Talespinning

Word Count: 261

She looked through the closets and under the bed. She went through every dresser drawer and took everything off shelves to check along the walls and into dark corners. Desperate, she went through all the kitchen cabinets, the vanity and the linen closet in the bathroom. She pulled out each set of towels and shook them, refolded them back into neat piles. She looked under the bed again. She couldn’t find it anywhere.

“Did you look out in the hall?” asked her neighbor. “Maybe you left it in class,” suggested her best friend Irene. “No,” she said, and “no, I wouldn’t have,” she answered. She was getting quite grumpy with all the suggestions of where she should look. If anyone knew where it was, it was herself, after all. Though she appreciated the concern, it was all speculation and nothing helpful at all.

As the flowers outside bloomed and wilted, as the maple trees spread their tips into green fingers, changed polish to fiery red for the autumn, dropped in a swoon before winter, she search and searched without luck.

Irene told her, “You need to get out more, see the whole world outside of your narrow street, your three-room apartment, your laptop and virtual friends.”

“But I like my street, my home, my Facebook and twitter friends,” she said.

“Is that what makes you happy?” asked Irene.

She thought about it carefully before she shook her had and looked down with a barely audible “no.”

“Then find it elsewhere,” Irene said with a smile. “You might try looking outside.”

Word Count: 430

I counted only five stars in the western sky this morning, the rest lost to the reach of the slow rising sun. They cluster together as if there is safety in number, as if they could stand by in the safe glow of the moon. It doesn’t work that way.

We were just children, the oldest fifteen, the baby, two years. The moon was our mother, our father, the angry flame of the sun. Yet we survived, if dysfunctional, to grow into some form of adults.

I look at the faces in the soft glow of the candlelit table. A giant turkey, the glimmer of cranberry sauce catching the light. Conversations are discordant hums but the overall image is one of a family. There’s Lucy, the oldest, who saw more than the rest of us knew. Her pinched mouth holds back more than polite talk, more than the baby, now twenty-four, would ever have guessed since our father died when she was ten. She experienced only the sad illness of his last years and he’d mellowed, his strength drained, his anger turned into mere grumpy self-pity. But each of us had memories of dinners that exploded like land mines. A word, a look, a childish fidget that lit a fuse in his head.

This is the first family dinner without my mother seated at the head of the table. Why had we never questioned her, never sought explanation, never accused her of complicity in the fear and noise that was home? I think of her fragile nature, of her sparrow quick hopping about, of the skeletal frame of her that elicited pity rather than real understanding.

Yet here we are, free to examine, free to express our realities and still, there’s a cloud that covers the room like a fog to silence emotion. We pretend it didn’t exist, this past that we shared. We make small talk of small rare memories, like the time mom forgot to make gravy and forget how she sprang up and boiled skin and wings in a rush with water and flour, crying over the stove. Shaking with expectation. All that buried deep in the closets while the turkey shines in a glorious display of plenty. A delicious aroma that permeates the cloud, drenches it and all of us with selective recall.

Smiles and hugs at the door, then the silence of being alone. In the house, in each car, in each mind driving away from more than the past and desperately creating a new present that allows us each to be happy.

Word Count: 358

When the storm hit, they were each in different rooms of the house. Claude in his easy chair with his laptop and the TV speaking to the living room where no one was paying attention. Jeanine in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher with dinner plates and forks and knives and the one pan she trusted the machine to clean as well if not better than she would by hand.

The snow piled up higher, the fat flakes like acrobats forming airy but heavy wet layers of cold. One branch broke off the large maple with barely a sound. Then another and another as the weight tumbled them down into skeletal arms reaching up from the white graveyard in front of their house.

Just then, the power went out. Claude didn’t notice. Battery power took over his laptop and he continued working, his face lit up by the soft glow of the screen and the night light beneath the keyboard. Jeanine stopped midway of placing a plate in the rack which she found more by memory. Awareness of her surroundings led her straight to the cabinet in which she kept candles and flashlights for moments like this. Proficient as a blind woman knowing her kitchen, her world in darkness the same as in light.

They went to bed early, his battery power gradually dwindling, the room turning cold. Too early to start up the generator. She found the old quilt in the top of the closet. They huddled together in bed, spooning one way then the other; Claude was easily asleep but she was a restless sleeper and drew warmth from his body, barely waking him each time she moved.

In the morning he went into the kitchen, muttered that the coffee was weak. She’d forgotten the exact mix of perked coffee to water, put it back on the stove with a half scoop of additional coffee. She made toast in the frypan on their propane stove. Reminded him he couldn’t shower or shave until he got to the office.

