Meg Sefton's Blog, page 74

frenemies

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Approaching the total solar eclipse by James Niland. flickr

Our vantage point for the total solar eclipse was a mountain top in north Georgia. Darren insisted on driving down from Tennessee to meet me on my way up from Florida though I had originally planned on watching it alone. I was early to the lookout, having scrambled over that last purchase of rock face, breathing hard, sweating. I didn’t want to be with him at the site the whole time. I wanted to carry out some of my plan alone although of course for the actual phenomenon, he’d be here with me, long legs stretched out, resting, assured, the climb having cost him nothing.

The rolling landscape below seemed to have drawn breath, the contrast between green trees and shadow sharpening even since my sitting down and taking out my binoculars. The color of the sky had intensified as if it were the abyss of the ocean. There were no clouds and I noticed the birds were silent.

I did not want to be here with him, especially not alone. I would not have always said this when we were younger, when we both lived in Florida, when we were in middle school and high school. There had been a kind of silly camaraderie between us. And then  a bit of a romance though I broke it off, being too absorbed in my studies and plans. “You broke his heart,” my mother said when he slipped into a coma before graduation. Though no one really knew why he became ill my mother’s words stuck with me being that they were both true and not true at the same time and had the power of a crucible. Before I left for college I visited Darren several times a week to talk to him and read to him while a machine helped him breath. When he woke several months later, I went to the hospital to visit. What hit me were his screams and inaudible complaints echoing down the hospital corridor. It was worse than the silence and again I felt selfish, self-concerned, but worried too. What was wrong? What would happen? No one spoke to me. I couldn’t go in to see him.

He recovered. He was fully functional again, eventually, even went to college. Rumors had it he had brain damage given that his tendency to make things up, to “get creative with the truth” had become vastly exaggerated. I was not in touch, however. At the time I only considered how his hurting made me feel, and by that time, I had begun to have challenges of my own, black shadows of depression, inexplicable highs. I was private and protective and I didn’t want to see someone who would remind me of off the chain behavior, or at least someone who had formerly been close.

I heard him climbing the mountain before I saw him. I could hear him walking along the path below in this newly silent world. It was like when he appeared to me many years after his coma: I, newly divorced and diagnosed with cancer, dealing with an angry son had been open, curious about my friend. The silence surrounding me during chemo had become an intense fog, friends had drifted away, some out of fear and some having been the friends with whom I had merely partied. And there he was, on the phone, talking to me like I had never left and he had never become ill. Admittedly, the attention from a man was soothing as well, as the chemo had taken my looks. He remembered what I used to be.

“Hiya, hot pants,” he said, that last scramble involving a climb on all fours. I wanted merely to watch the darkness spreading over the valley. I wanted merely to listen to the cicadas – to screech or remain silent – the verdict was still out. How little could I say and still be here with him.

He twisted down to sit and gave me a quick side hug with his massive arm. He was warm but not dripping with sweat like I had been. I was glad I arrived soon enough to look cool.

“Whatcha been up to?” he said, gulping down a water bottle from his pack.

“Nothing, Darren. Just waiting.”

I was over the cancer, thank God. It had involved strange and convoluted experiences with treatment. My hair was back but my appearance had finally caught up to my actual age. I was all of forty nine, and feeling it too.

He said, “Did you know we’ll be able to see millions of little half eclipses in the shadows of the trees?”

“You don’t say.”

He took another deep swig of water. The wind mercifully caressed my skin.

When he first started talking to me again after a twenty five year sabbatical, he spent hours describing in minute detail the horrors of living with his ex wife Debbie and her child, a boy of about eight. They also eventually had a child together, a daughter.

“I plan on looking at the sun,” I say. A squirrel skitters up a pine just beyond the rock. I don’t want to indulge him. After this, I would drive down to Birmingham to meet my son and his father and stepmom to get him installed in his new dorm room. I wanted to keep this short.

“There are cultures that believe that the sun and the moon are fighting it out,” he said, shading his eyes. “Some even believe it’s actually a time of resolving old fights.”

That’s rich, I wanted to say. In the depths of my chemo treatments, our long distance conversations over the phone had wandered into territory I could never have guessed when we first took up, when first he had presented himself as the well rounded, traveled, accomplished man.

By the time the fissure in his self presentation occurred, I was having frequent experiences with mental confusion and the highs and lows of my moods had intensified. And I was lonely, so lonely. I remember where I was the first time I heard him paint a picture of himself that shocked me: I was in the kitchen of my parents’ home. They were letting me borrow the home for the summer as they were away and it was a shorter drive to my chemo treatments than from my townhome outside of town. “Debbie accused me of sexually molesting the kids” he said. “Can you fucking believe that?”

To whom was I speaking? I remember thinking. I had no idea. Though we were long distance and his job would keep him from making spontaneous trips down, I could feel my chemo imperiled heart beating hard when he described the number of times he was picked up by the police and his incarceration in the local jail before his hearing. He was manacled he said to a huge man, accused of rape. “That bitch Debbie,” he said. “At first it was supervised visits, and then: nothing. What a bitch.”

I managed to end the call and get out of the house in the sweltering heat to walk my dog around the retention pond across from my parents’ place. I was sick. By this time, he knew a great deal about my life. I had emotionally begun to lean on him. And I had confided in him regarding my problems with child rearing.

And yet over the months, he had managed to convince me, somehow, that the accusations had no foundation, and to remind me there had been no actual conviction. And against my better judgement,  I believed in him. Part of it, I think, was the effect of the chemo, my inability to hold onto facts and ideas for very long. And part of it, maybe, was that I felt I owed it to him to consider it, his innocence, maybe it was the old guilt working on me that I had left him when he was ill. And maybe he knew it. Another thing he knew was how much I needed a friend. I wanted to believe perhaps because at the time I felt I had to believe.

