This is what happens when you make room for passion….
You think you are starting a discipline, just flexing muscles and practicing, and all of a sudden you are knee deep in a novel you didn’t know you had in you!
Over the last month, I’ve been writing furiously. The new novel is just one chapter shy of being a complete first draft. For perhaps the first time in my life, I’ve allowed my creativity to be purely for fun and I’ve been having a blast.
Below you will find the first chapter (unedited) and I would love to know if you are intrigued. For the record, this new book is totally off platform and different from anything else I have ever done. Please share your comments with me. Enjoy….
Chapter 1
I dreamt again a river of blood and misery, the endless parade of human need. Even in sleep I can not escape the surging cacophony of paltry lies, endless excuses, and unabated anguish. The noises, colors, and sheer volume of despair drown out any small hope of joy, or even quiet. While I dread the days, it is the nights that plague me and I am grateful for the mercy of morning. I dress, grab a quick coffee, and put up my hair up before stepping out into the long, lean shaft of daybreak.
It is better on the street. At this hour the menacing silhouettes that populate the park at dusk have retreated to wherever it is the hopeless go after the hunting grounds are empty and the prey is consumed. I remember a city bright with lights. I remember the time before, when fear was fallacy and dreams were good.
At the bench, I pause. Soon, pigeons will crowd the walks and the Callers will come. “Spare some, lady” “Hey babe, I got whatchu need.” “Oh man, I wan’ me some a dat! Woo Wee! Lookin’ mighty fine today.” I can’t help the shudder that rattles me. If they’re watching, they will know me for what I am. I shake my head, missing the feel of long hair swinging heavily against my shoulders and glare into the shadows. It is a dumb thing to do and will not hide anything. My face is already too pale.
For a moment, I allow myself to believe that I am safe. It is still early and they don’t normally crawl out from their dens until the sun tops the first low level buildings. In this morning bright, there is at least the memory of another life. Holding my purse carefully, I settle on the concrete bench. It is stained with years of toxic rain and human excretion, bird droppings, and old food. It is a comfort. It too has seen it all and survived. Wrapping my arms around my body, I try to dispel the dreams and revel in this brief respite of quiet. I take a deep breath. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Ocean breaths.
Do I still remember yoga? Did we go for coffee, laughing and gossiping, after class? Was there a time when my girlfriends gathered to share tragedies that seemed important then? I shake my head again and close my eyes. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
Something brushes my ankle. Opening my eyes, I jerk my leg away from whatever slithering thing has braved the thin sun. I slap at the pavement with my heavy purse, hoping to scare the thing away. When I hear nothing moving, I dare a glance under the bench. At first, I don’t see her. Shredded trash bags, dead leaves, and sundry debris from the night are piled against the tree trunk at the back of the bench. As my eyes adjust to the dim of shadows, I see a thin arm lying in the filth. I do not scream. I want to, but that would rouse the Callers from their dirty sleep. I don’t need that. I don’t need to do anything but leave. What, after all is one more body, one more tortured thing finally free? The sun is climbing and I have to get to work. The living are of far more concern than the dead. I am just about to stand when I hear a tiny voice scratch out a noise that sounds horribly like, “Please.”
I want to pretend I haven’t heard it. I want to walk quickly away, striding with confidence as if my job is also my purpose, as if there is anything to do but log the despair. I hear it again, a little louder now, a little more desperate, though it is still no more than a thin whisper. “Please…” Then there is nothing. No voice, no wind, no movement. The old, scarred square seems to be waiting. Like some surreal play in the off-Broadway years of long ago, everything will take its cue from me. I am the melting clock, the upside down horse, the thing that does not belong in the landscape. Where normal used to be, there is now only this dark carnival and I do not know its rules. The Callers are in the shadows. The sun is rising. The clock is ticking.
Pretending to adjust my shoe, I peer again beneath the seat. She is mostly naked. Her bare body is bone thin, model thin, the kind of thin people protested about before protests didn’t matter anymore. Her starved skin and prominent bones would have been, in those days, something to envy.
I suppose I know her, if you can call seeing someone every day knowing them. She is that frail, thin, wisp of a girl with the too big eyes who hangs around the park in late afternoon. She is not one of the Callers. I don’t know if I remember her ever saying anything. She just looks at you with those big eyes and hugs herself. Had she been born in time to go to high school, to know proms and boyfriends, to learn to pull her hair into just the right pony tail so it hung river sleek down her narrow back, she would have been beautiful. Her eyes alone are captivating and I can only imagine what her life might have been if she had learned how to bat them coyly. Instead she learned to dumpster dive and cook rats. She is one of thousands, millions maybe, who were born a fraction too late. She is just another street waif, a barely living legacy of corruption and human greed.
Like most of the Workers, I try hard not to look at the lost children on my way to and from the sorting office. It is best not to get too close or know too much. The Drivers caution us against them, warning of theft, disease, and any number of unsavory possibilities. I often wonder if they are actually warning us against something else, something worse. Some small part of me suspects that the lost children can hold up a mirror that makes their horrors pale in comparison with my own. After all, they have an excuse. They are just trying to survive.
“Please,” she says again, her small voice holding me like a cold hand on my throat. I glance around. The park is still empty. I get off the bench, turn and squat, wary of placing my back to the concrete expanse behind me. I reach in and pull away some of the leaves that plaster her skin. I look at the length of her. One eye is swollen shut and blood has dried in a trickle down the corner of her mouth. There are bruises on her shoulders and around her neck. My eyes, against my will, travel further down her body. Her nipples are raw and red. Her belly is peppered with welts. Her hip has been kicked or hit fiercely. Her thighs are drawn close together and around one ankle is a pair of dirty panties, crusty and stiff.
