Alice and the Cat

Photo Credit: Morgufile by Duggan Arts

By 10 am, the coffee tasted like ashes and spent purpose. Also, it was cold. Ever hopeful, Alice emptied the carafe into a mug and stuck it into the microwave. Reheated, it had the effect of a re-gifted fruitcake, wrapped up in a wrinkled bag. Wrinkling her nose, she tried it. Now, it tasted like the color brown. She placed the mug on the counter and moved on to other things.

She had spent the morning in service of tasks that nobody wanted to do, tasks that she hated, and which would all soon be undone. Sinks were scrubbed clean with the cleanser that felt like toothpaste and ground porcelain under her gloves. Floors were mopped at with mops that probably spread more germs than they took up. Everything lying on the ground was swept into a dustpan and tossed out. In the small house, bodies bumped into one another, let out deep, violent sighs and passed in anger on their way to straighten something else.

It was Saturday.

It was done now. It had reached the starting point again. Now the destruction of the house could begin from a fresh place. Alice's husband Bill had fled, disappeared into the bathroom or his office, some place where no one could ask him to do anything else. Her teenage sons wore headphones somewhere, unavailable and detached from the world of endless chores. If there was to be no coffee, she supposed she could make some tea. Or try to start her writing—her long-neglected fantasy novel. That got moved off the list every weekend. Nothing had been written on it for months. Alice picked a tea cup from the cupboard and looked out the window hopefully, as if for the presence of a distraction to save her from boredom of her house. It was then that she saw the cat.

What was unusual was that the cat was standing upright. She shook her head, closed her eyes tight, blinked hard and opened them again. When she opened them, the cat was still there. It stood on its hind legs, not awkwardly, but with perfect comfort, as if leaning casually on the post of a wooden fence. It was a tabby—ginger, ordinary-looking except for being large. It had shortish hair and an unkempt look about it, not neglected, but as if it had been busy doing very absorbing things. It turned then and looked at her. She dropped her cup.

The cat looked directly at her, the way she imagined Nixon might have looked at Kennedy. It met her gaze. Assessing her, it found her somewhat wanting but did not look away. You're the one to deal with here, its eyes seemed to say. It approached the door. Standing in her kitchen, surrounded by the three triangular wedges that had been her china cup, she tried to process what she was looking at. The cat walked casually, almost swaggered. Their legs, she thought, should not allow for upright movement. That should be impossible. Several old factual books on cats she'd once possessed traveled through her head. The cat, still walking, disappeared into the blind spot of her doorstep. She waited for a sign, a bell, unsure what to do, but no sound came. Finally, overcome by curiosity, she took a deep breath and walked toward her door.

Opening it, she wondered—should I say hello? And in what tone? Conversational? Inquiring? Hostile? As if talking to a child? As soon as the door was opened, though, the cat, without comment, sauntered past her into the house. It came in and entered the kitchen. How odd, she thought. How very odd. What next? Should I offer it some food? Will it like milk?

The cat wanted something. He stood there and stared at her. For half a moment, a chill came over Alice. Was she in a horror movie? What was this cat about to do? What could it do? It was a cat. What did it weigh—ten pounds? Twelve? She dismissed the thought.

"Do you want—would you like—some milk, perhaps?" she finally ventured, unsure what to do.

The cat's brow wrinkled—an expression of amusement perhaps, or assent? She wasn't sure. She walked the few steps to the open cabinet where bowls were carefully displayed and selected a green  bowl for the cat. She opened the refrigerator and found a bit of milk. Would it have preferred the half-and-half, she wondered, as she poured a little in the bowl. This is two percent. I know they can get diarrhea. Is that from the fat, or simply from the lactose in the milk? Turning, she considered the problem of presenting the bowl to this cat. Should she offer a bowl on the floor to an animal who walked upright and entered her house with the self-confidence of a long-lost cousin come back home? No, she decided to set the bowl at the counter where there was a bar stool.

The cat accepted this. He strolled to the bar stool and climbed on up, then sat casually, lapping the milk with his curved pink sandpaper tongue with his front paw resting on the counter top  What on earth shall I talk about, Alice began to fret.

"What brings you here?" she asked the cat nervously, as he finished up his bowl. No reply came immediately so she added, "Bill is allergic to cats." That was rude, she realized and reddened just a bit.

Still there was no reply. The cat looked at her. His gaze was penetrating. He looked right into her heart and soul. For a full minute, their eyes met in an exchange. At first, Alice was filled with anxiety. What meaning was she supposed to derive from this speechless stare? What was to be the nature of her reply? Then, all of a sudden, with full understanding, she knew.

