.”

“I can’t use that word.”

Marie gently lowers a brown egg from the fridge into the boiling water with a kitchen spider. The egg clinks lightly against the bottom but holds together. She puts in another egg for Rhonda in case she changes her mind. Rhonda knows Marie doesn’t keep pancake mix or bacon or syrup. House Rules.

“One time I used that line on a man, I got him right away. He cleared his desk. We did it again the next day, and the next. He gave up his girlfriend. We did it so many times he lost his job.”

Marie sorts her mail while Rhonda smokes, putting letters in her tiered wall system – read, pay, respond – and placing catalogues in a little basket she keeps below. Now that she is almost of a fashion viable weight, shopping for herself is enjoyable.

Marie pulls each egg out with the spider, placing each in a milk glass bowl passed down from her grandmother. She puts one before Rhonda, one at her place and puts a plate in the middle for the peel and a silver salt shaker, also her grandmother’s.

“I don’t want this,” says Rhonda, pushing the bowl away, causing the bottom to catch on the plastic cloth protecting the cherry wood table, nearly toppling the egg.

Marie puts the egg in the refrigerator for tomorrow and returns the salt to her spice rack. The salt had been for Rhonda. Sometimes the extra seasoning helps Marie stick with the diet but she doesn’t generally advocate salt or salty products at The Center. To help clients navigate this for such things as eating eggs, she recommends a no sodium stone ground mustard to mix into the mashed up cooked egg to make a kind of egg salad.

She herself forgoes even this, relishing instead the plain fleshy cooked white outer meat, just a bit more set than a well steamed flan, and the yolk rich and chalky, forcing her to drink a glass water to get it all down. The slight pain and deprivation seemed right somehow, and cleansing. Oh and that long hug from Him on that Best Day of All Days!

“When you get the doctor in the room,” says Rhonda, leaning into the table, her forearms flat against the plastic cloth, “Put his dick in your mouth.” And she inserts her middle finger between her teeth. “But take care to use your lips!” And with her other hand she encircles her teeth with her forefinger and thumb to simulate lips. “Hahaha!” She cackles, slapping her bone hand down hard on the table, and bounces up and down in her chair so that it clacks and scrapes against the tile.

Eddie the apartment manager had come by one night when they were up talking like this saying neighbors were complaining. They said it sounded like Marie was moving furniture at 2 in the morning. Marie had only opened the door a crack so he couldn’t see inside, so he couldn’t see Rhonda.

“Well take it easy will you, ok?” he said, softening after she explained, contrite, that yes, she was moving a few things. She closed the door gently to prove she meant to be the perfect, perfect neighbor. Besides, he was always nice to her. He had helped her move in. And he was always asking after her in a way that made Marie feel better, like she had a family member close by, though she couldn’t have him in because she couldn’t be sure of Rhonda.

“Time to party,” says Rhonda, pushing back from the table and clacking across the kitchen in her heels. She slams her closet door. Soon Marie can hear a riot of bones as Rhonda masturbates.

Marie puts a pot of water on for chamomile tea. She decides not to risk the coffee with her sour stomach. She would not be able to eat her egg until Rhonda calms down and goes to sleep. Her orgasms were always numerous, loud, and lengthy as she moans and slams against the walls of the closet.

When at last she hears Rhonda snoring she peel hesr treat, her delicious evening meal, the Doctor had said.

“The egg is a gift to yourself,” the Doctor had told her that initial meeting when he explained the basics of the diet to her. “It is the perfect meal, along with the vegetables I have listed for you on your plan. You will be so happy you found this little miracle worker. And you will be happy you have found all of us, at The Clinic. We will all become your very best allies.”

On that day of The First Day of the Rest of Her Life, she was thanking her guardian angel for guiding her into how to spend a portion of the settlement from the divorce: On a Plan to Get Her Body Back. Those hazel eyes of his stirred something deep in her, not just a heart skipping way but also in a stirring in her hips. She knew with everything that was within her he saw her beauty, he was going to help draw it out, unveiled, naked, dewy, made young.

The Doctor reminded Marie of her pastor when she was young and went to church with her family, on the days they took communion: “And Jesus said ‘Take, eat, all of you, this is my body which is broken for you. As often as you eat of it you do so in remembrance of me.” The Doctor had that same benevolent, beatific quality as her pastor, but her pastor had never been able to help her with her real problem, which was her inability to stop eating.

