Bixby Had to Go

 

Bixby had to go. I couldn’t tolerate his presence any more.  An annoying boy to begin with, he was growing into a self-indulged, conceited, deeply flawed young man.  As his father, I supposed I owed him some desultory level of love, perhaps even unconditional, but this is not a world without conditions.  I never understood this allusion to a basic, natural instinct to love our offspring.  I watched the nature channel enough to know that lions, prairie dogs and honey bees weed out the weakest, or even the strongest, of their brood.  Jettisoned from the arc.  If not outright killed by the parent, they are neglected and, in so doing, offered up to our not-so-friendly neighbors in the food chain.  It wasn’t my fault that nature’s mutation created a species with no other predators to take us out, besides ourselves.  I was his father; I was his only predator.  

Problem was, Bixby held in a safe deposit box the will that bequeathed him the family estate, bestowed upon him not by his father but by his father before him, by good ol’ granddad.  Maybe my father was trying to take me out of the lineup.  Perhaps this was his final fuck-you in face of these past ten or so years, when I finally gained the upper hand during his infirmity.  Or had gained the upper hand, until now.  It irks me that my destiny can be thwarted by a  simple piece of paper, the weakest element in nature, subject to conflagration by the smallest spark, able to be rendered in half by the hands of a child, even crumpled up and popped in my mouth like a truffle, chewed up, swallowed, digested, and shitted out into the bowl of my toilet.  

But I didn’t have the will. Bixby had it.  Bixby had to go.

Bixby came over at 6:15.  He was supposed to be over at 5:30, but whatever.  His mother fawned over him in the foyer, took has coat and shoved all others aside in my closet to hang it on the good hanger, then flittered off to the kitchen.  By this time I was retired to my office with a gin martini, straight up, two olives.  It was fall and I could smell the dry rot of autumn.  The leaves in my yard were not my leaves, as I cut down my trees years ago.  These came from Mrs. Sutterby next door.  She’s too old and too broke to get her leaves raked up; just lets them rot where they lie from season to season.  I might have arrived at a charitable idea of raking them for her, but Bixby came in and interrupted.

“Hi Dad, how’re you doing?”

“Great son, great!  Been sitting hear listening to the birds, smelling the leaves.  Can you believe how quickly Summer passed this year?”

What?  If there’s one thing I’ve learned, there’s the inside you and the outside you, and never the twain shall meet.  Appearances are everything, and if performed artfully, give you the upper hand until the right moment, and oh how satisfying it can be when you pull the trigger.  But today, this mockery of a Sunday roast with family, was merely a positioning of pawns.

Trail of Broken Wine Glasses

She left a trail of broken wineglasses through the house.  I followed them to the attic, up to the children’s playroom and chest full of costumes that hadn’t been worn in years.  She left me a trail of her own blood to follow, all the way across the floor to the dumbwaiter.  Did she go up or down?  Was she hiding in the low hanging clouds or was she crumpled up in a heap in the cellar.  She always liked her wine, Ms Millie, ever since her first beau succumbed to the allure of the pond’s murky depths while the two of them skinny dipped with a bottle of Jack.  She remembered the stillness of the water, the quiet of the trees crowded around the shore to gawk.  

She learned she was pregnant shortly after that, carrying her brood even before she climbed out of the water.  The boy’s last plunge.   After that she was secluded away in a cabin on the Gunflint Trail with an aunt for nine months, and after they were out, perhaps even before, she drank and partied like a girl ready to throw it all away, and she did.  The Gateway District offered her unsafe haven, where I rescued her, if that is how you look at it.  She wasn’t looking for kindness or saving though, and maybe that’s where I failed her.  I hid the bottles, schooled her children, paid for home visits by the doctor because they wouldn’t let her back into town.  

Wine glasses crushed to diamonds beneath my pacing steps.  Where does a lost woman go when she doesn’t want to be found.  I see her in the moon, I see her in the water, I see her swaying in slow dance with the limbs of trees.

Penance by Sea - The Freighter

I’m on this tanker out in the middle of the ocean.  I’ve gone from living in a Midwestern rambler to this iron maiden floating on the sea.  The ocean tries to drown us every day.  We slice through swells forty to fifty feet high, and when the calm comes, it feels like a momentary reprieve from the wrath of an angry mother.

I know nothing that is required of a ship mate.  I got this gig from the captain, who I went to school with a hundred years ago.  We fought on the playground, we played tricks on each other, I egged his house, and then we became best friends.  We would ride our bikes to the edge of town and hunt for a giant snake rumored to be living in the gulch.  We traumatized a possum we found living in an oak tree.  We built tree houses, started fires in fields of dried grass, and then his sister died and his parents moved them out to the West Coast to forget.

Twenty years can change a guy.  Harris is thick and hairy; best way I have to describe him.  His arms are like stumps, his neck sunburned and gnarled like an old log.  Beneath his cap he is bald as a cannon ball, but  he is almost never without his cap.  Teeth aren’t so great, and he squints because he doesn’t want to buy glasses or wear contacts.

I am his polar opposite.  I wear reading glasses.  My arms are skinny and my skin sallow for lack of hard work and sun, but I’m hoping all of that changes after three months out at sea.  So far I’m spared much of the heavy lifting because the first week I broke my arm and spent days laid up in the infirmary.  Then as the sea swelled my stomach turned inside out.  Yes, I am infirm.  I brought along several novels and have started a ship library for the rest of the crew, though I think they would prefer I replace Joseph Conrad and John Steinbeck with Playboy and Penthouse.  Little do they know the joys of Lawrence and Nin.    

Why am I out here?  Unlike Harris’s parents, who ran away to forget, I have followed to remember.  You see, I killed Harris’s sister.  It was an accident, but something for which I never took responsibility.  But the mind does not absolve one who knows the truth.  The soul grows sick from a wrong never made right.

The Meaning of IV

No, IV does not represent the 4^th cantos of my poem, nor the 4^th chapter of my manifesto.  Neither does IV represent the century of Constantine.  It is why I am home today from work, why I sit around uselessly in this quiet, empty house.  Intestinal Virus.  My stomach rumbles and gurgles like the errant plumbing of section IV housing.  I am an upended decanter of ditch water.  Fever and dehydration created the perfect conditions, a lapse of mental discipline, a crack in a years-forged wall of self deception, so I remembered.

I left by way of the back door.  I couldn’t bear the thought of staying in that house a moment longer.  It harbored all the years of my confinement, all of my fears and hate in the shadow of a cruel father and wraith mother.  Why must I become them?  Why shrink in cold, airless rooms?  Maybe I couldn’t believe in myself, couldn’t trust that I could make it on my own, but there wasn’t much else to choose from.  “What the hell, why not?” A rally cry for freedom as good as any other.

