Talespinning

Word Count: 218

The wind is insistent, huffing and puffing to blow down the doors. Scratching at windows with fingers of yew. Rattling and grumbling the shutters.

I sit on the couch by the front picture window, daring the rest of the large maple tree to split down. To hammer its way in and lay down beside me in the warmth of my home. I ache for its struggles, its conflict. It was determined to stand tall, after the last storm took an arm off in battle. Mending its best without proper surgery. Allowing only nature to heal it.

Somewhere in the city people huddle in tents, their stakes driven into the ground. They sing victory songs, sipping hot soup and wishing they’d brought woolen blankets. The night whistles tunes but they don’t sing along, not knowing the lyrics, not having the frets to chord their guitars.

In the sun’s reaching rays, the tree stands sodden but tall. Its branches weep second-hand rain. Its fingernails broken from clawing the wind. The light darkens and I can’t watch its battle but I hear its leaves rustle and curse. I drag its whispers into my dreams as it fights the night that once loved it.

In the morning the tree is still standing. In the city, the people emerge from their tents.

Word Count: 382

It’s been twenty years, maybe ten since I’ve painted the bathroom ceiling. Almost twelve since he died. The man who left pencil marks around the hole where he helped put in a new lighting fixture, complete with a fan.

Now I remember, I did paint it since, but not over the marks. It must have been too soon to erase a man’s life with a paintbrush.

He was our neighbor. Always willing to help with whatever we ourselves didn’t know how to do. We shared gardens. He liked tilling the soil and planting the seeds. I liked weeding and gathering the harvest. There was a year when his plot was all vegetables, mine all a butterfly garden of flowers. The time he snuck giant zucchini under my cucumber leaves. I put a deer target in the midst of his corn.

I remember the day he put in the light. I’d gone over to ask about wiring. He read the instructions and wandered over to see what I’d done. I tried to stay out of his way but wanted to help. Then I noticed a huge gash on his forehead; he’d walked right into the overhead garage door I’d left open to only my height.

The ceiling is old-fashioned 70s swirls. I paint with a short bristled wide brush, feeling like Michelangelo, not wanting the mess of a roller and tray, welcoming the more personal feel, the slowness, the touching of the bristles to the paint. Putting off that decision of painting around or over the lines he made marking the measuring of the fixture.

With each swirl I get closer. I step from a chair up onto the counter, down to the top of the toilet. Move the chair into the bathtub and push paint into half-circles as if the ceiling was a canvas, faces appearing, joining in smiles. Inevitably, I come to his.

There’s that hesitation, that moment that brings back the phone call, the rush over there, the CPR I tried so hard to save him. These two pencil marks over my head are not him, just a small part of a lifetime. They can’t be whitewashed with paint.

I softly brush the wet paint over the swirl, over the marks. It doesn’t matter. I know they’re there.

Word Count: 421

My friend Thomas won’t leave the house without first winning three games in a row of Solitaire on his laptop. I’ve also heard he won’t even take a shower before, for fear he may drown. He’s a great believer in luck and destiny, which to me, seems in conflict right there.

A fortuneteller once told me my life would be filled with disasters. She said I had horrible karma and hurried me out of her tent. With one arm on me, the other scattering flakes that fell in a starburst of glittering dust, she guided me out into the carnival night. The next morning, the booths, tents, and rides, people and animals, were all packed up and gone.

Still, I don’t believe we don’t plan our own fates, have some control over the good and the bad. True, I’ve had a lot of bad stuff happen in my life, but I sort of figure I just make some lousy decisions.

Like not taking a job in California when it was offered. Like dumping Carl when I was nineteen. Like…well, there were quite a few.

I have a decent job with the State and a second floor apartment in a building of young up and comers. Thomas lives there too, though I don’t think he fits in with the culture. He too works for the State and makes very good money, but a refuse removal man just isn’t invited to Friday night happy hour anymore. Odd, since everyone has that in common. Even more so than taste in movies, music, or pot.

Last Friday night I met a new man, a possible lover-in-training. Oh, I’m not really that manipulative but come on, every guy could learn from a gal. He hasn’t called, as he said he would, and Thomas says he probably just lost my number. For Thomas, this means he’s pretty sure the guy won’t.

“But he took my phone number,” I said.

“So?”

“And he bought me two drinks.”

“Yeah, so?”

“But I did everything right,” I cried, or was close enough to tears that my voice was getting smaller and higher.

“It takes two,” he said, “and maybe the timing just wasn’t right.”

“But why am I such a loser?” I was crying now. “I try so very hard to be likable.”

“Come here,” Thomas said. I sat down beside him. He closed his laptop and put it aside. He put a warm arm around me. “I just won three games,” he said. He was smiling.

Word Count: 393

The silence is so deafening with its drumming. The day is so dark with its night. The world is so small with its oceans and forests and the horizon is littered with trees.

Something, a small noise, like the cheep! of a sparrow, makes him look up. He stops, listens, waits for the nothing that is no longer there. Daniel is edgy, tic-nervous, absorbing everything in through his eyes, ears, and skin where it all finds his way to his mind, tumbles in a jumble that feels like an unscratchable itch.

