Meg Sefton's Blog, page 72

Butter Witch: Irish folklore in Appalachia(Happy St. Patty’s)

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temporalata, witch hut 1, flickr

On Saturdays, Mama set me down in front of the churn. On summer days, she set me on the porch to look out upon the woods, to look for fairies and woodsprite, to keep the woodland green at bay, she said, lest it overtake the house and we be lost. On winter days, I set inside not far from the stove but far enough that a witch’s spell that come down through the flue would not frustrate my efforts. The spell would come on account of Ms. Maybre, Mama would say, the spinster, who casts spells such as that of the butter witch. On account of that happening, we gotta stick the poker from the fire in the butter and break the witch’s back and get the butter going again.

I always wondered if she meant Ms. Maybre would have a broken back. But Ms. Maybre did seem to be the type of lady to be a witch and because of that, the Dempsey kids loved to play some tricks, just to get her ire going. Which is probably why we got butter spells going on us. We pulled tricks like stringing up a can of water over her door, dressing her cats up in the rags mama kept for washing down the house, hanging ghosts up in her yard from torn sheets, tying a scarecrow around the broom she kept by the door like it was flying it like a witch.

Mama said the inside of her house smells like a musty smoke house from the solid pig fat she buns as candles. She had been there once to check on her, witch or no witch she told us, and Daddy, at the dinner table. She hadn’t seen Ms. Maybre for weeks. It was her Christian duty, and there was Ms. Maybre, half naked from the waist up, drinking from a mason jar in front of the fire. Mama says she was drinking the moonshine she made from the pressure cooker on the stove with the copper wire run through, she was drinking the devil’s drink.

“Ms. Maybre,” said Mama to the old witch, “I worried about you when I haven’t seen you none, at all, not even to see you get your mail at the end of the road.”

“I drank the potion and went up the chimney. I flew over Grandfather on my corn broom with my red cap.” (Grandfather was a mountain not far from where we lived.)

She talked like the devil, said Mama. She was frothy with spirits. Mama put a shawl around her and laid her out on a cot she kept beside her stove. She set beside her and put a cold cloth on her head but hours later, Mama had fallen asleep for when she woke, there was no Ms. Maybre, only a cat, black as midnight, staring at her with white eyes, white as the yarrow she kept in a jar on the table in summer.

What Mama had concluded was that the cat was Ms. Maybre. “I swanee, I never seen nothing like this cat. It knew me inside out, like a person would. I held my cross around my neck,” and at this time in the story, she would show us how she clutched at the cross pendant Daddy gave her, “and I backed out the house.”

One Saturday, I gave baby Emma the handle for the churn. We call her baby Emma because even though she is grown up a bit, and in grade school, she is still the baby. I say to baby Emma, “On St. Patty’s, an old witch sends a butter spell down the flue and breaks up the churning. You let me know if the fat won’t come together and we’ll break a witch’s back.”

I left because I wanted to meet my friends at Sliding Rock.

When I came home, Emma was setting in the rocker next to the fire. Her normally blond hair was  black and her brown eyes were white and she looked old and blind. She cried and pointed at me because I had left her alone. Mama and Daddy had gone into town, she said, and everyone else had gone away. The butter wouldn’t churn and she didn’t know how to break the witch’s back.

My heart was racing, I stoked a fire in the dying wood stove. What had happened to Emma? I jammed a poker into the coals. I pulled the paddle out of the churn and thrust the poker inside. It hissed and a whippoorwill lapsed into its nighttime song, almost in relief. Emma’s hair returned back to its soft blond and her lovely eyes the deep brown of a pond in moonlight. I held her tight and asked her to forgive me. She just nodded, but said nothing. “I’ll make you honey toast. And milk,” I said. “Let’s not worry now,” which is something Mama often said although it never often worked. I was surprised to hear myself saying it.

By the time Mama and Daddy got back with goods from town, the butter was churned and dinner set out. My other brothers and sisters were there too, in response to the dinner bell I had rung for them, summoning them back from adventures in the woods.

That night, sleeping under the eaves in the room I shared with my sisters, something woke me. A crooked old woman stood in the door frame. Was that Ms. Maybre? She made no sound, but glided to the head of my bed. She reached a claw down to my mouth and put her other claw to her pursed lips, instructing me to be quiet and still. Her finger smelled like the burning embers from the fire. She lifted it then and swiped through the air. I felt a whoosh and closed my eyes. When I could open them again I saw the roof was no more and I gazed up at black sky full of stars. She put her finger back down on my lips to quiet me and gave the shushing sign with the other hand. She then pressed her charred fingers down on my eyelids until I knew nothing but black.

The next morning at the mail boxes down the road, Ms. Maybre gave me a knowing look. I couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t the same woman as the night before. I kept to myself like the good girl I had read about in a book as a child. I never knew that girl to be me but I certainly wasn’t a no-count either.

– for Valerie Willis

 

 

 

Butter Witch: Irish folklore in Appalachia. (Happy St. Patty’s)

[image error]

temporalata, witch hut 1, flickr

On Saturdays, Mama set me down in front of the churn. In summer days, she set me on the porch to look out upon the woods, she said, to look for fairies and woodsprite, to keep the woodland green at bay, lest it overtake the house and we be lost. On winter days, I set inside not far from the stove but far enough that a witch’s spell that come down through the flue would frustrate my efforts. The spell would come on account of Ms. Maybre, Mama would say, the spinster, who casts spells such as that of the butter witch. On account of that happening, we gotta stick the poker from the fire in the butter and break the witch’s back and get the butter going again.

