Meg Sefton's Blog, page 73
October 30, 2017
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)
Marco Antonio Torres, flickr
In addition to Flash-Nano, I will be participating in NaNoWriMo for the month of November. I plan to dig into my young adult horror novel. (I will explain more as the project reaches the end of the first draft.) You may find me on the NaNoWriMo site under my name Meg Sefton. If you decide to join in, let’s be “writing buddies.” Best wishes.
October 27, 2017
the woman who sings at the top of her lungs
Sky D.’s “Into the Woods” (a tribute to The Call), flickr
A coolish Friday late October days before children would traipse down our streets in costume, knocking on doors for candy, a Florida black bear scratched its back on a palm tree in front of the townhome adjacent to the townhome I share with my mother. As I sat by the window reading my morning paper I observed its black mass emerging from the green curtain of woods, stopping by the palm presumably before going on to look for unsecured garbage.
“Ma, come look,” I said as the bear bumped the tree first with its rear, then stood to full height, about a third of the height of the street light beside the palm. At this time of day, neighbors would begin to emerge with their dogs or get into their cars parked alongside the street and down the block to go to work, take their children to school, pursue morning workouts at the Y.
Ma was shuffling around in my kitchen, that reassuring sound of her slippers grazing the tile while she fixed a pot of oatmeal and fed the dog.
“Remember I told you, Ma, they should have left that magnolia tree and lamppost that at night looked like the meeting place of Lucy and Mr. Tumnus. And now, here we have a scratching post for wild creatures who would just as soon eat our children and dogs.” I hated the palms they used to replace the magnolias, the branches of the latter scattered down the street the day after they mowed them all down. The palms didn’t fit, were too stocky and awkward and obscured the light from the lampposts with their long finger-like fronds. And yet, I didn’t attend HOA meetings in which these things are most likely discussed. I paid my fees only to be unbored and unbothered.
“I will go and talk to the thing,” my mother said, standing over me as I sat at the window. In her fragile hands, she cupped a steaming mug of hazelnut cream coffee, her favorite in the morning.
“You will do no such thing, mother,” I said, using the fuller “mother” to express my firmness and authority. I know she was referencing her skill with animals but this was over the top, ridiculous.
“A bear is not a dog,” I sad.
She had once soothed a loose Rottweiler intent on attack on one of our morning walks. She grabbed my arm when she saw the dog coming and pulled me down to the ground with a strength that defied her diminutive stature. “Down!” she said “Roll up!” she said and I followed her orders and example and there we were, two women curled up on someone’s lawn, a dark creature licking our faces. Ma slowly uncurled, offering as she did so, a treat she always kept in her pocket, offering it underhanded with eyes averted singing a very low and tuneless song about the majesty of dogs and their protectiveness and power and love.
“What was that?” I had asked her afterwards.
“What?” she said.
“That song? Where did it come from?”
“The poor thing seemed happy with my treat,” she said, not answering my question. “We sure got out of a little pinch there didn’t we honey, the Lord be blessed.”
“I can go talk to this bear, so lost and turned around, you’ll see, the dear thing” she said, setting her hazelnut coffee carefully down on a coaster at the dining room table where I sat, a table we had arranged by the window with a light and a pair of comfortable chairs, perfectly suited for a spinster daughter and her aged mother.
“It will go away,” I sad.
But it didn’t. My mother sat for a while, but the thing didn’t move. It sat too, as a matter of fact, squashing the expensive groundcover under its enormous rear. I had only recently secured the phone numbers of my neighbors and started calling them, telling them what was happening. Someone said they would call animal control.
Until Mom moved in, I knew no one, life being what it is with computers and livestreaming movies and air conditioned environments and all of my excuses. Ma had met people hand delivering homemade butterscotch bars and introducing herself and inquiring about the inhabitants within and hence everyone loved her and by proxy, me too, but only because my mother was the one true human.