She heard stirring upstairs. The bathroom door opened. Eminem could be heard blaring from a bedroom door. She looked away and back at the cat.

"There's very little time," she said. It nodded its assent.

She stood up, quickly, and grabbed her purse, then took her laptop and her writer's notebook, already in their case.

"I'm ready," she said to the cat.

The cat nodded again and waited while she opened the front door. The street was empty as the two  of them got in her car. The cat did not buckle up.

"Show me where I'm going," she told the cat.

He nodded. They pulled out of the drive.

Inside the house, it was lunch time before Alice's absence was noted by her husband and the kids.

"Aaaaaalllliiiiice!" called Bill from up the stairs. "Where aaaare you?" But there was no reply.

"I want Mom to make macaroni," said one of the teenage boys, kicking the broken cup out of his way.

"Well, you do it, Paul," said the other. "I have no idea how."

Paul opened the refrigerator.

"Well, I can't. Somebody drank all the damn milk."








 

A Cloak of Scarlet Velvet: a story for Mimi, my sister-in-law

Photo Credit: Morguefile by ren

In winter, Elsa wore a cloak of scarlet velvet. The cloak shone like the moon on water. It moved with a sound like the rustling of grass. Gathered at her throat and tied with a satin ribbon, it was punctuated in a hood, which framed her face. The cloak swept downward until it reached her calves and fell elegantly about her legs as she walked. It was Victorian tea rooms, teddy bears and Red Riding Hood. It was timeless and perfect. In the cloak, Elsa was unassailable.

Elsa was ten. The cloak had been a gift from Grandma, the kind of thing one only gets once in a very few years. When she opened the box, a stillness fell over the family room.

"Elsa," said her mother in a voice like the whooshing of the air from a balloon, "that is very special. I hope you will take very good care of it."

Of course Elsa would take good care of the cloak her Grandma Nini had given her. She was so much older than they thought she was. There was some talk of rules immediately, which attempted to despoil the magic of the the gift.

It must be kept on a hanger.
And in the house.
And never outside.
It would have to be dry cleaned.
Elsa, you cannot eat any food in that!

And on and on.

Elsa was already in the woods and couldn't hear them. She walked through snowy acres with a basket on her arm. She led an army of wolves through thorny glens to castles black against the aching icy sky. Her arms pulsed with magic. Her legs itched with dances yet undanced.

"Elsa," came a strident voice. "Are you listening to me?"

"Of course," she said.

And then, the cloak became a part of Elsa's flesh. It appeared at the breakfast table, attached to the girl. At first, she was directed to take it off and hang it up, and had to. Then, the day that school resumed, Liam poured half a cup of sugar on his Corn Flakes and David drank all the milk, and that was the day that Elsa wore the cloak unnoticed. She ate a piece of toast and directed all the force of her magic into the direction of the crumbs onto the table and the floor. It took her twenty minutes to eat the toast and she got no jam, but the cloak was clean.

"Elsa," piped a train whistle, "you're going to be late!"

Elsa got up and took her backpack. She left, and the cloak was still on. It was January. There was snow on the ground, but the sky was almost clear. Cirrus clouds left unstirred in one corner of a vast expanse of blue. Made of ice, she remembered. She led the wolves all the way to school, silently. They were so silent they could not even be seen. A pack of six, the leader of them white. That one was Alba, who loped next to her, piercing pale eyes scanning the sidewalks of white. The streets from Elsa's house to Sutton Elementary School were deserted. No children lived on her block but her. She could walk in silence with her wolves and pass into the noisome world of children only just as it reached the school.

Today, though, there was a boy. He stood in the path across her way, legs apart as if to establish ownership of the sidewalk with his stance. He was taller than she, be-freckled. He had a hood on, but she guessed that his hair would have to have been red. She didn't recognize him. He was from nowhere, a spirit, an ifrit.

"Wolf," she thought.

Alba growled.

He didn't hear.

"Well hello, Little Red Riding Hood," he jeered at her.

"Hello, Wolf," she said. There are wolves and there are wolves, thought Elsa. The ones with fur made no matter. It was the ones with winter boots and freckles that you had to find a way around.

"That's a pretty cloak," he jabbed. I am supposed to be embarrassed now, sighed Elsa.

"Yes," she agreed. "It would look lovely on you as well."

The boy's eyes narrowed into fissures in his ruddy face. Elsa was supposed to be afraid. He was unsure what to do, and he was becoming angry. A sudden hand grabbed at her cloak.