The egg feels good on her teeth as she bites through the flesh and straight through to the yolk. She drinks ice water, really cold “to shock the system” he had told her though in her nursing training she had never heard anything about the benefits of the temperature of water in the body, though Jesus did say something about lukewarm water. He didn’t like it and said he would spit it out.

Rhonda is still asleep when she leaves for work the next morning, which is usually the case. Marie had stayed up late the night before to launder her new, smaller rose colored scrubs, a pair she has decided to finally wear to show to maximum effect her more streamlined body. Now she is a size six. At her Goal she was a size ten which, according to the Doctor was average and healthy for her height and build. What the Doctor and most men didn’t know, however, that to a woman size six was most desired of all the sizes, no matter the supposed health and desirability of other larger sizes at whatever height.

She had bought a new soft burgundy cardigan to wear with her new scrubs. She curls her hair and sets it high on her head. She takes even more care with her makeup, jewelry , and perfume. This is the day something would happen. She isn’t sure what, but she would get closer to him, close enough to feel the heat of him rise from his muscular frame. He would start to learn, really know, how she feels about him, and she feels most prepared to show him, what with this smaller body and the clothes to match.

But he doesn’t come to work that day. She feels faint and has to sit down. During the couple of weeks leading up to her final “reveal,” she had sharply curtailed all carbs and drank water constantly. Coupled with her frantic, almost manic, vertiginous climb to her best self for this Special Day, she was disorientated. The other nurses coached her to put her head between her knees. One of them drove her home while the other followed behind in her car.

“Is everything ok?” says Eddie at his office door as the nurses walked in, guiding Marie between them.

They explain the situation to him and agree to let Marie stay in his office while she recovers enough to be on her own. “Please feed her something,” one of them said. “I think she feels a bit weak.”

He takes her in gently, holding her by the elbow with one hand the waist by the other. He is a large man, but not unpleasantly so, the kind of man The Doctor would have attempted to diet down a bit, but he seems comfortable with himself. Marie feels the soft plushness of him as he guides her to sit on the couch under the window.

“I am worried about you, Marie,” he says gently. “Can I call you by your first name?” He had always called her Ms. Stapleton.

She nods.

“Would it be ok if I made you something?”

She nods again.

He softly claps his hands together, happy for the order. In his kitchenette, he warms a pot of cheddar bacon potato soup that he had made for himself the night before. He puts it on a tv tray along with a side of saltines.

Everything on her plate is such a No No, thinks Marie. She would never had eaten this on her own. But somehow with Eddie, she didn’t feel overly uncomfortable.

“Here, I like to put a little extra cheese on the top,” he says, and sprinkles some shredded cheddar on her soup with his big soft thick fingers.

She hesitates, her spoon hovering over the impossibly loaded bowl of fat and carbs, but then, diving in, she takes a sip.

“See, isn’t that nice?”

She doesn’t answer but takes another sip and another. Salty, fatty, buttery, cheesy, potatoey. Yum, says her body.

He turns on the tv for her. A news program about the traffic in the city, then the weather.

What if she had met Eddie earlier under different circumstances? Would she have children by now? Would she be fat with happiness and comfort? Would she be yelling at their kids and chasing them, worrying over them? Would she be nagging and arguing with Eddie but would they laugh about it later and make love or be tense some nights but know, overall, things would be fine? Would they be poor but happy with it and go to church as one big happy scruffy mess?

When Eddie takes her back to her apartment he asks her if he could call her. She nods. “Maybe you would like to go see a movie.”

She loved the movies. It had been a long time. She had been afraid of the smell of the fattening, delicious popcorn.

As if reading her mind, he says, “I’ll bet you love popcorn.”

She smiles, the first time he’d ever seen her smile.

“We’ll get a big tub of it and put it right between us.” He says, pleased with himself. He says he will call her to set something up for the following weekend and touches her shoulder. “Call me if you need anything before then, ok? And I mean, anything, Marie.”

When she is inside her small cluster of rooms, she leans her back against the door. How different this day has been from what she had anticipated. But she isn’t upset, just a little shocked.

A warm glow emanates from her sheers, the still early hour of the working day, just past noon, an hour she isn’t usually home to witness. She could indulge in a movie on television and work on her needlepoint. Or she could read a book. It amazes her to think she isn’t thinking about food – what to eat or what she couldn’t eat. All she wants to think about is what she can actually do, things she enjoyed doing in the days she wasn’t worried about Being the Best Version of Herself.

And there is quiet. No banging around in the closet. She opens the door. There is nothing. She closes the door. It is once more a place for guests to hang their coats.

We Awake

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

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

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

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

First appeared in Corium Magazine