Talespinning

CHE
Word Count: 362

She once shaved her head and renamed herself “Che.” They threw her out of Sociology for boisterous behavior. The last time she started with a cry for revolt from the top of the desk. Some joined in because it looked like fun and because young blood needs its own veins to travel. She had a tattoo of a raised fist on her butt and of a chain on her breast. She didn’t go to her own graduation. It was in protest, of course, but nobody noticed her missing.

After college she only changed strategy, not course; she voiced her views over wine with friends and at small town meetings in hot crowded rooms where the chairs were meant to elude comfort in every position. She learned to bite back opinions in the office. She learned not to vent to a lover. She realized hair that was long was as easy as cropped and that no one but a lover would admit it was feminine and sensual. Symbols like this lost their meaning. Required no fight anymore.

People passed through the hole of her life, rarely getting hooked on a nail. She never wondered, never held on, let their spirits go free from her tether. Men and even a woman slept in her bed but just long enough to weave loneliness into the sheets. Her friends slipped away into families and out of her reach.

She was forty-six and sometimes something inside her still flared up like heartburn, a bubble that comes up as a burp. When she opened her mouth to let it out as a speech, no one was there to hear it. She turned around and looked behind her, at the trail she had walked and she peeked into the rooms she had filled and she knew she had to make a decision.

Nowadays, in her sixties, retired and demure, she can be seen picking plump tomatoes in her garden, gathering green beans and collards and kale. In her mind she is waging both sides of a war, but if you drive by and wave, she will look up and smile. On her mailbox is the single name “Che.”

EYE OF THE HORSE
Word Count: 367

In the eye of the horse she saw herself as a thin golden princess, a waif wrapped in a butterfly wing dress with rose petal sleeves.

In the mirror she herself was a horse, long in the tooth, close-set eyes with a flurry of lashes, and an unruly mane of brownish-black hair. And rotund. Most decidedly round and rotund.

There was one single date in her first year of high school, a boy with bumps on his skin. She suspected they melted down his throat from his face, splayed out in a fan on a white hairless chest. She thought about that quite a bit until it became an idea she could find quite interesting. Fodder for dreams till the big night.

He left her at the buffet table holding two overfilled cups of pink punch. She waited what she thought was a reasonable time but sat down on the floor after an hour. She drank one cup of punch, believing it to be hers, then commenced to finish the other. She pulled herself up by the table leg, and looked around for the door. Hope hadn’t yet deserted her heart–that came quite a number of years later–and she did search for his face in the crowd of the room, though no one would meet her eye.

That was many years ago and the memory of it all still nourished her soul. She still wondered where he’d wandered off to, sad that he had not found his way back. She’d worn a lovely chocolate brown velvet dress that set off her eyes. She still has it.

So her dreams are patchworked of the past with little room left for a future. The squares are laid out like an album of photos glimpsed for that moment, caught by a camera’s eye. There are borders of present, sturdy and wide like her hips, that hold the memories together. But the fringe, the fingers of future, lay raveled and torn.

Instead of false hope, of faded dreams of what life could have been, perhaps with the bumpy boy of her youth, she looks in the eyes of the horse and believes she sees what she is.

CHANGE OF HABITS
Word Count: 361

He was just an old man who liked children, that’s all. Caught up in the witch hunts of the eighties.

“I know you didn’t,” said his wife, Mary, “I know you couldn’t,” and she stood by him up through the third year of his sentence then left him and went to live in a state she picked by the spin of a dial.

When he got out he was even older, broken in three different parts. His intellectual mind understood the mis-justice but his pure heart never could. His physical self he just took to a place across country where no one remembered and so couldn’t whisper or point.

He walked with a limp and his eyesight was poor. His bones were a rack for his clothes. He traversed sidewalks with a shuffle and drag making wide circles around the children as if he were playing a game. He worked as a sweeper with an office cleaning crew working dark to dawn. He did his job well and he shopped early morning for groceries then went home and ate and slept through most of the day. On Saturdays he’d go to the library and on Sundays he’d ride a bicycle out to the park and sit on a blanket and read. That was the sum of his life now, the sum of all his degrees.

One night he was sent under new contract, a middle school in the center of town. He was assigned the second floor classrooms and his knees shook as he went up the stairs. He flicked on the lights in the hall and along with the vision came the chalk scents, the cold metal feel of the lockers, the buzzing of the fluorescent bulbs. He opened the first door on his right and went into the classroom. He left the cleaning cart out in the hall.