Elsa danced backward and escaped him. His hand lost its grip on the smooth softness of her cloak.

"Alba!" she cried.

The boy looked around. Seeing nothing, he launched forward at her again. This time, though, before he reached her, he was startled by a growl.

_ _ _

"Well, as best as I can tell, it's a freak incident. But, honestly, Elsa, what were you thinking wearing that thing to school? We expressly told you not to! If you don't want to be picked on, you have to make some sort of effort to appear to be a normal child. You have to think about what the other children wear." Whistles, squeaks, and shrills.

"I can't see how they can say it's her fault, no matter what the child says." Bass rumbles and strong periods.

"Well, of course not! I mean, it's not as if she has the power to call every damn dog in the neighborhood and beckon it to threaten a child. I mean, honestly, what was that, though? Have you ever heard of such a thing?"

"I say it has to be something about the child. They say he just moved here from New Jersey."

"Roger, do you hear yourself? Is everyone from New Jersey to be menaced by dogs? I mean, really!"

Alba sat next to Elsa in the back of the car. Her enormous head was warm in Elsa's lap. And the cloak, unblemished, sat neatly about her lap. She smiled.


Note: This post is my Christmas gift to Mimi, my dear sister-in-law, who loves eccentric, precocious children, hates bullies and would probably love a velvet cloak. Merry Christmas, Mimi!

The Duster

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Anita Peppers

Today's post is a response to the GBE2 prompt: First Car.

My first car was a Plymouth Duster, and I used to climb in the windows like the Dukes of Hazzard because I could. I was nine then, and I wanted a pair of Daisy Dukes. I also wanted to drive, but not really.

Later I got to have the car, which by some sort of alchemy, still ran, but not really. A cloud of fetid smoke erupted from its bowels as I turned the corners of my winding streets. On the roads it made a sound like a heavy corpse shifting in a tilting metal room. I beat the dashboard to get the lights to work.

The car was legend. I had one, and some of my high school friends did not. Its seats had been chewed by ravening cats, its turn signal had to be operated like a clavé with the repeated strike of a hand, it smelled of mildew and of old magazines and years of my father's exhaled smoke.

"I can smell you coming," said my best friend Anne one December Wednesday. "And I can hear the sound of your car breaking as you drive to get me on the way up my street."

"Well, at least it gets your prissy ass to school," I told her.

She sniffed. "No reason to get your panties all in a bunch, Violet."

Rich kids with no cars. They pissed me off. She'd probably get a BMW the day she turned eighteen, so she could drive sloshed into a telephone pole in style.

"Mind if I smoke?" asked April, getting into the car.

"No," I told her. "I'm trying to keep it nice in here."

We drove without speaking, the sound of cigarettes flaring and Bic lighters flicking accompanying the percussion of my hand-operated turn. The girls exhaled. Anne blew smoke rings, like she thought she was Gandalf, as if blowing smoke rings did something that improved her general status in this world. I parked the car. Brakes ground, gears ached and groaned. The exhaust pipe belched putrescent fog. Gravity settled the Duster into place, and the teenage princesses issued forth, like clowns out of a circus car, grabbing onto satchels and cigarette packs and hairbrushes and illicit whispers they'd exchanged in the back. They walked off, gyrating hips with intention, shaking asses just like upright ducks, skirts all ruffles that drew the eye like the rumps of two baboons. I looked after them for a moment, feeling the pavement spread between us like years that could not be abridged. Then I turned to the Duster and locked the asshole up, placing the key in my purse.

"Do you think that's strictly necessary?" said a voice.

I turned. A tall, ragged sort of a boy stood in front of me. Brown eyes. Brown hair, longish, unbrushed. A leather jacket, nice but very old and covered with sewn-on patches. He looked half-awake, half-caring, halfway to being a man. Stubble punctuated his face. Too much silence had passed while I looked at those patches, at that stubble, into those strangely probing eyes.

"What?" I said.

"Do you think that you gotta lock that sucker up? Someone's going to steal that, you suppose?" A wry smile lifted one corner of his mouth.

I surveyed the parking lot, finding ten year-old Chevys, older Beemers, plebian station wagons, the occasional brand-new car.

"No, I suppose not," I conceded. "but my dad likes me to lock it up." This sounded ridiculous the instance it left my lips, and I suddenly wished to be anywhere else but talking to this boy, standing next to my wreck of a vehicle, in a parking lot that enshrined by status as the lowest of the low.

"No, it's cool," he allowed. "The point of a car is that it gets you where you want to go. Does that Duster take you places—?"

"—Violet."

