Talespinning

CHANGE COMES TO WILLOWBROOK DRIVE
Word Count: 487

It is an unusual Tuesday morning in this neighborhood of town. People move along like spiders with their prey. Mrs. Smith is in her nightgown with her shell of jacket for propriety, pulling a child’s red wagon filled with cardboard she spent hours cutting to the proper size last night. Her fluffy bunny slippers shuffle down her driveway punctuated by the clunk-clunking of her cane.

Her neighbor has been up pre-dawn, dressed, the lights burning in the cellar where he wraps old dried-out paint buckets as he would a present. To disguise their hard metal edges. To sneak them in while he still has the chance. He plushes bubble wrap and papers soft around each, making sure his address labels on the magazines have been cut off. These he puts into a separate, special bag.

The morning mingles sounds of crowing roosters with rolling wheels and clinking bottles. The long black driveways come alive with sleepy people crawling crablike to the curb. Laden with their glass, their metal, and acceptably numbered plastic and their magazines and papers in unbound piles and piles. They cannot let it go another week, for next week starts July.

The decree has been made. The notice sent without much notice. This is the very last Tuesday before the new garbage rules will take effect. It took a dozen years to get used to washing out bottles. Not pour bacon grease into a soup can. It took adjustment of reading daily news online, then magazine subscriptions would be expired, and useless gizmos and broken chairs would have to hang around and talk amongst themselves and wait three months for large trash pickup day.

The new law of the land has been laid. Two barrels each per family, one blue for recyclables (all cut into even smaller parts to make them fit inside) and one green for real and sorted honest-to-God garbage. The phones at Town Hall will be ringing across the land with questions as to whether this or that is garbage and what type of garbage this garbage really is.

Meanwhile, the evil in men’s hearts are brought to surface. The most honest of us still attempt to sneak something through while we still can. Thus all this ant-like activity as the sun strains to rise about us. We scuttle back inside when we are done.

It doesn’t change with growing up. Bubble-wrapping paint cans is just as bad as breaking crayons. And you respond the same. That rapping of the heart as it beats for escape out your ears. The breath that sounds as loud as thunder waiting for the light to streak and flash like fireworks as it hits the ground. We lock our doors, peek through the weave of curtains, watch to see if we’ll be caught or if we’ll get away with it and breath a sigh of relief and resignation.

THE MATTRESS
Word Count: 317

It was silly to worry about it, to feel shame. This she told herself again and again before finally deciding that they absolutely had to buy a new mattress set.

The problem was not with a new one, they’d already shopped price, and firmness, and spring count, checked out the new memory foam styles and the ones with two-sided temperature settings and even one made completely of down. Delivery dates and times were negotiated. The problem was what to do with the old.

Twenty years of a happy marriage leave their mark on a mattress. Rightfully so, she told herself. But still, Sister Marie Rose’s face glared through her nightmares, pointed fingers and clacked rosary beads at her dreams.

“We could let the delivery men take it away,” she had offered. She knew there could be snickers and winks but from two men she would never see again, or at least not for another twenty years.

“And pay twenty-five dollars for the service?” he said. “No, we’ll just put it out at the curb on large trash pickup night.”

But she imagined the reaction of not only the trash-men who she waved to if she happened to see them, but the neighbors driving by.

“We’ll put it out after dark, how’s that?” he said.

“But what about Tuesday morning?”

So she sat huddled with her coffee by the living room window, hidden from the rising sun by the curtain, peeking out at the sound of every car and truck driving by. When at long last the squealing, clanking, rumbling belch of the garbage truck hissed to a stop at the end of her drive, when the mattress and box spring had been loaded and the two men got back into the truck, she exhaled, cut short by the beep-beep of the horn and the wave of one gloved hand out the truck window.

THE FOOT
(for Hank, with love and understanding)
Word Count: 529

Mr. Zefferelli kept his amputated foot in a wooden box stored on a shelf in his closet. It had been cut off just below the knee because of an infection that wouldn’t heal. He owned the grocery on the corner of Main and Seventh and I knew him since I was just a kid. My mother went there for the bread, my father loved his lean pastrami and I just went along until I was old enough to stop in by myself with a quarter for a lemon ice.

