Robyn Hugo McIntyre's Blog, page 6

Smoke on the Water

The song, or rather just the first line of the chorus, had been going through his head all day. Repeating and repeating. He wondered if this was some new torture the liver cancer had dreamed up for him or if it was just his own brain tiredly trying to tell him something.

He settled himself on the toilet, using the newly installed grab bars for support. Changing his adult diaper while sitting down was easier than trying to do it while standing up and he had already been caught twice by another flow while in the middle of a change. Sitting on the toilet was safer.

This part of the end game was humiliating. But at least he was no longer pissing his pants. Or worse.

Smoke on the water…

He had never given much thought to the way he would leave this life, but if he had, he would not have guessed this. He had survived a lot of crazy, dangerous shit, but here he was. Finished changing himself, he  tossed the used diaper into the lined pail now kept in the bathroom and steadied himself to get to the sink and wash his hands.

He took his time getting out of the narrow bathroom and used the walls, counters, and furniture to get into the kitchen and poured himself a beer. His wife hated that he still drank, but an occasional beer at this stage couldn’t make that much of a difference. Okay, if he was honest, it was more like three or four a day, but he had no intention of giving it up. Everybody was entitled to go to Hell in their own way. Or if they weren’t, they ought to be.

Smoke on the water…

The dog was at the screen door with a tennis ball in his mouth, so he went outside to sit on the porch steps and throw it a few times until the dog stopped bringing it back. Beautiful fall day. The breeze smelled of sycamore trees and the nearby creek. There was a buzzing sound in the background and he looked up to see the wasps had started a new nest. Damn them. He’d have to get the wasp spray. But not now.

Crazy thing that you’re on your way out and still you have to deal with crap like dogs who want to play catch and wasps building nests in your porch. Shouldn’t everything just go on hold until you were gone?

Smoke on the water…

Sometimes he wondered if his wife would be able to manage this too-big property by herself. He just hoped she wouldn’t leave him before he died. He’d sure as hell given her plenty of reason in the last few years. She would be better off without him, and he had told her so, but he was too selfish to let her go.

He listened to the birds a bit and looked at the pear tree, which was swollen with fruit that needed picking before the squirrels got them.

He didn’t want to die now. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to live, either. Mostly, he kind of wanted things to go on pretty much as they were, though he would be glad not to have to wear diapers.

He grabbed the porch railings and levered himself up from the steps to go inside. Little House on the Prairie reruns were on soon and he didn’t like to miss them.

Smoke on the water…

Tagged: dying, growing older, relationships, self-awareness

From a Work-In-Process

They were gone. That much was obvious. Most of their clothes, all of what little jewelry they had. Two of her grandmother’s best tablecloths, no doubt to hold the other things. A third tablecloth lay abandoned on an unmade bed, spread out, discarded probably because of the large mend near the center.

Aleta stood in the stillness. The sun came in through the windows and made motes of dust seem to sparkle as they floated aimlessly through the air in front of her face. This whole part of the house felt abandoned, as though it had been empty for a long time. But just this morning it had seemed too small to contain her girls and their laughter.

She might have guessed. Lately, the girls had giggled more and talked more often in whispers. But they had done this often enough, so why should Aleta have thought this was anything out of the ordinary? They were silly girls. They had been born silly. Their father had been silly. Handsome and smart and silly. And one day, he had taken it into his silly head to leave them. The girls were like him. But Aleta had chosen him, so maybe some of their silliness was hers.

Tagged: fiction

From a Work-in-Progress

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Los Angeles, 1943

He had not slept in years, yet this waking vision seemed like a dream. A dream so real he could smell the white and purple alyssum  that grew in the cracks between the sidewalk slabs  that made up the entrance to the cathedral of  St. Vibiana’s.

Mass would begin soon. The families waited patiently for the others in front of them to find their way into the church. As always, forward movement slowed as people dipped fingers into basins of holy water and crossed themselves before walking down the aisles to find a seat.

Men on the doorstep were removing their hats, women adjusting their scarves or mantillas. A little apart from the others, his mother reached up to the black lace covering her head and pulled it back a little.