"Violet, does that car take you places? Anywhere you want to go?" He looked straight at me. I realized then that no one had ever looked at me before. He saw all of me, right through my clothes and my skin, down to the muscle and the bone. He saw each instance of cat hair on my jacket, the torn lace on my panties, each freckle on my hipbones and my back.

"It takes me to home and to school," I told him.

"Then, Violet," he told me, with a penetrating stare. I could taste my own name in his mouth. It sounded like chocolate.  "You are doing it all wrong. A car should take you where you want to go. Where do you want to go, Violet?"

The air became a colloid and the wind shut up. Nothing passed through that moment but the look between he and I, as I stood there staring into the question of where I wanted to go. Autonomy and lust fused together in my solar plexus. They felt like truth.

"I want to see the ocean," I whispered.

"Get in the car, Violet. Get in the car," he said. "Let's go."

He was right. That Duster took me exactly where I wanted to be. And, with a blanket thrown down, the chewed-up seats weren't even as bad as I'd thought.


Note: This is fiction. I completely made it up, except that my dad did have a Duster when I was a kid. By the time I was in high school, he had a Hyundai, but I never had my own car until later on.

A Part of the World

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Arker

This post is a response to the GBE2 prompt: Patriotism.

In the beginning, Lydia could not help but be moved by the emotion of the song. Oh say can you see by the dawn's early light...It swelled up on currents of pride and straight-backed decency that brought a trembling wetness to the eyes of those around her. She watched. This tradition was alien to her and so dear to the hearts of those around her. She sang quietly, a smile teasing up the corners of her lips. Even she did not know what the smile was for. She felt confused.

"It's the flag from the Star Spangled Banner!" Peter would exclaim, clamoring to show as they entered the Post Office door. "Look, Mommy. It's the Grand Old Flag."

"Yes," she agreed. "The flag of the United States."

Lydia had not been raised in another country. She had merely been raised on a commune on the winding seacoast of California. She was, for all that, raised in a different America altogether: America the aggressor, an America who helped to take down democratically elected Salvador Allende and install Pinochet, America of the Long Walk and the Trail of Tears, America of the internment camps, the America of Joseph McCarthy.

Growing up, she did not sing the Star-Spangled Banner. She had never learned the song.

Now things were different. They lived in a small town, in a world where towers fallen still left rubble in the landscape of the nation's mind, and she had chosen to place her only child in public school.

"When they say the pledge," she told Peter," stand up. Put your hand on your heart. Show respect."

"Humph," said Lydia's mother loudly, when she came for Christmas. "Why should he show respect? What is there to respect?"

"He should show respect, " Lydia answered, "because he is five. He doesn't know anything about Vietnam or Watergate or President George W. Bush. He doesn't know about Napalm. He is in kindergarten and he is learning to follow the rules."

A still anger for a moment crossed Lydia's mother's face. "You are teaching him to be a part of something that I worked all my life to pull away from!"

Lydia dropped her eyes. "I want him to be a part of the world."

"I see what you want, " replied her mother and empathy touched her voice. "But I want you to know that it isn't patriotism."

Lydia thought about this for some time, after the holiday decorations had been packed away, as the subject had been dropped and as her mother got on a plane and flew back to California.

She thought about her childhood. It had not been a bad one. She had run like a wild thing amongst oak trees, making tiny dolls of acorns and lichens. She had learned to listen to ravens, to catch bullfrogs. She had taught herself to read, three years too late and grade levels higher than her peers. There had been space. So much space you could lose yourself in it, like tule fog. She had lived in a world that was just as good, but utterly separate. Learning to navigate this one had been hard, the rules obscured and tucked under. She constantly had to tease them out.

This world apart, this abandonment of America inside America, was not patriotism either.

Patriotism, she thought, is something that is rare. It is a quality that cannot be found in a five year-old child, cannot be imparted by curricula or evoked with the use of flags. It is cultivated in the bold consumption of truth and the identification of an enormous group as a family of which one is a part. It is present when the criticism of a nation is self-criticism and joins together with continued hope for something more.

This saluting of a flag, this National Anthem, all of it is immaterial and it is ceremony. There is no reason not to play along. Every group has its traditions. They are part of how we belong.

At the New Year's concert, the school music director began, as always with the National Anthem. Lydia sang louder. It just didn't matter. So she sang as loud as she could.


What does patriotism mean to you? How is patriotism different from nationalism and is patriotism, by necessity, a responsibility that we have as Americans? Is it impossible to be critical of our own country and be patriotic?

