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Aunt Marty’s Magic Coins, a Short Story

Posted in short story, tagged , , , , , , , on October 22, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. –Ursula K. Le Guin, author (21 Oct 1929-2018)

AUNT MARTY’S MAGIC COINS

My great aunt, Marty Pestil, was a natural at tending to the dead. She got bodies ready for the all-night watch when folk gathered to make sure no bugs, dogs, or ghosts could get to the ripe-for-decaying flesh. I helped my aunt since I didn’t have no other place to go. My aunt took me in when my mama started talking to wallpaper flowers. Papa had walked off before I was born.

 I never got schooling, but not many people did in mountain-tucked Gray Valley, Kentucky during the early 1920’s. We picked up a common-sense kind of learning. Aunt Marty taught me her trade. She said living and dying fit together the way bare-treed winter followed full-blossomed summer.

Almost everybody agreed, but some folk thought Aunt Marty turned the winter dying part into a show.

Men took care of the departed men and boys.  The man who took care of the dead in Gray Valley looked like his grim job. He wagged his finger so hard at my aunt it about blurred his whole arm.

“You act like you was bigger’n God—it just ain’t right. Pretending you can step off into the afterlife with the dead.”

My aunt stared him down. She didn’t argue. “Our job is to open the next world. When the silver coins fall off the eyes of dead folk, their souls got to be ready for the hereafter. Ain’t no more I can say about it.”

He backed off, groaning, like there ain’t no sense talking to a crazy lady. It wasn’t ‘til later I learned he got picked accidental-like to prepare the dead and hated every second of it.

 Aunt Marty said the folks that set themselves for eternal damnation didn’t want to go, and Aunt Marty had to say somebody from the underworld would come for them anyway, so they may as well scat before the rotting set in, and their souls smelled, too. Besides, St. Peter listened to a good story. Usually, they ran for that last chance.

 I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. I got to be known as Lost Lacy. Hank Ross was my only friend. Hank helped my aunt and me with our truck garden. His papa owned the General Store. The Ross family didn’t care that Aunty Marty talked to floating souls.

Sometimes Hank and me would cook together. I thought of him as my connection to the earth and sun, to breathing, to the smell of boiling turnips and hot sliced pork.

“I like when you don’t have your hair pulled so tight on the top of your head like it’s caught in a trap,” Hank said. “Relax once in a while.”

 I shrugged. “It don’t make sense to hoe, pull weeds, or move bodies with hair in the way.”

Besides, I traveled from death to death the way a butterfly goes from flower to flower, especially when typhoid or scarlet fever hit. I guess Aunt Marty and me was lucky we never got no bad sickness. Butterflies get to drink nectar—I touched the cold skin of folk that followed both Beelzebub and St. Michael.

No matter how many times Aunt Marty handed me the magic coins and I rubbed them over my fingertips I never felt nothing special in them. They’d been used to close so many eyes. Everybody thought old Miranda Mill had been best friends with the devil.  She cursed and stole and some folk even say she got away with killing her own husband.

I could have sworn I saw a body twitch as Aunt Marty talked honest to it, even though it was as hard-cold as a middle-of-February icicle.

Eleanor Case, the old schoolmarm, brought extra lunch-bucket food for the kids that didn’t have nothing. If angels ever wanted to borrow a human body, Miss Case is the one they’d use.

Bodies all just looked dead to me.

 Aunt Marty told me I would inherit her gift. I didn’t want it. Maybe the magic coins knew how I felt and that’s why they wouldn’t let me know their secrets.

The strangest experience I had was when Ida Mae’s twin sister, Carrie Mae, died from a seizure caused by a high fever. Ida shook like a thunderstorm had formed inside her and was getting stronger and stronger, until it tore her apart from the inside. Aunt Marty must have noticed, too. Real slow, as if she was trying to soothe an injured bear, she reached over and patted Ida’s arm.

 “I got a message for you. And it’s real important. Your sister says that she would have run out into the cold rain to pick apples even if you hadn’t had a hankering for them. She wanted some, too. And the fever—this is the important part—the fever didn’t have nothing to do with getting soaked through.”

 Ida’s eyes opened about as wide as her face and she choked, “But how do you know about the apples? I never told.”

“Your sister’s telling you she can’t go to her eternal reward until you know her dying ain’t one-bit your fault.”

 Then Ida dropped onto her sister’s body and sobbed. Aunt Marty didn’t stop her until I saw the slightest light, no brighter than a candle flame flicker, pass through Ida and out through the wall.

 “But you didn’t send Carrie’s spirit into heaven,” I whispered to Aunt Marty.

 “It’s okay,” she said. “Ida Mae done it.”

 Ida Mae told her best friend that story. Versions of what happened got spread around the county. My aunt and me turned into either witches or messengers from the Almighty, depending upon the notions of who heard. Some thought we was gods, the kind that shouldn’t be approached ‘til there wasn’t no choice.

I loved my aunt. I would have been an orphan without her. But, the magic coins knew her, not me. Besides, in a month or two I would be sixteen-years-old. And all I saw ahead was more burying.  