If he had been other than he was, his heart would have felt joy at the sight of her. She was so small and yet he knew her to be strong. Her suit was slightly out of style, but well-made and cared for. She held her bag and her rosary in one hand as she pulled off the glove on the other, using a thumb and forefinger. She smiled a little, nodding at the other worshippers, and folded herself in with the crowd to enter. Just at the doorway, she paused as though she had heard something.

He wanted her to turn her head so he could see her dark eyes and perhaps feel something. Perhaps she was thinking of him. Perhaps she was looking for him. And if she was, what would he feel?

But she did not turn her head. She walked into the cathedral without further hesitation and he was left with less than a wish that he might have remembered how he loved her.

Tagged: Los Angeles, mother, St. Vibiana

What a Day!

“Oh, what a day!” the old lady said with a frown, and clutched her Christmas parcels closer to her wide and generous bosom. She eyed the line stretching from inside the Post Office out through the door and into the lobby of the building and halfway down the aisle of post office boxes.

She edged carefully to the end of the line, avoiding the piles of packages on the tiled floor. “I wonder what everyone is here for?”

“Maybe we all have these,” another woman said to her, waving a long yellow piece of paper. “Maybe we’re all picking up packages.” Several others in the line waved their yellow papers, too.

“I don’t,” the old lady said. “I’m mailing packages.”

“It’s always busy this time of year,” said someone else.

“They only have one clerk at the counter,” said yet another.

“Oh dear,” the old lady said. “What were they thinking?”

“Probably not their fault,” a younger woman, her face nearly obscured by the tower of brown packages she held, said. “I hear they’re cutting funds to the post offices so they don’t run as well, then they can make a case for privatizing them.”

No one replied to that.

“I remember,” said one old man with a Veteran’s cap “when we used to have two postal deliveries a day.”

“Yeah,” another older man said. “Wasn’t Calvin Coolidge president then?”

Everyone laughed.

Someone came in through the door; a middle-aged woman in a Christmas sweater. She looked stunned.

“C’mon in,” another lady with short curly grey hair said. “We’re having a party.”

The woman beside her laughed. “She’s serving refreshments later.”

“Oh no,” the curly-haired woman snorted. “The refreshments will be down the street. Unfortunately, I won’t be there. I have to stay in line.”

There was more laughter.

The newcomer smiled shyly and took her place at the end of the line while a dark-haired man, his arms full of packages, squeezed through the line to walk into the post office and leave his boxes on the counter.

Some of the people looked puzzled.

“He’s already put postage on those,” the man in the Veteran’s cap said. “You can do that from home, now.”

“Really?” asked the old lady.

“Oh sure,” he replied. “Just get yourself a postal scale and print out the postage on your home printer.”

A younger woman near the front of the line was nodding. “That’s right. You can even buy a scale that connects directly to your computer so you only have to type in the address.” She pointed at a display on the wall where a box labeled ‘postage scale with USB plug’ hung.

“I almost bought one,” a slender woman in bib overalls and a flannel shirt said. “But I only do this once a year and I don’t mind waiting in line.”

Several others nodded. No sense in wasting money.

A young professional woman smiled brightly. “I work from home. This is a good opportunity for me to talk with other people.” Many smiled back at her.

“Hey,” a young man with long-hair was reading the local paper and scooting a box ahead of him with the toe of his hiking boots as the line moved. “The newspapers say there’s a big storm coming in late tomorrow night.”

“How big?” someone at the back the line called.

“As much as four to six inches of rain,” the young man replied.

Everyone thought about this.

“Guess we’d all better get our windows closed and keep our batteries handy and make sure our generators work,” the man in the Veteran’s cap said.

Everyone nodded. “Probably be a power outage here in the mountains,” someone said. Everyone nodded again.

The old lady was putting her packages on the counter and answering the postmaster’s questions. “Nice of you to help out,” she told him. Every bit of counter space and nearly every bit of floor space behind the counter was covered in layers of boxes. “You must have a lot of paper work to do.”

