Archive for 'Fiction'
a bit of a novel (seriously).
April 9, 2010 by admin, under Fiction.
I need a few days or months before I write about current events. But the novel I started in the fall of 2008 came up in conversation today. I was cleaning up a random excerpt to send the person I’d been discussing it with, and decided to just share it here until I can write about my life.
This takes place in 1970. Marvin is a vet returned from Vietnam, just moved to a small college town to work at the post office. Cathy is the main character, but I like the parts told from Marvin’s perspective best of all. The only other thing I’ll add is that Marvin’s assumptions about Cathy’s marriage are not accurate.
Marvin met Cathy the Sunday afternoon Joe and Max came over to try out the barbecue left behind in Marvin’s new backyard. They put the longnecks in the cooler, tuned the radio to the local rock station, put out three folding chairs with those rubber bands that leave your thighs looking welted, and tested his backyard. It was deemed good. Max drank from her bottle and said, “When are Cathy and Fred coming over?”
Marvin lowered his brows. “Whatcha talkin’ ’bout, woman?”
“Your neighbors, the ones I told you about. Our friends, Cathy and Fred. See, those are their kids, Sandy and Denny- see them?”
Of course he saw Sandy and Denny, running around the yard buck naked, chasing each other into and around the wading pool. He chuckled and drank and noticed Max was still looking at him like she was waiting for an answer.
“You didn’t invite them?”
“I don’t know ‘em- I just moved in two days ago.”
“I though I told Cathy you were coming in- I thought I… I was sure you’d have mentioned it, and I just forgot yesterday when we talked on the phone…” She rose, tugging her shorts down. “I’d better give her a shout.”
“Hey, wait, you’re not going over now?”
“Sure, why not?” Max had steady gray eyes that could be reassuring or just deadly persistent depending on what she wanted. Marvin liked her a lot, and waved his bottle with a shrug for her to have her way. She stepped over the low hedge, tiptoeing between the plants, and said hello to the kids, who barely took notice of her. Marvin and Joe talked baseball while she knocked on the back slider, smiled, and stepped inside the door as it opened. A few minutes later, checking the heat of the barbecue, Marvin looked up to see the most beautiful woman in the world cross the hedge, along with a husband who, Marvin guessed, had been the high school king jock turned grease monkey. Thinking cynically to himself that they’d probably met and fallen in love at seventeen and now ten or twelve years later regretted it and had angry sex once a month, Marvin hardly heard names as he shook Fred’s hand and listened to Max’s prattling introduction.
The five of them watched Sandy and Denny get used to Marvin’s swing set, which they had coveted since they’d moved in, Cathy said, but didn’t have permission to use while the house sat empty. “We didn’t want them to get used to playing on it,” she said, “And then have to stop if we didn’t get on with the tenants.”
“Just you?” Fred asked as Marvin handed him the bottle opener. Marvin nodded and Fred said, “Joe says you were a mechanic at the beginning but switched over to navigation towards the end,” and that was how it started, talking shop and war stories, just three guys and the little women with their kids getting lunch ready in the background.
Max seemed to take it for granted that everyone would get along because everyone was her friend. Fred seemed to like Marvin’s gritty history, Cathy liked Max and therefore liked her friends. After that afternoon, though, Cathy did little more than the friendly hello when they caught themselves walking from door to car or getting the mail. Fred would pause to lean on the mailbox and tell Marvin about some technical whatsis problem they’d had at work. Every now and then the kids would knock on his back door and, lisping and twisting their baseball caps, ask him if they could use his playtoy. He’d look outside to see Cathy watching from her stoop with a smile for her polite kids, and they’d wave or make some joke.
It wasn’t until Denny fell off the fort and broke his wrist that they really started talking. Marvin was just getting home, setting keys and watch on table, looking forward to taking off the hot polyester blue uniform, when he saw a shape fall outside and heard a shriek and a wail that hit his stomach and brought it up into his throat. He ran outside and found Sandy, finger in her mouth, looking down over her little round naked tummy on Dennis, who lay on the ground letting out whooping wails louder than sirens. He moved towards the kid, not sure where to start, and felt relief when out of the corner of his eye he saw Cathy streaking toward them. She had that kid up in her arms before Marvin had even reached them, and she knew, she must have seen them- but even if she hadn’t seen the fall it took one look at Denny’s hand hanging sideways from his wrist to know what was wrong.
“I’ll call an ambulance,” he said.
“Don’t bother, let’s just drive him,” Cathy muttered, already walking up the grass that divided their houses. She threw a glance over her shoulder, “Bring Sandy?”
Marvin nodded and looked down at the girl, whose blond hair fell over a chubby face streaked on one cheek with jam. He knelt and gave her arm a little squeeze. It felt soft and boneless in his fingers. “Wanna go for a drive, kiddo?”
She nodded, looking at the ground and holding her dolly to her face. He lifted her up and followed Cathy, who stood in front of the open passenger door. She held Denny and bent forward as though to put him the seat, then straightened, then stood, then straightened. Marvin breathed easier knowing he could actually contribute to the crisis, and said, “Get in with him, I’ll drive. This one goes in the backseat?”
He lifted Sandy slightly and Cathy, eyes unblinking, still hunched by the door as though to begin a relay race, nodded. She slid into the seat and sat, whispering soothing nothings to Denny and running her hands through his hair, while Marvin put Sandy in the backseat, buckled her in after four tries, then got in the front and looked at Cathy. After several moments she noticed he was staring, and laughed, one short bark.
“They’re in the house, with my purse. Of course. I forgot. Shh, Denny, it’s okay, we’ll get there soon. By the front door, it’s unlocked- on the little table?”
He nodded, got out, trotted up the round cement stones to the front door, opened it and saw her slouchy green bag on the side table, along with a small teddy bear and three mints. He took everything, not bothering to lock the door and hoping she wouldn’t get all feminine on him and ask him to sort through her bag, get the keys, to do so. In the car he gave her the bag to find the keys, passed the bear to Sandy, who tossed her dolly aside in favor of it, and each of the kids a mint. Denny had settled into hiccups, tears still filling his eyes, but he took the mint and sucked it thoughtfully, his mouth parting around it to moan occasionally. Cathy handed Marvin the keys and returned to resting Denny’s hand on her arm.
Marvin drove to the wrong hospital. She looked up and said, “Oh no not this one, I’m sorry, we’re at the clinic-”
“Shit,” Marvin muttered, and drove around town to the smaller clinic, low and tan. Screaming kids and fat mothers filled the waiting room inside.