And so now, he we were. He checked his watch for the total eclipse countdown. An impulse arose in me at that moment to kind of shove him a little with my shoulder, as in a friendly gesture, and see what happened. The drop off to the trail below from the overhanging face was several hundred feet. I shrank back in horror from my own thoughts.

“You know there is no way he is innocent,” said a friend who ran a daycare. We went out to celebrate the end of treatments. I hadn’t confided in many people because I was afraid that once more I had been duped by the liar I had been friends with as a kid. “A guy doesn’t just lose all contact with his children.” My single friends always liked to tell me how sheltered I’ve been, having been married for twenty years.

We were having dirty martinis, a drink I yearned for during treatment. It reminded me of the ocean of my good Florida, of my life. My friend and I had been close since I graduated college, longer than I had been friends with just about anyone, except Darren. It took that moment with her and a moment on the phone with Darren to clear my mind. Darren said that the judge who had been so friendly to him at first, someone he had known around town, wouldn’t even speak to him after the trial. “And why is that?” I said. “Because when she heard all of the evidence, it sounded convincing, like I had done it,” he said. Something in his voice sounded confessional. An eighteen month confessional. That’s what my cancer had been. Someone else had wiped their dirt on me. And he had lied and the lie threatened my sense of safety and safety for my son. Maybe this was his revenge for what he said had been my abandonment.

How had I wound up on this rock with him, this rock that would witness the rapid cessation of heat and light? How had I let myself become guilted into contact once more?

“Maybe on this day,” I said, “Just about anything could happen.”

Numbskull’s Flower and the Well-Meaning Poets Society

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The Giant Flower of the King Protea by John Shortland, flickr

Once upon a time there lived in Numbskull Village an unusual little girl named Flower. Now this particular Flower was unlike all other girls in the village in that she was such a simple thing, she believed everything anyone ever told her. Even though this was Numbskull Village, almost everyone knew you could never trust anyone one hundred percent of the time. They knew this because one night when they were partying, some of them saw shadows on a cave wall and believed people who walked in front of the fire became bigger, ergo you could not trust people because you could not trust them to remain the same size.

But Flower was an anomaly and as she grew, she continued to say things like “a rose is a rose is a rose,” thereby demonstrating her belief in her teacher’s interpretation that “a thing is what it is.” Flower also said things like “Jesus loves me” without a hint of doubt and this is because other people she respected and admired told her this was true and besides, Jesus’ statue stayed the same size Sunday after Sunday and therefore Jesus could be trusted to be who he said he was.

One day, some boys got together and decided to have a little fun. They decided to stick it to this Flower babe and give her some love poems. Yeah! That’ll get her going! They said, slapping each others’ butts. Well, actually, they decided to have the girls write the poems. They requested that the girls phrase the lines in such a way as to evoke a mad passion. They said: Put just enough in there about Flower to make her believe she is the recipient, OK? So, you know, do girls smile? Put some stuff in there about smiles. Do they have hearts? Oh yeah, put that in there too. Also, bunnies. Girls love bunnies.

Then one of the smartest of the girls – which in Numbskull isn’t saying much – spoke up and said: So what happens when she believes these poems were meant just for her? What happens when she falls in love with you? What will you say then? The smartest of the boys said, Well let’s just say we give these poems to all the girls and even to some of us guys, that way it’ll look like we didn’t give them just to her, it’ll look like everyone got these poems, you know? Hence, The “Well-Meaning” Poets Society was born. (And they used air quotes too, in referring to themselves, and it made them feel funny and they bought beer and bashed their heads against boulders.)

So Flower took all of the poems the postman gave her and ate them all up, she gobbled them down whole. She really did. They were like sugar candy, like hot lava rocks that blew her socks off, that steamed her little hot tamales. Her parents didn’t need heat all winter and the snow melted from around the base of the house so that bulbs shot up early and the flowers bloomed. And when spring came, Flower couldn’t contain herself anymore. She had to go out and find her own true Love. She went searching, searching, everywhere, but she only saw mirrors on all the Numbskull faces. What had become of her Love? But she had not written the poems, had she? So why did she only see herself? That’s when one mirror told her she was mistaken to think she was special. When that mirror spoke, it sounded like it could have been the one who wrote the poems because he made reference to the unspecialness of a billion black bunnies.

And so, inevitably it seems, her heart broke. She ran through the village and up the hill to her tiny house. Her parents held her as she cried and cried. They had waited for this Moment. They knew it was coming and now they thought they could relax a little and help teach her by Hard Experience what all the other children seemed to know. She would likely become something less like a Hothouse Flower and more like a Dandelion or Weed.

But that which is called a Flower by any other name would still be as trusting and they were not to change her. In fact, she grew only more Hothouse-gorgeous as the bitterness poured down and off and around her and flooded the town, fertilizing crops, drowning fields, providing new homes for water birds and their babies, and bringing people from villages all around to swim in their beautiful blue lakes and marvel in the wonders of a village no longer called Numbskull but instead “Miroslava” which means “peace and glory.”

First published in State of Imagination

becoming a new creation in an age of turmoil

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woman by Zs, flickr

Using one of my pen names, Quenby Larsen, I created a memoir style blog “How to be Alone.” I created the site over a year ago and this most recent post this past spring. In this and other posts, I explore my struggle with illness, but especially, mental illness, a struggle which seems to inevitably inform my fiction. May God bless you in your fight, whatever fight it might be, for all of us are engaged in something. I hope you will visit “How to be Alone.” Maybe it could be a comfort to you or someone you know. Maybe it could serve to show that really, we are none of us alone. Sincerely, Margaret

I’ll have to admit that recently, I haven’t been as comfortable spending time alone being quiet. I believe this largely has to do with midlife circumstances that are not all that unusual though not necessarily a given for everyone at this stage – having a child preparing to leave home, adapting to life as a single person, grappling with health issues and family problems, facing regrets and limitations. Added to that has been the turmoil of a new government: The fear and anxiety it has created regarding the welfare of the earth, the sick and elderly and young, threats from menacing foreign powers to name a few. I feel attached to a roller coaster I cannot afford to be riding. I know many of us feel this way. What’s your stress level right about now?