The postmaster smiled wryly and admitted that he did.

“Is this kind of a break for you from that?”

The postmaster laughed. “No, just a different kind of paperwork.” He finished processing her packages, handed her two sheets of Christmas stamps and a receipt.

She turned to the others still in line. “Merry Christmas,” she said. “Happy Hanukkah.”

“Merry Christmas!” “Happy Holidays!”

The old lady put the receipt in her bag and walked through the post office door, smiling. “What a day!” she said.

Tagged: Christmas, holidays, lines, post office, waiting

Conversation in F Sharp

She queried him silently

Hoping he would have her answers

As he seemed to hold all of the questions;

That she would find them all composed

In black and white

Sharp

F Sharp

They would be black notes across the manuscript of her.

 

They would point the direction

Whatever it was

Forward

Backward

Upside down

They would lead inexorably

By mathematical degrees

To the coda, bypassing

The colon crouched before the bar, always to

Repeat

Repeat

 

She queried him silently

Hoping that tattoo of her fingers

On the tablecloth would cue him

To give her the answers – pianissimo

Even as he sang his questions FORTE

 

Duet for two solos.

Tagged: conversation, duet, music

Wondering

 

 

The horse is surprised to see you

here on the moon.

His lip is curled.

His eye rolls at you

and away.

You

have discovered his Secret.

 

If you promise not to tell, perhaps

he will not chase you and bite

your moon suit

and make you breathe space.

You can go home again and

walk in the air.

 

Walk past the fields and stroll

past the barns.

You will see the horses

and wonder

Have any of these been to the moon?

 

Have any of these been to the moon?

 

And then you might begin to look

at the cows

and the sheep and

all the rest.

 

It’s good to wonder, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

Tagged: fantasy, horse, moon, poetry, wondering

Piquant

Piquant was not the right word. There probably was no word to adequately encompass what she was feeling.  If someone slowly pushed a needle, the diameter of a single, fallen hair, into her chest and gently set a vibration moving along it so that the pain was overlaid with a strange pleasure, like grasping for a happy memory on the edges of one’s ability to remember, it might come close to a description.

It was not the chest-crushing weight that hearing her sister say “Our daddy is dead” had set to swinging into her.

It was not the confused mingle of restrained emotion – like dancers all hearing different music – that had joined together at the back of her mind when her mother had finally let go of her vegetative body in the nursing home.

It might be something uniquely mated to the understanding that she had misunderstood her position in the world yet again, that what she had construed as belonging of a sort was really nothing of the kind.

It held familiarity, the realization that she had been here before and recognized herself in this place and contained threads of rue and guilt that she would find herself here again.

It held relief, as well. For once again she felt surety. In recognizing and accepting herself in this place – yet again – she felt tension leave her, anxiety sent to bed without its supper. While the world might continue to misunderstand her and she, in her desire to belong to it, might often misunderstand herself, this piquant pain would always be there; a vibration set along a hair-thin needle in her heart to remind her of her true self.

 

Tagged: memory, pain, self-discovery

Look It Up

Hey kid.

It may seem quaint and exotic to you now, but it was just my life to me. And what goes around, comes around, you know. If you don’t know what that means, ask some historian of slang.

We didn’t stop in the middle of a birthday celebration and think about why it might look like to posterity. We bought our groceries, complained about our jobs and our mates and our kids and the government. You probably complain about other stuff, but trust me, underneath the words, it’s all the same thing.

Still, I’d give you all of what’s left if I could sit again in a traffic jam and play air guitar to the radio while I waited. Look it up. Traffic. Air guitar. Radio.

It was in 2262 that things went to Hell. Most people these days say ‘literally’ when they just mean to emphasize something. Crap, it’s all hyperbole now. And who cares? The truth became a commodity like everything else and was bought and sold and arbitraged. After a while, only the rich could afford it, if they even wanted it. The rest of us, if we wanted to live, had to feed ourselves and our families lies and more lies. They weren’t nourishing, but they could make you feel full for a while. If you were real lucky, you could lose your mind and then the truth could be whatever you wanted it to be. You might live on a street corner under a piece of plastic, or in an asylum, but being insane was still a step up.