“Pick you some happiness if I could,” Hank said one spring day as we searched the woods for some poke for a salad.

So, I told him about how I wanted to do something different than travel from one pine box to another. “I wouldn’t mind rendering hog fat over a hot stove all day, if I could work for the living.”

“How about you and me getting married?”

“Ain’t never thought about it.” I looked at the basket of fresh-picked poke, good-for-you in early spring. Poison later in the season.   

“I’m mighty crazy about you, and I think we can work together. Maybe even create living folk.” He turned red as a over-ripe tomato.

Hank made sense. Marrying him could change my life. A lot. “Think we should tell Aunt Marty together?”

He looked at me like I was a tadpole that turned into a full-growed frog fast as ice melts in a hot pot. “Should we tell her right now?”

“Yup. No point in waiting. She’d figure us out anyway.”

 “Then I think it’s time you knew the secret.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “How do you think Aunt Marty makes them coins magic?”

“I figured she had some kind of special power over them. They don’t look no different.”

“She learned how from my papa. It’s a business we do most folk don’t know about.” He sat on a huge rock at the edge of the trail. “True, you seen these coins when they been put on the eyes of folk to keep them closed, when the time’s come to look inside and see the whole of themselves. Just before they open before eternity. You don’t know how the magic forms before that happens.

 “The magic comes from inside a person. You’ve got to care about what you’re doing. A lot. And keep caring All the time. But that ain’t how it ends.”

Hank pulled a coin from his pocket, like the ones Aunt Marty used. Then I put the poke on the rock and let Hank drop the coin into my hand. It warmed immediately. I suddenly felt drawn to Hank’s eyes. Strange how I’d never seen them the same way before. His eyes was the color of a lake at noon when the sun shines. I noticed how his smile seemed to come straight from his soul.

When Hank and I walked into Aunt Marty’s cabin, my aunt wasn’t in her cane rocker, like usual. She lay in bed, her face white as a bleached sheet.

“Ah, you are both here,” she said as if her voice came from far away.

I took her hand, cold as snow.

“Good, you have found your path. I feel it.” She whispered, but her smile filled her face. “One last request. Lacy, you will send me on to my eternal reward. Then you and Hank will live in this house together. Promise?”

We both nodded. Aunt Marty’s body shook once and then remained still. We got her lying as peaceful as if she was taking an afternoon nap. Then I dropped an aspirin in a bowl of soda water and wiped her face. Hank waited outside the door while I done the full washing.

When I placed the coins over her eyes to keep them closed, the coins told me what to do. I called to Hank to stand by my side. A wavering light appeared.

“Follow the light. Your mama is waiting.”

The brightness turned around and came back into me.

Hank grabbed my hand and the light jumped into him, too. When I looked at our arms I saw the fresh skin of our youth turn the same sun-gold, and I realized we’d been given power.

We used our magic in the truck garden to grow enough vegetables to feed us, the poorer folk in town, and the young’uns in the orphanage in the valley.

Ida Mae took over for Aunt Marty, and when she got married her husband led the men to their destiny. They knew the secret of the coins, but they didn’t talk out loud to spirits like Aunt Marty did.  They talked to them silently, soul to soul.

The magic coins never made our lives perfect, but they made us rich in a peculiar kind of way. As of this telling, Hank and me have been married sixty years. We had five girls and four boys, and each one of our kids had two or three young’uns, and they ain’t stopped growing the family. Our sons and daughters all know how the coins work. They continue to make better whoever they touch, so that nobody knows where the goodness starts or ends.

I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Something called love.

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Courage, a Short Story

Posted in short story, tagged , , , , , , , on October 15, 2022| Leave a Comment »

“Generosity is giving more than you can.” – Khalil Gibran

Most of the traffic lights on Main Street still flash yellow as Dad drives my sister, Mom, and me to the hospital this Monday morning. April 6, 1998. There was no need to circle the date on the calendar. We haven’t been able to think about anything else.

Dad offers to stay with me while I get ready for surgery, but I tell him, “I’ll see you in the Recovery Room.” I’d kind of like to be alone right now. Not sure why.

He nods without looking at me. I think he gets it. Dad can be cool. My mom’s got easy-trigger tear ducts. She is going to need Dad more than I will.

 After all the preliminaries I shiver in my faded brown gown. It’s designed for mooning between the tied bows. I pull a blanket to my chin and close my eyes, but they refuse to remain closed. They stare at the ceiling. It’s bare, sterile, and covered with pocked tiles. The walls are a dull green, the kind only a Sherlock Holmes would consider remembering. Nothing like my room at home. My entire ceiling is covered with posters: Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals, Globetrotters, Frank Zappa, and The Simpsons. I even have some old Scooby Doo cartoon stuff. Mom doesn’t care for my design plan. She thinks it looks cluttered, like everything else in my room, but she tolerates it.

 My dresser is covered with football trophies. In the center is a framed picture of my sister Leah and me on vacation last summer. No girlfriend’s photo. Not yet. Sure, I play sports, so people assume I have dates all the time, but as soon as a female classmate says hi, I lose every bit of saliva in my mouth. I’m useless.

