Barbara Monier's Blog, page 7

Boat (new flash fiction)

[image error]While we were in California, my aunt and uncle took us out on their boat to fish for yellowtail.  The grown-ups talked about this for DAYS beforehand —  how we were going out into the open ocean, on our very own boat.  They would look at one another every so often and shout out “Yellowtail!” which was invariably followed by raucous laughter, back-slapping, and a big giant gulp from their glass.

When the much-vaunted day came, we set out for the place where their boat was docked. My aunt’s car was so big that the accumulated seven of us had no trouble whatsoever fitting in, and the three kids and one adult still bounced around the back seat with tons of space to spare.  It was like being in a room in someone’s house that up and moved from place to place. Riding in it didn’t feel like any car I’d ever been in.  Usually, when you drove over a bump, you’d feel a bump.  In this behemoth, when you went over a bump, the entire car seemed to take it personally, and became intent on minimizing the blow by rolling from side to side a whole lot of times instead of just hitting the bump and getting it over with.  When I looked over at my brother, the freckles across his nose had taken on a greenish tinge.

The seats were made out of a weird material that felt slippery and a little greasy all at the same time.  I couldn’t stop running my index finger back and forth across the seat beside me.  My mother turned around from her spot in the middle of the front seat and caught me doing this.  “It’s a brand new synthetic!” she chirped.  “It’ll last forever!” Being four years old, I heard it as “SIN-thetic.”  And since I had a limited but wholly terrifying idea of “sin,” and since my mother seemed unreasonably gleeful about the whole car upholstery topic, I thought I better not say any more.

When we climbed on to the actual boat, the adults were in such unfettered good spirits that I felt immediately suspicious and bewildered and like I’d been invited to some party that was celebrating something I couldn’t understand.  It turned out that you have to spend a whole lot of time on a boat, doing one thing and another that was also incomprehensible to me, way before the boat ever moves away from its place at the dock.  But that whole time, the boat sits in the ocean heaving up and down and back and forth.  Somebody decided that we children would be more comfortable “below;” so we – my aunt and the baby, my brother, and me — were relegated to the little enclosed room below the part of the boat that was outside and open to the air.  The minute the door closed behind us, my brother did a quick look around, spotted a tiny little bench alongside a tiny little table, curled up, and went immediately to sleep.

I didn’t know what to do – where to sit, or stand, or look at, or anything.  My aunt was holding the baby and cooing at her.  That baby looked right at me, staring a hole.  And without so much as a fuss or wiggle or even slight change of expression, she just opened up her mouth and spewed a gigantic amount of puke that ran all the way down her body and my aunt’s as well.

My aunt had a mess on her hands, and she got very wrapped up in wiping at the baby and herself with whatever she found at hand, all the while cooing and comforting her.  Then the baby upchucked again.

I looked at my shoes.  Partly because I still couldn’t figure out what to do, and partly because I thought the puke probably splattered onto them; and I was very proud of my saddle shoes.

What the heck were my parents up to?  I stared at the door to make sure I’d see them coming, whenever they did.

[image error]

Painting are by: Chris Schenkel (top) and Alex Scott.  Chris and Alex participate in Chicago’s Arts of Life program. “Arts of Life advances the creative arts community by providing artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities a collective space to expand their practice and strengthen their leadership.”

Birth Day

[image error]

“Early labor can go on for days!”

The first time she said it —  the nurse who popped her head into my doorway – I thought it was a strangely clueless and unhelpful thing to say; but I didn’t really find it all that annoying.  In the convivial phase of my early labor – if you can call your 25th hour of labor “early” in any sense of the word – I remained in the unshakable good spirits of a woman who would, in the very near future, finally finally finally get to meet her first child.  I met her comment with affectionate bemusement, albeit with a sort of “ah, isn’t that complete idiot kind of charming in an all-too-human sort of way.”

However, by the 19th  or 20th  time she poked her head in to say those exact same words – well, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to poke her eyes out first or go straight for the jugular.  I asked my husband if he could get her to come closer to my bed.  He said he didn’t think that was such a good idea, perhaps because I was holding him tightly by the collar and whispering spit balls directly into his face when I said it.

Forty. Hours. Of. Labor.

No. Pain. Medication.

Things did not proceed according to my painstakingly- created birth plan.  I never made it into the fancy-ass, brand new labor and delivery suites that resembled incredibly tasteful B & B’s with charming floral décor, and bentwood rocking chairs, and Boze sound systems.  The room where I remained, due to “complications,” was essentially the size and general schema of a cell, as in The Slammer.  At one point, I had the wherewithal to decide that I really must count: there were a total of nine medical personnel crowded around the bottom half of my body in this teeny little space.  All of them were staring directly into my vagina.

Well, I thought to myself (between interminable and excruciating contractions), whatever remaining dignity I may have had is forever lost.  At that point, I had been limited to lying in one position only for hours.  I was tethered to an oxygen mask.  Every possible monitor, probe, and gadget was either wrapped around  my body or inside of it.

Forty hours after the first contractions of real labor announced that my baby was really, truly on the way to the outer world, Taylor John Hales was placed in my arms.  I was too exhausted to lift my head by myself to get a good first look at my son.  And when two people raised my head and put him to my breast, I thought, “oh my God, oh my God, I did not do enough.  There is no amount of time, or work, or pain that could possibly result in this miracle, this brand new human life, this gift from the universe.