Last summer, I titrated off of klonopin, a controlled substance used to treat anxiety as well as psychotic symptoms. My challenge is the former and I had managed to be drug free after much physical and emotional havoc. Then a new president was sworn in who would by his actions and words began to create cause for concern for many, and for me, triggered the depths of my anxiety. I had to finally admit this week: I needed a partial dose of klonopin again if I was going to sleep and get back to a regular routine.

It is hard for me to admit my limitations. As a girl growing up in a pastor’s home, a pastor who share what he believed and spoke for justice and peace, I was always told I was strong. After this past inauguration, when I heard my fellow concerned citizens say things like everyone must do their part every day all the time to deal with the upheaval and threat on every front, I agreed with them on the one hand. And yet, on the other hand, there have been times when I’ve had to say, wait a minute, I have to stop. And sometimes I have to stop to tend to my child. Yet more recently, honestly, I’ve had to stop, or at least walk away for a while, to tend to myself.

The thing I’ve noticed about anxiety is that it’s like the action of the waves coming up along a beach when there’s a storm approaching. The waves start to pile one on top of the other, crashing more chaotically on the sand, disrupting the relatively regular ebb and flow of the tide. It’s a collective effect of the force of building waters, the weight of building incoming waves that increase and punish the coast. I have to stand in the gap of what builds when the chaos overwhelms. For me this has become having to take a pill. Once the storm goes past a certain point, I am lost and doing well only to remember my life preserver – take my pill again, call my nurse psychiatrist.

This is a hard lesson to learn. I remember the words of my father: Meggo, you are strong. And yet, these are the times I haven’t felt this way at all.

Besides taking a pill, something else I’ve felt absolutely critical when I have felt overwhelmed are times of silence, silence from the news, silence from corresponding, silence even from music. And yet this has only been a recent development.  Recently I’ve escaped the anxiety that silence brings, the regrets and bad memories, the negative emotions about so-and-so,  the flotsam and jetsam of a brain littered with old unfinished business. When the pain from this is excrutiating?  Turn up the television, turn on the radio or youtube, listen to a book livestreaming, watch a movie on Netflix or Amazon Prime. Get busy.

For three years after my divorce, up until quite recently, I dated, met people online, kept myself insanely active socially. When my child was with his father, I couldn’t stand being in the house alone. And this is what that amounts to: I couldn’t stand being with myself. Talk about psychic noise. I had failed my parents getting a divorce, I had failed my son, I had failed me, I had failed extended family. And then, probably partly because of my lifestyle which started with marital difficulties, I got sick with two diseases, cancer and diabetes,  not to mention the ongoing challenges of bipolar, and so I failed myself in the most fundamental way imaginable. I was on a collision course with myself and though my life is calmer now I still feel the effects of that collision, that storm, the beach is still littered and road repair is needed.

I used to read quite a bit. I used to write a lot more. I had ambition not long ago I think. I used to rarely watch television. The world was a refreshing break from so much silence and contemplation rather than an escape from what has felt like forced silence and separation. And yet, I think we sometimes make the choices we know that we should make even if they cause us pain. A choice to remain on the outskirts of town has given me the chance to get used to being alone, has given me space to begin to heal and figure out how to conduct myself and structure my time, to make a plan. I am vaguely remembering who I used to be and what I used to dream about, and that I actually used to dream. Cancer treatment can rob you of memories, of dreams, of a sense of self. So can experiencing extreme psychic pain. So can mental illness.

I am sitting on my bed now that I decided to get to replace my old bed. The old bed reminded me of divorce, of cancer. The new bed doesn’t look anything like my old bed. I liked my old bed, but I like this one much better. It is my new cocoon containing my new dreams, my new self, the place I lay my body down in recognition of my weakness, in recognition of my pain, in sorrow for my sins, in hopes of returning dreams, in expectation of stories read and enjoyed and inspirations to come, new friends to be made, old friendships to re-establish, family among whom to re-fashion roots, a world to think about and engage, letting no detail slip by but rather holding each in my heart as an object of concern and prayer and re-imagining.

liquid asylum

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Woman by Roberto Ferrari, flickrui

We think you should know, but you do, don’t you, dear ones, ones who have passed on, ones who now live in the street, ones who have killed and molder in prison, ones who live in underground spaces forgotten under cities until money and children and food go missing, until abandoned houses are destroyed, until libraries parks and public places reek of unseemliness, we will never leave you, the representatives of who you were before you were placed on operating tables, drilled clean through your skull, hammered through your eye socket, shocked with insulin and electricity, precious memories flying, shrieking, from your skin, old personalities, pleasures, predilections lingering saddened, forlorn, in corners of the operating room. See? The doctors and nurses and orderlies said. We don’t have to put them in cages. Look! We don’t have to put them in straight jackets. No longer the padded cell! And yet we said to you, we pointed this out dear ones: Your tongues are now so jammed in your mouths you can barely speak.  They congratulate themselves, the nurses, the doctors, the orderlies while you convalesce in the infirmary. There are cigarettes outside behind the surgery, there is wine and beer on breaks, a cake to celebrate the next hundred batch, and sex in the janitor’s closet. And finally, families can bring their smiles to the common areas and feel relieved they are not pretending.