In the quiet world after Claude left, Jeanine sat with a fresh cup of coffee, making a grocery list.

Word Count: 286

Eight people started the journey; only three of us made it to the end.

We were supposed to be doctors, lawyers, a couple accountants, a librarian and a pro football star. I was one of the lawyers. Jeffrey was the quarterback who made it to the big leagues and had several good seasons until he was found dead in a hotel room in Miami just before the big game.

Children make wishes. Adolescents have dreams. And college students make choices, take paths. There is that defining moment, after the campus has been selected, after the first year is sweated out and rolled into a ball and thrown in the back of the closet and a new outfit is worn.

I was planning on being a buyer at a high-end New York City department store. Lord and Taylor, or Bonwit Teller, or something internationally chic and expensive. The marketing courses turned me on. Questions tweaked me to the legalities. Law seemed so stable and pure at the time while merchandising began to seem sleazy.

Charmaine became a successful pediatrician and formed a marriage and a business partnership as well with Mark. Joe was an accountant who signed on with a corporation and eventually became CFO. Melanie was killed by a bus on the way to her job as assistant librarian out in Chicago’s East Side. Trudie was lost to her small hometown in Missouri and gave up her private accounting firm to produce numbers of kids. And Carl was disbarred for unethical practice in the handling of a career-making case for a large pharmaceutical company held responsible in the death of a child.

And me, I represented myself in Jeffrey’s murder trial and I lost.

Word Count: 387

The last time I saw her, her hair was aflame with sunlight. Funny how I’d never much been attracted to redheads until I saw her. Coppery curls that surrounded her face in an angelic halo with blue crystal eyes and skin the color of cream.

She was the first and last love of my life and we were seventeen at the time. You know, at that age, how the breath catches hold in your throat, how the thought of your life doesn’t move past the moment, how the light settles into each dusky night.

We married right out of college. She got a job at the bookstore while I went to school to earn my Masters and worked nights at the grocery store bagging and stocking shelves and sweeping the floors. Then I was a lawyer and she took her turn studying and staying up nights. Not a day went by without my loving her so bad it hurt but the years went by like hours. Before long we were two professionals with demanding careers and a humongous home dripping with crystal chandeliers I couldn’t reach with a ladder to change a burnt bulb.

She said it was a good thing we didn’t have children and she was moving to take a job out of state so all that was left to divide was our money and she wouldn’t be needing very much.

Yes, there was another man in this event as well, and he made enough to support her as well as two previous wives and three kids. Still, I liquidated stocks, remortgaged, balanced things right down the middle. Then she was gone and I was alone with the memory of flame-red hair until I saw her again many years later.

She was in town for her sister’s funeral and I had stopped by to pay my respects. We spoke for just a few minutes, the usual polite words ex-lovers make when they’ve been caught unaware. But all I kept thinking was how strange she looked as a blonde and I had to keep myself from asking her why? Then a miniature her came running up to her and she introduced me to her young daughter. She had curls of bright flame and eyes like blue crystal in a face the color of cream.

Word Count: 518

It’s Day #4 of the Great October Snowstorm over New England and our state’s still only halfway through restoring electricity for nearly a million customers in the cold dark. My neighbor’s been over twice for my one-pan version of an egg McMuffin and a spaghetti dinner. I’m melting snow for water to flush toilets and wash dishes and one-bowl whore-baths we’re taking. It takes about an hour to gather and melt enough snow on our propane kitchen stove to flush the tank. She’s wanting more coffee. She’s used to Kuerig; I serve blue enameled campfire perk.

She’s complaining of the cold though she has a propane fireplace she can warm herself by. Then I notice, as she tells me our unheated house is warmer than hers, that she’s layered like an artichoke and yet wears a dress and no socks. She’s hinted, we’ve offered, to let her stay overnight here with us. No heat, but company and hot meals and campfire style coffee. She complains of two flattened by the snowstorm bushes. She hasn’t noticed our huge maple tree in the front yard split in half.

There’s a generator at her house that she wonders if we could start up. She’s assured us her paid handyman got it ready and running a month ago prior to a hurricane. We shovel a path to the generator. My husband pulls it out and checks all the connections and dials and notes one thing that shouldn’t have been left as it was. He pulls and pulls and pulls but it won’t start. He sprays under the filter with starting fluid. It won’t run. He says it won’t run while she’s subtly telling me how the hired man “persevered, wouldn’t give up.” We finally give up and call her handyman who says yeah, he’ll come by, but he’d gotten it started with a battery pack. He comes by. He can’t start it.