He waited with Sandy in the foyer while Cathy and Denny went in with the doctor. The little girl’s eyes grew wider and wider, until they were officially too wide, from all the strange shrieking sickly kids. He asked the nurse to tell Mrs. Medford he and the girl were going outside. He carried her out to the station wagon, put down the wayback door, sat her on his lap in the sunlight, and read “Mr Birthday” to her ten times before mom and son returned. Cathy’s face was slack and vacant, but she smiled down at Denny as he ran toward his sister.
“Look see a bandage!” he yelled, holding up the cast on his arm.
Marvin looked up at Cathy. “Next time, couldja keep some better readin’ material in here?”
She laughed, two barks this time, so he figured that was progress. When they got home, she led Denny in by the hand and said nothing as Marvin carried in the little girl and set her down to run downstairs and play with her brother. Cathy stood facing the living room, hand on her back, the other running through her long hair that fell down to her waist. She turned to him. “Coffee?”
“Sure, and you can spike it with whatever liquor you’ve got,” he said agreeably, following her up the stairs to the kitchen. The avocado green wallpaper was covered in pineapples, the cabinets dark wood. So was the dining room set, in the next room, covered in coloring books, juice and coffee cups.
She put three uneven scoops of coffee in the filter, carried the pot to the sink, turned on the water, and stood there with one finger under the stream, the other hand holding the pot.
She remained that way long enough for Marvin to glance at the mail near the breadbox, brush a few crumbs into a pile on the counter, and look back to her. He touched her arm, from behind her, saying, “Hey…” She turned, with a sob, and threw her arms around him, sloshing water all over his back with the coffee pot and wet hand. He felt thrilled by the sensation of his hands in the small of her back.
She almost immediately stepped back and returned to making coffee, saying, “I just go to pieces when they get hurt, I can’t stand it. I always think it’s my fault.”
He watched a fly settle on the bread board where a loaf still sat, homemade, surrounded by crumbs and gobs of honey. “It’s not your fault,” he said at last, “And that looks like good homemade bread.”
She glanced over at it, clicking the pot on, then put the loaf back in the breadbox, sweeping up crumbs in her hand. “I have make things to pass the time.”
“You’re quite the happy housewife, aren’t you.” He leaned against the counter, heartbeat tripping along at the discovery this gorgeous girl didn’t have it all together. “What’s got into you, kiddo?”
“I’ve never been happy,” she said, and exhaled, shook her head, turned to him. “Never in my life except in college and that was because I was stoned and high… on life.” Her head bent as she made a sound he thought might be a giggle. When she looked up again he almost lost his breath at the sight of her smile. It belonged in a magazine, this smile, advertising toothpaste or lipstick or a tropical cruise, five nights for $399. She came close, dropping the crumbs in the sink, brushing off her hands, saying, “I loved being stoned. All the time. I don’t know how I passed so many classes, being that stoned.”
“Yeah, being stoned is good,” he agreed, scratching his head. “How ’bout we get stoned now? Got some at home.”
Her eyes flitted to his as she reached into the cupboard next to him and brought down two coffee cups. “What are you waiting for?”
When he got back with the weed, she sat at the table, as level as you please, flicking through a magazine. A spoon sat in her coffee cup, near a carton of milk and his cup.
“Got sugar?” he asked, already heading for the thick crockery jogs labeled SUGAR, FLOUR and SALT. She waited, sipping coffee, while he rolled a joint and lighted it with the lighter she had produced from her everything-drawer. He took a puff, closing his eyes at the fragrance, and handed it to her. He went home a few hours later, and when she called two days later, he felt like he’d been holding his breath waiting for it the entire time.
“Come back,” she said. “Fred doesn’t mind, if that’s what you’re thinking- as long as I’m nice to him when he comes home.”
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two old poems.
January 15, 2010 by admin, under Fiction.
The other day, my mom and I visited the storage unit where we keep everything she and my brother moved from Oregon after selling our family’s house last August. We used dustpans to shovel the snow away from the doorway, and filled up the car with boxes of my belongings.
Sorting things I still wanted to keep (a pair of black leather boots with ruffles and spike heels) from things I didn’t (a six inch thick English text book from high school) I discovered a stack of high school papers. I have no idea why I kept my AP history and English essays, handwritten and generality-laden as most such essays are. Unless it was to prove that I’ve always been fond of titling things oddly, such as, “Betty Freidan vs. Martin Luther,” and “The Fascinating Issue of Power as Viewed by Orwell, Plus a Few Frogs.”
A few months after graduating I went on a poetry-writing kick, and two of those poems have remained my favorite pieces of writing, ever. They were also lurking in this pile of old papers. So I thought I’d share.
“a friend I wish I’d had”
You appreciated so much of me, that year,
or tried to. But as April turned to May,
this was one thing you never understood.
… Please listen, children. Just one more sonnet before we are through,
one more month before you can leave…
You never believed my concern: My room is a mess.
So is mine, you’d say.
You’d smile.
Mad with thirst, I’d sneak from class and find you in the hall,
sit next to you on the bench with your books.
We’d talk, your hands punctuating the air.
I would drink and drink and
drink,
drink your conversation until the ashen hallway of that sheetrock warren
warbled away.
I saw only your chin,
jutting upward when you laughed.
Then the halls would fill with students, and we’d stand
(In my dreams, you pass by unnoticing)
… Just one more day, children, and you will be free…
Moving through the revolutions of bells, wishing she was wrong,
wishing I had the chance to talk to you…
always.
But, My bedroom floor is covered, I can’t make it to my bed.
Things I haven’t used in years are floating to the surface.
You listened sympathetically, but did not see the point.
Perhaps your mess was different.
The layers covering your floor, the clothes on your chair, books on your bed,
(I have lost so quickly what was never really there)
didn’t frighten you.
My room’s a mess, too, you said, as we stepped around the curtain.
… Just one more step until you have gone…
Sometimes I wish we were still there, laughing around her as she
read aloud a sonnet.
“Senior Year: Girlfriends”
Stalking hallways in black and curvy shrouds,
you girls taught me how to savor
insanity and pain.
Letters on your rumpled t-shirts;
your madness was a slogan.
(I was crazy before it was cool).
With dark eyes and limpid hair, they/we
ate lunch: a manic coven circle sitting
in a crowded high school hall.
Anger and joy passed through unwelcome:
genuine emotion unbalances woe.
Better sorrow, the clothing fit.
(The mall has a whole store of Misery)
Dismal bedroom, suicidal frustration.
Parents who are Mean.
Sorrow is never your fault.
Stepping briefly from our baths of tears,
we had a good time, sweeties.
Thrift store hunting, Mambo Lattes,
cigarette smoke fogged our nostrils.