“I will sing to it now,” she said and brushed past me and opened the door to our second story living room, high up from the bear, and so, safe still. She began to sing a croaky tuneless melody about the sleepiness of bears under the stars of black Florida nights, the soft undergrowth of pine needles and loamy earth where the bear can nestle down and sleep, the nuts and seeds and ants and possums the bear can find for its meals which nourish its coat and fill its belly, the current unavailability of people food due to the new locked trash cans provided to the residents by Seminole County, the glory of a bear in the wild vs. its trapped status in civilization, the family of bears under the trees away from roads and men and their cars – a place to belong, a place to call home, a place to protect its offspring and see they are cared for. And then began song in an operative bent, tuneless still but somehow modern, a song about the treachery of mankind, the evil men do, the noble savage that has been abandoned for Machiavellian schemes, how mankind out of bitterness for itself has devised its own traps and aims that nothing should be truly free, not a blade of grass, or a bee in its comb, or a bear on an adventure.
This went on now for what felt like hours but it must have only lasted minutes for still we waited for animal control. Meanwhile, the bear occasionally reared up to its full height and sauntered over to our balcony, its balustrade just out of reach of its paws which didn’t swipe, only slow undulated as if the bear were stirring honey on a lazy, hot day, as Ma sang her truth, the bear’s truth, the neighborhood on lockdown. Every now and then it gave a little roar accompanying the solo.
I could only imagine what my neighbors thought, but I couldn’t at the same time. By now, they loved her unconditionally and she was the elder among them who cared for them and their children and parents. I pretended to look at my paper but in a way that afforded me a view of the street.
And then finally, my mother sang to a it a lullaby, a bear sleeping song of how wonderful the bear will feel after its delicious meal from the forest. With that, the bear sauntered off into the trees, a final bellow as if to say “You are a wise and good old woman.”
My mother stepped in from off the balcony and closed the door. She shuffled past me where I sat with my paper, pretending I hadn’t listened to her, and witnessed what happened, and been embarrassed among the neighbors whom I had not taken the time to know or care about.
“Now what’s your pleasure for your oatmeal, dear, the cinnamon, butter, and walnuts as always?”
I laid the paper on my lap and merely nodded.
October 24, 2017
Flash-Nano
State Library of New South Wales, Police Dog Tess, 1935, flickr
If you like writing flash fiction or want to try your hand, join me for the month of November! The challenge is to write a flash fiction piece for every day of the month in response to a prompt. If I come out with several total during the month of Flash-Nano, I’m happy, but it is definitely a good incentive to make a start and have some fun! Here’s the site.
September 26, 2017
“Dirty Bird,” A Thousand and One Stories
Illustration by Martin Shongauer, 15th century painter and engraver
My quirky story “Dirty Bird” is up at A Thousand and One Stories. Give it a read! Happy Tuesday.
September 17, 2017
Never die
“the gas station,” James Loesch, flickr
It had begun again: Davie in his pajamas, standing by our bed in the near darkness, blanket it hand, asking me if we could go see the panda at the Walmart. I had to be up early, go in for the shift at the Wawa, heat and put out sausage and cheese croissants and bagels, replenish the cigarette case, clean the bathrooms, ready the store for the regulars who came in before their early shifts. Mark was stone dead asleep of course. I took Davie to the kitchen and made him a warm milk with cinnamon, the way he liked it, and sat him in front of Mr. Rogers. The show had made a comeback to the local station at these wee hours. I lay down on the couch behind Davie, his mind drifting I hope from the stuffed panda we couldn’t afford at the Walmart to Mr. Rogers Never Never Land with a puppet queen and talking lion.