I always wondered if she meant Ms. Maybre would have a broken back. But Ms. Maybre did seem to be the type of lady to be a witch and because of that, the Dempsey kids loved to play some tricks, just to get her ire going. Which is probably why we got butter spells going on us. We pulled tricks like stringing up a can of water over her door, dressing her cats up in the rags mama kept for washing down the house, hanging ghosts up in her yard from torn sheets, tying a scarecrow around the broom she kept by the door like it was flying it like a witch.

Mama said the inside of her house smells like a musty smoke house from the solid pig fat she buns as candles. She had been there once to check on her, witch or no witch she told us, and Daddy, at the dinner table. She hadn’t seen Ms. Maybre for weeks. It was her Christian duty, and there was Ms. Maybre, half naked from the waist up, drinking from a mason jar in front of the fire. Mama says she was drinking the moonshine she made from the pressure cooker on the stove with the copper wire run through, she was drinking the devil’s drink.

“Ms. Maybre,” said Mama to the old witch, “I worried about you when I haven’t seen you none, at all, not even to see you get your mail at the end of the road.”

“I drank the potion and went up the chimney. I flew over Grandfather on my corn broom with my red cap.” (Grandfather was a mountain not far from where we lived.)

She talked like the devil, said Mama. She was frothy with spirits. Mama put a shawl around her and laid her out on a cot she kept beside her stove. She set beside her and put a cold cloth on her head but hours later, Mama had fallen asleep for when she woke, there was no Ms. Maybre, only a cat, black as midnight, staring at her with white eyes, white as the yarrow she kept in a jar on the table in summer.

What Mama had concluded was that the cat was Ms. Maybre. “I swanee, I never seen nothing like this cat. It knew me inside out, like a person would. I held my cross around my neck,” and at this time in the story, she would show us how she clutched at the cross pendant Daddy gave her, “and I backed out the house.”

One Saturday, I gave baby Emma the handle for the churn. We call her baby Emma because even though she is grown up a bit, and in grade school, she is still the baby. I say to baby Emma, “On St. Patty’s, an old witch sends a butter spell down the flue and breaks up the churning. You let me know if the fat won’t come together and we’ll break a witch’s back.”

I left because I wanted to meet my friends at Sliding Rock.

When I came home, Emma was setting in the rocker next to the fire. Her normally blond hair was  black and her brown eyes were white and she looked old and blind. She cried and pointed at me because I had left her alone. Mama and Daddy had gone into town, she said, and everyone else had gone away. The butter wouldn’t churn and she didn’t know how to break the witch’s back.

My heart was racing, I stoked a fire in the dying wood stove. What had happened to Emma? I jammed a poker into the coals. I pulled the paddle out of the churn and thrust the poker inside. It hissed and a whippoorwill lapsed into its nighttime song, almost in relief. Emma’s hair returned back to its soft blond and her lovely eyes the deep brown of a pond in moonlight. I held her tight and asked her to forgive me. She just nodded, but said nothing. “I’ll make you honey toast. And milk,” I said. “Let’s not worry now,” which is something Mama often said although it never often worked. I was surprised to hear myself saying it.

By the time Mama and Daddy got back with goods from town, the butter was churned and dinner set out. My other brothers and sisters were there too, in response to the dinner bell I had rung for them, summoning them back from adventures in the woods.

That night, sleeping under the eaves in the room I shared with my sisters, something woke me. A crooked old woman stood in the door frame. Was that Ms. Maybre? She made no sound, but glided to the head of my bed. She reached a claw down to my mouth and put her other claw to her pursed lips, instructing me to be quiet and still. Her finger smelled like the burning embers from the fire. She lifted it then and swiped through the air. I felt a whoosh and closed my eyes. When I could open them again I saw the roof was no more and I gazed up at black sky full of stars. She put her finger back down on my lips to quiet me and gave the shushing sign with the other hand. She then pressed her charred fingers down on my eyelids until I knew nothing but black.

The next morning at the mail boxes down the road, Ms. Maybre gave me a knowing look. I couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t the same woman as the night before. I kept to myself like the good girl I had read about in a book as a child. I never knew that girl to be me but I certainly wasn’t a no-count either.

– for Valerie Willis

 

 

 

white buffalo calf woman

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Feathers, braids, and beads by Nic McPhee, flickr

In the Lakota legend of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, a beautiful apparition wearing a white buckskin dress decorated with porcupine quills approaches two men. She carries a pipe bag embroidered with the symbol of the four directions. One man, upon seeing her, expresses a desire to lay with her but the other man advises care and respect due to her sacred nature. However, the greedy man gets exactly what he wants until there was nothing left of him but a pile of bones in the grass. The White Buffalo Calf Woman explains to the remaining man that what his lustful companion had yearned for was only her beauty. His demise lay in his unwillingness to know her spirit.

My grandmother would sit before the fire in our house which backed up to the Wekiwa state park in Apopka Florida and tell me and my twin sister this story over and over. The purpose of this story has not always remained clear. When we asked her, finally, why she was telling us this story once more she explained: There are many interpretations and uses of the story, she said, but you should learn that a man should show respect for a woman’s spirit. The Buffalo Calf Woman gives us strength even though she came to the Lakota.

And then my grandmother laid down upon the couch because she liked to be near the stove where she makes little corn cakes for us, cakes she feeds us with squash juice and honey when we come home from school. Often my grandmother reminds us of our heritage: We are descended from a relative of Georgia Rose, a full Cherokee, who married a Seminole.