Nights spent imagining what life looked like.
Remember, not the anguish, but:
sitting in the grass,
blowing glitter on each other’s faces,
cuddling around a scary movie.
Books of revelation, shared poetry,
coffee and rain and
laughing till I could no longer stand.
The lightness when we pretended we had no homework,
and it would always be spring.
That year, you needed a stranger to your sticky, spider’s web.
I needed the glimpses of genius,
your weeping pasts,
loud music in the car and a cloister to dance within.
The puzzle shifts and people who didn’t fit, now do-
pieces once perfect, now cannot be wedged into place.
Funny how so brief a space
can slay a common language.
I returned and asked:
What do I do now?
You couldn’t tell me.
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passionate and be-furred.
August 24, 2009 by admin, under Fiction.
Cat’s tongue rolls along the curling, velveteen surface of the catnip.
Arms stretch across the sateen-sheathed stuffing of the quilt.
Satisfied, the cat exhales.
It lolls on back, paws curled, in the middle of the room,
for anyone to see its ruffled tum-fur and wide expanse of belly.
Reckless between its out-hung thighs.
The cat can stare for hours, who can tell it not to?
It will watch the bird through glass the sunny afternoon,
if it wants to.
The cat can ask, with meows rehearsed,
for a stroke,
an open lap,
a kiss upon the head.
A scribble of the chin or brushing of the back.
Your hand along the length, from head down to the tail.
The cat could lay beside you,
and even if you sneezed,
the cat could simply turn aside and fall asleep again.
Content to feel itself against you, closer with each breath.
There is nothing you could do about it: it is a cat.
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magic window.
August 4, 2009 by admin, under Fiction.
The rain pours down upon the roof,
and spreads across the floors
through the open windows.
Open,
because she shrugged at dryness and walked away,
walked down the dim-lit stairwell,
and out the frame of sunshine.
Into the sky,
into the sky
she rained down upon herself.
And let the floors buckle full of dark stain-
spread across her back
as she arched over her lover.
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Lacy finds the dress.
July 8, 2009 by admin, under Fiction.
Lacy bought the dress at a thrift store in Carmel, while staying with a friend sick with a multisyllabic illness requiring multiple surgeries and hair loss. Lacy’s boyfriend was not there with her to enjoy the dress because he had stayed in Oklahoma City to work, he said, on three or four grad school applications. Daniel wanted to get his masters, he said, so he could teach full-time rather than subbing and complaining every night of the lack of respect, the inconsistent work, the dreary alienation from the staff at the schools where he taught.
Lacy bought this hot, tight, black dress that fit her like a hot, tight black glove, and her friend said it made her look like a million bucks. She went home to Daniel in Oklahoma City six weeks later to discover that, instead of turning in the applications on time, he’d left them on a stack on his desk and developed an addiction to some fantasy game on the Wii his misguided mother had given him for Christmas. Lacy left Daniel a few months and many fights later, tired of the lies he had burdened both of them with for years. Never going to tell his father how he actually felt, never going to clean out the garage, never going to see the Eiffel Tower with her.
Her rejection surprised him, and he turned in the applications in a rush, late, but still accepted. This had been the third year in a row he’d said he was going to apply, and when he found that he was actually about to enter grad school, Daniel had a nervous breakdown and moved back in with his mom.
Relieved of the bullshit, Lacy began to decorate her own apartment, bought new clothes, met new men. Unable to find the Carmel dress, she felt annoyed that she’d never had the chance to wear it for the man she’d wanted to please with it, because he was, you know, full of shit. So she wrote it off, thinking it must have gotten lost in the move, and moved on with her life.
Meeting a man named Val, who had forthright conversations with his parents all the time, who had just asked for and received the promotion he’d worked toward for a year and a half, who told her he would fix her bicycle and then actually did so, only a week later, Lacy felt herself slipping down the stained, aluminum, bark-bound ride that is the slide of hope. She wrapped her arms around Val in her heart and held him close. But when he asked her to move in with him, visions of messy garages, stacks of unmailed college applications, and Wii’s filled her mind. Dressing for a date with him, wishing she could find that great black dress, she mentally rehearsed her thoughtful but firm “No.” More time, she thought, Getting to know you, she thought, Still not ready, she thought. Where the hell is that dress?!
Disappointed, Val retreated somewhat, going to Thanksgiving to his parents’ alone instead of inviting her. They still spent time together, but as his love and commitment became clear, Lacy watched one dry, analytical sentence after another emerge from her mouth, so that it sounded like she didn’t care for him any more than she cared for the twelve hundred and thirty-six dollars in her savings account.
Her obsession with the missing dress grew, as Val’s interview with a partner company in Minneapolis approached. If they offered him the promotion, he said he wasn’t sure if he would take it, as he was fond of Oklahoma City. Lacy ignored every prompt he gave her to voice an opinion either way. She tore apart her closet, looking through her suitcases, boxes of Christmas ornaments, the bags holding winter blankets. She looked under the bed and dresser, sneezing at the dust. She emptied drawers and climbed onto a stool to look in the cupboard over the bedroom door that she never used because it was dark and looked like a place one would discover bones in a horror movie.
Val flew to Minneapolis, promising to meet her for dinner in three nights and tell her how the meeting went. The day he landed at the Oklahoma City airport, Lacy sat on her bed, staring into space. It was such a cute dress. Daniel had probably found it and thrown it away without telling her. He was such a louse. Wasting her heart all those months, years.
If he had only done what he’d said he was going to, once. If only he was like… Val. He would have won her eternal love, then, a year or two ago, if he had sustained her hope with action.
She walked to the closet like an automaton, pushed away a pile of shoes with her foot, reaching into the shadows behind her wicker laundry hamper. Straightening, she held up the hot, tight black dress she’d bought in Carmel and never worn.
The phone rang. It would be Val, telling her he was on his way into town to meet her for dinner. Her hand closed on the fabric. She had bought it for Daniel, whose actions, or lack of them, had killed her hope. She remembered the friend she had stayed with when she bought it. Her illness was taking bits of her organs now, too, not just hair.
That scared Lacy more than memories of Daniel’s Wii.
She answered the phone, telling Val that yes, she would meet him for dinner. Her tone also said, I will meet you in Oklahoma City, or Minneapolis, Carmel, or Paris. It doesn’t matter. I may get a multisyllabic illness requiring multiple surgeries and hair loss tomorrow, you never know. So tonight, even if it exposes more chest than I’d like and flips around my hips in a way that makes my heart pound, I will wear this dress. For you… and for me.
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excerpt from the novel I've tried writing forty times.
July 6, 2009 by admin, under Fiction.