No one knew exactly how it started, a cut from a dropped knife, a stepped-on nail as he was sweeping up, a playful scratch from a kitty-claw that had just disemboweled a mouse. He told several different stories and each of us believed whatever we liked the best.

It gave him trouble so he sat in a corner directing traffic sometimes, his right leg propped up on a second chair, cash register on his lap. Sometimes he’d be gone for a few days and the store would be closed. Then he’d be back and hobbling around, his foot newly wrapped in bandages. When it became a case of life or the leg he made up his mind. And somehow he got it back and took it home.

It was horrifying. It was fascinating. It was a real life scary story. Mr. Zefferelli’s phantom foot was the step we heard behind us in the dark. The groan on the stairs outside in the hall.

Mr. Zefferelli never got over missing his leg. About a month after the amputation, Mrs. Zefferelli put a notice on the store window that they’d be closed the coming Saturday for a funeral service. All friends and valued customers were invited. They were going to finally bury Mr. Zefferelli’s foot.

My father refused to go but my mother and I were there. She out of some sort of understanding, me out of curiosity. The church turned down the request for a Catholic Mass, but Mr. Zefferelli paid someone from another parish to come in and officiate.

Mrs. Zefferelli was sitting there solemn and a bit wet around the corners of her eyes. Mr. Zefferelli had the look of apocalyptic devastation. He just stared at the small wooden box as if his life was in it. I went over and held his hand. I told him I was sorry for his loss.

He heaved a sigh that shook me to my toes. “That foot has skipped along the hillside paths in Sicily,” he said. “Along with its twin brother it stepped upon a ship and held me up through seas that rolled and boiled it to America. It found this little corner where we pinned our hopes and dreams to sell the freshest produce at the most honest prices. It took me up and down the stairs of the house we never thought we could afford. It chased the little boys I’m proud to call my sons. It followed everything my heart asked it to do.”

I thought about what he said and told him I understood. And now, when I am older, I really do.

THE WOMAN WHO COLLECTS CHERRY PITS
Word Count: 780

The woman who collected cherry pits wore woolen skirts all year around. She wore nylon stockings rolled down and knotted at the knee the way everyone’s grandmother’s mother did at one time. She had no name that anyone knew of but answered to “Cherry” or “Cheri” or “Addie” sometimes. You would see her walking in front of the old-fashioned five-and-dime where things now sell for two dollars and up.

I’m home for the summer with my usual job at Jonas’ Landscaping. I like working outside. When it rains, they have us work downtown on the green, or the church gardens where I planted some wild garlic in with the delphinium and astilbe just because.

Summer’s are weird. We regress back to the dumb high school kids we were before we went off to college to gain knowledge and world savvy. But on campus, the beer tastes the same, the parties are still loud, and a lot of the teachers are still pompous pains in the ass. It’s a sense of freedom balanced with a sense of aloneness and we head home to come up for air and answer to nicknames we haven’t been called since we left.

Addie swept by one day as I was weeding the circles planted with petunias around every damned lamppost in town. She was singing to herself, high and soft so that no one really could make out the words. I felt the swoosh of her skirt on my back as she shuffled by, heard a rattling, clicking sound. Then it stopped.

“Oh my,” I heard. “Oh my.”

She was hunched a bit, one hand clung to a fence.

“You okay?” I asked. I went over to her, had to bend to look into her face. It was as gray as her hair, punctured by blue-blue-blue eyes.

“If I could just sit for a minute,” she said.

We shuffled up the walk to a stone bench in front of the Episcopalian Church. Her arm felt pretzel-fragile, my hand on her back like tapping a balloon in a breeze. I knew that if I let go, she would fly up into the sky.

We sat. I watched her, still holding onto her arm. “I’m all right, child,” she said, and stuck her hands in the large and deep patch pockets of her sweater. Her fingers moved inside, as if praying on rosary beads. The tick-tick of rattle and clicking started again.

“Can I get you some water?” I thought she might have become overheated. So much clothing must have been hot on the spiderweb of her body in this warm June sun. I poured some water into a cup from the pack on my bike. She sipped at it delicately, as a hummingbird sips from a bloom.