We the spirits of this place, the spirits that gathered when the town said – we will build buildings for a keeping of those not fit to live among us – we those spirits want you to know we have been watching you and know you, and not your spirit of violence and destruction, of hate, but the one you can’t remember now, the one born of God, but the one we believe must exist somewhere, the one you believe you will capture and get married again, the one you believe will help you regain the respect of your children and community, the one your mother and your father believe is wanting to break through the face you present, the blank mind, the addled tongue the hand that drifts up uncontrollably to pat the space on your head where a drill bored through, the drill taking you though it didn’t care, not really, leaving you sensitive to light and noise, any loud noise, any disruption to a mellow day which nowadays means just about any sound, sound now like a flow finding its lowest drain center in the top of your head. And for those of you who became like power plants with nothing but current running through, for those whose bodies veins were flooded through with insulin over and over, you were just as fucked. We have your memories up here on a shelf. You may never get them back but we keep them and send them back in little batches like molded leaves rotting on trees, memories of leaves, veiny outlines, lace.

When you come back in your mind to us no matter where you are, the flophouse, the prison cell, the cardboard box, the bungalow with a picket fence, we know you want the whole thing back, what you were, or, more accurately could have been. You are with us in spirit and we meet you in the air while you are adrift in your dreams, we meet you to try to help you find what you are looking for. In your mind you go back to the place where you lost yourself, you go back to your old bedlam, you come home to us, your home you never intended to feel as home and yet it was the site of this terrible new self you were born into, and there is no place like home my dear ones for here we keep who you were for you, you will find it here, we promise, if only you return, to make yourself whole among us again, to confront your executioners as they say. It is not as haunted as tourists say, you know that, those foolish people who want to give themselves a shiver spending a night in restraints. Idiots. We have half a mind to show them real fear, but it would be a waste, alas.

You were the real beauty and the romance, my how we miss you, our beautiful, broken ones. Bring your old and weary bones to lie here again and let us give you back your self. Your memories await. So too the tears you cannot cry being too feeble to feel. We will give  your self to you whole, along with your pleasures, as well as a deep and lasting sleep if you come to us and find your home once more in the bosom of health. It did not happen the first time, the wholeness, the health, but let us try again. Please.

a record of ineffectual Anna

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Empress Anna Ivanovna of Russia, the lost gallery, anonymous, flickr

Deep in winter during the Little Ice Age, a frosty, bitter Empress Anna Ivanovna of Russia whose cheeks were like hams, commissions a palace of ice, the blocks carved from the frozen river and sealed together with water. It was to stage the humiliations of her broken heart –  her uncle Czar Peter the Great having orchestrated a cruel imitation of her wedding purely in jest just two days after the ceremony and her husband dying two months after.  Anna begged for new prospects for marriage. Peter turned away all future suitors.

As she remembered the dwarf ceremony her uncle had arranged as a way of mocking her wedding ceremony, she ordered the servants and artists to construct a thirty three foot high, eighty foot long ice palace. She would humiliate a man who had loved and lost someone, a Catholic, an infidel. They had been so happy and he so devastated when she died. Love was not possible said the dictates of Anna’s frozen heart and certainly he deserved the grief he received from choosing a wife outside orthodoxy. He would be an example of ill-fated, misguided love.

Up went blocks of ice, a bridal suite of an ice mattress, pillows, a frozen clock, and outside, a frozen tree with frozen birds, a frozen elephant inside which a man sat blowing a trumpet. Anna had chosen a servant woman to marry the broken hearted nobleman. She was old and unattractive. They were to sleep naked in the ice palace on the ice mattress. Though the lovers survived the beastly treatment of the Empress, the servant woman died several days later of pneumonia.

It is said to this day, though I’ve never visited this particular part of the world, nothing grows on the site of the palace during the warmer season. No grass, nor weeds. Only a flowering bush of roses where the broken couple huddled together in the palace, having purchased a coat from a guard and survived the night out of mutual compassion and care.

Anna was the worst ruler in Russian history. She hated lovers, Catholics, the physically disabled, the ethnically “undesirable.” She meted out her misery on others. A biography of her life can be bought at $400 for reprints are not desired and so copies are rare. There is nothing more to say.

 

the Florida report

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House engulfed by flames near Tallahassee, FL, flickr

Back when the sky stayed the blood red all day, when the beasts in the undergrowth ate gardeners and sunbathers, when workers came to hotels rising up from the scrub from which they had always lain and slit the throats of sleeping tourists, when the rumbling of the hurricanes did not stop but shook the earth in constant tremors, when we held our infants tight for fear, when we cried in the dark and ran from falling trees, when live wires threatened our walk to stores bereft of goods, when our computers were good for nothing but as paperweights and a place to drape our soaked clothes, when rumor had it our president was in an underground facility at his vacation address, when gas generators poisoned families because people didn’t know how to use them and there was no one to take them to hospitals, when it hailed afternoons in summer, when our children went to bed crying and woke up in terror, when there were no more leaders, when there were skirmishes and death among us over food, candles, matches, the dead walked out of the sea and dwelt among us and made it their course to banish the divide.