I do not give you the luxury of covering your eyes or ears. You may be the kindest and most protective of people. You know the right reaction to the unspoken potential in the word “incest.” But I ask you to listen as a way of holding hands with the one who must listen. The one who must listen took his or her part in the drama unwittingly, was forced to speak my language, and suffers alone. You, the moral, and you, the protected, should not use your inviolate state as a shield. Share, if only for a moment, the experience. Recognize that you are the predator, and you are the prey.
In order to bear the rest of the story, we must accommodate the horror of acceptance. If for a moment you can accept that this happened, and not try to prevent it by turning away in disgust or outrage, you will hear the tale and I (and others like me) will find my way from death to rebirth.
I was thirteen the night my father came into the bathroom and bent to help me dry myself. He began to breathe a little hard, putting the towel down. The bathroom was warm and steamy, and I felt a tingle as he touched the little hairs that had only recently grown on my pubis. It hurt the first few times he stroked me hard, there, but after the third time, he came to me with oil on his fingers, lifting me onto the counter to lean against the mirror, as he stroked with the utmost gentleness and attention. I could feel the blood gathering in my thighs. “Oh you’re such a good girl,” he said, “Lovin’ your daddy this way.” The attention in such a calm and focused way on an area that had seemed so useless and mysterious and hidden made me feel good. His touch felt very good. And I enjoyed it.
But I had to enjoy it all the time. There was no sentence in my head such as, “Not today, Daddy,” or, “I want to go outside and play instead.” It started to make me feel helpless, that I enjoyed it. Sometimes he could make me come without even looking at me, while watching TV. The pleasure was intense and addictive, and I did not say no. Later I thought, maybe I should have. Maybe he was doing it because he thought I wanted it.
As my body developed, he continued gently, still only touching. My breasts grew, and my hips widened. He would come behind me in the kitchen as I diced carrots or cooked meat, and hold me around the waist, feeling my breasts and down my stomach. It felt good, but sometimes I got a hot feeling like I didn’t want to feel those feelings, then. It seemed like my fault, that I wasn’t expressing that somehow, that I let him continue, that part of me wanted the attention regardless of how it felt.
Then as I grew more and more busty, with long blond hair and a figure men at the grocery store or on the main street would whistle at, I became aware that he did not know what to do with me. My friend Gary had to take me to the store to buy a bigger bra, and help me into clothes that fit but were not too mature. He encouraged me to dress well, in flattering skirts and blouses, rather than the smock-like clothes I wanted to wear to cover up my figure.
Gary didn’t know what was going on. When I would get home from doing homework at his grandma’s house, where he lived, I would find my father passed out on the couch, drunk. I still don’t know whether he’d been drinking before and I hadn’t noticed, but I felt it was my fault, that somehow my behavior made him unhappy. I wasn’t sure what behavior that was, though. I became concerned for him and responded more to his touch when he would come to my bedroom. I was just turning fifteen when he began to fuck me. He felt good, with his swollen cock and his effort as he lunged, although with his face so close I began to feel repulsed that he was my father. For some reason, when he had only been touching me, I hadn’t felt that. Now I began to. But I submerged it in a growing love and care for him that bent itself on destroying my mother, who was also an alcoholic.
The angel here was surprised I did not mention my mother earlier in the telling. She was hardly there. Most days she slept in her room, the curtains drawn. I don’t know where she went at night. There were some times when she would sit with a drink in her hand in front of the TV, hair uncombed, wearing a stained, threadbare housecoat. Or in the kitchen, smoking. Some days she did see my father stroking my hips or kissing my neck. But because she never seemed to see anything with her bleary staring eyes, well…
Later, when I was fifteen or sixteen and he would come to my bedroom, he would complain of her. It was then that I began to want to scream, the nights he spent with me. Not the fucking, but the cuddling after. It began to feel like a man with his wife, and I was aware finally that I was not his wife, I was his daughter. In the darkness there, I would want to scream.
My friend Gary began a friendship with a boy on the football team named Todd. Todd was a sweet boy, husky and rugged, unlike Gary, who was slender and blond and wore tight jeans, Western shirts, and cowboy boots like he was John Wayne. Trouble in our town was he walked like John Wayne, too. Todd and Gary and I were friends for most of our high school days. Gary and I would root for him at football games, and during the spring track and field events where he could shot put and throw a javelin. He was our best friend, but it was like that, he was “ours.” Until we were all seventeen and they became lovers. Until then, he was ours, and we would look after him, already older and wiser feeling only because Gary knew he was gay, and his parents were dead, and mine were alcoholics, and I was cast as the town slut, and men were coming to my house at night to do things with me and my father. But ironically enough what Gary and I shared was the purest of true friendships.
High school continued as normal. I got A’s and B’s in my classes, and loved every hour in choir. I think whatever I couldn’t say to my father found its voice there. My choral teacher was also gay, with a soft smile and active hands as he urged us in pieces from Baez to Bach. The students at that Colorado high school lived on the poor side of middle class, some of them from dirt and trucks and hard work. They didn’t have time to make fun of us, much, but there were times when a group of boys drunk after a dance would corner Gary and threaten to beat him up. Nothing ever happened until he started going with Todd. Everyone looked at me and assumed I was a tramp because even the teachers were eyeing me as they lectured. But the only person who ever touched me was my father. I was shy and avoided most boys, always going to dances and movies with Gary. Most of the time, we all acted like he and I were a couple. There were a few other kids we hung out with sometimes, but Gary and I were the only ones with real secrets. Our shamed us, and kept us separate.
People in town knew what my father was doing. Not all of them, but some. We had a temporary principal for my sophomore year, and he was the one my father chose to include first. I still don’t know why. The principal visited, and I hid upstairs, hoping he wasn’t talking to Daddy about me. When my father called me downstairs, I went, still in the skirt and blouse I’d worn to school. “Sit down,” Daddy said, patting his lap. I glanced at the principal and saw he was looking at me strangely. I began to get wet, and sat on Daddy’s lap. He started talking to the principal about what a good girl I was, as he stroked my tits under my blouse. Kissing my chest once, he grinned and slid his hand up my skirt, saying, “See what I mean?”
I groaned and leaned back, feeling the pleasure of his hand and the delight of shock. He whispered, “The principal here would like to feel you…” his finger ran around the inside of my wet vagina. “What do you think?”
Always vocal in my pleasure, I slid back off his lap onto the couch, and my daddy rose and stepped away, squeezing himself through his pants as the principal unzipped his. “You sure?” he asked my father, and when he nodded, looked at me. I lay with one knee bent, stroking myself, so he came into me, yelping with delight, “Oh you are so gorgeous!”