At Wawa I would have to deal with Mr. Brumbley and I was glad for the extra hour to laze on the couch. Mr. Brumbley’s hands were always busy in the back office, busy on one of us girls when they weren’t busy with the paperwork or the safe. I had to take the job, had been desperate when Mark’s job at the plant got the squeeze. Mr. Brumbley thought he could touch me and I would still come to work anyway. “Remember?” he said, the mint aroma of the Starlight he was always sucking on mixing with the crypt like natural fumes of his yellow toothed maw, his face uncomfortably close as I wondered how to escape having been called to his office without reason, something that happened several times a day. “I trained you. I took you in. You need me. See?” And then he laughed. “Now get back to work, Gregory!” slapping my rear with the clipboard he kept with schedules, stocking notes. He always called me by my last name. He always called me back to his office to supposedly give me some feedback from the day before but us girls, we looked at each other knowingly. I just happened to be the newest acquisition. I should never have begged him to take me on. Now he treats me like he owns me. What can a girl do. When you’re desperate, you’re desperate. Then you get this shit.
Mark would bring Davie in soon before taking him on to his day care. Employees got a discount off the morning fixings and fruit. I got to take my break with them out on the picnic table, another special compensation for which Mr. Brumbley made me pay but I never tired of seeing Davie stuff a fat grape or two into his sweet face or enjoy a sausage round, knowing he’d be ready for his day. Mark would go onto his job as a stockroom worker. It had been lucky he finally found something but we could scarce give up either of our jobs. I had found this one the year after we lost Micah, Micah, my sweet tiny boy come to us early and not well enough to stay. I had stopped by his little grave when I got off my shift the night before, bringing him a leftover flower from the night shift before, a rose Angelica always held back for me when she was refilling the flower display.
I put my hand over Mark’s as it rested on the picnic table. He held Davie on his knee. Cars and trucks were coming and going in the lot and he kept pointing at them, wanting to know their names. “PT Cruiser!” we said. “Mustang!” we said. “Bronco!” we said. And we laughed as Davie clapped. And I brought out cookies for us, a special surprise from Kylie who brought them homemade to work.
“Let’s go get a dog today, Haze” said Mark. He always called me Haze short for Purple Haze, the Jimi Hendrix song we danced to at the party where we met, both of us dressed like hippies for the theme. He said he loved me right then, at that moment. My name is actually Lisa, but I had grown to love the affectionate Haze.
“Me want panda!” said Davie. Of course, he hadn’t forgotten.
“We’ve got a wee one who wants a Panda,” I said.
“Wouldn’t you rather a dog?” said Mark, bouncing our little Davie on his knee a bit, who then hummed as part of their routine.
Davie smiled and clapped. “Pan-da!” he said, drawing out the name of his object of desire.
“And so where are we going to get this creature?” I said.
“Shelter,” said Mark.
“How are we gonna pay the vet for shots and buy it food?”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Me want pan-da!” said Davie. Chocolate smears hung out around his lips and I dabbed him off with a napkin.
The plan was I was going to talk Mr. Brumbley into letting me take the later shift so I could help pay for the new expense of the dog. After Mark got off work and collected Davie at daycare, they would go to Walmart and get Davie’s panda. Then they would go home for a nap and dinner and then come get me. We would go to the shelter between this shift and the graveyard, the name my coworkers gave for that nightmare shift between 12 and 8. I said goodbye to Davie in the parking lot where Mark had strapped him down in his carseat, my heart thumping a bit extra when I kissed his damp cheek. He was happy and clapping and kicking. I would liked to have believed all that joy was about me, but some, to be sure, was about the bright eyed panda waiting for him with all the other unclaimed but hopeful fluffy toys.
The favor of the extra shift would perhaps cost me more with Mr. Brumbley, to be extracted now or at some future point, but I never let on with Mark. It was just too much to put on his shoulders and I knew how much he needed me working right now. I only wish I had stayed in college to finish my bachelor’s. Little had I known that a lack of follow through would net me degradation with the likes of Yellow Teeth. We had gotten pregnant when I was a sophomore and I wanted to stay home with Davie. We married and Mark got a job. We were happy. Maybe a little short sighted. Our parents told us so. It didn’t matter at the time. Now however life was less clear, like swimming in a muddy lake, but it had it bright spots, like Davie, and for a few days, little Micah.