Voices and sounds came like breezes that swept through his mind, picking up leaves and memories and making them real. He stood at the desk of the teacher. Filled each empty seat that he faced.

“Open to page 373,” he said right out loud, and then he started to cry.

SCARECROWS AND STRAWMEN
Word Count: 539

From the window over the kitchen sink he watched her and his heart sank, settling like a stone skipped over a pond. He felt the surface ripples circling outward to the edges of his being and fade away.

She stood in the garden, the hoe left lying as in death where she’d dropped it. Her body thin in clothes that hung on her, her arms outstretched, a living scarecrow. He couldn’t help the thought. He closed his eyes in shame.

“Julie! Julie?” he called. But even as he did he turned to go and get her. At times like this he wasn’t sure she heard him.

“Julie,” he said softly, not wanting to startle her as he walked up behind her. He came around to face her. She was smiling and he knew it was not for him but for some other world and being that only she could see. He gently brought her arms down to her sides and led her back up to the house. She never fought him anymore.

He sat her at the kitchen table and set a cup and saucer at her place. It was from her Blue Willow collection, the only one she’d still touch. He filled the teapot, set it on to boil. It wasn’t fair, he thought, and this time he genuinely meant it wasn’t fair to her. She looked to him, at peace, but elsewhere. It struck him that she’d likely found the escape for all humanity, an answer to the stress of living. She went through the motions of sipping the half-cup of tea he’d poured out for her.

He brought her upstairs and washed her hands and brushed her hair and put slippers on her feet. He helped her lay down on the bed. He hoped she would sleep. He hoped she would wake up as herself. He left the door halfway open, went back downstairs and after a little while, went back to writing.

She slipped out of bed and went to sit by the open window, staring at the ferocity of the sudden late afternoon rain, the gentle flickers of lightning that preceded a deep rumbling roll. She wondered if it could find her, reach through the window and illuminate her too, like the sky. Or the small Virgin Mary light she had on her bedstand as a child. She stood up and crossed her hands over her heart, staring up at the rain. That’s how he found her.

The cruelty was that sometimes she was normal for weeks at a time. He often thought that with the gradual dip into insanity, he could cope better. Get used to it a personality at a time. Scarecrow or Mother of God, it didn’t matter, but it was the Julie that peeked through in between, stayed long enough for him to ache with love of her, then disappear into somebody else.

It was that, that in and out of his reality that she flitted through like a butterfly, stopping to sip of him but eluding his reach, it was that which gave him his poems and his stories. The collection would be named “Julie, in All Her Colors” but it meant Julie, as she splinters into forms.

KNOCKOUT
Word Count: 444

Two days after she held a pillow over her infant granddaughter’s face as she was sleeping, Edna Waters tied a cement block to her ankle and drowned in the pond behind her house. I agree it was the smartest thing to do. You don’t come back from killing your own grandchild, really. What would you say? Oh I’m perfectly fine now, it was just a bad time in my life and I forgot to take my medication.

I think her family felt much the same way. Else someone might have thought to consider that she might be suicidal. She had been left home alone. Her husband Joe ran out to get some groceries. They knew the police would be arresting her any day. While Edna double-knotted ropes around her ankle, he was in the Super-D wondering if he should still buy the big half-gallon milk.

They didn’t find her right away. When he came home he took a nap. To be honest, I don’t think he really wanted much to see her then; it was a heartache and loyal love itself could not penetrate deep enough to comprehend her mind. Their son said he did forgive her but everyone was still in shock of course.

Joe woke about an hour later and went downstairs, expecting to see her likely starting dinner. Some necessary things are automatic. He didn’t even think about the knives. He went from room to room before he called her name, finding it stuck like a dry pretzel in his throat. He went out and checked the garage and all around the house, noticing as he walked that she hadn’t weeded the flower beds in quite a while. He called louder and circled around again, went back inside and did the same, this time going down to the cellar where he doubted she would be. Then he called his son.

It was certainly a double tragedy, like getting hit with a one-two punch right in the middle of your stomach. Many thought that really, it was more a one-two-three. They gathered around in comfort and collective grief for a couple weeks. Then Edna’s husband suddenly found himself alone. He poured himself a cup of last night’s coffee. Heated it in the microwave until it started sparking and cracking light and noise. He almost burned his fingers on the cup until he found out where she’d kept the hotpads.

He wrote down “coffee – less than 5 min” on a little notepad they’d left him by the stove.Then he opened the refrigerator and pulled out the milk, surprised at how light-weight it felt in his hand.

(First publication rights belong to Wilderness House Literary Review)