After that, my father would ask me now and then if I minded a visitor. I looked forward to these men with dread mixed with anticipation because I knew some would be rugged and virile, others disgusting. I also knew, any morning that followed, when I usually threw up from disgust and guilt, that it didn’t matter. At sixteen I was being whored out by my father and enjoying it. At least, not disliking it enough to run away.
I couldn’t even go to the pastor of the church where we had gone when I was a kid, because the pastor had once stopped by the car where my father and I were parked one afternoon, taking my mother shopping. He’d leaned in the window to say hello to him and looked down my shirt, and back up into my eyes, as though no one cared that a religious man had eyes that dirty. I blushed, as my father loved, and he said, “Quite a little lady you got there.”
“Yep,” my father said, slapping my thigh and giving it a little squeeze, under the skirt. I looked at the pastor and the pastor looked at me and I knew there was nothing he was going to do for me, if I asked him or not. It never occurred to me to go to the police; in my mind they were as foreign and mysterious as an invading army.
When I was fifteen I got pregnant and miscarried in the third week. I didn’t really understand what was going on, except that my father kept asking me if I’d had my period, and I would say no, and he would look worried. Then when I did and it was heavy and painful and I cried, he looked so relieved and kissed my forehead and got me a milkshake and hamburger from the take-out for dinner. Gary said, later, when I finally told him what had been going on, that I probably miscarried.
Later, when I was seventeen and my father had been bringing other men by, I got pregnant again, and my father was furious. He stormed at me that my lascivious appetite for men had brought this on me and I was going to get fat and ugly like my mother and turn into a shrew and then I’d have this baby to look after and no one would want me anymore. Deep down in the hidden parts of my brain I thought that sounded like heaven, to be ugly and unwanted with a child of my own to raise in some decent way, but I was so horrified by his anger and the sense that I had done wrong. I cried and cried, so sick with it that I couldn’t go to school. Gary came by after I hadn’t returned his calls or gone to school for three days, and asked me to go for a ride.
That was when I told him what was going on, in his car. He never came by the house, he couldn’t stand my mother. I was so worried by what had happened I didn’t even notice until later, in memory, how red and furious he looked during the story.
He drove me to the city, where a clinic on the outskirts of the good part of town catered to “women in my condition,” as he put it. I cried still more at being called a woman. The woman at the desk took one look at me and put me in a room right away. I had to wait four hours there, with Gary reading magazine articles to me and calming me down with tales of his grandma in her youth, tall tales that made me laugh, but still they got it done that day and I was glad for that. Looking back I think the nurse must have broken a few rules letting Gary sit with me, too. He didn’t want to take me home that night but I knew it would be awful whether another day had passed, or not.
When I got home my father was passed out on the couch and my mother upstairs and I got to bed and locked the door. There were only three times in my life my father let me do that without knocking and telling me I was being an evil daughter for keeping him out, and then following me around the entire next day asking, didn’t I love him, didn’t I care that I was torturing him when I shut him out that way.
The night after the abortion was the first time I locked myself up in peace. The second, was when I tried to kill myself a few months later, and the third, the night before I moved to college.
I survived the suicide attempt in late April. Gary knew I was getting upset and instead of trying to talk me into a cheerful mood, he took me to a lot of movies, holding my hand. But one afternoon we went to the wrong movie, one about a good girl gone bad. He didn’t know that going in and neither did I until halfway through. By then it was too late, we were captivated, and watched her body floating upstream, her mother sobbing into the policeman’s arms, mesmerized. I thought, What a wonderful idea.
Gary parked in front of my house and opened his mouth to say something, but didn’t. I kissed him on the cheek and let myself into the dark house, hearing my father snoring from the couch. Walking upstairs, I was very aware of the wallpaper, green and brown flowers glowing in the shadows. I passed my parents’ room, hearing my mom talking to herself in there, the light on. I locked myself in the bathroom and got my father’s razor out of the cabinet and just cut.
I don’t know why but my father came pounding on the door just as I had started on the first wrist, and I let him in, I was so surprised. He grabbed my hand and said “What the hell are you doing,” in a dead voice, his face white, mouth gaping. Putting the razor away, he looked at my bleeding wrist and must have decided it wasn’t that bad, because he rinsed it under the tap, poured alcohol on it, bandaged it, and led me to my room. At my door, he stood there, holding my hand and the other arm and trying to speak. Finally he said, “I didn’t know this was doing this to you… I’ll stop, Cathy, just never leave me.”
I think my face must have scared him more than the sight of my bleeding wrist because he stepped back and I closed the door on him, locking it even as he stood on the other side. What I felt that night knocked the allure of death right out of my head. Anger took over, blind, blinding, blinded rage. I was so shocked that he had known all along that he was doing wrong. I had never had the strength to think articulately about his motives, but I had always assumed in a blind, daughterly way that he thought it was okay to have sex with his daughter every night of the week, to sell her to strangers, to fondle her in front of his wife. That he just didn’t know. The rage, not only at him but at my self-delusion, knocked me to my feet literally and emotionally. I skipped so much school that month it was touch and go whether I would graduate, and I spent a lot of time at Gary’s house. But I couldn’t move out, although by that point his grandma knew enough to invite me to live with them as long as I liked. I couldn’t keep from going home, at least once or twice a week, to see… them.
And after the third or fourth time I spent several days in a row away, my father did stroke my arms, in the dark back porch, saying in a low voice, “Come on, Cathy… come on…” and kissed my neck, and I let him, I let him fuck me again. And again. The anger grew, in proportion to how much I pushed it down, so that I think I might have kept going back to him to grow the anger until it could propel me from home forever. I think I feared, sleeping on the pull-out bed in Gary’s room, that if I just stayed in Gary’s safe, normal home, I’d talk myself out of it, out of what had happened, and when he left town, I would go home, and go insane, there, alone with my parents in their hell, forever.
I had to use whatever energy I could find because graduation was getting closer and closer, college is scary to anyone, especially a girl from a small town that was only sending one or two other females away. And worst of all everything was going wrong with Gary, his life and his future.
But you good people who have read through this already know more than you deserve to about life on its wrong side. I’m sorry I had to share this. It happened to me, and it spread, not just through my life, but the lives of others. I am sorry for the role I played in it, but what my angel is telling me, is to stop saying I’m sorry, to say instead, I am angry, I am mistreated, and I will do my best to prevent it from happening to others ever again.
Meanwhile we can talk about Marvin, who had some fun, and we can talk about fun itself, in the mid sixties in this big rolling wonderland of a country. If you like. We can talk about pure love, and friendship, and laughter at a barbecue, or holding your baby for the first time. We can talk good. Since you’re visiting me in the between-space, you can have whatever you like. And when we’re done talking, we’ll both know what to do next.