I straightened up the aisles and thought of Micah, everything about him miniature and fragile as he lay inside the incubator. Born at four months, five months too early. Little Michah, his red wrinkled, transparent skin, little down fur, never opening his eyes to see me or his dad but moving to our touch and our voices. He knew us for just a moment til his little heart gave out. The surgeons tried but it was too late. Mark and I cried and held each other in the hospital chapel for what felt like hours. In the Bible on the lectern, we looked up the passage we had named him for, one of our favorites, Micah 6:8: “He has shown all you people what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
“Our little humble Micah,” said Mark. “He would have made us proud, I know it.”
“God needs him now, doesn’t He, Mark?” I said.
In response, Mark embraced me long and hard.
Mama had brought over some preemie clothes. I had no idea they made them. The NICU nurse helped me dress him with an outfit I thought looked like one I would have dressed him in had he stayed with us, a soft blue sweater with a tiny white embroidered car on the front and matching knit pants with feet.
“Gregory!” blared Mr. Brumbley down the aisle. What was there to like about Mr. Brumbley? Surely God made him too. I couldn’t come up with anything, not at the moment. Mr. Brumbley gave me this job. That was it. And that was all, frankly.
In my reverie, I wasn’t doing too much straightening. “Malingering,” Mr. Brumbley said when I appeared to be “spacing out.” This was his description for what appeared to be my lack of productivity. His solution was toilet duty to be followed by peer inspections. If either the cleaning of the bathroom or the inspections were found to be lacking, all employees would get a round for the day scrubbing the bathrooms, high and low, walls and stall walls included until every surface was sterile enough for surgery. (Mr. Brumbley’s words.)
I was down on my hands and knees, scrubbing, a requirement, which also meant I was wearing kneepads, long gloves and a face mask when I heard the clop clop of Mr. Brumbley’s shoes and the click of the lock sliding into place. I was now locked in there with him and not only that I was on all fours, not a situation ideal for the female employee at the Wa Wa on 17-92 and Dog Track Road. He stepped over my legs and sat on the toilet behind me. I stopped what I was doing and sat up straight.
“No, no keep going, Lisa” he said, for the first time using my first name. My heart fell. This wasn’t good. “Get down on it, girl. Show me what you got. I like the look of you like this.”
I thought of Davie, by now, hugging his new stuffed animal. He and Mark were holding hands, about to go home and to naps, Mark with his dream of a dog fresh in his head, a welcome distraction from their financial straights.
I knew my backside was wiggling when I scrubbed. I tried to tighten my whole body. I wished I worked out so much I could rip the toilet he was sitting on straight out of floor.
“Nice,” he said, and I felt his warm, meaty hand on my rear end. I sat up again so that he lost his hand lost its camping spot on my butt. “No, you have to keep working now. You don’t have a choice now Lisa my sweet angel. I helped you so you help me.”
I crawled to another spot and scrubbed.
“Yes, that’s right, darlin’, keep crawling all around here. Scrub, scrub, scrub. That’s right, my love.”
I knew what was happening behind me, I could hear the ceramic of the toilet lid scraping against the tank, a little at first and then as I moved away from him, more and more violently, like a giant teacup in its watery saucer.
“Keep scrubbing, Lisa, damn you! Do your job!”
I didn’t give him the benefit of looking at him. I didn’t want to see what was happening behind me and then maybe he would see my breasts as I bent over. I made it to the corner with my nose pressed right into the grout. I made myself smaller so small, as small as I could, pressed up against a wall that would give him the least visual vantage point on my body.
And then I heard him stand up abruptly and splash his hands around in the sink. “Nice work,” he said, all soft, like he talked when he drew close in the work room with his minty Starlight mixed with crypt death breath, and he was gone.