The Tale of Princess Faith

Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a kingdom far, far away (somewhere in the neighborhood of Barstow, California, which is the same as saying Nowhere Really) there lived a princess. Her name was Princess Faith.

Faith was not a princess by inheritance. She was a princess in her own mind. When she was seven, a tiara made of flesh sprouted above her ears and she herself painted it gold and bedecked it with cheapish jewels. Far from being royalty, her mother was a fish-seller and her father was one of the two swindlers who sold the emperor of another kingdom some fabric that wasn't really there. He was in prison during most of Faith's growing up. Faith had one sister who was not a princess, but instead made apple pies and sold them in the market square.

Faith's most favorite thing in the whole world was to write. To get ideas for her writing, she sat at the pond in the enchanted forest and looked. And this pond into which she looked was the very same pond in which Narcissus lost himself, my dear reader. It was a magical pond, all set about with narcissus plants and satyrs and sorcery and spells. Faith's writing went like this: when she had looked and looked and looked, she would pull out her reflection and turn it into ink. Dipping her pen into it, she spread it on a page. Very happily, Princess Faith did this for many years.

Until, one day, gentle reader, an evil witch came upon her at the pond (that pond of Narcissus). And this was the same witch who is always stirring up trouble. This was the witch who makes gold into straw, turns princes into frogs and is the creator of Jersey Shore. She saw Faith and what she was doing and this witch, she thought to herself, Too much self is never a good thing.

Do you know what she did? She took that image straight out of that pond. (And I suspect she sold it to a Hollywood producer, probably with movie rights, as well.)

Poor Faith! She, who was so sure of the worthiness of her own self to have actually made a crown right out of flesh, to be without her own image! She looked and looked, but there was nothing in the pond she knew how to write! Nothing from which she could make ink. She sobbed great tears that rolled into the pond, making it larger, but still no reflection was there. None but the trees about the pond.

"I am not a landscape artist," sobbed Faith.

"Go to see the Wise Woman of the Woods" advised her sister. "She will be able to tell you what to do. Have a slice of pie."

Faith had not known there was such a woman. She spent most of her time at the pond, unaware of the other features of the magical woods.

"Of course," she told her sister. "I was already thinking of that."

She took a pie of pie and left.

The Wise Woman of the Woods sat on a stump. She looked like a stump herself, wrinkled and tangled and hard as bark. Her hair was like lichen, and with a hand like a gnarled branch, she waved Faith toward her and, with effort, formed her lips into a twisting smile.

"What can I do ya for, my dear?" she croaked.

"My reflection is gone. It has been stolen by a witch!" Faith told her story. She added dramatic elements, and showed rather than told. She spun a tragedy and laid the weaving down.

The Wise Woman blinked and yawned.

"Perhaps it is for the best," she said. "How many tales can one tell all featuring the story of one self-made princess, the daughter of a prisoner, whose hands still smell of fish? I'll tell you what. You go and sit back in that same spot in the forest, but turn your attention away from the pond. Look at what's in the woods around you. Write about the satyrs and the demons and the fae. Write about the dryads and the hamadryads. If you do this for one month, I expect you will begin to be able to see yourself again."

"One month!" gasped Faith. "Hamadryads...Thank you, Wise Woman."

And off she ran.

Back at the pond, she sat and looked at the forest. She watched the stirrings of the creatures in the sylvan deep. And she turned their stories into ink. Without speaking a word to anyone, she spun their images into tales, making up what they were saying and doing and thinking out of the whisperings of the leaves. And she waited for the end of October, the magical month of October. She hoped that either the Wise Woman's words were true and her reflection would appear again or that she could learn to love the stories of the wood people.

She never noticed as the crown began to melt back into her skull.

Note: I hate this story, but I have started three things and not been able to finish any of them, so I am going to go ahead and publish this anyway. 

The Cobwebs of Summerland

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Simon Atkins

Dear Ann,

I have wanted to write you ever since I arrived. Grandma has clearly fallen off her beam. It has been clear, really, from the moment I set foot in Summerland House, but I have been kept so busy with the wreckage of this domicile, I have hardly had time to breathe, much less write to you, dear cousin.

Grandma every day sits in her rocker by a window that looks out upon her expansive lawn. I must remember you have not been to Summerland. (This is not to say that you are missing much, but it did amuse us when we were very young.) I will describe the view for you from that window. The lawn rolls out for seeming miles of un-raked leaves and veers into thickets of rowan, where it erupts into strange toadstools in the deep shade. Red, phosphorescent yellow, green. Striped, spotted and rayed like exploding stars. An otherworldly rainbow exists there after rain.