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soft and sweet.
June 29, 2009 by admin, under Fiction.
Even in today’s permissive society, Anthony mused, combing back his long soft blond hair, there were still many closets to step from. One man may hesitate to reveal to his family that he loves another man, while in another part of the country, someone may feel equally ashamed to admit he voted for Bush in 2004. Yet in Anthony’s society, the world of darkness, and teeth, one could not survive unless one was what one was.
And Anthony, polishing his fangs with a foaming toothbrush, was a vampire. As he dried his wide, full lips with a soft, fluffy blue towel, tilting his head to regard his high-cheek-boned visage in the mirror, he repeated this to himself with a dimpled smile. Vampire. Anthony Marcantio, Vampire.
His blog said as much, though his readers assumed he, like them, were pudgy Goths who treasured their Director’s Cut of Interview with a Vampire on DVD.
Anthony slipped his burgundy velvet blazer over his ruffled white blouse- cliched, some said, but he stuck with the classics- and slid his glossy lizard skin wallet into the back pocket of his trousers. Well cut, of course, just draping over the arches of his pointed lizard skin shoes.
Hand in the small of her back, the other pulling back the straight black hair from her neck. She twists against him, one leg bent against his, squeezing his shoulders. As his lips taste her skin from her the neckline of her blouse, up the front of her neck, she exhales with a tiny groan, sliding one hand up the back of his shirt, sinking her teeth into his earlobe. His mouth lingers where jaw meets ear, then kisses its way back down again, her pulse pounding against her skin, his lips.
Walking out of his apartment with a nod at the shining scalp of the bellman, he inhaled deeply of the burnished sweat and moist of the night. It was September, early, not quite fall, still warm in the sun, but falling chill in the evenings. He loved this season, it made girls tremble in their sleeveless dresses, loathe to cover their shoulders for another few weeks. Anthony smiled at an elderly couple walking home, stiff and costly like a pair of vintage Louis Vitton cases. He lived near a train stop but preferred to walk downtown, engaging passing New Yorkers in rare smiles as he listened to the decisive click of his leather soles on the stained pavement of 5th Avenue.
The store windows glistened in the streetlights, reflecting into the shadows beyond the well-clad mannequins. He would cross over to 6th and ride the F down to the IFC, soon, but for another block or two, he enjoyed watching his slender, springy image from the corner of his eye in the glass. He would fall into a daze, on these walks, imagining the women he would encounter in the Village or, perhaps later, the Lower East Side.
She jerks her head back, hair swinging in a curtain away from his hand. Her eyes, hazel, rimmed with thick mascara and dark shadow, stare into his as though trying to read him. Her mouth is stained from the lipstick he has already eaten off. Under his hands, her skin is hot and damp, and he licks his lips, hunger weakening him, exposing one fang.
The clubs would be crowded, and though they might gather goosebumps pretending to smoke on the sidewalk outside, the women would soon warm and soften, their golden skin buttery like dough that has been left to rise perhaps twenty minutes too long. Considering this mouth-watering metaphor, Anthony crossed the empty street.
Emerging outside the theater, he beamed upon the flock of queers giggling and stumbling down the stairs past him, feather boas flapping, vinyl sparkling in the yellow glare of the stairwell. “Ooh la la,” one cooed at him, head bobbing from side to side in laughter as another steadied him on his platform sandals.
Anthony regarded his turf with deep happiness. Here they all were, the New Jersey couples, one member as polished and buffed as the other, glancing nervously at the man in rags holding out his hand from the darkened doorway of the pizza shop. The unblinking gaze of the newspaper vendor, selling porn to boys from out of town. These boys walked in flocks, too, but Anthony knew a few girls of his ilk who had prevented Chuck from Ohio or Jeremy from Colorado from ever going home.
They just lost the taste for it, somehow.
Passing a group of teenagers watching a tattoo video, girls on a stag night in matching too-short black cocktail dresses, and finally, the Papaya Dog on the corner of West 4th, Anthony crossed the street to a little bar below street level. The heavyset bouncers did not card him. Foolish people thought vampires had no reflections in mirrors, not realizing that, like every species, vampires adapted to their environment. His breed of New Yorker vampires had developed invisibility to the police, landlords, and bouncers.
Neck muscles straining as she lays back on the bed, pulling him slowly down with her against his sheets. He pushes her down with a hand under her blouse while kissing from one ear down, down, to that soft, sweet spot where blood beats so swiftly in the act of love. Anthony opens his mouth against her skin, the surface of his teeth sliding along her skin. Hardening with anticipation, he closes his eyes, losing himself in the approaching pleasure of sinking into her flesh and then tapping the rich hot flow of the vein.
Finding a strategic corner of the bar, Anthony sipped his drink, looking through his long lashes at a threesome standing near a pillar five feet from him. An overweight gay friend bounced between them and two out-of-town boys who clearly did not realize they were being hit on. The three women, meanwhile, wearing strapless tops and straightened hair, were obviously a bridge and tunnel set from Hoboken or perhaps Weehawken. Knock off platform sandals, he noted, and tans a bit too dark under short-shorts.
Still, their thighs curved perfectly up into those shorts, and each offered a unique thrill above the waist, one rounded, with longer hair falling against her back, the next blond, with the contours of her shoulders clearly defined, the third, nearly pouring out of her top, with a laugh that spread from Midtown to Wall Street.
She flopped away from him, one hand on her naked stomach, still rising and falling with exertion. One leg curved, hiding all but a spot of the triangle of black hair that rose there, in that place, that place he had sunk into instead… instead of… his teeth, her neck.
Anthony drank to hide the small drips of drool that often developed, irritatingly, in the corners of his mouth when regarding potential targets. He ordered a second drink. To his left, down the bar, a dark-skinned man with green eyes, startling in their paleness, gazed at him over the heads of laughing, drunken humans. Anthony swallowed an ice cube. He had forty pounds on Anthony, and long fingernails on one veined hand. Manhattan, he reflected, with its many closets for humans to emerge from, seemed to lack any for night-creatures that didn’t end in death.
She leans up on one elbow, one corner of her mouth raising at the sight of him on his stomach, head on pillow. “You alright?” she asks, voice throaty, now. “Didn’t hurtcha, did I?”
“Oh no,” he says into the pillow. “But I think my tribe will be angry that you fixed me.”
Courage failing, Anthony makes eye contact with the rounded member of the threesome, the one with the longest, softest neck. She locks eyes for a second. He smiles. For tonight, he will have to fake it.