“Feel any better?” I asked and she nodded, handed the empty cup back to me and her hands crept back into the cave of her pockets. Tick-tick, I heard, tick-tick.

I asked her where she lived and she told me. I asked her if she had family in town, she said no. I asked her if she was married, had any children, and were those cherry pits in her pockets and if so, why. I wanted to stall her, to make sure that she was all right to go on. But too, I don’t think anyone ever asked her who she was before now.

“I was the senior prom queen,” she said. “Bobby McCutcheon and I were going steady back then. My dress was pink as cherry blossoms, and he brought me a double gardenia to wear on my wrist. He went away to the war but he asked me to marry him and I wore his ring and wrote to him every day.” She stopped. I waited. She seemed to have forgotten she was talking or maybe she was thinking of things she couldn’t let fly into the bright summer day. Like the photo you find in a pile of Kodachrome memories where you climb in and live for a while.

I helped her stand up and watched to make sure she was steady. She stopped every five feet or so and dropped something along the path. I followed her. She was dropping cherry pits. I caught up with her when she stopped by a bench. “Planting trees?” I asked. I thought of Johnny Appleseed.

“Oh my,” she said. “Oh my. No, we all need some way of finding our way back home.”

I really don’t know if I’m right but I believe that I understood her. And I knew for me, it would probably be the wild garlic.

THE RAINDROP IN ITS MOMENT
Word Count: 253

She said, “This morning I watched a single raindrop suddenly lit up by the rising sun. It flickered like a firefly, clinging to the tippity-tip of a new grown spurt of branch. An old tall fir tree dressed in its spring baby-green coat. The raindrop quivered in a soft east breeze, clinging to its host, flashing green and yellow, red and blue as a prism in the light. It hung there like a diamond earring–likely hangs there now–but as the sun toiled its way into the sky, lost the perfect angle of the light, and with only less than a minute’s sparkling life, went out. I’m sure I couldn’t find it now.”

He said, “Oh really?” and went back to concentrating on the laptop on the kitchen table.

She said, “Do you have to go to work today? Why don’t we take a walk, go for a swim, drive into the city for chocolate ice cream?”

He said, “Oh. . . no, I can’t. I have a lot of work to do today.”

She thought, I saw a raindrop gleaming in the morning sun. Against the dark old fir tree it shone for that instant. I wonder what it’s like to shine, even for a moment.

He thought, It’s only because you’re so young that you don’t understand.

She said, “I know. I just thought it would have been nice.”

He said, “Maybe some day next week we will.”

She brightened, her smile lighting up her face for just a moment.

THE THING ABOUT PEACHES
Word Count: 486

He struggled up the three stairs and into the kitchen, the screen door banging shut behind him.

She was standing at the stove, stirring a huge steaming pot that came almost up to her chin. She turned around at the noise, stared as he shuffled past her and put the heavy load down on her clean kitchen table. “What you got there, old man?” she asked, hurrying over to clean the dirt that knocked off the old bushel basket as he plunked it down.

“Peaches. Art’s got a shitload of peaches this year,” the man said proudly. He moved out of her way as she cleaned around him. She rinsed out the rag and knelt down to wipe up the clods of soil he’d tracked in across the linoleum squares.

“I wasn’t planning on doing no canning this year,” she grumbled. She was scowling to show him she was angry at him, at his fifty years of presumption.

“Look at them,” he said. “They’re perfect this year. You don’t get them like that every year.”

“Thank God for small mercies,” she said. She wouldn’t look at the peaches.

“Eh, what’re you bitchin’ for? You like eating them in the middle of winter.”

“You sure do.” She was pulling out plates and forks and knives from cabinets and drawers. “Get them off the table, will you–if you want supper.”

He lifted the weight with a loud grunt, set the basket down on the floor in a corner. “They ain’t that much trouble to do up.”

“You ain’t never done them!” she said. Her grunt was softer, more a hmmph! of annoyance. He washed his hands at the sink. She set the table after wiping it clean again.

They ate in silence with a focus on the task, each moving in their own steady routine. He ate all his meat and then the potatoes before he started in on the carrots and cabbage. She moved like a carousel horse around the plate, dipping a fork in each in turn.