Hellhound

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Henry Leivroll, Dog, flickr

 

I only ever knew by her dogs, frowzy, dowsy Ma, her curs spun out and frozen, plastered by the same hair freeze Grammie used, Aqua Net. I could never catch the rare whiff of that 1950s hair product or see the representative of one of the breeds Ma had owned without thinking of the things that went along with my Ma – fried bologna sandwiches  with a square of melted processed cheese, the smell of Pall Palls drifting inside from the porch, The Price is Right blaring on the TV. She had her slightly more refined moments too like when she watched TCM and made us beef stroganoff with fancy cooking sherry and sour cream, the times she got dressed to go out to her book club, her bridge club, church, which was now Episcopalian though her roots were most firmly Southern Baptist, the times she served us wine out of grandmama’s decanter using the heavy crystal she received at her wedding years prior but now had little use for. But this was the every day Ma – the Pall Malls, the bologna, The Price is Right – the one buried in her past of poor whites, all of them related or at some point been a friend to a man wearing a sheet burning crosses at night singing praises to Jesus on Sundays. That past goes way back as do Ma’s dogs and her mother’s dogs and her grandmother’s dogs before her. It was deep and dark and impenenetrable it seemed, this past, these dogs and the women who owned them.

I had escaped all this, or so I thought. I had moved to New York City to take an internship, then a job. It would be cliché for me to extoll the city’s cultural merits and so I’ll just say, I never thought I would be living there, or maybe dared not dream it, but when I landed finally in my own apartment with my own life, it felt like I had arrived.  Still, I was poor. I’d like to think I was a better poor than Ma’s poor, but this was New York. On my better days, I acknowledged the difference between Ma and me were negligible, except I had a cat, one of several very superficial differences.  I do sometimes think of all the things Ma didn’t expose me to, like a string of boyfriends or a new dad. Who knows but maybe the constant string of dogs addressed her need for companionship at just the right level. There was also the likely fact of her sacrifice: She had given her prime years to me and me alone.

By way of contrast to Ma’s life when I lived with her, mine has consisted of men who overstayed their welcome after sleeping over, men who expected me to cook for them, men who assumed I was into them just because they have paid attention to me. I had dated cruel men and abusive men too. I hadn’t known my father well, he divorced my mother when I turned seven, left and didn’t look back, but I assumed he probably was not a generous man being that he was out of my life for good. He may have even been abusive to Ma and maybe me, but I could never recall anything specific and Ma didn’t want to have a heart to heart about this kind of a thing. Maybe she was trying to spare me. But there were some mornings a man would stay over and I had the urge to tell my cat Mo to go scratch his face while he was asleep, while his body oils soaked into my sheets. It was cruel, vicious of me, those thoughts I knew as a woman I was not supposed to have. When they occurred to me I rationalized by telling myself they may have some origin in unremembered violence.

It was with great surprise, however, that I met my mom’s most recent dog, “Lucy.” This past Fourth of July we pooled our resources as we did every year to rent a house at Flagler Beach. I flew down and Ma got into her station wagon, packed the dog, Pall Malls, extra beer and flip flops and drove over from Jacksonville. She drove up while I was in the kitchen unpacking the groceries. I heard her pull into the gravel drive though there was little else I could hear over the sound of crashing waves and crying seagulls. Low bursts of thunder had begun punctuating the monotonous roll of the waves. Through the windows along the beachside of the house, I could see a steel gray shelf of sky sitting low over the water.

I descended the worn wooden stairs of the stilt house to greet Ma in the drive. She had driven over in her pea green panel sided vehicle, a throwback from my past if ever there was one. Through the windshield I caught a glimpse of the silhouette of her teased out hair and the new dog on the seat beside, riding shotgun. I want to qualify, however, I saw the eyes of the dog, its body presumable black in accord with Ma’s description of the Rottweiler pitbull mix.  But why would I be able to see a dog’s eyes from that distance in the bright light of day? It wasn’t as if it were night and a light illuminated them. There seemed to be some inner glow though there wasn’t time to puzzle it through. Ma’s veiny slippered foot emerged and she plunked it down on the gravel.

“Ma, I told you not to wear your slippers while you drive!”

“When you wear heels all day all bets are off at down times.”

“Sneakers would stay on your foot better. Remember that time on the bridge.”

“Lucy!” she said, ignoring me and my recall of a near slipper related accident when she was at the wheel. She pulled a treat from the lipstick pocket of her high waist full moon pants.

“How can you be so chic,” I said, noting the pants and mock turtleneck combo, probably handed down from rich as Croesus grandmamma, “And wear those beat up boudoir shoes. I guess I’ll let it go though.”

“Got no choice, ‘parently.”

“Let’s get your stuff in.”

Lucy raced out of the passenger seat, all bluster and saliva and a fiery silken blackness, and slammed into my right thigh. I fell, crunching into the gravel.

“Lucy!” Ma said. “Well, you devil!” and slipped a choke collar over her neck. Lucy sat and Ma gave her the treat.

“What’s rewarding the thing with homicide, Ma?” As Lucy chomped down on the tiny knot of rawhide.

“Why Su Su,” she said, calling me by the name I knew all of my growing up years, “I think you’re overstating your case.”

After scrambling to stand, I observed my closely the animal’s eyes. The irises were red. I had never seen anything like it in a dog.

“I’m Sue now, Ma, just Sue,” I said not sure of what to make of what had just gone down.

“Where did you get this one?” I said.

“From hell.”

Typical, I thought. The most essential of my questions relegated to the dust bin.

“Keep it away from me.”

“You’ll grow used to her. Won’t we make friends, Lucy?” She spoke to the beast in a way I’m sure would be translated as praise in the dog’s brain. Ma’s other animals had been incorrigible, shitting on the rug, steeling meals from tabletops and countertops, running away for days, but this was something different.

“Nice violent mixed breed there.”

“Bridge club loves her.”

I didn’t press it further. I was frightened for Ma’s friends at that instant but I had learned to compartmentalize my fears. I had enough going on at the present moment.

That night I made Ma a crusted salmon dish and we lit candles and had wine while the storm set in. Lucy was resting in “her bed,” thank God, with the door closed. I had put them in the front room, facing the ocean. My stuff was in the back room behind the kitchen, a quiet space where I could work.