I drifted down The Great River road to Beale Street and Bourbon.  I slept in unlocked cars, ate what food was left unguarded, wrote in a notepad while I smoked along the levee.  I drew out a picture of my father, crinkled Kodak paper with spores of mold, but there it was again; his flashing smile coming out of the dark, his white teeth approaching like a line of ghosts.  It made me warm, happy, proud, protected.  What of this father in the picture, who was not my father in the confines of the house, who was not the man he projected for the lens, but who ran deeper than the polluted waters held back by this levee?  Perhaps Bukowski could help reconcile me with my forebear, my template, my mould, the piss pot emptied and waiting to be filled.

Were they really that bad?  They left me with board games but nobody to play with; Sorry and Life and Surgery.  I dressed in costumes of their old 70’s clothes, wide ties and polyester purple trousers and wigs and white boat shoes. 

I had left with a regrettable lack of drama.  No fury towards dad, no accusations or commiseration for Mom.  I patted the dog on the head and began walking.  As I accumulated miles at my back, I began to believe in myself, in an utter lack of infirmity, an immunity to cold and virus, flu and bugs that get lodged beneath the finger nails.  Antibodies.  Parasites.  Latent.  Blooming.

IV represents my fallibility.  IV represents the number of years I’ve been gone.  IV is the number of miles left in a nearly complete circuitous route back home.

Incubator Boy

photo by Heartbeatbox.

It was what he wanted, in the end. He rode the Greyhound bus out of town to North Dakota somewhere. There was not much ahead of him, but more than enough behind him. Little boy blue, nestled in his incubator, curated by the nurses to a thing of beauty more fragile than a faberge egg. Countryside flashing past, with a steady image of his disconnected face on a palette of green. His girlfriend was back there somewhere. He couldn’t see her face. Only a smeared image now that it has begun to rain.

The bus broke down near Fargo. He stood on the side of the rode holding up an old lady that reminded him of his grandmother. Too hot in the bus. The highway shimmers and fades in the heat vapor rising off the tar. Fiberglass shattered around twisted metal frames. Covered bodies in the passing lane. Wait for the EMTs and troopers to clean up the mess, the tow truck to haul away the wreckage.

He dreamt he would have had a motorcycle by now, and not have to schlep it on an interstate bus with these people. He dreamt he would have had a lot of things by now; a place of his own, a dog, a kid or— no, no kid. Children had never been in the picture. He was too much of a kid himself, still ate Frosted Flakes for breakfast, still watched reruns of Gilligan’s Island. He had a hard enough time figuring out how to keep himself alive.

The bus pulls away from the shoulder again, the overhead air nozzle feeding a lifeline of air to his lungs. Expand, contract, expand, contract. North Dakota comes but it doesn’t take long enough, not enough distance measured in mile markers. It’s not what he wanted, in the end. Maybe he wanted mountains this stretch of his life, land masses to block part of the blue, blue sky filling the vanishing point on the horizon. Maybe he wanted straight roads replaced by switchbacks, steep descents and faulty brakes, emergency escape ramps for runaway trucks.

Sullen's Fish House

photo by German Chocolate Ladies.

Northern lights flash across the sky like dust blowing over a car windshield. This place is no desert, though. Here we got endless snow and ice cruel as any desert could be, and the people who live here are as cruel as our winters. What pleasures to we enjoy as we wait for it to end? Sit on a frozen lake in a plywood box, staring into a dark hole, waiting for something to bite?

Sullen’s fish house is something else though, about three times the size of your average fish house, strung up with Christmas lights like a carnival drawing us in from the dark. Me and my brother Jay go out there to thaw out. Drink some Jim Beam and spark a bowl. Other bright shiny things draw us there, too; make us warm for a while at least. Then when they get cold we drop them down through the hole to come bobbing up again sometime in the Spring. Spring will never come though, we tell ourselves. It still hasn’t.

Mom don’t like us hanging out there. When we come home, me and my brother come through the back door and let in a drift of snow behind us. I stamp my boots off just inside the door, a pink slush of blood and snow. Jay come in behind me, slams shut the door and wipes his nose on his sleeve.

Mom stoops over by the wood stove, shoving in birch logs. “What you boys been up to? Sandy lake still frozen over?”

She knows it would be, but asks anyway.

“Yeah. Sullen’s fish house is all lit up. Nice. Like Christmas.”

“Sullen din’t light it up like that for Christmas, be damn sure of that. I don’t want you goin’ there.”

Sullen has been a buddy of mine since the third grade. Mom don’t like him much. Much of the town don’t like him much, nor his folks neither. The nice half of the town, that is. Then there are those like Jay and I. Something about Sullen makes you want to do what he does, look like he looks, talk the same. His whole family’s kind of like that. His folks’ place was the biggest in town once, but it’s falling apart now like some ruin. Last summer we’d go there to smash stuff in, with Sullen right there beside us, breaking up his own shit.

So I got friends like Sullen, right; I can deal with people like that. Dangerous people, some of them. Funny thing is, he isn’t the one to be scared of. I’d learn over the next several weeks what brought Sullen’s family down from the top.

“You got to watch what those Sullens do.” mom said. I’d learn that the ice and darkness didn’t keep to the lake, but spread from a place closer to hearth and home. ”Got to keep them in line,” she finished, almost to herself.

We knew who to be scared of, the one that called all of the shots and decided when winter and spring would come, when it was time for the ice to thaw, when Sullen’s Fish House would finally go dark and break through the thin ice, drift down through the dark and settle in the sediment.

Mom fed the last log into fire and slammed the stove door shut. “That should be just about enough, now. Spring’s coming.”

The Grand Tour: Conclusion

photo by iloveupstate.

The Aunt is a sister of The Uncle, not a wife. She was an amateur artist whose life and art was augmented by schizophrenia. Her art consisted entirely of crayon stylings on mail envelopes and postcards. She was middle-aged and…I can’t remember her face. Odd. Can’t remember her body or her eyes, though I held both that night. When tea was served she gracefully slipped under the table, where we joined her for a cup and a biscuit under the table cloth, while she told us about her date with a clown earlier in the day. I gathered that the clown was not metaphorical but quite real, having just returned from a child’s birthday party and still in costume. They had a picnic in a park. She spoke English as best she could, for my benefit; “There we were, laying on our plates…”

“You were lying on your plates,” asked The Uncle, “and what fine gentleman was eating you?”

She either did not catch his meaning ignored him, “…and then he asked me if I wanted to taste his Bobo? What’s his Bobo?” she asked, turning to me.