The place is frankly odd. Things seem to move in the grasses as if the hills of green were water full of menacing fish which shift as the eyes passes over them. It's nothing I'd want to look at—mostly un-pruned hedges and flowers that have escaped their beds and creep across the landscape like soldiers on their bellies, petals dragging in the dirt and leaves going to grey. But there she sits. Hours after hours, from before the dawn breaks until well after breakfast, and she asks me to bring her tea and various blankets. She says nothing else. And she looks. At what?

About the inside of the house, things have gone to wreck. Dust jumps in clouds off of mantelpieces where a book is set. Splotches of a purply-grey mildew span the tile in the guest bathroom. I have had to clean it with what I could find, which wasn't much—chiefly lemon juice and baking powder under the sink. When I shower in there, it's difficult to feel as if it might not leap onto me and become something of a leprosy or a measles, a damning rash splashed across the canvass of my skin. I wash my hair and get out as fast I can do.

The worst thing, though, has got to be the cobwebs. They are all about the place—not just along ceiling beams, higher than I can find a tool to reach, but on the furniture, on the edges of quilts in un-used rooms and on various oddments about the place. The place is wrapped up like a corpse in a shroud! I can't seem to get all of it. You have to realize the largeness of this old house. It's a small castle, really. Three stories. Nine bedrooms. Four bathrooms. Two kitchens. Drawing rooms. Hearth rooms. The lot. The places for cobwebs to settle are infinite indeed.

Here is what really bothers me, Ann. I can't quite make out what happened to Grandma. She shows no sign of stroke. Doctors can find, really, nothing outwardly wrong with her. And yet she sits, speaking little. I know you hardly know my father's mother, but you will have to remember that my Grandma was quite a talker. She kept, as well, a neat house. She permitted a spiderweb or two, I'll grant. This drove my mother to fits of shivers, but Grandma persisted. My father, having grown up with it, was the same.

"Spiders need a home as well as you do, Lydia," they would both tell my mother at Thanksgiving.

My mother of course would grimace, argue or grow silent and morose. But the spiderwebs remained. Grandma must have cleaned up the old ones, though—those that had been abandoned by spiders, because I never remember the place like this. Grandma spent most of her time sketching, writing and cooking, but she did clean. And she had help then, of course. Where the household help can have gone to, I don't know. Certainly, none were old enough to have died when I last was here a year and a half ago. And Grandma has the money to pay them. Her bank account statement, if nothing else, proves that to be the case.

I hope, dear cousin, to leave here within a week, as soon as I can complete the cleaning process and hire some new help. I suppose I should put Grandma in some sort of hospital, but it seems too cruel, somehow. She is a part of this house and land as much as a toadstool from the soil beneath those rowan trees. Besides which, what would I do with Summerland? I'll have to make the drive back up regularly to see that she's OK and ask the staff the write of there is the slightest problem as well.

Please tell our employer that I will be back as soon as I can.

Much love,

Alice

This letter, I'm sorry to say, was found in the drawing room of Summerland a week after Alice failed to return to her job as expected. Upon arrival, friends, including the aforementioned cousin Ann Ridley, found her as if asleep under a copse of rowan trees. Her body was wrapped in cobwebs completely as if shrouded for her burial, still and cold, but showing no sign either of harm or of disease or decay. Her grandmother, one Eleanor Alice Summer, was seated in her rocker at the large front window overlooking the lawn, where, upon the arrival of the search party, she quietly continued to rock and to hum. 

Flash Fiction Attempt #3: The Old Man

Photo Credit: Morguefile

Today's post is a response to the GBE2 prompt: Picture Prompt!

"I need to talk," said Lissandre, settling into a seat.

The old man shifted on his cafe chair, set down his newspaper, and looked at her, his merry eyes driving beams into her heart. He took a sip of his coffee.

She coughed.

"I need to know what to do," she began.

She heard stammering in her voice; the echoing back of a simpering female courting the wisdom of a patriarch. Momentarily, she was repelled by the whole scene. And yet...

"No one can ever tell you what to do," replied the old man, and his eyes twinkled.

He took another sip of coffee and, for a moment, beads of coffee pearled upon his mustache and his beard before he wiped them off.

"Here I am," Lissandre pronounced. She extended her arms wide to include the world beyond the tables outside Starbucks. "I feel stuck. In my marriage. Do I stay with Leo? Do I leave?"

She looked at the old man. He was watching her. His eyes twinkled merry; not unsympathetic, but still somehow amused.