Oh God. Does it never end? Will they never leave us to forage what we can unimpeded? Do they always have to exact the same price by tearing out the small shred of self we have managed to covet and rendering us, year after year, daughter after mother, only mewling shells and empty vessels? When it is done, when they have taken all they can, we can barely care for ourselves, much less each other. And what am I to do now? Leave her for the dogs? Let her drain out what’s left of her life with what’s left of her will, hoping rain or cold will get to her before night when certainly someone or something will find and ravage her yet again for the little meat on her bones or the hard pleasure of her final, futile cries? Why couldn’t she be already dead?
I glance behind me. The first of the pigeons are on the ground, wobbling this way and that in search of crumbs long gone. The sun is lighting the second story windows above the vacant shops. The callers will be here soon. If I am late, I won’t get my ticket and there will be no meal today. My Driver will leer and offer me an exchange. The thought of his hairy hands, slick with sweat on my breasts, makes me cringe and I pull my coat tight around me. His meaty thighs have parted me more than once in trade. Each time, I die a little more but that slow death is never enough to quell the hunger in my belly or the ragged breath in my lungs. My heart, in spite of itself, still beats. It will not risk the absence of normalcy. It needs the daily dinner and the chipped rectangular surface of my desk. My heart demands something more than mere survival.
When I was a child, the world was my present, a great gift to be unwrapped after I finished school and was properly settled in marriage and career. As the only daughter of a well off, middle class family, I had been spoiled. I did learn to pull my hair into that shining tail and bat my eyes coyly. Third generation Slavic stock, my family had adjusted in most ways, though they named me Vanessa in deference to times past and battles won. In my youth, I wanted for nothing except a name generic enough to be truly American. Still, I had exotic eyes, heavy dark hair, and was curvy in all the right places. I belonged. The boys wanted me as much as I wanted them and my name made teachers think I hid my intellect on purpose. They reveled in trying to release it.
I did all the right things. I played volleyball, scored B’s in my classes, and drank enough, but not too much, at the weekend parties. For my sixteenth birthday, my parents bought me a car. It wasn’t new, but it was cool – a slick blue, two door Honda that I named Marie. She took me everywhere, to the lake and parties, the games and movies. She took me from girlhood to womanhood with a boy who thought he was a man and I was driving her when I told my best friend, Lisa, that I had done it. After high school, I went to the StateUniversity. I thought I would major in TV journalism or sociology. I had no calling and was grateful for it. I was happy to just be average.
The change began in my sophomore year. At first, we thought it was nothing. The Occupy movements were for hippies, druggies, and homeless people. The news didn’t even bother to cover them and we were oblivious to the wail of the 99% except when the police barricades surrounding the encampments impeded our easy access to the coffee shop we frequented. We laughed with everyone else when comedians spoofed them and figured the camps would disperse when winter came. They didn’t.
Instead, the occupiers got leaner and more determined. When government officials, motivated by well-endowed donors, called the police to disband the camps the undeterred protesters went underground. For awhile, there were lots of videos floating around the internet of police brutality. Students were encouraged to take a stand. We didn’t. We watched, shocked by the images, then were distracted by a cute guy or our favorite TV show. At that time, no one knew who the Occupy organizers were or where they had gone.
Her voice, softer now, snaps me from my reverie. There is a tear coursing the muddy track of her face. What to do? How do I do anything? Though I am fed, I am not strong. The dinners I get are barely more than dumpster sustenance. I can not drag her from what will surely be her last resting place into the light of morning and carry her anywhere. Where would I go? What, if I could manage to think of a place, would I DO for her? There is no extra food. There is no medicine, unless you are desperate enough to go to the medical center with its dirty bandages and vermin infested beds. Even if I were that desperate, how would I explain why I happened to be there with her when I am supposed to be at the sorting office separating the newly dead from the newly departed, and the barely alive from the not worth feeding?
I touch her. I try to be kind. I push her stringy hair off her battered face and let my fingers linger a moment. I remember tenderness. I was full of compassion once. She raises her arm, lays her palm against my shoulder and moans a little. Another tear falls. Oh the hurt! The staggering loss! I can do nothing for her. Not now anyway, with the Callers waking, the Driver waiting, and the day beginning. Still, I find I can not leave. I too have been naked in the dirt — torn, bloodied and without hope. I am sure that unless I find the courage to go, I will be here again.
They used to tell us that it was not our fault. We were free to wear what we would, go where we wanted, and go alone. If something happened, it was the perpetrator’s fault. He was the only one to blame. We were women of the new generation. Feminist’s daughters were to be without guilt, shame, or fear. We were, they said, finally equals. What they didn’t tell us was that in the dark, on some soiled frat bed or behind ornamental bushes, held against our wills by guys who didn’t care, none of that mattered. If we hadn’t been there in the first place young, beautiful, and alone it wouldn’t have happened. Being guiltless is irrelevant when your panties are ripped, your body is brutalized, and your soul is dead.
A call rings out across the square. “Woo Weeeee! Gonna be a fine one today!” Startled, I backward onto the ground in my rush to flee. I glance under the bench. The girl is well hidden. There is nothing I can do for her. If I don’t move soon, there won’t be anything I can do for myself. It is time to go. Without looking back, I stride across the square as if I have purpose, as if I am someone other than myself, toward the bus stop where there will be others like me, armed patrols, and normalcy.