My stomach lurched and I wretched into the dirty commode. I scrambled to the door and turned the lock. I sat legs splayed, back against the tile, mercifully cool. I thought of Davie now, snug as a bug in a rug taking a nap with his panda. There was no way that Brumbley was going to get to me. No way! I thought, flinging the scrub brush across the room to the opposite wall. I lifted myself up gripping the toilet. I splashed the whole bottle of Fabuloso on every surface and wiped it down with a towel and two towels under my feet scrubbing as I walked. Not the way we were taught in “training,” but this was not the day for perfection, it was the day for survival. There had been many such days recently and I didn’t break up about it, just kept moving.
I had never done a graveyard. But when I saw how happy that mutt made Mark, I was happy I had thought of it. Since losing his factory job, there wasn’t much to lift his spirits except Davie. Even though his current job offset some expenses, I knew he preferred to be the main one fending for his little clan and the warehouse work was not well-paying enough to make this possible. Mark moved a little slower, smiled less, except in response to something Davie was up to. I worried about him and the effect of his mood on Davie. He was drinking more too. Not a whole lot more, just a few extra beers a night. Still.
Mr. Brumbley was putting the money on lockdown when I came back. Graveyard included storing more money away in case of the worst: A burglary. There were signs at the register and on the front door that there was never more than twenty five dollars cash in the register. That didn’t always stop the desperate, but so far, luckily, nothing bad had gone down, but then, I had never worked this late at night, or, if you thought of it this way, this early in the morning.
I clocked in as Mr. Brumbley worked over some numbers at his desk. “Be careful, tonight,” he said, “They’re some rowdies, drunk people you know, bikers from the bar across the way.”
Mr. Brumbley telling any woman to be careful about other people was deeply ironic.
“Do you work graveyard?” I said.
“Not usually. But I thought I might this evening. Such a nice night to be out and about, ya think?”
“Out and about” was not the phrase I would associate with working the night shift at the Wawa, not if you were a single person in a town with ample bars and places to be entertained. Please go out I practically screamed in my head. But then I thought of the women that were being saved by his working here. Damned either way, ladies, I said silently to all the women in town who didn’t know that one or more of us was gonna have to suffer tonight. I’ll take the graveyard tonight with Mr. Brumbley but God, or the devil, take him. I need this f’ing job.
“Gregory,” said Mr. Brumbley, “I need you to fill me up. Think quick,” he said, tossing his keys to me. He laughed as I scrambled to grab them. “I gotta little bit on this gas card. Just use her. Use her all up.” And he tossed the card down on the desk and laughed again.
Sometimes strange things happen at the pumps. I had a friend once who said she was filling up her car and two men came up to this guy who was filling his car and punched him in the face, took his wallet, keys, and car, along with the kid in the back. The baby was found later, left on a front door stoop, the men too skittish it was supposed to take it any place official like a hospital or fire station. Explosions can happen. Around gas you have to be careful you don’t accidentally light up. People begging for gas money are often hanging out, in cars, with a woman and children in tow, asking for change that will get them to their mother’s house in Port Orange. Maybe they are going to Port Orange. Maybe they are going to the ABC Liquor Store. Drug deals go down. People get shot.
The lights at the pumps are always bright at the Wawa and the “light rock” station plays just as loudly as during the day though there is less vehicle noise and traffic and it grates if you are standing there, filling up, thinking of the risks that come with using a pump at night, including a possible scanner that has already lifted your pin number.
The Girl from Impanema was blaring over the loudspeakers, a throwback I loved. Sometimes the company had throwback music nights. It reminded me of my parents who used to play it on their vinyl record player which looked more like a piece of furniture when the lid was closed. “And here is the girl from Impanema who inspired the song,” my mother would say, pointing to a picture of a beautiful tan woman with long blond hair. There was a picture of her on the inside flap of the album cover. “But you are more beautiful, Lisa, by far.” I hadn’t thought of myself as beautiful in those grade school years, but I understood, now, how a mother saw her children, in the light of an unfathomable love.