Her daughter hasn’t called to check up on her at all. She lives 45 minutes away. The neighbor doesn’t call her either and I’m wondering why. Eventually they do come down and pick up the food the neighbor was making for a party. They pack up the food, leaving my neighbor behind.

She calls to tell me she’s staying at a friend’s house, a lady who also lives alone but has an operating generator. She calls the next day to tell me she’s stopped by her house and the phone works and she’s going back to her friend’s house to stay. Funny, she never asked about us.

In the dark dawn of Day #5 I stand outside looking up at the stars. There’s a sharp beeping sound that cuts into the silence. My neighbor’s carbon monoxide detector she put outside on her porch because she couldn’t stand listening to it inside and didn’t take out the battery. She’s gone and can’t hear it from her friend’s house, warm and snuggly and asleep. The rest of us listen to the constant beep and I’ll have to remember to go over and shut the one working damn thing off.

Word Count: 495

I awoke to the warm sun on my face through the train window and the bare rocking of the car as it clacked its way to the half-lost town. The view in the dawn morning was astonishing, the hills splotched with autumn color amid the dark furry green of the firs. It was incredibly beautiful, just as my mother had said.

From the window I looked down into the valleys where wet ribbons of river wound through the gradual mountains that grew as we climbed higher. I was going to see the town where I was told I was born. Where my mother had lived in the welcoming arms of family until she had me and all the strength and perseverance she’d learned against the struggles of a remote mountain village was not enough to withstand the scorn of bearing a child out of marriage. Not for herself, for she could have handled the looks and the muttering from church ladies and store clerks and former friends; for me, who she felt was born innocent and deserving of better.

Within an hour the train screeched and whistled its way to a stop. I picked up my few bags and stepped off the train onto a station platform that looked straight from something you’d see in the movies. An old cowboy western perhaps, or the dramatic loneliness of a romance where lovers are doomed to part. I asked the porter where I would find a place to stay and headed in that direction.

I registered for a room and the woman at the desk looked up quickly when I gave her my name. Could she have known my mother, have been one of her friends at the time? Or an enemy…the jilted girlfriend of the man suspected of being my father. My mother never told me his name.

I wandered through the small shops on the main street through town, reading faces, looking for places that might seem familiar through stories. The center square was just as my mother had described it, but the gazebo was shabby and the stone pavement was riddled and broken with unconcerned care. At a small diner I looked at a phone book I’d asked the waitress to see. No one with my name, though I supposed her sisters had decently married and her brother may have moved out of town.

I had planned to spend a few days there but there was a general feeling of discomfort that hung like a low-flying cloud. No one spoke to me unless directly questioned and the questions were met with a squinting of eyes and long pauses that didn’t encourage any more.

The next morning I was back on the train heading out. I never told my mother I’d been there. I never told her that there was nothing left to cling to of her past because the way she remembered it was the way she wanted it to remain.

Word Count: 373

The morning hums of generators, those who have singing out to those who have not. The dark is expansive, extending to all edges of vision. Water, heat, but no lights. The odd storm of deep snow in October has taken down trees, branches held up by power lines threatening to let go their grasp. They’ve already lost power.

We slept under blankets so heavy neither one of us moved in the bed. My body is sore from the weight. Clinging to body heat to keep warm. The spooning we so often start out with but move away from during the night as being too uncomfortably hot becomes the position we find ourselves in in the morning, unwilling to let go and move on to the day.

Ten hours of sleep because there’s nothing much else to do. I wake to use the bathroom, already having learned not to flush until necessary. Gallon wine jugs are lined up on the floor, ready to refill the tank. In summer storms, we used pool water to replenish the jugs. This is much better, an unlimited amount of fresh snowfall I’ve gotten so efficient at collecting and boiling. Still surprised at how much snow is needed to melt down into a gallon.

We have no heat, but a gas stove for cooking, an old style percolator for coffee and tea. And soup. So many odd soups from the combination of food from the freezer that we’ll need to use up.

My husband is grumbly. Cleaning the driveway with the help of a neighbor since his own snowblower refused to start. His disdain of computers is starting to mellow when he finds that the world so close to one’s fingertips is suddenly cut off. Our phone works but few that we call can answer; their cell phones and rechargeable land lines aren’t working.

It’s strange seeing the trees standing tall with bright yellow leaves once they have shaken the snow from their hair. Some haven’t made it and branches stick up like toothpicks out of the ground.

It’s a once in a lifetime storm. Different than anything else we’ve experienced. Something to talk about years up ahead. And I will remember the warmth of his body against mine.