In our room at night, we talk about this story Grandma tells us and try to discern what it must be saying. No man seems to care about us. There are many men who have said they want to lay with us and we are only fifteen. There are many guys our age who want this and older guys too and when they admit it to themselves they want not just one of us but both at the same time. A couple of men have tried to pimp us out. They are greedy, like the lustful man in the story, and they do not know what is inside, our spirit. They want what they want.

Still our grandmother has taught us a lot and we try to listen to her. My mother married a white man much to her disappointment and now that my mother has cancer, Father is gone, gone, off to Texas without a penny left to give his dying squaw, to save her life.

We have crosses and dreamcatchers, Native American dances and hip hop, prom and religious ceremonies, native costumes and Juicy Couture. Grandmother holds it all together and yet she grows weaker. “You girls are going to have to handle the guns and take care of this place. You are going to have to drive and share the car and take care of your mother. As for your father, girls, I will have to say: It is expected.” She lay her head down at last as if that final confession had taken her last breath.

That night, my sister and I built a fire in the fire pit. We put on our ceremonial dresses and braided our hair and interwove feathers. We put paint on our faces and burnt bundles of sage. We had done this many times, when we were bored, lonely, when grandmother had to go to the hospital, when our mother was diagnosed, when our father left us alone and our mother wouldn’t get off the couch for days. It was what we knew, this turning slow circles in the way we had been taught, but slower. We danced a man’s dance but in a woman’s way. We were turning and we were thinking through our plan. Here was the story of the hunt, the way the weapons were prepared, the way we were to feed our family, this is how it would happen, how the buck would be approached, how it would die and we would live. We had talked over it in the moonlight shining through our bedroom window, the feathers in our dream catchers caught lightly by air blowing through the vent.

“Come to Wekiwa State Park,” we said to the men in online exchanges. “Walk to Sand Lake and sit there and wait until the park closes. We will meet you at midnight. We will build a fire and make you feel good.”

That was all we said. Well, we made arrangements for letting them know what they were getting and for how much. We found the men to be pliant, but not all of them followed through, and some of them, when they followed through, would not drink with us and so it wasn’t safe to continue and we disappeared into the woods, leaving them stranded. But somehow, we would make them pay, pay for what they are doing to us, what they are doing to my mother through my father and his white man Porsche while my mother is left with the cost of radiation, chemo, surgery.

We got better at it. Drinking became part of the deal. No man liked being called a woman and so we goaded them: Drink, drink, we said. And then we slipped Mama’s oxy, powdered, into their beers. And then we danced, turning, slowly around the fire, circling, ever closer, putting the buck in our sites. We kissed each other and he began to drink. We touched each other and started taking off each other’s clothes. Drink, drink, we said. Yet when these men stood to touch us, they would lurch back and collapse. It was the drug, taking effect. We would wait until they were immobile and then we dressed. The fallen man would keep long enough for us to raid his wallet and run away, through the moonlight, through the woods once inhabited by natives who fed on alligator, through the fields now deserted.

On these nights, a woman rose up out of the grasses. Her hair was white and adorned with feathers and she wore a white calf skin dress. She was mother to us every night and we made our escape.

soulmates

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Valerie Everett, flickr

 

He was at it again, thought Sylvie, her husband talking of Her, the alien, the dream alien, and this of all times, with dinner guests to witness it, this being Thanksgiving no less, the table set the day before, the house cleaned last Sunday, the afternoon light bending in perfect golden shafts over their cleared place settings, the room smelling of warmth, mellowed perfumes, buttered dishes, wine, coffee. A pale pink rose petal had fallen from a low bunch of flowers gathered in a centerpiece and was tinged a slight brown against the cream fabric. Almost nothing was amiss.

Their guests were young, coiffed, and beautiful, supremely educated, their clutches firmly settling into the world. When they were at Abbie and Jake’s house this past summer, Sylvie had overheard her young handsome husband Brad speak of an alien having visited him in a dream to extract his semen. It was such a brief conversation sliver that folded back into the larger noise of the party that it did not hit her, the cut of it, until she turned the lock to Abbie’s tiny half bath, and then she felt her head turn heavy and she sat upon the commode, gripping the sink. Had he really said that? She asked him about it on their way home. He just shook his head, his eyes glazed over, but for Brad that could mean he just didn’t want to talk about it.

And now here it was again.

“She was there, beside me, last night. Sylvie was asleep and I tried to wake her.”

“Oh yeah, I’m sure man, I’m sure you tried to wake your wife to tell her about the sexy alien babe,” said Jake. “You must be a baby daddy by now. They got your semen last summer.”

“What? What is this?” This from Rakesh who taught at the college. He and his fiancé were holding hands under the table but let go at this unexpected turn. They were newly arrived from India.

“We grow ’em rare over here,” said Jake.

“There are gods, there are other beings,” said Rakesh, trying to be helpful. “Perhaps this is what is happening to you.”

“I don’t know,” said Brad. “I’m just saying, this woman was with me last night, an alien. This was the same one from before.”

“Why I never heard – ” said Abbie. “Sylvie, is everything all right?”

The room was starting to shift a bit, Sylvie could feel it, they leaned in, their elbows pressed hard against her table, the floor length curtains sentries, the chandelier oppressive.

Sylvie tilted a dinner knife, unused and abandoned, so that it reflected Brad’s image. His head appeared football shaped, his neck bulbous.