I looked to Odlef for rescue, but he only shrugged and drained his cup of tea. We crawled out from the table and moved on to wine, something from Hungary called Bulls Blood. Before opening the next bottle, The Uncle took the empty bottle by the stem and tossed it through an open window, where it cartwheeled twenty feet down and kerplunked into the mote. “Back in the day of our forebears, they always threw their empties into the mote. As a preservationist, it is my duty to uphold their customs in the highest regard. Do as they did, I say.” He laugh was more of a giggle, a bead of wine clinging to his curled mustache.

The Aunt brought our dinner, a half dozen smoked eel in butcher wrap. The Uncle smoked at the table. Odlef was a blond blur at the edge of my vision, laughing and alternating from Dutch to English, though it didn’t matter because I could understand neither. Talk led to my writing aspirations, the state of literature today, the need for a new commune of writers like the Lost Generation. Who would be our Gertrude? Was Odlef our Fitz drinking away his talent? I was none of the above, but they saw in me what they wished. When I talked about Morrison and wanting to be a visionary, and about Artaud and Rimbaud and how writing could be inspired by the unsettled mind, I forgot to whom I was talking. The Aunt cautioned me about romanticizing mental disorder. Was it worth the price, in the end? As if in explanation, she escorted me from the dinner table to the makeshift studio The Uncle had set aside for her in one of his many rooms. She opened the door to a simple room; four walls, a table, a chair, but plastered across the walls and ceiling were hundreds of envelopes, each consumed by brightly colored flames, curling at the edges, wrinkled, pressed flat again. On the floor they gathered like so many fallen leaves. Each burned and yet did not expire; they were only crayon flames, I realized, and the crayons that ignited them were scattered across the table, some snapped in half like broken fingers or rubbed down to the nubs. I looked more closely at the envelopes and found that not all were only made of colors following the folds of the envelope, but some also held stick-drawings of bicycles and trains and boats and planes, suns and flowers and sons and daughters.

It wasn’t good. I didn’t get it. I felt deflated. I wanted her to be brilliant, but she didn’t care to be, knew she was not, aspired to be nothing but who she was. At twenty I didn’t appreciate that. At forty I wonder if you grow up or grow in. At sixty I hope to understand if the evidence of that growth, the product of all my exploration, like her colored envelopes, is meant more for myself or others. Shit, who cares.

We went back upstairs and drank and smoked, stacked dishes and tried to fish empty bottles from the mote. I fell asleep on the sofa with the aunt. Awoke in a tangle of limbs and clothes in ray of blinding sun.

It was a morning of hangovers and shame, putrid cigarettes and cotton mouth, bad smells lingering in the rooms from the night before. While The Uncle brewed a pot of strong black coffee, I drew away from the group and slipped out the door to the castle grounds still wet with dew. I walked down winding cobbled paths, through a maze of wood neatly stacked in cords, through the shade of the trees spared from emperor’s ax, and by the time I made it through the maze to the mausoleum, I had in my mind the beginnings of what would be my first novel.

Odlef and I stuffed our backpacks to catch the last train home. The Aunt presented me with her latest envelope creation, which she must have colored over her morning coffee. Was it something in the image she drew in childlike crayon, or was it in the recognition of her chosen medium — an envelope? Whichever caused these chemicals to collide, I had received her message carried over a great distance, not only the very real ocean that would soon divide me from my grand tour of Europe, but also a message that bridged the space between her art and the irrational world in which she had learned to live, and with which I was only now coming to terms.

The Grand Tour Pt2: Atlantic Crossing

photo by Just Plane Photography.

I am on the plane somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Blackness fills the window; I have no fear of the ocean because I cannot see it. Yet it is there, those churning depths, those sharks and whales just below my body suspended in space, but right now I feel no nearer to the ocean than when I was lying in my bed in Iowa, imagining my Atlantic crossing. In fact, I was closer then. My room was dark. This plane is filled with light, stewardesses handing out blankets, and men with their shoes off to air out their stinking feet; this is my version of the Grand Tour, 21st century style.

How did I do it? How did I manage in one year to get thrown out of the Iowa writing program for mental indiscretions, move back home with my mom, and get signed up for this trip to Europe with a Dutch nobleman, Odlef? I paid for it myself, working a job that few people wanted at a local park, dumping garbage barrels, cleaning piss off of urinals, and waking up the drunks from the picnic tables where they had bedded for the night. More than the money, I had to overcome my natural Midwestern stoicism by staring off of that cliff face of doubt—and jump. Everyone tried to hold me back with that moral they held in such high esteem: stay home, stay grounded, and be realistic. But this was real. I imagined, I created, I formed in one flash of daydream this trip to Odlef’s Europe, and made it real. It was no different than writing a short story at the university, only I changed the medium. I became my own work.

I had to wait in Boston for a connecting flight. We were delayed because dense fog had had crept in from the harbor. Out of the fog rose boat masts, warped shacks, seagulls navigating the air above the waters. I saw a guy stranded at the same gate who looked altogether too much like me—same black leather shoes, faded jeans, unbuttoned flannel shirt and a tangle of bracelets around his wrists. He started up a conversation with me, the typical harmless banter of plane schedules and travel plans, until out of nowhere he interjected, “They shouldn’t cancel flights just because of a little fog. I think those people that are afraid to die should just die right on the spot, because they’re not really living, man.” Was this what I sounded like? Idiot, blowhard, self-important fraud. My Muses snickered from behind a potted palm while I ended our conversation at the first opportunity and tried to put some distance between me and my doppelganger. He was hard to shake. Now back on the plane, I’m thankful for assigned seats.

Odlef meets me at the Amsterdam airport. He has transformed himself once again after having left ISU. Back then he was a foreign exchange student, a fellow drinking buddy, a budding artist who, back home in the Netherlands, was a nobleman’s grandson and an economics prodigy destined for a career in global markets, but who in one year in the states took on charcoal life drawing, German philosophy, and Beethoven’s Sonata No.1 in F Minor on the piano in the dorm lounge. He grew his hair out just long enough to fit into a ponytail, tried to grow a scruff of blond whiskers on his eighteen-year old chin, and took to wearing long overcoats so that he looked like an extra in the movie “Wings of Desire.”

The young man now standing at baggage claim had shed his troubadour skin for neatly trimmed hair, a sport coat, white cotton shirt and a silk scarf tucked in at the neck. “Welcome to the mother country,” he says, holding out his hand, which I knock aside to give him a bear hug and a firm smack on the back. He grabs my bag in one hand and elbow in the other and marches us down the airport colonnade. “I’ve planned it all out for us: first, Paris. Then on to the south of France, La Cote d’Azure, then Florence, Rome, Budapeste—wait until you meet the girls in Budapest!” and like that, we pick up the thread of those college nights strung out on lack of sleep, too much Heidegger and too little Calvinism, a little weed and a lot of Grain Belt Premium Lager. Odlef whisks us out of the airport to the first of many train station platforms awaiting my next thirty days and nights of our tour.