I will never stop, not for a second, trying to love him as best I can.

My son Taylor is 35 years old today.

[image error]

 

Ice: A flash fiction homage to pneumonia and the unreliable narrator

[image error]

I’m not really sure if I’m here.

Every so often, someone comes into the room.  The person always says, “how are you doing, Mr. ______.”  I usually say, “I’m not really sure if I’m here.” Not once have I gotten a reasonable response to this.  Sometimes the other person seems to ignore the question altogether, so you can see where this would be extremely unhelpful in determining whether I’m really here, or not.  Sometimes the other person gives a faint, indecipherable smile while they go about their business.  They examine the machines that surround me.  They make notes – sometimes on a computer they roll in and out of the room with them, sometimes on a little scrap of paper, once in a while on their wrist or hand or some other part of their own body.

Frequently the other person says, “I’d say you’re getting better.”  I used to ask: “Better than what?”  I had no idea what standard of comparison the person was using, and the statement confused me a great deal.  Once again, I never got a response that I could make any use of, so I thought it best to stop asking.  The people seemed quite well-meaning, and very dedicated to their various tasks as they moved around my room.  Sometimes I wondered if it was the tasks themselves, or the movements associated with those tasks, that were supposed to be helpful to me.  Perhaps it was a carefully choreographed dance, an incantation, perhaps designed to allow for my return, if I was, in fact, gone somewhere in the first place.

[image error]

Before the person leaves my room, they invariably grab a device that looks like an exceptionally outdated remote control and place it directly in my hand.  “Press the button if you need anything.”  I nod.  I am pretty sure that I nod.  “The button,” the person says, pointing to a bright red circle in the middle of the outdated remote.  I lay the remote right next to my hand and contemplate what I might need, in the future, so I could push the button and summon the people.  I’m not sure if they’re disappointed in me for not thinking of something.  I’ll try to work on this.

I’m very high up.  In a bed.  I am so high up that the floor seems miles away.  I can have as many pillows as I want, and they are the fluffy but firm ones that are just the way I like them.  They blankets are laughably thin, but I can have as many of these as I want, also.  I think this is a memory: I was shaking with chills, shaking way up high in my bed miles above the floor, and some people brought me blankets that had been warmed up.  They wrapped one entire blanket around my feet, and a second one around my torso, and a third they used to wrap me all the way up to my chin, making me into a mummy.

There are always two pitchers of ice cold water within my reach.  They are always completely full to the top, and the ice never melts.  The ice is the very best part.  People come and go from the room.  I don’t know where they go, because I don’t know what’s on the other side of the door to my room.  I don’t know for sure that they continue to exist.  But there are always the perfectly-formed, small, rectangular ice cubes.  They are immensely satisfying to crunch.  My hand gets colder and colder with each handful of ice that I take from the pitcher, and my mouth gets colder and colder as I crunch.  It is at these times that I most believe that I may be real.

[image error]

Paintings, top to bottom: Yves Trevedy, Laurits Tuxen, Rembrandt

Little Burro – FLASH fiction*

[image error]

I was pretty sure my parents were tricksters.  From an early age, I was watching them out of the corners of my eyes.

Like when we took a road trip all the way across the country when I was four years old, driving west across old Route 66 from Pennsylvania to California, where my aunt and uncle lived.  Days and days of endless barren landscapes, our brand new station wagon throwing up a dust storm that followed in our wake.  No air conditioning.  The windows were wide open, making any kind of talking sort of impossible.  It was dry, and dusty, with a hot wind blowing in your face all day long.  My brother and I bounced and blew around in the back seat in a woozy stupor.  Every so often, one of us would come out of our haze long enough to let out a plaintive whine of “How much longer?” or, even more important, “Are you sure there’s a POOL?”

I got to eat pancakes every morning.

At one of the pancake places, I got a little stuffed burro with a bell in his ear for my souvenir of the trip.  Except I wasn’t allowed to make the bell ring because it drove everyone nuts, so mostly I just held him in my lap and stared at him.

My aunt and uncle had a new baby.  I’d pretty much never seen a baby before, and I wasn’t at all sure she was real.  She just sat there doing absolutely nothing most of the time.  Every so often I would pinch her, to see if she was real after all.  She would scream or cry or something, but somehow I still wasn’t entirely convinced.

I was pretty sure the people next store were really, really bad and would snatch me up or hurt me if I got too close to them.  They were always trying to get me to come over to their gate to talk to them, or to show me something.  They didn’t speak English, and they wore clothes that covered them all up from head to toe, and they were older than even my grandparents.  I made sure never to get too close to that gate, even if I didn’t see them in their yard.  But that meant that I had to stay in my aunt and uncle’s garage, and that was terrifying, too, as my aunt had shown me a bottle that she swore had a genie inside.  It was hard to find a place that was far enough from the gate and from the bottle, both.  But at least I could stand there and shake my burro’s bell.

My parents seemed to think that everything was funny.  They laughed all the time in California, and I was pretty sure they were laughing at me.  But I was watching them.  They just seemed like people with a lot of secrets.  Mean people.  With secrets.

[image error]

 

*The blog has been silent for a spell, while I have labored over the re-re-re-writes of my upcoming novel Pushing the River.  In the interim, I have become fascinated with the concept of the unreliable narrator. And I continue to be taken with the idea of flash fiction.  Hence, a little piece that utilizes both.