“This feeling I have, it is like a unification,” he went on. “It is beautiful. I feel whole. I have a second life in that place. It is my real life, my actual life, my soul.”

“For fuck’s sake, man,” said Jake. He had known Brad since they were children. They ran an accounting firm together.

Sylvie retreated to the kitchen. Abbie followed. She held Sylvie for a while. She then poured her friend a glass of water. She asked Sylvie some questions, none of which Sylvie could answer. The dinner guests trickled away and Sylvie managed not to cry, not even for Abbie. Sylvie prevented Jake from calling the hospital. Abbie and Jake finally went home.

Sylvie sat up in bed that night while Brad drifted off. The shifting shadows from the trees outside created dark spaces and light. “Be gone,” she said, touching Brad’s forehead while she spoke, for she loved him no matter the alterations of his attractions, adventures, grotesqueries. “Be gone,” she said. “Mine.” And there was not a sound but the shifting leaves.

Girl Indigestible

 

[image error]

Mike Kniec, To Grandmother’s House We Go, flickr

(mature content)

In all the nights before I became a woman, a beast lay at my feet, pursuing some aspect of my flesh, his furred back reeking of fires and stagnant pools. There had never been a time when he had not whispered into my ear or lapped at my neck or felt the contours of the rises and dips of my body under his hands. My mother had always left my door cracked as if in wait, as if in welcome. When I was a very young girl, pre-pubescent, he hadn’t much to touch other than a flat plain, only a little rise in the mattress, my bones under the sheets and grandmother’s wedding ring quilt.

I remember a woman saying to my mother “Drusilla is well-groomed.” There were people on the television who talked of men and children and grooming. I am a child who is ready for men, I thought, I am well groomed, or maybe it’s that I am well and I am groomed, or, I am only well when I am groomed. Maybe I am a well that has to be groomed.

He touched me and each night his pressing between my legs became harder and more frantic as if he were a dog pawing a hole for a bone. His back was hunched, his eyes wild, his mouth dripping and slack. He finally tore a hole through the quilt and my pajama bottoms became thin. I could feel him more and more when he brushed, when he stroked me. His nails were piercing and light, lightly piercing and tickling. I was both sick and excited and I used to lay in wait for it again.

In the day, I decided to make a cage to protect myself, to see what he would do. I used chicken wire for armor and cotton batting to protect my skin from the wire. I put it all in my hope chest with my Grandmother’s wedding dress and the veil that covered her eyes. There I also kept my dress of red. One day, my Grandmother’s wedding gown would be a pillow. One day her veil a canopy. One day I would take back the thing stolen from me, that was my promise.

Though my hope grew ever fainter, every night I bundled up in the cotton and covered myself with the cage, locking myself in with keys I hid in a rusted hole in the bed frame. My brother brought me Southern Comfort. He got me drunk before he went back to his apartment to study for med school classes. “You are one messed-up fuck,” he said. One day when he was over Mother talked to him about having me evaluated.

Father hunched over his roasted chicken, fat dripping from his lips and fingers. “She’s fine.”

Mother went outside with my brother to talk about me more.

Father wiped his hands on a napkin pressed between his legs. He inserted each finger until they didn’t shine and then he licked his napkin. He ran his damp napkin under my shirt until my nipples rose.

My father groomed himself after eating and then he groomed me with his napkin. My mother and brother groomed us by leaving us alone.

My father had a hairy back. When we were little, four and six, he held us, one on each hip, bouncing on the waves at the beach, bouncing up and down at the pool, up and down. When he went under with us, the soggy hair felt like moss.

In bed, the hair on his back became coarse, like an animal’s, and the stench of the day and the street were on him. It was strange how he could stand upright for a family photo and smile but he seemed most himself when, unshowered and undressed, he lay at my feet and touched me.

When I started wearing the cage, he couldn’t talk me into taking it off. He stroked my legs. He stroked my arms and face. What more could he do? One night he entered my bedroom with a gleaming pair of shears. He cut the wire: snip! snap! snip! He threw the broken cage across the room. He pulled at the batting and unwound me. I was naked, spread across the virgin whiteness of the cotton.

He began to shake and cry. He beat his fists against his legs. He lay down beside me softly. He spread my legs with his fingers. He touched the tender place. He groomed me. This was the next step, the one that lead to the last. His touch was deep, long, knowing. I was ashamed of my own pounding, my own orgasm, my child death. He whispered into my hair, “Remember the time your mother stroked your hair a hundred times? I love you more. I’m going to eat you alive.”

Indeed I died.

But I awoke, after a time. I got up out of my bed and was alive. I married, and to my wedding I wore red. And what’s more, I gave birth to a beautiful daughter, Rose.

Still, my readers, my dear ones, I hold close to my breast a key to my daughter’s room. I vow to my grandchildren to keep the wolf at bay. Though the darkness is no match for a woman’s fierce love, still, let’s not be naïve.

Published in honeypot literary miscellany: subversive, feminist, literary

what I saw at the funeral procession

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Cross by Evan, flickr

In my small North Carolina town where I kept a house with my grandma and ten cats, we read of the funeral procession of the late renowned evangelist through our small mountain community. It was a rare day my grandma felt like leaving the house anymore, but she insisted on propping herself on the curb in her favorite “outside chair” to take in the pomp of the procession and to rest her eyes on the hearse carrying her dear one who touched her at a rally and said words to her and prayed for healing for her failing heart. She was going to Jesus, she said, due to the one man on earth who has been the most like him.