"Leaving," she continued, "seems exhausting. Dividing up the house, the debt, the kids." On that last word, she stopped with a faint shudder. "But is it wrong to stay simply because it is too hard to leave?"

Behind the old man, a small phantom of wind grabbed a pile of fall leaves and lifted them up, lofting them skyward, like one-dimensional colored birds. The autumn played on the awnings of shops, made of them an instrument, grabbed flags and lashed the sky with them. A single red leaf landed on Lissandre's hand.

"There is no more joy to be found on the pavement than on a tree," the old man told Lissandre. "The trick," he continued, "is to remain whole."

With his booted foot, he gestured an inch to a leaf like a skeleton sewn of lace, a doily of a leaf, its architecture revealed. He crushed it into dust under the weight of a heavy heel.

Lissandre rose from the table, her heart alive in her chest. She was alert, full of adrenaline and, at the same time, calm. Her limbs knew what to do.

"Thank you," she told the old man. "Thank you so much."

He nodded, took a sip of coffee and lifted the newspaper again from the table. He began to read.

As Lisandre walked away from the table, Leo exited Starbucks, his long coat whipping behind him and two hot drinks clutched in his hands.

"That line must have been half a mile," he lamented. "But here is your skinny vanilla macchiato."
He handed her the drink. "I thought I saw you talking, but I couldn't see who you were talking to."
He looked around.

"I was talking to that old man," Lissandre told him. "The one who sits outside Starbucks every day. He's such a nice man. I feel I've known him all my life."

Leo looked around.

"Well, there's nobody there now, Lissa."

And nobody was. So she she simply gave Leo the red leaf.

Exploring Point of View: Early Morning

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Jade

GBE2 WEEK #72 (9-30-12to 10-6-12): Exploring POV

This week's post is a task set by Beth, aka Word Nerd. The assignment: to write a short piece first from the first person and then from the third. I decided to write fiction and to attempt, for once, to write from a male point-of-view. See what you think.

First Person

Monday I woke up to the bomb blast of an alarm rupturing the dark.  The alarm sat on a nightstand across the bed—on the other end of an emptiness where covers lay almost undisturbed, a pillow still neat and fluffed, a vacancy. I dragged myself there on my abdomen, like a pissed-off nudibranch or a purposeful caterpillar, in search of the button.  I hit snooze instead of cancel. God fucking damn it. Behind me lay wrinkled sheets coiled up about my body like foam around a rock, the neatness of her absence now despoiled. 5 AM. The first words from my lips a curse.

Downstairs, the coffee was brewing. I had needed to remember to set it up last night. That was her job. She set up coffee. I unloaded dishes. How bizarre it seemed now that a marriage should be so much of classroom job assignments and so little of holding hands and jumping together in falling leaves, screwing in hot tubs and pouring out the contents of one another’s soul. Neglect to unload the dishwasher and forget about a smile from your teacher, much less a slap on the ass.

Bitter. The coffee tasted bitter. And the half and half was spoiled, curdling chunks of cottage cheese in my mug. At least there was plenty of coffee. I’d made enough for two.

Third Person

Monday morning Ethan woke like every Monday morning, angry. Maybe angrier than usual. Maybe sad as well. He beat up his alarm clock as if his arm were the extension of a baseball bat. For all his rage, he appeared impotent—a bedraggled man of forty-five, with hair in need of cutting and a face that needed shaved, attacking banal technology as if it might have been the cause of all his ire. He sat upright for a bit and stared hauntedly at his bedroom, at his king-sized bed, now gone to wreck, and then scooted off the mattress and stood, tucking anger under hospital corners of control, to straighten the sheets. When the bed was restored to perfection, he left the room.

Downstairs, the coffee was brewing for Ethan. A cat mewled outside and he didn't hear. Lisa let the cat in every morning, fed it, petted it. Ethan hated cats. He simply didn't hear it. It wasn't there. He had put in too much of the grounds and they had leaked into the carafe, had settled into mud. He didn't see this either. He didn't smell the off-ness of the turning cream. He poured it into his coffee and it rose to the top, forming solid pieces of corruption. He took a sip and then stared at what he was drinking. For a moment, a look of realization was etched upon his lined and tired face, as if frozen in time, coffee in hand, still. He stood this way, second after second, unbearably still. Then, slowly, Ethan lowered the coffee to the counter. A tear rolled down his cheek.