I would be depressed, but medication is the one thing that’s free. Use it to calm yourself or kill yourself. Your choice.

I heard the Minute ManEaters were getting it over on the Tea Party Hearties. No doubt that will switch around next week. In the meantime, juice is cheap, so all of us are stocking up. When things go vice-versa again, we’ll all be so loose we won’t care and we’ll easily coast until the next faction takes over. They say there will be elections, but who would go to them? The districts are so ragged now, there isn’t anybody who knows if they can vote or where. If there are elections, it would be good, though. Then the cops would be so busy rocking the ballots that they won’t have time to come down and beat up the surface dwellers near the Chutes. And these days, none of them will actually go into the Chutes. Not for love or money or a ticket to the Mayor’s house for cocktails. Cocktails. Look it up.

I’m glad you’re keeping up with your studies. I keep thinking that someday knowing stuff will be a good thing again. But I live here, so what do I know?

Whatever you do, DON’T COME BACK. You’re safer where you are – these idiots will never invade because they think everyone where you are is diseased. They run scared of everything and disease scares them the most, now that they’ve killed everything else, I mean. If you don’t have real doctors, you don’t have much of a chance controlling something like a disease or stopping it.  And most of the doctors got disgusted and left long ago, except for the ones that own their own medical schools. Got the cash or the stash? You too could punch medies to the rich and famous!

Oh well, I’d better try and get this out to you. Hard to say whether or not it will reach you. Any means of communication that you don’t pay a subscription for is a bad gamble. Like betting on a three legged-horse in a horserace.

Dad

PS: Horse. Look it up.

Tagged: dystopia, future

It’s Not Too Late

He was tired. It was well past quitting time and he was just leaving work. He let out a sigh that came up all the way from his shoes as he dropped a bill into the hat next to the Homeless Man.

“It’s not too late you know.” The Homeless Man cocked his head at the man, stared at him with watery blue eyes nearly buried in dirt and wrinkles, voice as scratchy as a vintage record.

He paused in mid-step. “What?”

“It’s not too late.” The Homeless Man put aside his sign and took a drink from a cracked and equally dirty coffee mug.

He was annoyed. “For what? For what is it not too late?”

“You know.” The Homeless Man bobbed his head up and down.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. Think about it.”

He thought for a moment and wondered why he was thinking about it. His annoyance ratcheted up a notch. “I’ve thought about it. I still don’t know what you’re talking about.” He sighed again, but this time it was less tired than exasperated.

The Homeless Man had picked up his sign again and was displaying it to the passersby as he continued the conversation. “Yes, you do.”

“I don’t, dammit.”

“You just don’t want to admit it.”

“Admit what?”

“That you regret it; that you wish you could change it.”

“But I don’t – Oh. That.” He put his hands in the pockets of his jacket and looked off down the street. After a while, he said, “Maybe.”

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe I do regret it. A little. But it’s too late.”

“It isn’t. It isn’t too late.”

His face grew an expression of disdain. “How would you know?”

The Homeless Man smiled. His teeth were yellow, but plentiful. “I know all about being too late. All about it.”

He considered this, then dropped another bill into the hat. “I guess you might at that.”

“It’s not too late. Not too late for you.”

He did not smile, but one corner of his mouth did turn up a little. “I’ll give it a try.”

“Good for you,” the Homeless Man said. “You’ll see.”

“Yeah,” he replied, as he walked away. “I’ll see.”

The Homeless Man watched him as he disappeared into the evening crowd, walking a little slower. The Homeless Man grinned in satisfaction then turned to look as a woman put some coins into his hat.

She shifted her packages and handbag and started away.

“You know,” the Homeless Man said to her, “it’s not too late.”

 

Tagged: beggar, homeless, not too late

New on Medium – Tree Leaf

Written in response to writing prompt: For a Stranger.

Tree Leaf

 

Tagged: Medium, short fiction, stranger, writing prompt