It wouldn’t be easy. I would need to take her to our desired spot early in the morning, drop her off, and find a car somewhere up the mountain. The procession would follow the main road through and we were somewhere up the mountain on a little tributary of a road. And walking for my grandma would be inconceivable. It was also cold.

“Are you sure, Grandma?” She was bending over clawing kibble into King Frederick’s bowl, a Balinese, who gratefully mewed in response.

“Lookie here, Doreen, if I die up here on this mountain seeing the sight of that man, God take me.”

That’s what she always said when she was expressing her hell-bent determination to do something: “God take me.”

The service itself was for family alone. This was the one chance for average people like me and my grandma to witness and pay some sort of tribute. I was going out of respect for Grandma. Some of my friends weren’t as excited by all of this.

One of my friends, Keith, said: “I’m glad he’s dead, the bitch.”  This was because “the bitch” in question had tried to influence law makers against gay rights in North Carolina. Other friends of mine were upset he hadn’t done more to curb gun purchases. Many of these friends have moved on to Asheville and do things like sell their wares in the River Arts district, attend massive drum rallies and protests, participate in wild events such as the annual Topless Rally. Nowadays we keep up day-to-day through Facebook. They’re not that far away but caring for Grandma is nonstop. One or two come over sometimes, and when they do I watch her talk quietly to herself as she watches the TV while we sit in the front room, chatting. She only talks to herself when she gets upset.

Mission accomplished though, the day of, Grandma, clothing layered up, chair firmly in place on a curb, blankets on her lap and over her shoulders, a thermos of hot cocoa, a packet of graham crackers and a chocolate bar, her favorite snacks, and all before the police begin the sweep of the street, the barricades, and crowd control, just in time to scoot up a side street and find a parking place, albeit way up a mountain where, if you kept walking up, the street turned into a gravel path which lead you straight up to the mountain peak. The rush of a stream beside the road was soothing, I was tempted to collapse on a boulder, at least while Grandma was entertained, but I forced my legs to propel me down the hill. It had been a while since I’d done much walking and my thighs began to burn.

I myself liked the evangelist Keith calls a bitch. I used to babysit a couple of his grandkids when they visited over the summer holidays, taking them rock hopping and to the pool, taking them for ice cream.  I almost never saw him, except a time or two in his study when I came inside to fetch the boys from their rooms. He knew I was there and had a smile for me, and a wave. He kept his door open. He seemed to be the kind of man that would do that, be intensely focused, but keep the door open for a child, or his spouse, or one of his grown children, and even a relative stranger like me. I didn’t know much about what he believed. That never really mattered much growing up, only that I did what my parents and grandparents wanted me to do. I didn’t attend church in college or much afterwards. I thought it would be good to believe something, I just couldn’t decide how I felt about it all. When grandma tried to convince me to believe it was Jesus that had healed her, that seemed as just a good an explanation as any. But really it seemed most likely that she believed it was the evangelist was responsible. Had the cardiologist done much more? Hardly.

I found her in the place I left her, all squinched up in the beach chair with a wool cloche jammed down on her head, purchased in a day and age when she had more hair and it likely sat up on her head a bit more primly. She sported ear muffs that wrapped around the wool of the hat and because of that hardly touched her ears but I guess she appreciated the psychological sense of extra protection. Between all that and her cataract glasses I couldn’t even see her face, just her nose, chin, and bright coral lips she colored that morning in preparation for The Funeral of That Man. Since the healing, he had ever only been That Man, and this had never been in reference to any other man, not even Grandpa. She had even insisted on wearing her green chiffon dress, but somehow I talked her out of it, asking how Jesus’ Man would feel if she got sick watching him being escorted to the pearly gates? All that progress lost? She relented finally and I pulled her wool slacks and jacket on, a high fashion ensemble from the days she and Grandpa used to dress to fly overseas. I had to put a few stiches in it the night before to draw the pieces closer to her body and keep out the cold, she had lost so much weight.

She reached for me and grasped my hand in her firm bony one.

“Grandma, we need to get some gloves on you,” I said.

“I know, I was just eating my grahams. Yum,” She said and gave a little girlish chuckle.

An officer came up to us. “Ma’am,” he said to me, putting a hand on my arm, “You’re going to need to get behind the curb here.”

Grandma reached out for him. “My son,” she said, “What do you think about all of this?”

“I think it’s amazing, ma’am. What an amazing man.”

“Oh I think that too!” And I heard the quaver in her voice and I knew she was starting to cry.

The officer graciously held her hand for a minute. “Now you put on your gloves young lady. I’m sure that’s an infraction of some kind and I don’t want to have to take you to the pokie on such a big day.”

Grandma laughed as he went down the street, placing people where they should be. “Oh, I know it might not be right to laugh at such a time,” she said, “but what a buster that one is. What if you dated someone like that, Doreen.”

As if it was as easy as ordering a cheeseburger. I’ll have that one medium rare, please, with a big easy smile and a knack for charming grandmothers.

The police motorcade was beginning to make its way through. The chattering of the crowd died and the rumbling of motors reverberated in my chest. Grandma put her gloved hand in mind. I stood beside her chair, a space someone had mercifully made me along the street lined with thousands for miles, apparently. I could tell this was going to be a very emotional day for her. I had never seen a funeral procession. It was very somber and the occasional familiar person dotted throughout the crowd, people I had known in my life prior to becoming grandma’s full time keeper, were uncharacteristically quiet and still, people I had known from bars in town, parties at homes flowing with booze and weed, women I had known from my parents’ church who talked incessantly even during the quiet parts of the service, their voices sussurating over the hushed tones of the organ during communion. They all stood with tongues ceased in their mouths as if some sort of numbing gas had stunned them momentarily. Not even the children there were moving or talking, a rare phenomenon in a community that lavishes its attention on the young. And then a brigade of riders on horses passed us following soon after the dark black hearse. People threw flowers down on the street so that it rode over stems, crushed roses and lilies. Grandma threw the clump of violets we gathered that morning from the pot that sat inside by the window.