 I get up to go to the bathroom—more to move around than any real need. The clock seems to be moving in geological time. My toes touch an icy floor.

My privacy feels invaded as the flush echoes into the hallway. As I wash my hands I frown at my baby-round face and blotchy field of dark freckles. A stranger would never guess I’ve been seventeen for three months now. Funny, though, I never realized how much my eyes look like my sister’s, small and pale, kind of green and kind of blue.

 I’m crazy about my younger sister, Leah. No doubt about that. But we’re not that much alike. I’m a redhead, with too many freckles for my face, and she’s so blond and pale she could fade into a sheet. She’s barely twelve and would rather read than anything else. I’m not anti-intellectual, but I prefer to weave and run on the football field.

Mom says I charge through whatever I do as if I had only one chance to grab the ball. I tell her that born leaders act that way. She doesn’t always know when I’m kidding. She should lighten up now and then, but I understand why she’s so worried all the time. My sister is so sick that I lose count of how many times people ask how she is.

 Dad worries in a different way than Mom does. He gets sullen and simmers. Then when I’m spending a rainy Saturday watching TV, he asks me what I plan to do with my life. I pretend not to care, but I’m not really that great at anything, and I can’t tell him that. Especially not when he’s in one of his moods. He shakes his head and then goes in to check on my sister. I hear him talking to her about how well she did on her science test after she missed half the term. He talks loud enough that I’d have to be beyond stupid not to know he’s really talking to me.

 I barely passed Biology last term. That means a brain surgeon career is out. I could go for history, at least the way Mr. Riley teaches it. He’s an American History buff.

Once he said, “Abe Lincoln didn’t like dressing up. He’d take off his jacket, pull off his boots, and stretch his toes, whether there were visitors at the White House or not. And there is a reason why I’m telling you this.” He unlaced his shoes and slammed them on the desk. “That doesn’t have a thing to do with the founding of Virginia, but these are new shoes and my feet hurt. I figure if Abe can do it, so can I.”

The whole class laughed. I’d like to be cool like Mr. Riley. But I’m not sure I can teach people who don’t want to learn. There are a lot of kids like that at my school. Heck, I wouldn’t want to try to teach somebody like me.

I wonder if Grandpa Myer was a good student. He served in the army in World War II in bomb disposal. I can see him in the old stilted-frame home movies, his khaki uniform turned to gray on the black-and-white film. Of course, when I ask him what it was like when a bomb started ticking, he says, “Courage doesn’t come pure. It comes wrapped up in a lot of very smelly stuff.”

I want to tell him not to talk to me as if I were a six-year-old baby, but Grandpa always asks how I’m doing, no matter how weak Leah may be, so I let it go.

Heroes intrigue me, of all kinds. There was a time I imagined being on the cover of “Sports Illustrated.” I wouldn’t admit it out loud, but I had my front-page pose planned in my parents’ full-length mirror. Last year I dislocated my left knee in a game early in the season. That knee hurt like crazy. Sometimes it still does. Mom doesn’t want me to play at all.

Almost cutting time. My mind has been doing cartwheels. Now my stomach is doing them. Come on, David. It’s not like you are afraid of the dark or anything.

Sometimes Leah likes a night light. Kids her age tell ghost stories with flashlights aimed at their chins. But then Leah has spent a lot of the last few years in the hemodialysis unit. Three days a week in a narrow, blue vinyl chair, with the machines, thick needles, and tubes, her blood thinned with heparin. I sat with her and read stories with her for hours, the smell of insulin and something antiseptic stuck in my nostrils.

I have never understood why my smart sister acts like her C-student brother is the greatest ever. She’s always asking for me. When I tore up my knee that time I didn’t cry much. She cried for me. Last summer I stayed the whole four hours with her when she had dialysis. I got to know the health techs and nurses. They joked and talked with me as much as they did with her. Sometimes Leah’s potassium level would get too high. The doctor would order kayexalate with sorbitol from the pharmacy STAT. That would help, but at other times she needed an extra day of hemodialysis. Then she would cry and I would fume. I know every inch of the dialysis unit, and I’ve learned a lot about kidney disease.

But the fact is, I never got used to the routine.

Yeah, Leah’s special all right. Maybe I’ll make her proud of me for real someday. I’ll tackle my study phobia and get a job in research, at a miracle place where intense studies eliminate kidney disease, make the common cold less common, cancerous tumors antiquated, and bloated fat cells a thing of the past.

Right, what a rich fantasy life you have?

An orangish pink is washing over the darkness outside. I see it through the window. A woman pushing a portable X-ray machine passes my door. Voices in the hall rise: “Hey, Kelly, do you have the med-room keys?” “Lifting help in Room 11.”

Somebody in blue scrubs writes something on my chart. He looks at me and smiles. It’s funny. I know this operation is a big deal but the thing I’m worried about is that first needle stick.