The Grand Tour, Pt 1

photo by klebersales.

He dropped out of the Iowa State writing program weeks into the first semester, after he started binge drinking beer, half a liter of whiskey, and then rioting across campus in a bacchanalian frenzy, diving into creeks, hanging over cliff ledges, smashing beer bottles over his forehead. Campus security picked him up, and he was assigned to a campus psychologist. The counselor sat with knees crossed, notepad at the ready. “You’re clearly exhibiting self-destructive behaviors, but we haven’t talked about what’s going on inside. Why do you want to hurt yourself?”

“I don’t know,” the young man replied. Long stringy hair hung over his face but didn’t hide the stitches sewing up the gash in his forehead from one of the broken beerbottles. “I can’t take life anymore. It’s boring. It’s mundane. It doesn’t have any of the magic from Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, and I feel cheated. There’s nothing for me to write about in this town. Worse of all, I’m freaking out. I’m nervous all of the time. I get panic attacks just walking into the classroom.”

“Why is that, do you think?”

“I’m supposed to read my work in front of the class.”

“And you’re nervous they won’t like it?”

“I don’t know. They like it fine. Some of them even tell me it’s better than anything they’ve read. Other’s tell me I ripped it all off from the poet maudits, from movies I’ve never seen, or that I use too many adjectives. But that’s not it. It’s being exposed like that in front of the firing squad, all of them watching me, all of their eyes on me, all of their judgments being processed at that moment, and I see myself through their eyes. I panic.”

“Your MMPI showed you have a number of personality disorders. Four, in fact. Nothing to get overly concerned with, any person taking the test will probably have a few disorders identified. You have Depression, Anxiety, Suicidal Ideation, and Social Phobia.”

“No pills.”

“But you’re already medicating yourself, and in all the wrong ways. Don’t you want to feel happy and at peace with yourself?”

“It’s not about being happy. I want to feel life, experience the full spectrum emotions. Live dangerously, sail my ships into uncharted seas. I want to open the doors of perception. I am the lizard king. I can do anything.”

“Okay, now you’re just quoting directly from Nietzsche and Jim Morrison.”

“Jim who?”

“So you think the magic is ‘out there?” the counselor asked, making a sweeping gesture with his arm.

“I hope so, because it sure as hell is not in Iowa.”

“So leave.”

“Leave?”

“Go on a road trip. See the country. Take the grand tour.”

“But I can’t. I don’t have any money. I’ve got my classes—“

“You’re flunking all of your classes.” The counselor dropped the notepad in his lap and raked his fingers through his hair. “Look, you’re dying. You’re killing yourself with this behavior, and you keep putting yourself into dangerous situations where you leave the choice of life and death to chance. You are not a happy person.”

A thought came to the young writer. “There’s Odlef. He’s a friend of mine, a Dutch foreign exchange student that lived in the dorm. We used to get drunk together a lot.”

“About the drinking—you need to stop.”

“Not likely. So this grand tour thing, you mean like how the young English aristocrats would travel around Europe, visiting museums, playhouses, operas?”

“Yes, it was considered a right of passage and that their exposure to European culture, art, and history would complete their education.”

“Odlef is back home now in Amsterdam. Could you get my Mom to pay for one of those train passes?”

“The Eurorail. Yes. I mean, no. It’ll be up to your mother whether she thinks this is a good idea, but I will recommend to the dean that you take a break from school without penalty. And I would like to talk with you mother, if you approve.”

“To convince her about this trip?”

“To talk about your issues, and about what kind of therapy that I can recommend.” The crestfallen look from the student stirred up his sympathy, and he added. “This treatment just might include Gestalt therapy, which essentially focuses on the experience of life; ‘send your ships into uncharted seas,’ as you said.”

As they wrapped up their session, the counselor couldn’t help envying the student, despite his mental anguish and inner turmoil. The boy was bright, literate, creative, and he would be headed on the grand tour that the counselor had never experienced. What kind of inspiration might he find while strolling the halls of the Uffizi, gazing up to the Sistine ceiling, breathing in the Parisian night air?

Getting My Land Legs

photo by Federico Erra.

My creative funny bone has not been smacked in quite some time. How do I get back to that place inside my head, how do I find that playground of my youth? My lack of inspiration is evident even in the storyline of my dreams. Now, when I feel bored, I reach for the cheap escape of “Desperate Housewives”, or catch “Sherlock Holmes” at the discount theater, or I play hours of solitaire on my iPhone. I search for high-priced gadgets to distract me, while what my soul really requires is something as simple as pen and paper. We compromise: an hour on my laptop for a little stream-of-consciousness. The lowest priced effort for the would-be writer.

Out of the morning mist emerges a tea house, about a hundred yards from the docks. Inside gather Harajuku girls, professors, grandmothers. Drifters slink to the shadows of the back room, sipping their oolongs and nibbling dried scones like the rats down at the pier.

In the front room by the portrait window, huddled in overstuffed chairs with their feet propped on footstools, the silver-hairs click their knitting needles and unravel infinite balls of yarn. I sneak down the back hallway towards the store room, riddled with crates of tea. There’s a cracked cellar door leading to the basement, where century old wine casks lay broken amid the cobwebs and dirt floor, the stains of their contents still discernable on floor, or is that blood? In the center sits a small round table with the melted stub of a candle where the tea shop owner escapes from the bustle of the shop to read through his wife’s diary.

I leave through the coal chute and head further inland. Dogs bark all over town, lunging into the dark but snapping back in mid-leap as they reach the end of their leashes. Dark clouds roll in, electricity in the air, green skies ready to hatch. Children on their bikes pedal hard for the hill from which to watch the storm pass. One giant lightning rod, that hill. They don’t know the danger in which they put themselves. Twelve years ago Sally was struck and lived, followed by her prolonged hospital stay with her fried nerves, muscle twitches, blackouts. People plied her for visions embellished on her through the lightning bolt. She waited for supersensory abilities, but no such magic came. She told them that the rare honor of being struck by lightning and living was like a steel rod being pounded from the crown of her skull through her spine and out through her heel bone, and that was all, yet people still asked her if she could pass on a message to their dead mothers, what day of the year they should plan for their wedding to ensure a lasting marriage, or where they could find their car keys. In frustration she started to make up answers. She was right almost every time.

Flavors of Crazy

photo by Midnight-digital.