The sound of the beach always reminded me of those long summers with Ma, the summer storms in the afternoon, playing board games and working on jigsaw puzzles. Ma smoked less when she was here, didn’t watch as much TV. She loved soaking in the shoreline as did I. During the day we took our golden “Lucky” down to the beach to collect shells and pieces of driftwood and at night we took flashlights down at low tide and watched the sandcrabs scitter. Those summers at the beach there was always a dog. Lucky was the golden who had stayed with us longest. She died before I went away to college and mom spent time fostering various breeds for the animal shelter. Lucky was hard to replace, she had said.

“Thank you for my dinner,” she said, leaning back in the bamboo seat and setting her unslippered feet on the chair beside. She was enjoying the Pinot Noir I always bought her at the Publix. “Doesn’t that storm sound delicious,” she said, sipping meditatively.

I stacked the dishes and pots and pans in the dishwasher. No handwashing ever, if I could help it though my tiny New York apartment boasted only a drain board.

“Glad I got Lucy out when I did,” she said referring to their jaunt down the sidewalk by A1A while I unloaded her car.

I didn’t want to talk about Lucy at the moment. Maybe if we crept around and didn’t say her name out loud she would continue to sleep as she guarded the depths of hell.

I had some laundry to do. I hadn’t exactly come on my vacation prepared, work being what it was of late, that and the fact that I didn’t have the luxury of a washer dryer. I loaded the basket provided and stepped out into the rain to make my way down to the ground level floor beneath the house. In the basement, I flipped on the light, a single bare bulb in the middle of the unfinished cinder block room. It smelled dank, a familiar smell from years previous, but it was swept bare and clean and was generally empty except for a wooden boat, overturned, it’s body a carved wood. It looked heavy, almost unusable.

I turned to make my way to the stairs when I saw it in the frame of the door Ma’s new creature, its black body glistening from the rain, its glowing red eyes, its lip upturned in a snarl, and this time, it growled in a low rumbling way, refreshing its displeasure with each breath. Ma appeared shortly thereafter as she was attached to the other end of the leash. She sported a slicker borrowed from the coat closet and rubber flip flops.

“Get on with it now, Lucy girl!” She said nudging the animal from behind with her knee. “I’m sorry Su Su, just our late night thing, us girls. I’ll be back.”

“Be careful.”

Dogs weren’t technically allowed on the beach and I wasn’t about to break the doggie beach laws in these parts for Lucy. It would be the sidewalk for her. As the leasee it would be my hide if something happened. Still, I didn’t like the idea of my Mom walking Cujo along A1A on a rainy night.

“Should I come with?”

“No.”

I sat by the window waiting for them doing my breathing exercises, eyes open. The rain had slowed and the moonlight fell soft and yellow over the undulating water.

One summer, the last summer I lived with Ma, I came home from being out at night. I had found some friends my age in town and we didn’t do much but it was a narrow escape from that growing sense of boredom and suffocation I was beginning to feel when it was just me and Ma. I couldn’t find her. The house was pitch black. And then I saw it, out on the beach, her little fire and Ma, dancing slow, rhythmically. She hadn’t known that I could see her, that I would be watching, or that anyone would be watching. At that time ours was the only house within a quarter of a mile on either side. What was she doing? I asked her later. She said nothing.

I hadn’t brought my pills for my anxiety. They were developed to treat psychosis my former doctor had said but that’s not what I’m prescribing them for. I wish I had brought them now but I was determined to separate myself from them. My current doctor wanted me off of them. They were dangerous to use long term he said and were highly addictive. But they tamped down so much. Nothing else seemed to do what they did. I retreated to the back of the house to my dark, soundless room. For a moment I wished Ma was the kind of mother to come home and bustle in the kitchen and make me a cup of cocoa and fuss. If she was this when I was younger, that was not who she was anymore.

Since I saw Ma dancing under the moon, by herself, silently, I had noticed a change. She seemed more independent, powerful, even brooding at times though when she was with me she could still pull up some of her gentle, playful Ma talk from my younger years. Still, it took being with her again for me to remember that in many ways Ma had changed. I had since learned from a Google search that the triple moon necklace she had taken to wearing was Wiccan. She had raised me to believe in a Christian god. I wasn’t sure how this happened but at some point she had lost the faith. Maybe no god brought back the man she had loved. Or maybe the god she had worshipped left her lonely. Yet in this new faith she didn’t seem unhappy or lonely. I was gong to talk to her about it this trip. I did have some of my concerns but  it was not easy to talk to her. Though we did things easily together, engaged in our little diversions, she was not into talking, especially regarding things she considered her business and her business alone. I understood but I wanted to be close. I didn’t know how I could get her to trust me more.

I could hear her and Lucy coming back inside, the animal’s nails clicking on the tile, its flanks plopping down as it playfully rolled around. “Asshole,” I said quietly to myself. I heard Ma’s sing songy voice as she poured a bowl of food for her and set it down on the kitchen. I drifted off.

I woke to utter darkness and the sound of a low growl in front of my face. I sat bolt upright.

I wasn’t sure how the red eyes were now so close, in my room even though I had locked the door.

In one quick leap I threw my comforter over its body and ran. I closed the door behind me. “Yes, animal control,” I told directory assistance when I saw Ma had gone to bed. I stood in the kitchen twisting the antiquated phone cord around my finger. It was me or that demon.

They came out and I instructed them to be quiet about it. They lassoed her, muzzled her, and took her away in their white van under a full white moon, the stones of the drive bleached, the low underbrush and trees shielding the house from the highway a glistening silver mass.