My lab results are on target. Leah is ready. I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be. I slide both hands over the warm trunk of my body and picture the charts the doctor showed me, full-color glossy pictures. He showed me something like a map of what was about to happen. They’re cutting Leah from the front, someplace by the groin; if something goes wrong, they can get back in easily, not something I want to think about. Because they’re cutting me through the back, the doctor told me that I will take longer to recover than Leah will. For the first time, I realize those pictures were flat and superficial, the difference between viewing Italian travelogues and visiting Rome, or checking out pizza ads and taking a good solid bite of double-cheese pepperoni.

I nod to the man in blue scrubs, gulp, and then smile. Mom and Dad are with Leah right now. I’m going to be fine.

Oh well, whatever happens, here’s to you, little sister.

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Among the Rabbits: a Short Story

Posted in short story, tagged , , , , , , on September 11, 2022| 1 Comment »

Among the Rabbits pic

“He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.” Elbert Hubbard

AMONG THE RABBITS

Carson had a knack for quiet. He sat as still as the broken clock that stood on a pole outside his school building, obvious yet ignored. He would talk in class, when necessary, about how numbers fit together or an e at the end of a word changed its sound. That one muted vowel grabbed the end of a word and changed its meaning. He understood.

Silence didn’t necessarily mean safety.   

Carson had hair bright as a ripe tangerine, tiny freckles across the bridge of a small nose, the kind of face adults called endearing. Yet, he had learned trust and grownups didn’t necessarily mix. No matter how nice they appeared. It isn’t a good idea to touch a colorful frog; it’s poisonous. Inside and out. 

His third-grade teacher smiled and called him an ideal student. She never threw him against a wall for reasons more silent than the e, the way his foster mother did. Carson, however, couldn’t take any chances. He measured syllables as if they had the power of a summer storm that could stop a clock.

Reading helped as a temporary escape, especially library books about animals. Dolphins swam in oceans as blue as ink. Beavers built dams and he imagined joining them. He traveled across Australia with joeys and flew with eagles over canyons. He loved wild, free rabbits. He watched for them as he rode the bus in the morning, in the center of a lawn one moment, out of sight the next.

Carson had no place to go. As soon as he got home at three o’clock, his foster mother locked him in the tiny storage room. He never knew when she would return. Their apartment had designer couches and expensive antique vases; they could have been gold-plated garbage cans. Carson never experienced the gold.

Summer vacation began in one week, and his stomach hurt whenever he thought about it. He would spend long stifling hours alone. Or, when his stepmother stayed home, he would iron, scrub floors, and scour the toilet with undiluted bleach, his usual chores.

He remembered his real mother who had been taken from him when he turned five. The grownups were all wrong; she wasn’t crazy, only sad. Besides, they talked about her as if she had done something wrong. She just cried a lot, saying horrible people surrounded the house. They listened to her conversations. She warned him that their cat had swallowed a microphone; he needed to be careful about petting her.

The last he had heard, his dad lived someplace on the west coast, or was it Florida?

His foster mother, however, seemed to enjoy meanness. “If you tell anyone about the bruises on your back, you’ll get worse. I swear.” Carson didn’t doubt it for a second. She wore each threat like a funnel cloud, no warning siren necessary. He could feel it in the atmosphere.

 At school, Carson had one friend, Robin. She talked enough for the two of them. “Beat you to the cafeteria line,” she always said, but never did. One of her legs hadn’t grown as long as the other.

None of the other kids bothered with her, except to call her Wobbles. Her teeth lined up as crooked as a rock fence and her eyes looked no bigger than uneven pebbles. She told Carson the kids who made fun of her needed to grow up. Although he noticed Robin was the shortest kid in the class.

Sometimes she shared homemade quickbreads from her lunch: a muffin, biscuit, or cornbread.

“Mom and I had a flour fight last night,” she told him as she cut an oversized banana muffin with a plastic knife.

“What’s a flour fight?” Carson devoured his half of the muffin and then folded the paper as if it were going into a shirt drawer instead of the trash.

“You know, where you take flour and throw it at one another when you make cakes or bread.”

“Doesn’t that make a mess?”

“Sure, then we clean up, and laugh about it.”

“Oh. Okay.” It didn’t make sense at all, although he remembered when he lived in a house that wasn’t neat, especially toward the end. No flour anywhere. The garbage overflowed and the house smelled like a cat box. All the blinds stayed shut night and day with the lights turned out.

“What would you like Mom to bake next?” Robin gathered their paper trash into a crumpled ball.

“Whatever she wants.”

“But what is your favorite?”

“Biscuits. Big ones.”

“You got it. Maybe your mom should make some biscuits for you. That same old skinny bologna on white has got to be boring after a while.”

Carson stared at the lunchroom table until the time came to go out to the playground. Remembering his mother made his head hurt.

“Let’s hurry to the playground before the other kids get to the swings. Beat you there.” Robin grinned.

Carson didn’t try to run. He wanted his friend to win for a change.

 “Doing anything this summer?” Robin stretched her belly over the lowest swing on the school grounds, arms and legs dangling.