She was crazy. Utterly nuts. I knew even before I had officially met her. I could tell when I first saw her behind a booth at a software conference in Las Vegas. She was one of those six foot tall, leggy women in a tight tee-shirt of a software vendor, as though she was one of the programmers, peddling a handful of flyers to the throngs of computer geeks. Black hair all tangled up in a bird’s nest, and these little black eyes like pebbles in her face. I sensed it right away; she was a bipolar carnival perched atop her high heels. For some reason I had always been drawn to the crazy ones. Later that night at the conference party I saw her again, only this time the roles were reversed and she was the target audience, with the computer geeks marketing their come-on lines and clumsy attempts at flirtation. After a few gin and tonics, I felt a need to assert myself as the alpha male of this inferior gene pool and took my shot. She ended up bar hopping with me and one of my coworkers, even though she didn’t drink. Mixed poorly with her meds, I figured, but she had no problem watching me drink for eight hours, and then followed me back to my hotel room.

Only flashes of memory, like some “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” montage, the silhouette of beauty that turned monstrous in too direct of lighting, the fuzziness of alcohol giving way to flashes of lucidity, disorientation, regret. Were those wrinkles and scars in the dark, or did the alcohol send me off into some kind of delirium? Who was this wrapped in the bed sheets the next morning? She quickly got ready in the bathroom and left, leaving a lipstick message on my mirror “Bye Sweetheart” with a heart drawn underneath. That was my first clue that she had a flair for the dramatic.

I was too hung over to attend that day’s conference sessions, but she had the vendor floor to work. She called me later that afternoon and came by the hotel lobby to talk, saying she didn’t want me to think this was a regular occurrence for her, that she was recently divorced and going through some stuff, and that there were no expectations, but she thought I was somebody special and sweet. Some shit like that. We hugged when she left and exchanged business cards.

The next week at work, I got a package mailed to me. It was a vintage Batman lunchbox (must have been something I said during my drunken binge), filled with Halloween themed decorations: orange and black tissue paper, confetti in the shape of pumpkins and black cats, a CD of Halloween songs like “Monster Mash” and “Werewolves of London.” There were homemade cookies, and stickers of ghouls and goblins on the inside of the lunchbox. I got razzed by the guys in the office, but it made me smile. I thanked her in an email, and she responded that she just happened to be in town for a vendor exhibit next week, so we could go on a real date if I was interested. I thought “Sure. Why not?” I resisted offering her to stay at my place, and found out which hotel she would be staying at.

I should have suspected something was not right when her hotel was nowhere near the convention center. She said she needed to find one with an oven. I found out why when I picked her up. She had baked me three dozen cookies. She apologized for how many there were, but she wasn’t sure if I’d prefer the chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips, or the traditional chocolate chip cookies with walnuts. I usually don’t go for nuts, but it looked like tonight I would be stuck with one that night.

I’ll skip describing for you the obligatory dinner, or how despite all of the warning signs I was still attracted to her, and that if she lived halfway across the country, I couldn’t really be in that much danger, could I? Instead, let’s jump ahead to the post-sex pillow talk at my place.

She had been bulimic at one point in her teenage years, then an obese binge eater, and now she had some sort of band wrapped around her stomach that had turned her skinny. The skin hung off her bones like an old blanket, in places. There were scars on the insides of her thighs where excess skin had been removed. Jesus Christ, what was I thinking? Why didn’t I go after a nice normal girl, like Christine’s friend, the geeky one with horn rimmed 60’s glasses, but kind of cute and funny? But in a moment, even this unhinged woman would be rejecting me.

After she told me about her bulimia, did I offer her a hug? I thought; okay, this just happens to be her flavor of crazy, compared to all of the other flavors out there, including my own. I clinically listened, nodded my head much like I imagined a therapist would do, and stayed at a safe distance. But she needed more. A sad sympathetic face and a tilt of the head. A hug. An “awww, come here you,” with arms held out.

When I missed my cue, she turned on me. Accusations flew. Why did I seem so stand-offish, now? Why didn’t I show more emotion? I tried to cover with stories of my own scarred childhood, an emotionally distant father, and how maybe I was unconsciously trying to become like him; a rock, an island. Why did I always conjure up Simon and Garfunkel lyrics when a woman put me on the defensive? It didn’t have much effect on her though, and she went on bitterly about the flat-lined men in her life, making me feel increasingly guilty until I felt like I was in some long term relationship when this was ONLY DAY THREE with this person.

Then I found my honesty and spoke up, “No I am not comfortable with you spending the night, and yes I think you’re a little bit crazy for baking me a batch of three-dozen cookies and sending a Halloween box to my work, and yes I think it would be a good idea if I drove you back to your hotel room right now!”

During the tense car ride to her hotel, she informed me that she would be flying out immediately, that there was no conference and that she had spent all of this money just to come see me, but good riddance to me. When I got back home, I sighed a breath of relief. Okay, brush my teeth: two times. Shower: two times. Wash the bed sheets: three times. She was almost erased, except the cookies hung around for another week. She made damn good cookies.

Postscript: She mailed two CD’s shortly afterwards. One was a forty-five minute burned monolog of how angry and hurt she was. Odd that she felt the need to capture this in a recording rather than an email or letter. Also odd how she somehow looped around from a tirade about that night and how cruel I was, to an introspection of her self-worth, to how I was so wonderful and caring on that first night when I was drunk at the convention, to eventually how I showed characteristics of an innocent, sensitive side that she would miss. I thought about posting it on YouTube. The other CD contained every possible cover of the song, “I am a Rock.” She was clever; I had to give her that.

A Night in Birmingham

photo by Trondelarius.

He was driving all night from North Dakota to someplace south, maybe the gulf. He wasn’t sure exactly where, but the main thing was to feel the thrum of the road passing beneath the wheels, an unraveling ribbon of tar with no end, no beginning. It was midnight by the time he crossed into Alabama, but he didn’t want to stop. He was in a zone, tired brilliant and half mesmerized by the highway. Trees loomed out of the dark into the headlights. He struck a deer just past Birmingham, and his clothes were splattered with blood because he had stopped the car, walked back, and dragged the carcass to the ditch.

Got to wash up at a motel or something, but none of them would take in a man at 2:00 am covered in blood. From a travel guide in his glove box, he started calling B&Bs. An old lady named Ms. Sandy answered on the third phone number, at a place called the Fox Trot. Said all of her rooms were open, and that she’d be happy to take in a boarder. She gave him directions, a ways off the highway, but he was desperate.

When he pulled up to her home, she was standing on the porch wrapped in a shawl. He grabbed his duffel bag from the trunk and asked why an old lady was answering her phone at 2:30 in the morning. Couldn’t sleep, she said. Seemed like the older she got, the less sleep she needed. Hardly knew what to do with all of that time on her hands, especially at night with nobody staying with her to talk to.