I would tell Ma when she woke it appeared Lucy had gotten out somehow. This had happened with other dogs of Ma’s. Sometimes one of them wouldn’t pull the door all the way to or the strong winds from the shoreline would blow a door open and a determined creature would get out and wander around.

I went back to bed, fell asleep hard, returning to the kind of sleep I remembered from the time before my pills and the time before Ma danced by herself on the beach, back to the time when Ma and I played board games and chased sandcrabs and fell asleep at night with the smell of the sea air in our hair.

“Su Su,” said Ma, shaking me from my sleep. “Su Su.” The early morning light shown through the tiny window of my room. “Guess what? Lucy was outside, just waiting for us on the front step. Isn’t that weird?” And there, beside Ma, was Lucy chained and by her side, the black creature staring at me with that crimson gaze.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “But I’m so glad she’s here!”

I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing.

“We’re going outside.”

I arose stiffly. What the hell. I threw on a sweater and slippers and enlisted Mr. Coffee to help with a much less powerful chemical fix than the Klonopin. I had ringing in my ears that had gotten slightly worse since leaving off the drug night before my trip down. I wondered if the local pharmacist could hook me. Doubted it. Law kept controlled substances flowing as freely as other scripts.

Still, things were a bit better for a time that morning. The day wore on. Ma and Lucy were staying away for a while so I had the house to myself. Given the new circumstance of an aggressive animal I was relieved. The sun set high, warming and drying the porch. Ribbons of grey green waves furled and unfurled along the sand, snapping out like a long whip. I put on a suit and hat and grabbed a chair and water. The sand was warm and giving. Familiar. Reassuring.

When the sky faded I grew concerned. It would not be unlike Ma to wander around on her own. I texted her. An hour later, nothing. Normally, I would have started dinner. Steaks were resting on the counter.

I put on a coverup and headed into town. At the second bar I checked, there was Ma talking to a group at an outside bar overlooking the water. Lucy sat at her feet. The group, men and women, about ten or so, were dressed for riding motorcycles. They were heavily tatted. Lucy growled when she spotted me.

“Come now,” said one of the men, placing a gigantic hand on the beasts head. The dog relaxed.

“Your mom is amazing,” he said, as I approached. “So many great stories.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. He was about Ma’s age, I guessed, maybe a bit younger. They were all tucked into their beers.

“Thank you,” I said weakly, unconvinced. What had she done that was so amazing. I honestly didn’t know. I would have liked one of them to tell me. But I also didn’t want to be there either.

“Have a drink with us,” said the man.

“Yeah, honey, have a drink,” said Ma, indicating an open chair.

“Thanks. But I’ve got work,” I said, grateful for the excuse.

“Don’t wait up for me,” said Ma. “We’re going to hang out a while. Love you. Kisses,” she said, playfully and bless me a few.

The nights when I was in my last years in high school my mom sat home with casseroles waiting to emerge, how many times had it been this way. I was a little hurt but glad too in a way for more peace, more time to get some work done. After some blundering this year in the wake of drug withdrawal, I had something to prove and had brought some proofs to mark up. I hadn’t told Ma about the drug and the withdrawal, hadn’t wanted her to worry.

“Have a good time,” I said, and I meant it. It made me happy to see her being social, especially with a nice guy who was interested.

Later that night, a couple of proofs worked through, I stood outside under the moonlight to stretch and breath in deep the ocean air. For the second night in a row a yellow moon painted the rippling waves gold. As I stood and watched there seemed to appear from the luminous sea a circle of people swirling and twirling, holding hands like a ring of dark figures on a merry go round. Was it the group that had gathered at the bar? Was this a late night swim in the ocean with her mother as ring leader? Off to the left, closer to the dunes there was a low fire. I stood and tried to understand what I was seeing but every time the group formed it seemed to dissolve again. And if this were actual figures, why were they silent?

There was a low growling from the stairs leading up from the dune. I plunged into the house, slammed the door just in time to escape the black dog that, eyes aflame, thudded against the glass.

 

 

*This story for my own flash throwdown for flash fiction month this July breaks my own rules and is not considered flash. The idea also did not come from the prompts list on the proceeding post. However, I just wanted to write about a woman and her dogs, that first line occurring to me and not letting go. I am about to pop over to FB and form a group for those interested in writing for flash month. I am hoping to be able to direct you there shortly. I hope you are having a good Fourth weekend and thank you for reading. Let’s see what we come up with. It’ll be fun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dark Flash Month

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Missouri state archives, flickr

July is flash fiction month. In commemoration of this very short form, I’ve decided to use a prompt each day for thirty days to generate short works of fiction. I will post the results, as many stories as possible, here, on my blog. In other words, I’m going to share the prompts with you, prompts generated by someone else, and I’m going to let you see what I’m doing in real time.

However, I may not write something each day. I’m not going to dig myself in that deep! No way! If I do that, my inner narrator, a little girl dressed in black, cobwebs in her hair, hiding in the closet, will never come out. This is an experiment to see how much I can encourage her, coax her, help her be free, remember what it was like to be a girl, to make huge blotchy creations as well as fine line scribbles. To help her along, she’s getting her favorite of encouragement: dark prompts.

Also, if my inner narrator is feeling especially loquacious, scattered throughout may be discussions regarding flash fiction, dark fiction, and storytelling in general.

If you are receiving blogposts in your mailbox, know you will see an uptick in email from the site. It is impossible for me to say at this point what this will look like but just know this will be the case.

Also if you wish to join me using your own fiction based on the prompts I will be using you may wish to join my Facebook group. Posted stories will be kept to around 500 words maximum. If your work is longer, you may post a link to the story on the group page. If your group leader decides a piece is not suitable for whatever reason, you can expect to be given the opportunity to post something else.