 He had heard one of the teachers tell another they might take the swings out during the summer and replace them with safer equipment. Carson hoped that didn’t happen. He liked joining the sky and feeling power. Besides, swings made him forget about danger. He never saw anyone get hurt. What made the playground unsafe now? Why hadn’t the change been made last year, or the year before if they were so awful?

“No, I’m not doing anything. Nothing special anyway.” He stared into the sky as he pumped his legs and kicked the air until the chain jerked

 “Not even read?”

 “Well, sure. About animals.”

 “Yeah? I live where rabbits come out of the woods because we feed them. Lettuce. Tomatoes. Every morning, early.”

“No cages?”     

“Uh uh. Why don’t you come to my house and see them?

 “Not allowed.”

 She dragged her shoes through the dust. “Oh.”

 Carson’s throat tightened. He wouldn’t dare get his feet that dirty.

“Follow me. Over there.” She pointed to a wide tree at the left of the playground.

She spit on her hand. “You do it, too. Then we shake hands, share secrets, and become best friends forever. We die if we tell.”

“That’s silly.”

“Carson, don’t you trust me?”

He looked at her, grimaced, spit on his hand, and then slapped it onto hers.

“I have a toad-shaped birthmark on my back. When I wiggle, it hops.”

He shrugged, pretending to smile. “My best friend next to you is a pee jar.”  

He expected her to laugh, but she didn’t. Instead, she frowned, and opened her mouth to say something, but didn’t. Instead, she ran, awkwardly, toward the slide. He climbed the ladder behind her. The metal surface gave a scalding warning. He should not have hinted at anything about his home life.

The next day Robin asked about a burn on his hand.

“An accident. Sort of.”

“From what?”

“Ironing my foster mother’s stuff.”

“You iron? Wow.”

Carson re-tied a shoelace that didn’t need it.

“I’ll go to your house. How about tomorrow?”

“Bad idea.”

“Why?”

He paused and then shrugged.

Grinning, she tugged at the back of his collar, gasped, and suddenly let go. Her smile evaporated. “I didn’t. I didn’t.”

“What?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to pull on your shirt so hard.”

“It’s okay.”

But chirping Robin turned into a mother hen. If Carson dropped a pencil she dived for it, as if it were breakable glass. He felt her eyes on him almost all the time. She never explained why.

On the last day of class, she almost turned back into herself. “I brought two muffins today instead of one.” However, she peeled off the wrapper of both pieces of bread as if he were a toddler.  

“Okay,” Carson said. “What’s up?”

“Nothing. Mom just made extra.”

“I iron. Remember? I can handle paper.”

“Oh. Sorry. Just being polite.”

After Carson arrived home he made a peanut butter sandwich, washed the knife, poured a cup of water, got his own pee jar, and smoothed a blanket under the single light bulb in his tiny hideaway. Three books lay unopened on the floor. He had already read them. No more library books during the summer. His foster mother would never let him go. All his new reading came from the school library. He only had a few books now.

He thought about the rabbits at Robin’s house as they ran through the yard, free, fed, happy. He bowed his head when he heard the storage room door lock from the other side, then the front door slam. He waited until his foster mother had been gone at least five minutes before he cried.

Scarcely an hour passed when he heard the door reopen. She couldn’t be home already. Then he heard the landlord’s voice. “Really, officer, if there’s been any trouble, I knew nothing about it. Honest.”

“Carson, where are you?” Robin shouted. “Mom’s made a snack for you.”

Then a woman with a musical drawl called, “This is Robin’s mom. It’s going to be okay, honey.”

Carson felt his heart fight to get out of his chest.

“Got some homemade biscuits with butter if you’re hungry.”

“In here.” His answer came as a dry squeak. The lock slid open.

Outside the door stood the tallest, darkest policeman Carson had ever seen, a plump woman the color of spicy pumpkin pie, and Robin.

“We are here to help you, son.” The policeman extended his hand.

Carson held his breath.

“I’m sorry. I had to tell Mom and Dad. Especially since he’s a policeman. He promised me it would be okay. Dad doesn’t lie.” Robin bit at her thumbnail.

“Huh?”

“Oh, guess you didn’t know. I’m foster, too.  When I saw the cuts and bruises on the back of your neck, they made me remember.”

Carson heard footsteps in the hall outside the front door. He was surprised he didn’t pass out when the apartment door opened, and the footsteps got louder.

A woman he didn’t know appeared. “Sorry that I’m late. Construction detour. Traffic backed up for miles.”

“Oh, that’s the social worker. Don’t worry,” Robin said. “You’ll like her. She’s a good person, not just nice.”

“Where am I going?” Carson whispered.

Robin smiled. “If everything works out okay, with me to watch the rabbits.”

 

First appeared in Piker Press in August of 2014

 

 

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Callie, Meet Callie: a Short Story

Posted in short story, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on August 14, 2022| Leave a Comment »

sun

“It`s not how old you are, it`s how you are old.” Jules Renard 

This week I will tell another short story. The world is full of ugly. It needs to be faced. However, sometimes we need a moment with a happy ending. 