A Little Flash Fiction: Whatever is Best

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Sideshowmom

Edie wore her hair in a bun and, once you knew her, this seemed an obvious cliche. Pulled back not so tight that it strained her face, it was still tight enough to prevent a wisp or strand from slipping down onto her cheekbones, from obscuring the lenses of her glasses, from walking like a tickling caterpillar onto her lips. One time—only once—Kate had seen it down, as Edie got ready to set about coiling it back up. It hung in untamed ringlets of auburn curl to her elbows, begging to be touched. Without her bun, Edie had looked vulnerable, younger and playful. It was a sight Kate could not shake from her mind.

"Arthur, you're filthy!" Edie exclaimed in horror, evaluating her five year-old son.

His arms were caked with wet sand, buried deep into the substrate of the playground. To Kate, he looked like your average five year-old. They get dirty, she thought. You clean them off. The two women stood side by side on the playground, silently at odds over this simple matter.

"I think we'll need to strip you off before you walk in the house," Edie pronounced, dusting him off.

Kate wondered if this wasn't why her house was always so in need of being swept. Children—filthy children—tromped in and out of it, boots on as often as off, trailing wet sand, scattering fall leaves, leaving a wake of garden soil. It seemed so much effort to pursue them around spitting strong adjectives and attempting to halt the entropy they blew like bubbles from their happy lips.

"I'm hungry, Mama," Arthur began to whine.

"Me, too," said Aster, who arrived like a bolt from somewhere else—where was she?—and spinning around Kate's legs.

Kate, always so ill-prepared for hunger outside the home, had cereal bars in her minivan.  Cereal bars, in a box crumpled and ill-used. Maybe juice boxes. Neither would be acceptable for Arthur and Aster would have to eat them under his watchful and jealous stares, while Edie reminded Arthur that bread products and juice made him hyperactive and unpleasant. On this count, Kate suspected, Edie might be right. Our modern diet is so unnatural. And yet it seems a shame to raise a child only to continually tell him no. Why, Kate wondered, do I have cereal bars and juice boxes? Laziness? Stupidity?

"I have raw almonds in my backpack," Edie volunteered. "In the front zippered pocket. Make sure to close it back up, please."

Arthur fetched these and, happily, he and Aster shared. Not for the first time, Kate felt immensely grateful for Aster's willingness to try any food, for her love of things she recognized as grown in nature and for her stunning lack of memory for things like cereal bars in her close-by minivan, filled with jam.

"So, in a few months, these two start kindergarten," Kate observed, mainly to interrupt her own uncomfortable train of thought.

"Yes," said Edie, carefully. "They do. I hope it will go OK. I have to say I wasn't that impressed at the orientation. Maybe things will be fine when we get him in. It could just be that it was one of those things because they had to present to everyone. I hope they'll be able to meet his needs."

"What was it that bothered you?" Kate wondered. She had quite liked the kindergarten classrooms. Of course, Fiona and Sebastian had gone there, many moons ago. Maybe she was blind to something.

"It all seemed so..." Edie struggled to find the words. "So pre-school. Invented spelling. Letter names. Letter sounds. Isn't that what they've been learning already? At what point are they going to teach them to spell things correctly, to compose something that makes sense? I recognize they're all in different places. I just don't want it to be a complete waste of Arthur's year. We're thinking of homeschooling him, to tell you the truth."

Kindergarten. Once Kate had volunteered in Fiona's class all year, twice a week, for much of the day, when the school couldn't afford a teacher's aide. It seemed to her that a  great deal was being learned there that had nothing to do with letters, sounds, or writing at all. Children who, perhaps, had never before been asked to defer a desire for the greater welfare of the group, in kindergarten learned to do so. Children learned not to steal Legos, not to eat their Hostess cupcakes before their sandwich. They learned to listen to adults who were not their parents. They learned to make friends, to get along, to solve their own problems, when possible, on the playground, rather than running to an adult five times a recess to complain that so-and-so was being mean. They learned to take pride in their work. They learned to like school.

Kate struggled to find a way to express this and choked on her feeling that Arthur needed badly to get away from Edie's watchful eye, that he needed to get dirty, he needed to eat something sweet without her knowing, he needed to poke another child and sit in time-out, he needed to spell "kid" with a "c" and have an adult around him who would not react with horror and alarm.

Kate remembered when Sebastian was little and she would not buy him cake for his first birthday. She remembered when she asked that people purchase only wooden toys. Everyone ignored her. In the end, looking at thirteen year-old Sebastian—worldly, tainted, popular and able to negotiate the cosmos of middle school with just enough of pop culture to fit in and enough of her values, perhaps, to save his soul—she was glad. She was glad that she let him eat cake.

"Well," said Kate, quietly. "I'm sure you will do whatever's best."