Daniel is in a strange town, a small town two hundred miles further than he should be at this time of Friday afternoon. He is looking ahead even as he looks far behind him, at a trail that leads to escape and winds away from his life as he leaves it to the distance he’s trying to make.

Last night, Daniel made all the last preparations for what he completed this morning. As senior accountant he had all the right keys, all the right passwords, all the complete access he needed to empty the company’s tills. And he did.

The temptation had been there for years, luring him; neck-deep in the water of Tantalus, fruit just out of reach overhead. Resistance became thin with rust when his wife threatened to leave him. The holes widened and met when she did.

That was four months ago. Now he had money to go buy her back. He could buy her the much bigger house, the car that wasn’t a station wagon, the fine wine and pearls that she craved.

At the diner the waitress was big-smiled and friendly. She winked at him each time she refilled his coffee. She handled the whole counter herself and all of the booths. She worked hard and quick, efficient, kept her patience and poise through the grumpier crowd.

He asked her her name, then said, “Arlene, would you like to come along for a ride?”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said.

“Right now?”

“Now.”

The silence was riddled with short bursts of laughter between conversation. As they went through the last light of day and into the purpling sunset, the trees flew by the windows, stuck by their roots to the sides of the road, waving their branches, cheering them on and away.

She was told to fire him and she couldn’t tell the manager that she couldn’t fire him because they were dating and it would be, well, very awkward and probably impossible for her to do. She was that type of person who could not remain neutral about people. Particularly when good sex was involved.

It was easier by far to instead expend effort to make him look good. She added his name to projects after a few minutes’ discussion to make him aware of them. She ran ideas by him and guided him into making decisions that gave him credit. She ensured that it appeared he took short lunches and put in extra hours. She was so good at creating his cover that when it came time for promotions, his name led the list.

When she was laid off in the downsizing he offered his sympathy, made the small noises that spoke louder of whew, it’s you, not me! But he never called her again.

After several weeks of registering at all the job shops, answering ads after updating her resume, and sitting alone under a lap robe on the couch watching talk shows on daytime TV, she considered becoming more hard-nosed, more survival-focused. Each morning she’d lose her resolve.

She lost her apartment when she could no longer meet rent. She sold anything she owned that was salable. Then she got in her car and drove. Up one side of the coastline then across to the other and down. She ran out of money in Mexico.

Broke and near broken, she might have ended up as the sad subject of a country western song. Soft crumples when forced to fit in a box. Round edges turn into sharp corners. She was too smart to be sung about, or maybe it was just a case of survival and luck.

She worked at a small taco stand where she met a wealthy American tourist who happened to be looking for both assistant and wife. Luckily she fell in as much love as he did because she never did learn how to let someone go.

Word Count: 426

She was seventeen that year. She knew everything; knew nothing. Amazing how you can look backwards and see things the way they really were instead of how you perceived them when you were young.

She couldn’t have an abortion because she was Catholic. She couldn’t have the baby because her father would go nuts. She was afraid to go off on her own and her boyfriend wanted nothing to do with a wife much less a family. The least traumatic, the easiest, the choice most likely to affect only her and no one else was then, the abortion. As a Catholic, she decided that was the only just way to do it, accept the private pain as a personal penance.

A lost summer becomes small in the span of a lifetime though it never fades entirely from memory. At seventeen, her belly growing bigger to bursting, away from her family and friends, it seemed like three months lasted years. When she returned home it was only for a few weeks before she set out to college two states away. By then she had tasted distance, bitter and cold. Still, she came back every few weeks from the beginning till campus nearly became her new home.

In her freshman year she learned that what she’d expelled from her body was just a clump of dependent cells, a bloody mass, a tumor; very different than her concept of a sweet little baby. It was the same time she started sleeping in Sunday mornings after late, great, Saturday nights. It might have been guilt or it might have been new-found innocence that kept her from going to church. Whatever it was, she was changing, yet some of the personal pain stayed on in her soul.

She took a full time job at the firm where she’d interned. Came home for the Holidays and rushed back to her life with relief, leaving the girl that she’d been behind to walk streets made only of memory. She married a man she met through a friend where she worked. She got pregnant, never connecting the first time with this second, the difference too wide between the fearful despair and the joy of this welcome child.

Memory plays tricks on the mind and the past is as alive as the present. It was strange, she told no one and couldn’t explain it, but the baby reminded her more of her old high school love than the man who she’d married. She’d laugh it off but it made her wonder about parallel time.

Word Count: 129

In the cold gray of dawn the bare trees reach up to scratch the sky with their fingers, leaving holes for ghosts to float through. My mother, my father, my brother, my friends; then my lovers all looking for Heaven.

Heaven exists in my memory. Heaven was dinners of prime rib and lobster. Heaven was holidays warmed by the bodies of everyone laughing and sharing. Heaven was nights swirled in satin sheets on my bed.

Hell is there too. Loud streams of epithets sprung out of anger and hurt. Loud as the doors banging shut and the silence that hangs in the head.

Go back, I tell them, go back. Leave me in the still quiet of a dismal gray morning. There’s no Heaven left here anymore, only Hell.