When the hearse was just past us, out popped a man from the crowd in a black face mask, his clothes black. He was on the street and wearing combat boots and had just escaped the grasp of police on foot though horses were bearing down.

“Good riddance!” he shouted, and a streak of red paint lifted up from a bucket in his hands, and the paint smeared the street and doused the flowers but missed the hearse, the intended target. Everyone gasped and shouted, confused. The police locked him down, almost immediately.

That night, Grandma prayed for the man with the paint.

And that was when I began to wonder just what it was she believed.

 

 

 

Santa Baby by Meg Sefton

Check out my new flash piece in a fabulous UK literary magazine Use Your Words. Merry Christmas! — Meg

· Santa Baby ·

by Meg Sefton

There is a man I see from the dating site I call Santa. He calls me Cupcake even though I asked him from the beginning to call me by my given name. He did once, in a text, but ever since, it’s been “Doll” or “Cupcake.” I wonder if he even really knows my name anymore. When I first started dating five years ago after my divorce from a twenty-year marriage, I had been overwhelmed and appalled by trying to date midlife, things were so different when I met and dated my ex. Plus, I had been raised and married into a religiously conservative subculture and when I started dating again, soon learned how sheltered I had been for most of my adult life.

Santa hangs Christmas lights from the roofs and eaves, ancient oak trees, and palms in the wealthiest suburb of…

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Cocoa Beach Christmas

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Daddy drove us nine hundred miles to Florida the Christmas after Mama passed. It was just me, Daddy, and my little sister Lulu. Daddy said there wasn’t anything in Florida that wasn’t all around the world and that was Christmas love and reindeers and Santa. He didn’t want to see snow, he said, or get a tree or eat turkey. These things reminded him of Mama and he needed a break from feeling sad. He said she would have wanted us to go to Florida for Christmas. In fact, he said, she probably knew what we were up to right now and it made her happy.

When I wasn’t keeping my sister occupied with books and games of eye spy, I was watching the landscape change from naked trees and gray skies to thick grass and fat palms and I was watching for Mama to see if she was watching us drive to Florida. Maybe she was traveling beside us, just outside the window. I looked for her in the shadows of green. I looked for her in the marshes beside the freeway. She would wear her white linen gown, the one with the satin bow I had learned to tie when I was three years old. She would wear her hair long, like she did before the sickness took it. She loved the outdoors. It made sense I saw her a few times, walking along in the trees, touching the head of a tall white bird in the marsh, a place she would sink if she were a real person and not a ghost.

The camp was a place called Cocoa Beach. I had wondered if that meant the water would be made of chocolate. I had visions of me and Mama and my sister rolling in waves and waves of cocoa. Dad would be sitting on the shore, reading his paper as usual. We would bring him cups of cocoa and he would pretend to drink it just like he did at our tea parties. He would finally join us and mama would flee away, not wanting to cause him pain because she was a ghost and it seemed like ghosts knew everything.

We camped in a spot surrounded by twisted trees and bushes with red berries. It looked like God put his finger down and stirred things up, but it was really the wind and soil that made them the way they were said Daddy. While he set up the tent, he let us go to the beach and put our toes in the water which was not cocoa. The sand was crushed shells and scratched my feet but it didn’t hurt. When a wave crashed, bits of shell rubbed up against my legs. My shoulders felt warm from the sun. I put my diving mask on and dunked my head under the water, looking for Mama. Not far away I saw the tail end of a white gown flowing in the water but then a wave took me down and by the time I stood up, I could see no one. I went under again and all I could see was the strange grey green sea.

Lulu was scared of the water and so I had to hold her like Mama used to, on my hip. She could swim but I knew it was the moving water that worried her and she clung tight. When the waves started slapping her bottom, she kicked and screamed. I took her back to the shore and held her hand while we walked back to the campsite. My stomach was all in knots because I thought she might cry to Daddy about the waves and spoil things but she just sat on the picnic bench and sucked her thumb. I brought a towel and wrapped it around her.

That night by the camp fire, Daddy read about the baby Jesus. All I could think about was whether Mary would get cancer and leave Jesus. Then I remembered Mary weeping for Jesus on the cross. I didn’t feel so sorry for him that he was poor and there wasn’t room for him in the inn. And I didn’t care about Easter and Jesus dying. This was Christmas. I kicked some sand into the fire.

“Katherine Elizabeth,” daddy said like he does when I’m in trouble.

He sent me to the camp restrooms to get ready for bed. There was a lady in the stall beside me who had blue veins running through her feet like Mama did right before she died.

“Where is your campsite?” I asked her when I came out of my stall but she just kept washing her hands over and over. I couldn’t see her face. Her hair hung down like Mama’s used to hang when she let it free. “Are you Mama?”

She looked up at me then. She had dark eyes and a face with deep lines around her mouth. She only wiped her hands on a roll of cloth that went round and round through a machine.

Daddy was silent in the tent. He didn’t sing to us like Mama would have. I knew I shouldn’t say anything about the lady and about whether Mama was in Florida. He promised Santa would find us no matter where we were but of course I knew Santa was a made up story. But how come so many grown ups believed you would never die? Was Mama an angel now?