Callie, Meet Callie

The young man in the driver’s seat glances toward me after he makes a left turn into city traffic. He tells me everything is going to be okay. My shoulder will get repaired, and I will be pitching a baseball game. The first octogenarian in the major leagues. He says it too many times. I can’t tell whether he is trying to be funny or not.  

I look out the window and watch the traffic. I wonder if I ever drove a car or lived in a brick house with a flower garden in the yard. Right now, all I remember is a sour, skinny someone coming into this small room where I stay in this big building.

“The medicine I am giving you doesn’t taste bad at all,” she told me. She should have added, compared to swallowing liquid bleach. I don’t know if she was trying to fool me or just get an addled old lady to toe the line. After all, the place I could call home if I wanted to, is unpleasant to every sense: hearing, smell, taste, touch, sight. Old folk, some much frailer than I am, fill small rooms like the one I occupy. Roommates come. And go.

 The deep ache in my shoulder doesn’t go away. No matter how many times my young escort says it will. Of course, he doesn’t say how and when that is going to happen. And he isn’t talking to me right now. He tells the traffic light something about cracked bones. “Not for one second do I believe she fell.”

He finally turns to me. “It was Sadie, that new aide, wasn’t it? She pulled your arm. She throws temper tantrums toddler-style and gets by with it. That girl should be fired!”

I don’t answer. He must have been telling traffic signals and passing trucks about how my shoulder got hurt, but he doesn’t continue his rant or give details. Chances are no one would have believed me if I said anything, even if this pulled-arm story is true. I have a difficult time keeping names in my memory—or remembering much of anything for that matter. My thoughts feel like scattered puzzle pieces outside a crushed cardboard box—with no way of getting the pieces back where they belong.

Right now, the puzzle piece I see has a picture of a frowning aide on it. No name that fits and stays in place. I remember the pain.

Then the young man turns to me with a softer, less irritated voice. “Grandma Callie, you know I’m Kevin, don’t you?”

“I know you come to see me. And you make me smile.” I want to lie, to say of course I remember everything about you. But he could start asking questions I can’t answer.

Kevin is the only face I recognize as someone who bothers to visit me—on purpose. That much I know, even if I can’t hold onto his name for long. Besides, this peculiar sadness comes to me, and it doesn’t have words. Just a sense. Something happened that I’m not sure I want to recall anyway. Something sad and big. Not big like an empty room. Big like a hole in the ground with an ugliness at the bottom.

“Thank you.” I look at Kevin and want to say more but words don’t come. I have no idea where we are going until we reach a building even bigger than my so-called home. We are at a hospital.

He stays with me, fills out papers, pats my good arm, and tells me I will be as good as new until this lady in what looks like dull green pajamas is ready to take me to the operating room.

I watch the tiny holes in the ceiling as I ride down a long hallway. The holes are all the same size. All empty.

“You have naturally curly hair, don’t you?” the lady asks.

“Probably.”

“The pattern of ringlets is unusual. And you were a redhead. Your eyebrows. That’s how I guess. The color shines through the gray.”

Chances are, this lady is making conversation, trying to keep me from being nervous, and yet she has triggered a memory. I see my hair at the age of 25, as golden as the sun at midday. Then I see a man, his arm around me, but the image is interrupted because we have reached the operating room.

“Hi, I’m the anesthesiologist,” a woman completely covered with green pajama material says. “It’s my job to make sure you sleep well while the doctor works.”

“We definitely want you to be having pleasant dreams,” a man who is likely the doctor says.

I close my eyes and float. I’m asleep. Even so, before long I hear a voice holler, “No pulse!”

Then the faraway words. “Cardiac failure…no code.”

But my dream is too good. A man has his arm around me. I know who he is. My husband. Andrew. Tall. Dark as the bark of an ash tree. He draws me to him. I hear a baby cry, turn, and pick him up from his crib. Our son, Michael. Yes…yes. Kevin’s father has become an infant again.

 Another dream slips in. Earlier. Less pleasant. My parents.  “Marry him and you will never see us again.”

Locks changed on their door. The inside space remained sealed against us.

Andrew died from cancer. Then our son, Michael, died because of complications from a bout of pneumonia. He was buried next to his father, an ancient stone with a fresh death underneath.

“We are sorry about your loss,” my mother said. No comforting arms were offered. Not even a greeting card.

I feel myself slowly waking in what is probably the recovery room. But the anesthesiologist and the doctor told me to have pleasant dreams. Only the reappearance of my sweet Andrew had been pleasant.

Finally, I feel a gentle hand rouse me. “Wow! You must have been having a wild dream.  You were kicking the sheets.”

I look up to see a nurse wearing the brightest white scrubs I have ever seen.

“Not only that…” I decide not to mention what I heard in the OR as I slept. It was just too strange.

 “Well, there’s a party waiting for you.”

 “A party? How did Kevin arrange that in such a short period of time?”

 “Oh, you don’t know yet. Don’t worry. Kevin will grieve. Long and hard. He’s a good man. But those of us on this side of the clouds will lead him to the insurance policy Andrew left for him. It’s big enough for him to finish that engineering degree he’s always wanted. And there’s this girl. I think they are getting serious…”

 “Huh?” I check out at my shoulders. Both of them. No sign of a scar. No pain. “So, I really didn’t make it through surgery.”