“Coffee?” she asked, though he always had it after a meal.

“You got pie or somethin’?” he asked.

“Blueberry,” she said, already pulling it off the counter. She counted the coffee scoops into the old aluminum percolator and filled it with water. He pushed back his chair and leaned back with the day’s newspaper in hand.

She finished washing and stacking the dishes, turned down the coffeepot on the stove, and stood waiting for it to turn the right color brown in the little glass bubble on top. She folded and hung the dishtowel. She looked down at the basket, bent over and picked out a peach, straightened up and held it up to her nose and sniffed. It was gold blushing crimsony-orange and felt fuzzy and firm in her hand. She glanced over to the old man quickly, to make sure he hadn’t seen her smile.

LOVE IS
Word Count: 365

The girl’s name was Maricela and the man’s name was Cruz. They were the only two people in the world.

Every day Cruz would bring Maricela a gift, some small something that had caught his eye, a white plush-centered daisy, a shiny copper penny, a poem. She would accept his offerings with delight. She wove the daisies into a necklace, turned the penny into enough to buy a large fish for their dinner. The poem she sang into a song.

Their world was fresh green and flowing. Bountiful. Clean. Their sky was rainbowed and puff-clouded, sun-yellowed in morning, coral and mauve-painted as it darkened with night. The nights, oh the nights were sweet-scented with love.

Before Cruz, there hadn’t been Maricela and before her, there hadn’t been Cruz. Life started in the one instant when they connected and it rolled out before them, each day a paving stone into forever.

One day Cruz found a caterpillar, fat and fuzzy brown and picked it up in his hand. “Ah,” he said, “she’ll now have a pet, to stroke and to cuddle, to keep her feet warm as the summer fades into the fall.” He carefully put the caterpillar into his shirt pocket, along with a ballpoint pen and a green glass coke bottle he found.

“Close your eyes, dear one,” he said when he came home. Maricela closed her eyes and smiled as he took her hand and held it palm up in his. Then he placed the fuzzy little caterpillar in the center of her open hand.

The gates of hell flew open. Maricela shrieked, opened her eyes, threw the caterpillar flying across the room where it smashed and dribbled down the wall. She cried, hopping up and down in surprise and fear.

Cruz was heartbroken of course, and it took him a long time to calm her; a cup of tea, a primrose plucked from the edge of their garden, a host of soothing words, an apology, a promise, and dinner and dishes and all. Maricela stopped shaking and crying, forgave him and assured him of her undying love. But life for the two was never the same again.

AFTERMATH
Word Count: 353

I told them that I saw Russell’s face in all my dreams. That like a wax doll he shows up at a party right in the middle of a living room. He’s sitting on the couch. A death mask, white and hardened, eyes closed. No one talks to him. They told me if I didn’t think I was ready to take the finals I could take them the following week. Would that be better? Yes, it would. I hadn’t studied.

The first time I saw Russell was at the wake before the funeral. He was the older brother of my friend Janice who had been the driver. Four of us went together to the service to see her and according to the school counselors, to bring closure. He didn’t look like her at all, red hair flaming against the white satin pillow. Hers is blackish-brown. He didn’t look real. His hands looked like a mannequin’s, wound together in rosary beads. He’d been killed instantly. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t smiling.

I told them that I saw him screaming. That he wanted something from me and I didn’t know what. It wasn’t true. He only came back when I closed my eyes and tried hard to remember what he looked like.

Janice didn’t finish out the semester. We lost touch over the summer. I wondered if she had nightmares of the dark road being swallowed up by her car.  I started having bad dreams of speeding down a road and hitting a tree head-on. I’ve been by the place where Russell died, still marked with the dried flowers and melted candles and goodbye notes that aren’t readable anymore.

I think of Russell a lot. I want to know him better. I reread the obituaries I’ve cut out. The prayer folder from the service. He had been home on leave for a few days. He’d been a basketball star in college. His picture shows him smiling and his eyes are bright and friendly. I think we would have dated, fallen in love, maybe even gotten married. Our kids would have had red hair.