1 Comment
Terasa and Agatha.
June 15, 2009 by admin, under Fiction.
It took Tom two years, living next door to Terasa, before he noticed the weight of her breasts falling against the neckline of her blue top as she bent to pluck the right key from her key fob. She had heavy brown hair that often covered a portion of her creamy face, large brown eyes clear of makeup. She looked up at him as he left his apartment to buy beer, pausing as he saw her fully for the first time.
Terasa’s cheeks flushed slightly, but she didn’t smile, jabbing the key in the lock of her door and disappearing behind its swing.
He tapped his wallet against his hand as he walked to the stairwell. Hmm.
Four months later, after breaking up with the blond with the mini Chihuahua, but before returning to the local college to finish his bachelor’s degree a decade after his friends had, he caught Terasa again fumbling with her keys. One elbow pinned her mail, flyers advertising chicken wings and car lots, to her side, the other elbow suspending a bag of groceries against her hip. Her sleeveless dress followed the contours of her chest and waist, bunching out into tiers of ruffles that grazed her knees. Cute. She had her hair pulled back in a clip, one strand drifting against her forehead. It looked-
“What?” she demanded, tossing that strand from her eyes as she lifted them to glare at him.
“Nothing,” he grinned, pulling the mail from between her elbow and dress. “Let me help.”
She unlocked the door with a thrust and reached back for the mail.
“Why so angry?”
“I’m not angry.”
Terasa had no desire to let this man smile at her. His hair, just long enough to “flop,” his lips, round and only slightly more pink than his skin, his jawline with the bump at each corner, emphasizing the bone structure beneath… he was beautiful. She wanted nothing to do with him, and told him so by holding out her hand for her mail, her eyebrows only slightly raised.
Opening a beer a few nights later, Tom’s hand slipped on the metal bottle opener, stabbing the currogated lid into his finger. It bled like heaven and he almost ran next door to ask politely for a Band-Aid. That got him into her apartment, and the sheer pleasure of looking down on her soap-smelling bent head as she wrapped the bandage around his finger. Asking her about the delicious aroma coming from the kitchen, he was shown yet another chamber of the forbidden unit, as she pointed with a frown to a large tossed salad. Naturally there was too much for her to eat alone, oh glory days the opportunity, he thought as he ran back to his own apartment for the wine he said would round out her feast nicely. Over her pasta and her greens, he slowly unwrapped her verbally. Where had she lived before this, how did she like the building, the neighborhood. Was she used to living alone?
“I love living alone,” she said, one corner of her mouth lifting one degree, as she spooned more fusilli with cherry tomatoes onto her plate. “I don’t have to listen to lies.”
His heart turned over. Here was the secret door, and she had shown it to him willingly. He knew she knew he knew that if he responded incorrectly, he would return to his apartment after helping her wash the dishes. Whereas if he found the magic words, tricky as a pea in a princess’s bed, he would wind up next to her on the couch in the dark, pulling free the top button of her yellow dress. If not more.
Tom loved a challenge with breasts.
He swung his wine glass in small circles, contemplating the red swirl. He could hear her quiet crunch of Romaine and croutons. After taking a small sip, he set down his glass, and said, “I lie all the time.”
As he’d hoped, her eyes met his, though her fork moved in the fusilli. He rested one elbow on the table as he continued, “I lied about needing a Band-Aid. I have forty two boxes of bandages in my bathroom. My mom brings first-aid supplies whenever she visits. I used to skateboard,” he finished through the laughter she choked around her mouthful of lettuce. “So she’s sure I’m just two seconds from skinning my knees any second.”
Her face, relaxed from laughter as she reached for her wine glass, raised in his mind’s eye a vision of what she would look like beneath him in bed. He cleared his throat and added less confidently, “I lied about the wine- I hate Merlot. But I’m drinking it,” his eyes followed the lift of her throat as she drained her glass, “Because I thought you looked like you had something interesting to say.”
“That’s a lie,” she said, but softly, leaning toward him.
“Yeah,” he admitted, and cleared his throat. “I wanted to meet you so…”
His eyes traveled the expanse of wall behind her dining table, dusky green in the low light from the kitchen. Scanned the half-full bowl of curled noodles, the platter with only a few bites of salad left on it. Then, across her plate, one glistening red tomato remaining. Her hand, resting her fork just above her plate. Up her arm, to the strap of her dress, where the skin of her shoulder met her hair. And then to her eyes. He made no movement. The words came slowly. “I wanted to meet you… because your breasts… are beautiful. I wanted to touch them.”
A sound of a waterfall crashed over his thoughts, then, sure as he was that she would laugh, sneer, insist he leave, throw her wine in his face, stand up and yell. He had sex for the first time at fifteen, and in the thirteen years since, had never once told a woman precisely what his goal was when seducing her. Though it was so obvious, so simple, he had avoided it and each had let him, encouraged him to pretend it was her views on politics or her spunky sense of humor.
Now he met her gaze and blinked with shock. Terasa had set her glass down and was rising. She leaned over him, hair falling either side of his face, cupping his chin in one crooked index finger, leaning in to kiss him.
Tom woke the next morning with her arm flopped across his neck and a headache developing in the front of his brain. His eyes crossed with pain as he tried to remember its source. Not the wine, he hadn’t had enough of that. Not the sex- he remembered flashes of bouncing breasts, a hot tongue, slow, deep breathing. He lifted her arm back to her side and sat up, rubbing his eyes and forehead. Words. He had said unforgivable words. What were they?
Truth. Shields dropped. He staggered into her bathroom, turning on the faucet and splashing lukewarm water on his face, moaning. His teeth felt covered in fuzz. Toothpaste on his finger, he scrubbed the inside of his mouth, watching his reflection in the mirror. His face fell into hardened lines before his satisfied eyes. There. Hotter. On guard. Strong.
He stepped out and bumped into her, shuffling in overstuffed pink slippers past him into the kitchen. She barely glanced at him, with a small smile. He watched her hair swing against her bare back, butt cheeks rising and falling in little turquoise panties. Nice.
Tom rolled his eyes and returned to Terasa’s shadowy bedroom to dress. He wanted to get out of there before she offered him coffee or lured him back to her bed. But as he bent in the semi-darkness for the pile of jeans and t-shirt he’d tossed to the floor somewhere between removing her bra and kissing her left ankle, his hand was met with a “Yowl!” and streak of claws. Cursing, he raised his bleeding hand to his squinting eyes. An orange and white striped beast streaked past him out of the corner of his eye. A cat. It must have been sleeping on his clothes. Covering them in a thin coating of white fur.