Remember, flash fiction can be as few as 55 words and can be as long as 1,000 so there is a great deal of flexibility and opportunity to participate a few times during the course of the month.

I hope you will join me.

Whatever you choose, I will begin posting here before the official start of flash fiction month.

I wish you the very best. Thanks for reading.

Darkly,

Margaret

Prompts

Sunshine State

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A Study in Contrasts by Nic McPhee, flickr

He jumped off the train and went into the station, the conductor in the gray cap. He was shriveled and hunched, like a shrimp. It didn’t seem to Julie he’d be capable of doing much more than riding up and down the rails, taking tickets, but he always had a coin for Buddy, a penny the train had squashed between Mt. Dora and Winter Park. Buddy fingered the oblong copper and put it to his lips as if it were a thick shaving of chocolate. Julie slapped his hand. The heat rising up from the pavement made her short.

On Wednesdays, she and Buddy came down to the station. They stood on the tracks and waited for the rails to vibrate with the motion of the oncoming train. It made Buddy coo to feel the shimmying metal tickle the soles of his feet and he put his face next to the track, his baby flesh on the forged steel. Julie tested herself to see how long she could wait before she pulled him off, how long she could stand it. She knew it was wrong to tempt fate this way but it felt as if the palm trees and the bushes and the sun itself held her. And then one time she saw the light of the train and she quickly, with a pounding chest, snatched him by the waist.

After the train stopped, the shrimp man came to where they were standing. He had eyes with uneven patches and he seemed to be watching her through a pool of opaque pebbles. She thought he was going to say something, but then he gave Buddy a coin and brushed his cheek with a curved finger.

Julie liked wearing clothes from the thirties and forties. She shopped online and found dresses with flouncy sleeves and slingback shoes with open toes and platforms. She liked vintage hats and wore them to the station when she brought Buddy. It was not a place she was likely to see anyone from the Country Club or anyone her husband Frank knew. Frank asked her why she didn’t go to Neiman Marcus or Bloomingdale’s. She liked looking like ladies from old movies, she told him. Her mother died when she was thirteen. Though sometimes her husband Frank wished she were like other women, he liked the way she wore things only dead people had worn. People didn’t invite them to many parties and if they did, they kept their distance and talked about them behind their highball glasses. Her mother died in a boating accident. Her father had been driving the boat. This was what happened and this was what people knew. That and the fact that her mother was from money and had lots of it. Now her father drove all over town in a restored Model T.

Julie took Buddy to the roses when the train wasn’t due. He pricked his baby fingers on the thorns. She read the signs which told them their names: Louis Philippe, Belinda’s Dream, Old Blush, China Doll, Clotilde. Sometimes he grabbed a fistful of petals and she slapped his knuckles. An old man usually watched her from the bench. He watched the seam on the back of her hose and he smiled when she bent to slap the baby and her rear jiggled. He wanted to reach out and grab her but he knew she was too fine for him, too fine, that much he knew, though he wore his Agua Brava and a linen suit, crumpled as a napkin. She knew he watched her. She didn’t care. It was better than the college boys who whistled at her under their breath and told her what they’d like to do with her right there in front of Buddy, his pie face intent on the pink petals in his sweaty palm. She watched the boys, her eyes following them while her body stayed still. She stood in the rose garden until they were well past.

Last Wednesday Julie wore her hat that was open at the top. It showed the hair she had dyed a bright auburn. Buddy wore the coveralls with the choo choo. The suitcase was hidden in the bushes. It was vintage with straps like belt buckles. After the train pulled up, Julie scooped something into the suitcase. At that time of day, Julie had the privacy to do whatever she wanted. There was no one at the station. The train ran by the provision of the federal government. When the pebble-eyed man died, someone else would replace him, someone equally infirm. It didn’t matter who took the tickets. No one was there to buy them. There were no bags to lift or arrange in the rack over the seat, no ladies to hoist up the stairs.

Julie expected to ride that day. She had come from a different time, before Buddy, before Frank even, before modern clothes made women look like men, like whores. She wanted to take the train to Hollywood. She wanted to be in the movies. She wanted to be a star.

The shrimp man tore her ticket. “Where’s the boy?”

“Resting,” she said, as she lifted her bag into the overhead rack.

He gave her the pressed coin. She put it to her lips, blotting her lipstick. “You keep it,” she said. He turned. The back of his neck was a hollowed out place.

She closed her eyes and felt an ache in her belly. She drifted between the pain and her dreams. She was walking in a warm rain on a California beach. She stood in the shower. She would not think of the boy. She would not think of Frank.

They got her in Mt. Dora. The shrimp man had seen the first red drop fall from her bag onto her hat brim and blossom into a dark peony. He stood in the back and watched the incessant dripping of blood, like rain falling from trees. They would have to replace the seats. He called ahead to the next station to alert them as he slumped on his bench in the caboose. He felt for the paperwork for his retirement in his jacket. It was in there somewhere.

First published in Colored Chalk

Hidden Strengths | by GJ Hart

FAIR FOLK

     Like the sarsen stones and sequoias that lined the frozen rails from City Junction to the rumbling oak mines, Philip emanated heft. To strangers, he appeared to possess a petrifying and feral strength. However, once acquainted, they saw he directed his brawn with dignity and was no more threatening than the quaking dogs the president, it was rumoured, used to warm his bed.

     Forsaken at the station gates and pressed into service still barely able to say his name, Philip had grown – composted in coal dust and fertilised with cruelty – into an impeccable employee of the North-Eastern Train Company. As such, he favoured new overalls over boiled, cultivated no beard or sidebrooms and since keeping secrets was discouraged, kept only one: when doubt and unease called, he would touch the tattoo of Mellusa, eternal pacifist and gentle dissident, that tumbled in pale inks down…

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