“I guess that depends upon how you want to define didn’t make it. Could you tell me a story about your life if you wanted?”

“I could take all day and tell one tale after the other. I remember when Michael, Andrew, and I were looking through a family photo album, and he asked why we only had pictures of our darker-skinned family. I groaned, but Andrew’s smile never stopped.

“Instead, he scooped Michael into his arms. I’m sad they missed the roasted marshmallows at the picnic and Great Uncle Lou’s band concert, too. But it’s a small complaint, like complaining you can’t own the sky when the blue over your head is so beautiful you can’t take in anything more wonderful, so it doesn’t matter.”

I look at the bright nurse as every memory fits back into place: the ugly ones that had seemed so close when ugly had described the pattern of my memory-vacant life. I see the ordinary as well as the extraordinary times. The broken puzzle box is reassembled. The picture pieces fit—none missing.

“Then you made it, Callie. True, time doesn’t matter anymore. Today. Tomorrow. Next week. They don’t exist here. But, come on now anyway. You have a whole group of family and friends waiting for you.”

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Between Chester and Me, a short story

Posted in short story, tagged , , , , , , on August 7, 2022| Leave a Comment »

ring

All my life I have maintained that the people of the world can learn to live in peace together if they are not brought up with prejudice. (Josephine Baker) 

My blogs have always included either facts or poetry with one exception. Once I wrote a flash fiction piece, The Inside of a Ping Pong Ball, published in 1995. While looking for another document, I discovered a short story I had published in Dream Weaver, a local magazine that unfortunately is no longer operating. This fictional piece is longer than my usual entries. However, I think it fits as well today as it did in any century.

BETWEEN CHESTER AND ME

     Mom and her friends said Chester’s dad was nuts for sending him to an expensive private school after he failed third grade in public school. Again. Especially since the money he spent on out-of-parish tuition could have replaced that worthless pickup truck he drove. But I pretended I didn’t hear. Mom didn’t care what I thought anyway. She said that I may be eight years old, but I could give out eighty years’ worth of opinions. Seems to me I wasn’t allowed to have one different notion about anything, much less too many.

     “We get nasty notes about how much money we owe,” Chester told me, his mouth so full of crooked teeth, even I stared, and I was his best friend. “But Dad always pays. Late maybe. Just has to borrow a little once in a while.”

     “So, doesn’t change a single game we play,” I said. “Uhm. You can’t come over today. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment, just for a check-up. See you at school tomorrow.”    

     I ran off before Chester saw the lie in me. I wish he wouldn’t tell me about his money problems. His dad’s dark shaggy beard and one pair of paint-spattered jeans told me he didn’t have much. Unless he owned more than the one pair of pants I saw, with a star-shaped tear in the knee and copper flecks of something on the seat. Chester wore old clothes like the ones we gave to the Salvation Army, things that were too shabby to wear, but too good for rags. Mom said I should never say anything mean to him. But I shouldn’t bring him home either.

     “Stacey, Chester’s not all there. Do you know what I mean?” she said.

     “Not all where?” I lifted the lid to the sugar jar and tapped the sides a few times. I thought about sucking on one of the crystal chunks that fell into the center, but I didn’t really want it. Besides, it would fall apart as soon as I picked it up. Just like most of my arguments with my mother.

     “Don’t pretend ignorance,” Mom said. “You never know what someone like that is going to do. Besides, it wouldn’t hurt for you to play with another girl now and then.”

     I knew better than to argue anymore. I always ended up with extra chores if I did. But Mom didn’t understand. The other girls wanted to be fashion designers or actresses. Or they played with dolls in boring lace dresses and talked for them in voices that sounded like they’d been sucking-in helium balloons. I never understood how someone could prefer fancy pretend to football. Of course, some of the boys would think since they were boys, they had to be boss. I hated that. Chester never played by those rules.

     Once I broke a string on a brand-new gold yo-yo. I tried to tie the broken part back on, but I knew that wouldn’t work. I was just being stubborn and trying to prove a point about how I lost good birthday money on a piece of junk. So, I got mad and hurled the worthless thing at a fat, old tree. Chester grabbed the two broken halves and covered his ears with them.

     “Hey, Stacey? Look, my head’s winding the string.” He squatted down and stood up again until he got dizzy. Then he stuck his tongue out at me and I laughed so hard I forgot to be in a bad mood.

     In class, Chester would suck in air through his teeth and fold his arithmetic papers like an accordion. Sometimes his answers were so wrong the other kids laughed their heads off. Then it would take Mrs. Craftwood at least five minutes to quiet everybody down. But I wouldn’t laugh, even if Chester said something really funny, like the time he asked if the earth was hollow like the globe in the science room.

     “Yeah, hollow like his head,” Jerry Freeman whispered. Then he stared at me. “Are you going to marry Hollow Head?” Every freckle on Jerry’s face flashed malice.