Nursing his wound, he converged with both the angry-eyed cat and its sleepy-eyed owner in the living room. Holding a cup of coffee in both hands, Terasa looked from his savaged extremity to her pet. She grinned. Ambled past him into the bedroom, slippers scuffing the floor, ignoring the “Ouch” he said too late.
“What’d you do, step on her?” Terasa asked, pulling her white lace comforter around her knees.
“I reached for my clothes,” he said in outrage, heading for the bathroom. Nothing useful in the cabinet over the sink. He opened the drawers beneath, shoving aside tampons, razors, Q-tips, cotton pads, wondering if he should just return to his apartment in his boxers. Why hadn’t he paid attention to where she got her Band-Aid for his hand last night… ah, there it was, right on the counter in front of his face. Pouring alcohol over his hand, he squeezed the cuts, urging any remaining droplets of cleansing blood from them.
Bandaged, he returned to the bedroom, ignoring how luscious she looked lounging against her pillow. Pulling on his pants, he faked a smile. “Gotta get to work, only reason I’m in a hurry.”
She lowered and raised her lids once, slowly. “No kidding.”
Against his will, his memory retrieved the image of her curled up beside him the night before, laughing quietly and wrapping her arms around his shoulders as he pretended to wrestle with her layered blankets and sheets.
Her lips, as they met the wine glass. The words she had whispered when he’d paused, inhaling her, her legs wrapped around his waist in the darkness. The half-whimper in the early morning, in her sleep… but at what?
He dropped his jeans in resignation.
Before him, she lay on her side, watching without any apparent concern, one finger twined through the handle of her mug. Behind him, it sat under the computer desk, waiting with golden eyes.
“Here kitty,” he said, turning to the living room, brushing thumb and index finger together. “Here puss a puss a puss.”
“Her name is Agatha,” Terasa called from the bed.
It took Tom two hours to coax the cat from under the computer chair at Terasa’s desk.
Four minutes later, after deciding honesty might add some novelty to his oft-predictable lovelife, he rubbed Agatha’s chin and felt a purr rumble from her white throat. Behind him, Terasa stood in the doorway, rubbing one ankle against the other as she finished her coffee.
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the half-drawn man.
June 8, 2009 by admin, under Fiction.
Prompt thanks to my brother Ian.
Her pencil grazed the page, her head tilted slightly. His squinting eyes reminded her of a photo of her grandfather during the second World War, but his long nose had a dash of Basil Rathbone in its tipped bridge. She flicked her pencil in upward strokes, marking his hair. Jeremy Brett, the later Sherlock, his black hair. Moving her pencil down in a faint broken line, she contemplated the empty outlines of his trousers and socked feet. Maybe he was a soldier, or a detective, in slacks with a crease you could cut butter with.
Of course, I thought your father’s paintings were wonderful… but he stopped painting after he was promoted to department head back in ’78…
Pencil returning to dab at the ears and hair along the nape of his neck. Could be a teacher or lawyer, he had a by-the-books firmness in his thin lips. Or her uncle, the accountant. Hmm.
Balding, pot-bellied, burping in front of the TV! Why don’t you use that paint set I bought you for Christmas?
She had filled his face in; more detail would push him out of reality into fantasy. Yet the lower half of his body remained ghostly on paper as well as in her mind’s eye. She couldn’t commit to this half-drawn man. Adding a belt, jacket, shoes would perhaps push him into a career he hadn’t chosen. He might settle.
I wrote a poem, once. For the yearbook, in school. We were voted most artistic one year, your father and I. Isn’t that funny?
Head moving from right to left, she flecked the shadow beneath him, cast by the sun- or would it be a lamp overhead? Did he stand in a train station or a bowling alley? He looked so conservative, a man of necessity, yet those eyes… those eyes saw truth.
I’m taking this vacation to Rome whether you want to or not. I may meet some romantic Italian man and never come home.
She pushed her chair back, sticking her pencil in her mouth to gnaw on. No good. He had to manifest soon, she couldn’t start her illustration for the local paper until her little obsession had completed. The face had appeared to her one night while she ate at the diner, a flash of a stranger passing the window outside. Just his head. He’d caught her eye with his own eyes. Eyes of vision.
We could have raised the girls on less! We would have been happy!
It was the mouth, the mouth was wrong- the mouth made him look like he’d been pushed, pushed by life or outside forces, the government, into a job or a battle he’d never chosen. The mouth had compromised and made its own agreement with himself, decided what price he would pay for breaking rules he’d taken for granted all his life.
Your mother always expected me to be a Van Gogh… but I was never sure what she thought she was…
A soldier. If she changed his mouth, she thought, pencil hovering where laugh lines could develop between nose and chin, if she changed his frown to a smile, she could loosen up those trousers and give him the Converse sneakers her fingers twitched to draw.
She could hear her parents’ car pull up in the driveway. She smiled. Whatever. Pinning the man up on her board, next to half a dozen other half-drawn people, she left her studio to go make coffee.
Let people fill themselves in. That was her philosophy.
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the telltale staff.
June 8, 2009 by admin, under Fiction.
She spread her hands across the page, but could not still the orange and yellow dots. If she closed her eyes, they only continued to dance up and down along the rough yellowed surface of the page when she opened them again. When she hummed herself to drown them out, they sang in a little high pitched tone alongside her voice.
She closed the old notebook and put it back on the bookshelf, marching into the kitchen to make toast. She could hear them singing from the living room. She returned, switching off the lights, as though like birds they would fall silent in darkness. She brushed her teeth at the bathroom sink, lowering her brows against the sound of “hm hm hm’ing.” She slammed her bedroom door shut against them.
Finally in the middle of the night she walked back out into the living room, tore the notepad from the page, and threw it the floor. “Would you stop!” she yelled down at them, glowing as they bobbed in the darkness at her feet. “You’re dead! I can’t find the next measure! I’m not good enough to keep you alive!”
She put the notepad in a plastic grocery sack and cleaned the dirty cat box into it, dumping clumps of litter-covered poo on top of the singing book. It trilled as she slid on her flip flops, walking in her PJ’s around the back of her house to the garbage dumpster in the alley. She threw it away on top of the neighbor’s pizza boxes and her own recently discarded kitchen trash, coffee grounds and smeared, bleeding ketchup packets. The lid fell shut on those la-la-la’ing notes with a thump.
In her bed, in the darkness, she flexed her toes on the sheet, pulling the comforter up under her chin. The room was silent.
In the darkness, a treble clef slithered along the baseboard, snail-like. It would watch her, approaching more carefully than his fallen comrades. It would wait until she liked herself enough to let the treble clef live.