He started to explain the blood, but she waved it off. Doesn’t matter, come on in.

He remembered, later that night after having showered and had a cup of tea in her kitchen, what it was like staying at his grandmother’s. That feeling of being taken care of, being safe, and the odd way that time hung suspended in her kitchen in those purgatorial hours between night and morning. They talked of the kinds of things that, later on, he couldn’t remember. All he would be able to recall was that feeling of kindness, acceptance, of being made to feel completely at home. That’s how it felt being in Ms. Sandy’s presence, even more so than any particular thing she said or did.

Who was she? Maybe it was just her name, but he imagined her to be the Sandman’s widow, grown old now and abandoned, left to lord over this home in the Alabama woods, wiling away the insomniac nights with guests that needed a place to rest.

I wish I knew what they talked about, or what he was running from in North Dakota, or what he was running towards, but it seems that Ms. Sandy doesn’t gossip about her boarders. Your sins are safe with her.

Solace of a Bad Man

They drove up the North shore for a weekend away at a small cabin. Back in the Twin Cities, her new boyfriend was the perfect gentleman she new him to be, but with each passing mile his civility towards her gradually peeled away, like the trappings of the city slipping away as they drove further north. The trees grew taller, the woods deeper as his temper flared over petty things, like where they would go for Thanksgiving, and who would pay for the gas, and how fast he was driving.

On they drove, up past Duluth, the roads growing narrower as they passed hulking ships rusting in dry dock. The winds picked up near Two Harbors, fueled by drought, gusts coming from every which direction, and he struggled to keep the car on the road.

Civilization dropped away by the time they reached Grand Marais. The interstate trickled down to a county road, then to a gravel road, then to a dirt path with weeds growing down the center, winding among the birch trees, until they finally coasted to a stop in the deep woods of the Gunflint Trail and their cabin for the weekend.

It took them much of the day to get there. The sun was already setting. Inside the cabin, his gentler side came out again; he prepared a quick spaghetti dinner, and they talked about friends and family. She couldn’t explain, even to herself, what made her shut down his advances that night. She felt that things were not as they appeared.

Her nightmares didn’t help matters: she dreamed of wolves circling the cabin, staying just out of sight behind the trees. The next day it was her turn to become unhinged, picking fights over whatever was convenient. She got into an argument with him about hunting: he was for it, she against. He claimed it was natural and necessary for thinning out the herd, but she said only Native Americans should have the right to hunt. He claimed Native American’s weren’t good sportsmen when it came to hunting, using lights for spear fishing to attract the fish, or setting fires in the woods to scare wild game toward their hunters waiting in ambush.

She started to hate him. Maybe hate is too strong of a word: he dropped in her esteem. She lost respect for his ideas. He must have picked up on her change of heart, because he looked like a trapped animal, eyes darting around the room, mouth tense like a snarl.

She wanted to get out of there. She grabbed her things and marched out to the car, waiting for him to come drive her home. He didn’t. She crossed over to the driver’s seat. No keys. Stupid idea anyway, she couldn’t just abandon him out here. She decided that a walk through the woods might help cool her off. She happened upon a deer trail and followed it around the pond, down a ravine and beyond the surrounding poplars and birch into the deep woods of evergreens.

Windfalls crossed the trail, forcing her off the path. She lost her way among dead trees felled during the severe storms of last summer. She lost all sense of direction and began to panic. She smelled something in the air; soot, cinders, smoke?

The tree canopy rose too high to get a good view of the sky, but among the undergrowth and the tree trunks drifted a haze, like morning mist, only dirtier. The heat sucked all moisture out of the air. Within seconds the wind came rushing in with a smell that burned in her lungs. Fire.

Fir trees on fire. Great plume of sparks. In the strong winds, flames leapt from tree to tree. She ran beneath the arches of burning limbs, bolting through the woods alongside panicked deer and rabbits. Birds dropped from the sky like meteors. She fell out of the burning bramble to an open clearing where, beside the pond, sat the cabin: the one thing not burning in this world on fire. Inside, standing at the window, she saw him. Waiting for her. She stumbled inside, into his arms, and smelled the gasoline, the sulfur, the stench of a bad man who just got what he wanted.

Narrative: Boys Will Be Boys

photo by Haeretik.

Stay here. Don’t move. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I just have to go find the deputy. He’s out back looking for bodies. See his flashlight bobbing on the grass? Why did you do it? You had so much going for you? Don’t answer that. I already know what drives a man to kill. But my own son? My own boy? Didn’t I raise you right? Didn’t I take you fishing? I paid for that pansy summer camp when you were twelve. Lots of good it did. I knew you were going to do something, one day. I knew you were going to go too far. Sit down. Didn’t I tell you to sit down? I’ll go out back. I’ll take care of the deputy. Tired of cleaning up your shit, I can tell you that. I’ve been cleaning up after you all your life and it’s why you continue to make such a mess of things. What are you going to do when I’m not around to clean up your mess? When I get back here I want to see you cleaned up. Get a duffle bag. Pack enough for a week on the road. No more. No less. Now you can get up. Go on. Didn’t I tell you to get up? Don’t start crying now. Did I teach you to cry? You made choices, and now you have to live with them. You’re one thing or another, but not both at once. You have to decide. Are you a man, or are you a baby? Are you my boy? Or are you a little girl? I didn’t raise you to be a girl, so go on now. Boys will be boys. We’ll get this cleaned up in a just a second. Stay in the house. I got to go find that deputy.

Chloe Jean: Siren of the Skies

His family lived on a farm briefly when he was a kid, back when his accountant father and architect mother decided to abandon the New York City bedrock for the more tender bed of soil abundant in the Midwest. It was there that he spotted his first love, Chloe Jean, cutting a swath across the sky over their crops. The young woman crop dusted all of the properties in Jefferson County since her father had developed glaucoma when she was sixteen. Chloe Jean. Her name was on the lips of every man watching her dip and weave over the fields, misting a cloud of insecticide over the waiting plants. She was pretty, that particular kind of wholesome, healthy, white teeth pretty that farm country tends to breed. The town believed the only reason she was still unmarried was that she spent more time in the sky than on the ground, and nobody could catch her.

Chloe Jean. Even years later, just saying her name conjured the image of the young beauty buzzing low overhead, summer dress and scarf trailing in the wind. When he was thirteen, how many nights did he fantasize about sneaking off with her, taking to the skies, a stowaway in the cockpit between her thighs? He rode his bike to the landing strip at her father’s farm and hid away at the side of the hangar to watch her climb in or out of the cockpit, just in hope of catching a glimpse of leg or swelling breast beneath her summer dress. She was always smiling when she climbed in or out of the plane, the same kind of smile when a woman gazed into the eyes of a man she loved, but for Chloe Jean, it was reserved only for her plane.