A woman was saying something behind me. She was calling softly to me. “Hello….I’ve got something for you,” she said. She was an older woman Mama’s age with long white hair a long skirt, tshirt and a sweater, something Mama wore a lot in her older years, except the woman wasn’t wearing shoes. She had a bundle in her arms which she carried like a prom queen would a bundle of flowers. She even looked vaguely like a photo of Mama in the old days, carrying flowers as part of the homecoming court. She was probably a bag lady selling flowers, or something, though she didn’t look as street weary. But who in their right mind would be out at these hours? “Here,” she said gently, “take this in your arms for a bit, please. I’ll be right back.” Something in her words reminded me of the way Mama would speak to me when I was younger and she was entrusting me with some special task. And then she handed me her bundle and before I knew it, I could make out her figure in the store. How had she moved that fast? I looked down. The bundle was not a bunch of flowers but a tiny baby, translucent-skinned with light fur down, no eyelashes, eyes clothed, its fingers moving in tiny slow pawing motions. Before I had the chance to cry “Micah!” the woman swooped out of the store and the baby was gone. It was almost as if she had flown, like a hawk, and swooped down on Micah like he was her prey.
I crumpled up by the old dirty Chevy crying and in shock, but just as soon I was on my feet and running out to the cross street, calling and looking for the old woman with the baby. There was no sight of them. The night was just as quiet as it had always been except for the loudspeakers blaring out the songs no one was listening to and the sounds of karaoke at the bar across the street. I parked Mr. Brumbley’s car and went inside through the back. There was no Mr. Brumbley. Count your blessings, I said to myself, something Mama used to say, and I set to work, still puzzled and amazed over what I had seen at the pump, but relieved for some peace.
The next day a dog and its owner found Mr. Brumbley out behind the Wawa in the ditch. “Cardiac arrest,” it was ruled. Why in the heck was he back there? Everyone wondered. No one really knew. He didn’t smoke so he wasn’t going out there to light up or anything like that. And he certainly wasn’t a walker.
Also that night Mama had passed but Daddy didn’t know when. He had fallen asleep in front of the television and was distressed to learn she had taken her last breath without him. She had been sick a while with cancer and had stopped receiving chemo. Poor Daddy had gotten so worn out. He felt guilty but we tried to assure him he had done everything possible, which he had.
I didn’t ever really learn for sure what happened that night but Mama always taught me there were many explanations for things. Some things just fell together haphazardly, she said, because we are headin’ toward chaos. However, we never know when sometimes things relate to each other like a domino pushing over another domino then that one the next til a whole row is flattened. Life, she would say, is in essence, mystery.
A couple of months went by and I became store manager. Things got much better for me and Mark and Davie.
September 14, 2017
detritus
Misha Sokolnikov, flickr
We are what is left when everything from the accident is carried away – the driver, the smashed car, the branches from the bush that crumpled thin metal. We are the detritus, the pieces, the bits – the piece of reflector, the broken glass of the windshield, the broken cross dangling from the rearview. The bush the car crashed into was as crushed as the frame. The conclusion of the police was that the young man was drunk. But we know it was a deer. He swerved to avoid a deer. But he died. The deer lived.
The mother who came to collect pieces of us the day after had it right. This is what she told the police, that her son had swerved to hit an animal, but his intoxication level had been a more solid forensic indicator. It was a deer, or a cat, or a squirrel. The boy loved animals, she said. She told it to the ground, she told it to the bits of debris.
We are a reflection of stars and lost dreams and yet should we be able to tell the story of that lonely boy riding through the night in the city of lakes at Christmas we would tell the truth only a mother’s heart knows: The purity of her son’s heart, that, drunk though he was, was responsive to the natural world even in a city like ours where people careen around lakes without their licenses because of last year’s DUI, believing they can save the world despite themselves. The law does not allow for the best of what someone could possibly be but more often what is the worst.
A mother’s heart is not law. We are testament.
