Talespinning

SPEAKING IN TONGUES
Word Count: 385

What is she saying? The girl who is taking my money and giving me change. Yes, yes, Thank you and have a nice day, but there’s something else too, when we listen with our eyes. I’m just not real good at it still.

My mother and father were screamers, several decibels louder than anyone ever needed to be. Intensity, importance, all layered on top of whatever was said just by shivering the curtains a bit, or moving the walls. My sister and I would hide in the bathroom, hunkered down in the tub. We’d seen on TV how that’s where you run when there’s a tornado warning. Only we never learned to read warnings and ran when the rooms spun around.

I pass people slithering through the openings in the noon-crowded walk between banks, lunches, jobs. I’m slithering too but the wrong way it seems; those coming at me are stronger in number, more violent in their thoughts. One man dared me to touch him. One woman shrank from my accidental touch. It’s all in the eyes and I’m guessing and learning the language a blink at a time.

I caught the man’s eye just as I was pulling open the door to my office building. He turned his head but kept on walking by. He was with another man his age in conversation, nodding but arguing, the way words can let you do. I’d like to fuck you seven ways to Sunday, he said to me. I don’t think his friend caught that in their conversation. I’m not sure what I answered but I stood there with the door wide open even after he’d faced forward, falling back into place as only a piece inside the puzzle of the crowd.

All day I repeat what the man had said to me, wondering if I got it right. It sounds so familiar that after a while I wonder if I made it up in my head. In that area of brain that lurks in the frontal lobe.

That night I look at myself naked in the mirror. I stare into my eyes. I look like my father in some ways. I have his dark hair and deep-set eyes. It comes slowly, but it comes to me then. Where I’d heard the words before.

~~

Photo from Dorothee Lang’s Day 20 Cubes, a little messed with (distorted, as is life), after inspiring this piece for me today.

PIECES
Word Count: 365

There was the single hair she’d brushed off her shoulder in the hotel room in Delhi and hadn’t given it a second’s thought until now. Arielle stared at the broken finger nail, played with it, putting it back in place on her finger. Then she mentally said goodbye and dropped it on the ground. She got up and put some money on the table for the bill. The finger with the missing nail felt obvious, stunted, buzzing with its loss and clumsy with the handling of the money. She got up and left the outdoor cafe, wondering if this piece of her she’d leave behind in Paris was enough.

On the plane back home she slept. Skin cells snowing a trail behind her. She wondered as she waited for her luggage if she could follow herself back through the buildings, out the parking lot and straight to her car.

All of her time spent in travel, and even her routine daily life over the years produced places and the people crowded inside her mind. But time would fade the memories. Arielle started leaving bits of herself in places instead of places in bits and pieces of her mind. If some part of herself was always there, she would always be wherever she’d been. Never completely leaving her favorite places.

Mostly hair, nail clippings, DNA left on cup rims and doorknobs, Arielle consciously shed herself over places she loved. By the time she was twenty-eight she had settled in Amsterdam, Venice, Paris and most of the Middle East and India. She was forever in several provinces of China, and along most of the coast of Japan. By thirty she’d covered forty-nine U.S. states but took care not to leave a single cell of her own in Arizona.

Arielle was relaxed and confident with her progress of becoming a citizen of the world. Her hair grew back in enough to keep up with her obsession. Her nails were fashionably long. One day she realized she was lonely. With that came the realization she may be places where she’d never traveled. There was Alan, Matthew, and Charles and more and she wondered where she had been.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS
Word Count: 466

He packed his clothes, whatever he would need for a few days, and loaded up the car with a tent, a blanket, a blow-up mattress and their hibachi. He filled the car up with gas and picked up food, milk, coffee, and beer at the tiny supermarket at the edge of the last town before the state park. He paid the twenty dollars for the camping fee and stuck the ticket on his dashboard for crows and bears and forest rangers to see.

It was a get-away, a time to think things through, decide if they should split up after fifteen years and two kids. It was a time to find a pelican in the woods. That’s how he thought of it; he was searching for the pelican that would be his answer.

It took him until dark to put the tent up and then he had a hard time keeping a fire going. He ate a half-cooked hotdog on a hamburg roll. He finally crept onto the flat mattress because he’d lost the air hose and pulled a blanket between him and the cold night air. He settled down to think but fell asleep.