     I tripped him when he went to sharpen his pencil. He bruised his elbow when he fell into another kid’s desk. I claimed it was an accident, but I know I didn’t look the least bit sorry. Mrs. Craftwood sent me to spend the afternoon in the principal’s office, and I had to sweep floors after school, but it was worth it.

     Chester kept a tiny, gray velvet box hidden in his pocket. A ring with a big white diamond lay in a soft spongy space inside. He said it belonged to his mom. She died and went to heaven not long after he was born.

     “You can’t touch it, Stacey,” he said. “Only I can do that ‘cause it belonged to my mom. I like to hold it and pretend she’s right next to me. Dad said she had hair dark as molasses and a voice that made the angels cry.”

     He rolled the ring in his palm, then held the jewel to the sun, as if he could see more than a few sparkly places. Then he carefully put the ring back inside, and we ran to find swings next to one another on the playground. If there weren’t any, we climbed the monkey bars and he never seemed to care that I always beat him to the top.

     One day in the lunchroom, Mrs. Craftwood saw Chester take the ring out of his pocket. She dragged him to the principal’s office. I threw away the other half of my bologna sandwich and followed them. They didn’t close the door. I saw everything.

     “This ring had to be stolen,” Mrs. Craftwood told Mrs. Austin, “Because this boy’s father is entirely incapable of affording something like this.”

     Mrs. Austin glared at Chester. “Stealing is a sin, son. You should know that.”

     After school when Chester’s dad got to the principal’s office I sat outside the office and listened again. I knew that he had a job in a big, important office a long time ago, but the company closed one day, and he never found another job like it. Then after his wife died, he moved into an old four-room house on the edge of town and did odd jobs now and then. Folks said he didn’t seem to care anymore. But when he charged into Mrs. Austin’s office, it was clear he cared about something.

     He didn’t say anything while she and Mrs. Craftwood accused Chester of stealing. Then he asked if either one of them took a close look at the ring.

     “Why should that be necessary?” Mrs. Austin asked.

     “Because it doesn’t take much light to see the truth in that diamond.  Let me guess.  Came in a gray box. Smells a little like grass stains and peanut butter.”

     “What are you talking about, sir?” Mrs. Austin said.

     I had to cover my ears because Chester’s dad got so loud. And this time the door was shut. He’d slammed it when he went inside. Hard.

     “Would a real diamond look as scratched up as the side of a matchbox?”

     “Please lower your voice,” Mrs. Craftwood said.

     “Not until you return his mother’s ring.”

     I wanted to lean into the door and catch everything that went on, but then Chester’s dad started talking about how his wife deserved better, and so does Chester. Wasn’t so exciting anymore. Something I couldn’t explain made me feel strange, almost like I walked into the boys’ dressing room by mistake. So, I sat on the bench outside the door and waited for what seemed like a long time.

      “Thank you,” Chester said as his dad opened the door. Simple, like nothing was ever taken from him in the first place. He didn’t even see me right away because he was too busy slipping the ring on and off of his finger.

     But his dad’s face looked so red it must have hurt. I could have sworn it burned right through his whiskers. He stopped when he saw me. “Stacey, you’re a good kid. Chester’s crazy about you. Don’t ever get too big for yourself.”

     “I won’t,” I said. But I thought that was a strange thing to say.

     Chester never did come back. He went away to a special-needs school on the other side of town. Mom said it was time for me to start playing with normal children.

     “What’s normal?” I asked, and Mom accused me of being smart aleck.

     But this time I wasn’t.

     After that, I decided it was best to be vague about what I was doing. Sometimes I went to Chester’s house, and we explored the woods behind it. We hoisted ourselves into the trees with lower branches and hunted for birds’ nests and woodpecker holes. He carved our names into a young beech tree.

     “Someday when we’re old enough, let’s get married,” he said. “We’ll come back here, and I’ll draw the heart and put the date on it.”

     “Maybe,” I said. “But let’s look for salamanders down by the creek now.”

     “Okay. But why can’t we ever go to your house to play?”

     “Mom said I had to play outside. She’s cleaning.”

     “You said she was sick last time,” he said.

     “That’s because all she does is clean. And that much cleaning would make anyone sick.”

     I stopped going to his house as much because I got tired of lying. To Mom. To Chester. Then one day I told Mom I was going for a long bike ride all by myself. I went to Chester’s house, but no one was there. When I peeked into his house it was empty, blind-dark. On the way home I felt mean like somehow, I made Chester move away. I stopped at our beech tree in the woods, took a sharp rock, and etched a shallow, lopsided heart around our names. It didn’t look very good. I’m not sure why I did it. Playing house never appealed to me. And Chester and I were never boyfriend and girlfriend.

     But when I went to my cousin Janet’s wedding that summer, I thought about what it would be like to be a grown-up getting married. Maybe just for that day, I would be willing to wear a lace dress, one made by a silly third-grade girl who grew up to be a fashion designer. Of course, I didn’t want to marry just anybody. The groom needed to be special, someone like Chester, who could give me a fake diamond, yet be real inside.

    

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