When Daddy and Lulu were asleep, I slipped outside the tent. The moonlight made our campsite white. Little puffs of air blew against my face and the shadows moved with the trees.

I spoke with Santa then. I asked him for my old Mama back – the one who could still lift Lulu on her hip, who could sing us to sleep without stopping to catch her breath, who made us fried chicken and biscuits. I asked Santa if my Mama was here. I asked him these things even though he was supposed to be an old made up story for children.

There was only the sound of the crashing chocolate waves. How Mama would have loved that, that I imagined them as cocoa. She would have played along, filling up a pot and putting it on the fire, doing magic and making real chocolate. She would have kissed me for my dream of the dark, sweet, milk sea. There was a sea somewhere like that and Mama was waiting for us, with Peter the wolfhound who died soon after she died, heartsick my dad told us. He was licking up the ocean. She had gone there to prepare a place for us. We would never be apart again and Daddy would watch over us always.

I stuck a dried up flower from a palm tree in the sand. Daddy said people didn’t really notice the flower of the palm but he said the most interesting things come and go in secret. I put some rocks around the base to hold it up and then at the top I tied the ribbon Mama had given me. It was white and satin like the ribbon in her gown. The dried up palm flower looked like a Christmas tree. I would leave it out all night, just in case.

Tiny Dreams

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slow moves by gregorfischer.photography on flickr

There were lots of people she used to sing for but now with the thyroid surgery, her voice had changed. She could talk, and whistle, but she couldn’t sing which was why the song of the caged parrot down the street inspired a sense of loss she would not have been able to describe had someone cared to ask. Whenever she walked her dog she would hear it. She had always wanted birds – finches, or even a parrot or cockatoo, – but now it looked likely, because of the cancer invading her body, any bird she may adopt now might outlive her.

A man in town sold pet health insurance and she was beginning to make her plans. She wanted her son to have her little white dog and knew he would need money to take care of her. He was not old enough to pay these expenses on his own. And a parrot was out of the question at this point. They could live to be 100 or more and she would be dead at 46.

She felt it, no matter what people said, no matter how much they told her to have a positive mindset. Buying a parrot now was an act of faith bordering on the ridiculous.

Every morning the parrot chirped from the third floor balcony down the street where she walked her dog. The bird was a part of how the real estate company was staging the property, he was part of their plan to sell the new orange painted homes.

Not far away, a woman was mauled by a black bear as she walked her dog. The cancer was about the same thing. What difference did it make, she would be gone, taken by something – whether it emerged from the forest – a madman or bear – or a malignancy in her body that grew until she succumbed. She hoped, at least, in the case of the woman confronting the bear, the dog managed to get away.

Which was why she sat across from the desk of the pet insurance agent. She signed every paper. She paid. She set up a plan for payments. The agent had no ring. She asked him to lunch. They ate nicoise salad in a restaurant where unlit chandeliers and stained glass panels hung from the ceiling. He said he had old movies on reels at home they could watch. He said they could dance to music on his jukebox.

A shaft of light poured in through the basement window where they were dancing. She was not expecting this. She considered asking him to draw up a separate policy for a parrot. The agent had nice leather shoes, smelled of bergamot oil, had a curl against his ear.

first published in beakful

In them old cotton fields back home

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Mar O. omL, school bus, flickr

We always sang a song to the fields on the bus on the way to our middle school and at the time, I wasn’t really sure how any of us came to know it, given that we were a bunch of white kids. For some reason, I thought it was a spiritual, or something from a spiritual. Even as a young girl then, I always thought there was something sad about the song, like I knew it wasn’t mine to sing or I worried there was something wrong about a white girl who wore Izod shirts and Ralph Lauren barrettes to sing: “Now it was down in Louisiana, just about a mile from Texarkana! In them old cotton fields back home.” I only knew about slaves and cotton back then. But I finally learned when I was older and moved away from Arkansas that it was a rock song sung by some white guys and also various white guys before them.

I assumed we were treading on forbidden territory with such songs, territory I was made aware of almost daily when I was the new girl at my school, one of the few white girls in my grade. Daddy had moved us from Columbia, South Carolina where me and my brother and sister lived in a white neighborhood and went down the street to go to school with white children. At this new place, things were quite different. Like, at recess a big group of the black girls in my grade got in our faces and chanted “White cracker, white cracker, you don’t shine, betcha five dollars I can beat your behind!” I was scared, and fascinated too. I never knew you could be hated and taunted like that just because you were a white girl. They still let me play hopscotch though and jump rope. I was really good at Lemon Twist and practiced incessantly at home so there could be at least one thing I could be better at than the girls whose skin was darker, whose homelife I never knew, who taught me the Sugar Hill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight, and who loved it when I stole the basketball from them at practice.

Mama and Daddy had a maid named Maimie who cooked for us and though the housekeeping was marginal, which Mama never seemed to mind, her cooking was unlike anything I’d ever tasted. I never told Mama that she could never cook like Maimie, but I think she knew it and would tell Maimie how she wasn’t sure what she would do if she wasn’t around to save us. She looked after us too, us kids, me, my brother, and my sister, and whatever kids we dragged in with us, and sometimes a stray dog or cat or two. I don’t know how Maimie did it, but I respected her that she wasn’t into housework. It’s like she said: I cook, I wipe up the counters, and sometimes I go fetch a kid or animal, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna be wonder woman. The one thing though I know was a bummer for Maimie was that Mama expected her to polish the silver, constantly. I never understood that, but first thing, as soon as the box fans in the kitchen and front rooms were on and breakfast was under way, Maimie would be there by the sink, one of our old cloth baby diapers in hand, rubbing away with the polish until the silver gleamed.