He was in chemistry class when everyone heard the fire trucks and crowded by the window. A thin trail of black smoke curled into the sky over Peterson’s farm. Chloe Jean, the first love of his life, crashed and burned in a bean field. Investigators later determined that a tree limb at the border of the field had clipped her wing. For years afterward, boys from town kept a shrine in her memory at the trunk of the massive oak. He considered, several times, hanging himself from one of its limbs. He still feels, unreasonably, somehow less a man for not having done it.

The Extortionist

She wants money. Lots of it. She has confidence that with her green eyes and porcelain skin, she can lure a man to give it to her. She starts off small; dates with executives, doctors, lawn firm partners to fancy restaurants. Then a ludicrous number of flower deliveries to home and work. She takes it up a notch, starting with the mind games. How does one take a normally stable man, who has shown enough responsibility to have built a fortune, and turn him into a irrational man, one who exercises poor judgment for once in his life and grows sick with longing for her, terrified with thoughts of losing her? She plays them so well.

The relationships graduate to expensive gifts: diamond earrings, all-expense paid trips to Vegas and Vancouver, Caribbean cruises, lodges in the Rockies. Once they pay for her high-rise apartments not too far from their executive offices, she knows they are ready. And she severs them. She tears these powerful men apart, leaves them weeping in their Humvees or their chauffer-driven Lexus’s. Now it is merely a matter of presenting a sound business proposal: the sincerity and feasibility of her talking to competitors, wives, boards of directors. It’s a matter of supply and demand, Darwinian economics, event-horizons.

Trailer Park Professor

Up in a trailer park on the shores of a lake more modest than nearby Mille Lacs, in a 1987 silver Airstream camper nestled under a canopy of fir trees, lived Warren Futgers, nicknamed the Professor. He was not a college professor. He had never even been a high school teacher. He held no degrees that anybody could speak of. Yet he carried himself like an educated man, one taken to long hours of contemplation on his lawn chair with frayed nylon seat and plastic armrests smudged with newspaper ink. He spoke rarely but when he did, he held your interest. He had an easy way of speaking and a tone of voice that was comforting and reasonable, so that you found yourself frequently saying things like, “Yes, I see. That makes sense. I never thought of that before, but now that you mention it, I suppose so.” His hair was long and stringy, balding at the temples, and he grew his beard until it touched his chest, then he would shave it all off and start over again.

The Professor didn’t read the Sunfish Times like the other locals, instead subscribing to papers from London, New York, and Boston. He read his newspapers seated in his lawn chair from early morning until lunchtime, drinking tea from an insulated mug roughly the size of a bait bucket and brandishing the name of a local gas station. Then he folded up his papers, slapped them against his knee while he looked out towards the lake, and retreated to his trailer.

His trailer was filled with books; nineteenth century novels, historical biography, herpetology, travelogues. Herbs grew in miniature pots, and creeping plants wound their way across drapery rods and down from shelves. His kitchen countertop was a clutter of experiments and specimens: ant farms, honeycombs, caterpillars spinning cocoons in jars with air holes nailed through tin lids. The place smelled strongly of curry; he used it nearly everything he cooked.

He was one of those solitarians that rarely wandered over to say hello unless officially invited for a potluck or a drink, so his neighbors frequently came over for a visit when they saw him out in the lawn chair. Kids knocked on his screen door in the afternoons to hear stories of distant places, mythological heroes and villains, arctic explorers and Indian chiefs.

He owned a canoe with a hole in the bow that restricted him from ever having another person in the canoe; only by sitting alone in the stern would the distribution of weight raise the bow high enough above the waterline to stop water from leaking in and sinking it. He didn’t go out much on his own, but he did take you up on a sunset boatride on a pontoon if invited, and he particularly enjoyed rides in the Culverson’s speedboat. He’d sit up in the bow with his hair and beard whipping in the wind, sunglasses shielding his eyes but tears driving horizontally across his cheekbones from the rush of air.

Then one morning, he was gone.

Where’s the professor; did he go into town? Did he leave to visit a dying family member? Is his mail getting forwarded? Nobody had a clue. The children whined and asked their parents to tell them stories, but they were never as good as the Professor’s. People missed seeing the glow of his light at night, warming the shadows beneath the pine trees into the early morning hours. Now the woods seemed particularly dark and menacing, as though a guardian had abandoned his post. When the sheriff’s department dragged the lake, they found his canoe sunk in about twenty feet of water, but no sign of a body.

The kids of the trailer park came up with their own theories: the professor had finally found a canoe partner, but the moment of his delivery from loneliness had resulted in his drowning. Who would it have been? "It was the ghost of Pocahontas." "No way, it had to be a mermaid." One boy offered the theory that it was an escaped serial killer had broken into his trailer and demanded they paddle across the lake to get away from the cops.

The adults’ theories were no more plausible than the children’s. Maybe he was a felon and staged his death. Maybe he was an insider trader with all of those big city papers and struck it rich and left without so much as a goodbye. Maybe he was out on lake in the middle of the night and got abducted by aliens.

Everybody waited for him to show up again, either floating face down out by the docks, or strolling into the park with a fresh mug of tea and no explanation for his absence, but the truth is, he never showed up again, and they eventually had to tow away his trailer.

Safe Harbor

Road to nowhere photo by stevacek.

I traveled by train to Stuttersville, pulling into the station shortly before sunrise after a restless night. Some people say the gentle rocking of a train lulls them to sleep. Not me. I lie awake listening to the scrape of metal on metal, the rush of air over the cars, listening for all of the sounds that indicate you are on a runaway train accelerating to certain disaster. Finally arriving at the Stuttersville station in those pre-morning hours was like coming into safe harbor from a storm at sea. I was home.

I’d left town to get away from a girl that ran the Tea House with her father. I left town to get my head straight, to find myself somewhere on the highways of the American southwest. Instead I just found dead coyotes and a bad case of hepatitis. I’d been delirious in a roadside hotel just outside of Tucsan. The owner’s mother took care of me there in room number 4. In my fever I was surrounded by demons, most of them looking too much like the father of the girl I was running from. But for the most part, fever deliriums are not what they’re made out to be. Most of the time I just felt frustrated, going round and round in my mind, circular arguments, clammy sheets, the knowledge that I was far from home and slipping into unconsciousness. But then my fever broke and I came out of it, like a boat emerging from a storm into safe harbor. Yeah, I see the parallels.