Which is too bad, because while he slept, a large female pelican did strut by his campsite wanting to talk.

The morning dawned grey and drizzly. He was proud of his pot of coffee but grumped down overcooked scrambled eggs. He kept the blanket wrapped around him for warmth until he realized he was only getting it wet. He lay down inside the tent and fell back to sleep.

Two pelicans came by, coughed politely in front of the tent, waited a few minutes, then left. He woke up a few minutes later. He sat and thought for a while.

On the one hand, he felt like a fixture, a couch, or maybe an easy chair in his own home. The kids had reached the age where he was a jerk. His wife seemed to always have headaches. They all seemed to swim around him in their little aquarium while he floundered around mowing seaweed and shoveling coral. That’s a dumb metaphor, he thought to himself. But I know what I meant.

On the other, what did he want that would make it all better? He sat and thought. He got up and went outside. He took a walk around the campsite, afraid to go out too far and get lost. He came back and opened a can of beans and stuck in two hotdogs. They were almost cooked before the fire went out. He ate and he thought. Then he packed up the car and drove home.

Which was a shame because the pelicans came by an hour later with a hot casserole and freshly made apple pie.

I AM A SHINING STAR
Word Count: 319

I can bend the willow trees and stir the oaks. I can even make it rain. I can lead all the cats in town into the river with a song but of course I wouldn’t do that. It’s only people that I don’t get along with. Them, I would.

Women tell me that my skirt’s too short because I have nice long legs and their’s are lumpy-kneed and veiny. They think because I’m only twenty that I don’t know anything at all. They snicker over husband jokes and even if I get the punchline I don’t let on. I never want to get like them. I hope I never do.

My mother is an Avon lady. She paints her face with quarter-inch grape lipstick samples and tiny packets made for a single application of sparkle purple eye shadow. She says she peddles Avon because it’s a really good product and because she enjoys helping people but it’s really for those samples. She doesn’t have the guts for going after what she really wants. She nibbles and licks at life with a tongue that’s only millimeters long.

My father is a corporate asshole. He goes wherever they send him and comes home stinking of booze and women. Well I don’t really know that but I’m sure he does because he loves to go on these business trips and my mother gets all pissed off about it but makes a roast with mashed potatoes and gravy and four different vegetables and some fancy crème brûlée dessert when he comes home. I even feel bad for her. It’s just so lame.

Neither one of them pay much attention to me even though I am an only child. If my mother would wash her face and look at me without her makeup, if my father would drink lemonade or ginger ale, they’d know that I can turn a rainbow upside-down.

RIVER RISING
Word Count: 347

So the river’s comin’. Get out, take your things, they tell us. Ain’t matter none to me. Start fresh all over again. Like we done before and before that.

“Mama, can I take Hildy?”

“Best you do. She sure cain’t swim.” That rag doll’s her world. She ain’t got nothin’ more valuable than that. “You go tell the others come home now. Now, you hear?”

Like spring cleanin’ I go through the house, pickin’ up this and that, mostly clothes for the kids and some things that like Hildy, I cain’t leave behind. Most stuff I just stick up high on the tops of shelves and furniture, figurin’ maybe the river won’t see it up there. Or maybe it’ll take it away.

Like it took Sam last time it rose up ragin’ at all the peoples that come too close and settle in. Like they owned it. Nobody can own the land nor tell the river where it oughta run. Ever now and then it comes back at you. Teaches you that soil you been standin’ on’s no better than sand. And no man’s no better than that neither.

The kids come trompin’ in, all talkin’ at once like a church choir out of harmony.

“Help me pack up some food for a few days. Go roll up them rugs and stick ‘em top of the dressers.”

They all complainin’ like I brung the rain all by my own self just to ruin the day.

The oldest one’s walkin’ ‘round with her bottom lip lickin’ the floor cause she wants to go be with that boy. “You stay here and help this family,” I tell her, “before you goes startin’ another one.” She flounces outta the room but I knows what she and he’s been doin’.

They come ‘round again, shoutin’ through bullhorns that we gotta move out right now. But they’s right. For folks like us, it don’t take much to pack up years into an hour’s warning. Things left behind ain’t worth nothin’. That’s what I says to myself. No more than if somebody died.