“Child, child!” She said to me, one night, late, after everyone was in bed. “Maimie done need your help now! I don’t want you to say nothing to your Mama about it neither.” I put on my clothes and went with her into the night under the moon and stars. We lived in the country and our neighbors had farms. My Daddy was a preacher so we didn’t have much land but there wasn’t a building or a stop light for miles.

“I need you to drive me to take this food to the dance on the other side of Cherry Hill. You be a good girl, now and set on up there behind the wheel like I seen you do with Ms. Millie.”

Ms. Millie was the sweet old soused spinster who taught me to drive even though of course I wasn’t the legal age being I was only eleven. Maimie sometimes cooked for her too. And Maimie knew about my driving my friend Chad’s old Chevy. We drove off the road on his property. We did that and he taught me to play cat scratch fever on his guitar. I had hopes he liked me but he liked my sister.

Maimie had too much dirt on me so that I couldn’t refuse helping her and so she just sat back like a queen while I inched along the dark road. She always had the men in her life drive her, whether it be Gustus or Daddy or the Reverend at her church.

“Gustus is gonna have the bus there where all the children can hang out,” she said. I didn’t question Maimie when she told me what to do. There was something in her voice. And being that I wasn’t sure what was happening, I felt reliant on her, like she was my parent in this other world.

Gustus was Maimie’s son. He was the only dark skinned person on the bus in the mornings and he drove all us white children, never a word spoken, a hello or good bye, or a sit down and shut it. I sometimes wonder what went through Gustus’ mind while we sang spirituals and rhymes that mostly the black girls sang at school while they huddled in a circle and danced, making the white kids look stupid and clumsy and way less cool.

“You be a good girl, you hear?” Maimie said. “You’re going to black town now, little sister, it’ll put some Africa in your bones.” And she laughed.

“Why you laughing, Maimie?” I said. “I’m not scared. I go to school with lots of black kids.”

“You ain’t heard of no ghosts then, the ones we brought with us over on the slave ships long ago, that’s right and voodoo spirits and spirits of people who died in slavery or hanging from ropes in trees. But children ghosts are the scariest of all.”

“Then why ain’t you scared, Maimie?”

“You know not to say ‘ain’t,’ June bug.”

We were downtown at Main Street where lights only blinked because it was too late for traffic.

“Go on child, down on past the track.” She was pointing with her long bony finger, the one she used to crimp pies and test temperatures of hot milk.

“I’m used to it, chile, all the time, I carry some ghosts around with me and talk to them. You think I’m just talking to myself. No way, sweet Michelle, I keep in contact. Mmm hmmm.” Maimie liked to call me sweet Michele. She said my named reminded her of the Beatles song Michele, my belle. I wasn’t named for the song, but I always thought it was cool Maimie was in touch with the Beatles. I asked her once if she knew Rapper’s Delight and she started singing: “I said a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie, to the hip hip-hop, and you don’t stop the rock it to the bang-bang, boogie say “up jump” the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat.”

We arrived at a field with bonfires and a big stage up front. There were sounds I’d never heard before, so many drums, and people wearing colorful clothes, bouncing and twirling and shimmying as if they were mainstage of a massive parade.

“Now see what the black folk do, you see what we do,” said Maimie, pointing out a place to park. “And you thought Maimie was just a boring ole house slave runnin’ a rag ’round your Mama’s silver.”

“I never said stuff like that,” I said, feeling defensive, wounded.

“I know that chile, I’m just messin’ with ya.” It was like the girls who messed with me at school, calling me a white cracker and threatening to beat my behind, although they never did.

Maimie took me to the bus where some kids were hanging out, most of them younger and in the pajamas, lying down for bed. I found a longer bench near the back. Maimie gave me some food, a little package she had worked up, with snacks. She brought me a blanket and a pillow.

“You’re not to leave, you hear?” she said.

I was worried. I didn’t know anyone. And I was worried about how all these black people would feel about me being here. And I was worried about the ghosts Maimie told me about, a big secret she kept when she was with me, in the white world with me and my family.

“Are there really ghosts, Maimie? Ones that hang around all the time?” I asked, settling down on the bench while Maimie fluffed and arranged my pillow.

“There are,” she said. “But they’re not going to worry you, honey, no way. Maimie was just giving you a hard time now, come on up in here and lie down.”

She left me there, saying she was going to dance with some of her friends under the harvest moon, but said she’d be back, and wake me up, and we’d go home, and my parents would be none the wiser.

I could hear the drums outside, but it was quiet with all the windows closed and the door closed. I could hear the other children on their benches, breathing and sighing in their sleep. It was strange to think in a couple of hours Gustus would be driving me to school in this same bus. He would pretend nothing else happened with it in his off hours and he would be same old boring Gustus though I was sure he was out there dancing with Maimie or maybe even playing the drums. I sat up watching the swirling figures in the distance until my eyes grew heavy and I lay my head on the pillow. I dreamt of dark ghosts ascending over the swirling colorful mass of bodies and I dreamt also of smaller dark bodies, ghost children, indistinct and diaphanous, racing over plowed fields where Maimie’s kin, hunched over with sacks dipped low to the ground, had once bloodied their fingers on cotton bolls.