Okay, so maybe I did see elephants pirhouetting atop telephone poles, and scarecrows doing a mean tap dance down the rows of corn. Maybe I invented a new language from idiotic sounds, shuzzle de bop and de dim bam floozy. Maybe I did find myself in a foreign town of steep hills and nearly vertical streets. I boarded a trolley that laboriously climbed, climbed, climbed, until it reached the apex. What a view, in that split second before the descent. An old drunk drives the trolley, and he frequently drifts off to sleep, awakened only by the blaring car horns as we shoot through intersections against the red lights. He takes another shot from a bottle of rum. His ancestors were pirates, you know, and this infamous bloodline of criminals has diluted itself down to this pathetic figure driving a trolley. Before the trolley crashes through the docks at the edge of the harbor, I leap off while it’s still rolling.

I wander the fishing piers. Great bins of silvery pollock and mackerel, herring and sardine, jellyfish and squid. Mermen cart their catches around in crates, ye traitors of the sea. Where have all the Mermaids gone? Out there in the bay, flipping their glittery green tails in the morning light. Beautiful swelling hips cresting the waterline as they dive deep. I try to steal a rowboat to paddle out to them, to cavort there in the rippling blue water, but all of the boats are filled with pale bloated bodies, flies, and the stench of seaweed. I launch them all out into the bay to let them drift to their final destinations.

Where am I going with this? This is delirium. This is fever. This is like a runaway train that finally rolls to a stop in my home town. Stuttersville.
I leave the station platform and walk across town towards the girl I had been running from. It is in the early morning chill that I crept through wet grass towards the Tea House windows. Inside, a golden light burning from a single lamp in the library. Creeping up to closer, careful not to lean into the light pooling just outside the window, I looked to the two figures inside. The girl, still in her night dress, served up a pot of tea to her father crashed out on the sofa. He was drunk. She nursed him. She had a matronly kind of concern on her face for her father, brushing back a strand of sweaty hair off of his forehead. He wrapped an arm around her waist to pull her close. She peeled back his arm, like some kind of tentacle, and tucked it to his side, then crossed the room to the buffet where she set down the tea pot and wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and I froze there crouched at the window, fingertips held up to the glass.

Come Forward

powerball
photo by rwhite..

She left without so much as a word. He tore apart the kitchen looking for a note—isn’t that where women always left their notes in the movies—and then went to the bedroom to collapse in exhaustion and found the note, resting on his pillow. All that the note said was “I’m leaving you.” No shit, he thought. But why? Sure, in no way could someone say this was marital bliss, but we had our good times, didn’t we? You liked when I made fun of actors during movies, or at least you laughed. Some of the time. I know you hated how my spoon scraped the cereal bowl, and how I couldn’t stay on a television channel for more than five minutes, and how I had to buy a Powerball ticket every weekend. You always thought that was my ticket for escape. It was, baby, but not from you. It was our ticket out of this neighborhood with its crack house and thumper cars. It was our ticket out of our jobs, so I could go into the Garage and tell the foreman to go fuck himself, and so you could tell the school that you were done dishing food onto the plates of all those thankless delinquents.

That’s when he realized: the last Powerball ticket was not on the nightstand, where he usually kept them.

Later that evening he heard on the news that the winning ticket had been sold from his home town, from the convenience store that he always bought his ticket from, but the winner had not yet come forward.

Please Vacate the Theatre

red seats
photo by nepenthes.

Sitting in an empty theatre, he watches advertisements flash across the screen. Rita the Condo Queen Real Estate Agent; A watch/clock repair shop around the corner called The Fixery; Advertisements to rent out the theatre for corporate or private events. As he waits for the featured film he imagines himself projected up there on the screen, larger than life, his voice bellowing out of the THX speakers so that he fills the theatre.

A woman walks in. He slinks down further into his chair. She pauses at his isle, looks at him out of the corner of her eyes, then continues on to the front row, where she moves across to the middle seat and sits down. She’s blonde, her straight thin hair nearly platinum. She’s heroin-addict skinny, but her skin flawless. She wears dark maroon lipstick that makes her lips look too thin. She’s not smiling, and something about her face makes him think that it is probably painful or strenuous for her to smile. She wears a shirt with Abraham Lincoln printed on the front. On the back, his assassin.

He gets up from his chair and moves to the seat directly behind her. He does not try silence his change in seating; in fact, he pulls down each spring loaded chair as he passes down the isle like a boy running a stick along a picket fence, but she ignores him. She cranes her neck to the screen, where the movie has finally begun. Black and white film of flowers in a cemetery, time lapse, wilting. Two children, a boy and a girl, wear their Sunday best. He’s wearing a little clip on tie, and she has a sun hat. They cup their hands beneath a spigot to gather water, then carefully walk to the flowers and dump the water on its petals. Back and forth, back and forth until the children are near exhaustion but the flowers continue to whither until they finally die.

He sits so close to her that he can smell her hair, see the fine wisps on the back of her neck. He sees a childhood scar on the nape of her neck, while his fingers draw to the razor-thin ridge at the back of his own neck. Grandmother’s emerald ring; did she really twist it around on her finger intentionally? Her signature disciplinary move was to clutch the back of the necks of the two children, forcing them in whatever direction she willed them.

He leans across the seat in front of him and turns to see her face in perfect profile. Her nose has lost the little button shape of the girl and grown sharper as a woman, but the eyes are the same. He keeps watching her eyes and sees in their reflection the big screen. Over the speakers he hears the sandpaper voice of his grandmother, cursing a boy and girl. “Get in the tub, you filthy little grubs. Dirty, filthy things, you stand there. Turn on the water. No, did I tell you to turn on the hot water? Only cold water for you. You think I would use up my hot water on you two? Dirty filthy things.” A course rag, rubbing until raw, unrelenting as the sensitive skin of the children grows red, but her voice falling to silence, only the harsh choked breathing of effort, one hand clutched on a thin wrist to hold them still, the other scraping the cloth across their skin. Dirty filthy things, they stand there in the cold water and watch the other shivering, naked, dirty things. Grandmother hands grows cramped from the strain. She sits on the toilet yet still doesn’t let the children out of the tub. The two of them crouch on either end of the clawfooted cast-iron tub, facing each other, freezing water, arms wrapped around their knees, huddled.

He shakes his head free of the grating voice of his grandmother and gathers the courage to look directly at the screen, but he doesn’t want to look. He shakes his head free of her. In the reflection of the woman’s eyes he sees the screen fall dark, and she turns to look directly at him, and he wonders if she really sees a dirty, filthy thing? Did they every really outgrow those raw naked bodies? They tried to water the flowers, they worked themselves to exhaustion to keep them alive, but they still died in the end. They still felt guilty for letting the flowers die. The girl was always the stronger one, the defiant one, and now the woman held out her hand and he took it, and together they walked out of the theatre.