For my brother
September 4, 2017
Episode 272: Henry Hughes!
Thank you, John King, for your wonderful interviews, and this great resource. I loved hearing all about fish and fishing which reminds me of my girlhood. I look forward to reading this author.
Episode 272 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
On this week’s show, I talk to the poet and memoirist Henry Hughes about how to get over rejection, poetry, the freedom of ekphrastic work, memoirs, and fishing,
Plus Todd Boss reads his poem, “One of the Joys of Dry Fly Fishing.”
TEXTS DISCUSSED
Episode 272 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
August 24, 2017
Ms. Myska’s Field of Dreams
Julien Belli “A Story,” flickr
Fall was Ms. Myska’s favorite Little League baseball season. Her son used to play in the neighborhood league. He had long since graduated and moved to another city and yet there she was, working the concession stand, having kept a key. Not only that, she tidied the field and toilet, picked up the trash, wiped down the metal bleachers. The city janitor assigned to the park had been shooed away by a smiling Ms. Myska and the young mothers were also summarily dismissed when they tried to insist that she should be sitting outside, enjoying the weather. She merely smiled and turned the oil on for the fries, made the coffee. For all they knew, she kept a cot in there, they said to themselves.
By the end of each season the players and their parents had always developed a strange fondness for the rodent-like woman who scurried from task to task, never speaking much, never making much eye contact. They would have been surprised to know she remembered their concession preferences, knew their faces and voices, knew whether they were confident, shy, slow, smart, funny, knew who their friends were, knew their family members, beloved and otherwise.
Little did they know that each summer, when they were vacationing, she was scurrying to the store for the secret ingredients to her chili. Making the chili every year made fall her favorite season for baseball. Who could resist a good chili on a cool evening? No one, and certainly no one who had tasted her version, contained as it was in a tiny bag of corn chips, the corn chips serving in lieu of pasta, the small bag a portable meal, ready to eat with a spork.
Nor did they know of her harvest moon night when she turned cartwheels in the field and tilted her head back and sang her full-throated songs. Other mysterious women, bodies worn from giving life and sustaining it, joined her, dancing, singing, drinking wine, running the bases and laughing until they ran up into the night sky and they transformed into other beings entirely, birds and butterflies and delicate moths. At daybreak, they became human again.
The season after she died, a young mother found a chili recipe in the cash box. “Make it with love,” the instructions said, “and you will be blessed.”
August 20, 2017
Amy
Sven Van Echelpoel “Nadia,” flickr
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.
August 17, 2017
black bitch
[image error]
Leann Arthur, flickr
A couple of months ago, my son noticed a change in me. He said, “Hey Mom, what’s wrong with your eyes?”
I was no longer able to hide it from him, the full throttle visitation of my manic depressive illness, the illness I secretly called my black bitch, a nod to Winston Churchill’s “black dog.” This time, my bitch was frustrating my concentration and numbing my senses. The last time she pounced on me this hard my son was a baby.
I didn’t answer him but he knew. He was a smart boy and knew about me taking the medications, knew how much the illness had cost me and his father, knew it was the kind of thing that could become dangerous.
When I got up from the sofa, he followed me into the kitchen. I opened the fridge and poured him a Coke. He was staring at the knife block. When I first told him why I was on meds, he started asking me and his dad about all the ways a person could kill himself.
I knew it was vital I get ahold of myself right away, that I send that slathering hound back to a dark corner with a bone. So I took his chin in my fingers and moved his face gently to mine. “Hey,” I said. His eyes slild away. He didn’t want me to read him. “Hey,” I repeated softly and when I caught his gaze, I looked at him as steadily as I could manage, right into those light blue eyes and said, “I would never do that, son. Never.” And then I took him in my arms and I held him for a minute.
And then he went off to play.
“Bitch,” I said, under my breath. And for a moment, I was free.
First appeared in A-Minor Magazine under the title “Needful Words”
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