Short Stories and Flash

Tomorrow is a big day for us. The beginning of our last adventure. I just finished packing the bags and checking my list. I walk into the library for the two items that aren’t on it. I don’t need the list to remind me to bring them. The box is on the mantle over the fireplace. We were browsing in that antique shop in Middleburg when you discovered it. The owner of the shop told us all about the craftsman, an eccentric old artist down in North Carolina who fabricated his work from the driftwood he’d find along the coast. “This one has character,” you said. So, I bought it for you. It’s scarred by the biology of the ocean. I’m tracing my finger along grooves dug long ago by shipworms seeking refuge and an easy meal. The tracks have been smoothed by sandpaper, stain, and glaze, but I can still feel the ridges and crevasses against my fingertip, and I consider the lifelong journeys it took to build them. In addition to the natural embellishment, the artist left his own mark as well. The mermaid that’s carved in the top is an elegant creature to be sure, with a delicate, complicated face, and hair that seems to drift and float about her. She’s naked from the waist up, though I guess what I’m saying is that the top is the exposed human half of her. Because, really, is a sea creature naked when it lies in its natural state? She’s blessed with a full and ample representation of her womanhood, and I imagine that a good many of the little boys that accompanied their mothers for a Sunday browse to that antique shop wore their own path across those geographic landmarks. Shoot, you caught me doing it too. “You only bought it because of the mermaid,” you joked when we got back to the car.

The other item I’m seeking in the library is kept in the cabinet with the rest of the photo albums. I pull it out and set it on a side table and then I get distracted. It always happens, right? Before I know it, I’m spending the next few hours looking through the albums, at our photographs, mostly of you.

There’s your baby picture. You were a tiny little thing. Barely six pounds, with eyes shut tight and lips screwed up in a pucker. You’ve got a little curl of hair poking out from the center of your head like an immature, unformed unicorn horn. Here’s the one of you in your ballerina outfit. You’re in fifth position, I think. That’s what you told me once. Or maybe it was your mother? She remembered how you kept arguing with her about the tutu and tights. You wanted all pink and cried for days when she dressed you in black and white, which made for a better picture, and most of the ones from the first decade or so of your life were developed without color. In this one you have your arms up over your head, like you’re imitating that spinning dancer figurine we got at the five and dime out in Ocean City that one summer. You have this crooked smirk that you’re wearing instead of a smile to cover up the gap of missing teeth you were suffering. I call that photo the Angry Prima Donna, though I guess prima donna is a term more appropriate for opera. Still, I think it fits.

I’m in your middle school era now. There are some splashes of color, but there’s a sepia quality to those pictures that makes me think there was a problem with your father’s camera. It’s like looking through a dirty screen or a sheet of oil-stained wax paper, which is a shame because I’d rather experience these next few years of your life without the brown and yellow filter. But it’s still you.

Here’s one of my favorites. You’re smiling, probably for your dad who loved taking pictures of you. Lucky for me. He was a good man, your dad. Treated me like a son all those years, even after I stole his daughter from him. You’re sitting cross-legged on thick shag carpet with a book in your lap. I can’t be certain, and I don’t remember if you ever told me, but my guess is that it’s Little Women. That was your adolescent Bible, wasn’t it? Shit, what am I saying? It was your adult Bible too. We never did do the church thing. Our religion was literature. Your disciples were Alcott, Austen, and Woolf. Mine were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Salinger.

What I like about this picture is that it already tells me so much about the girl you were and the woman you’d become. The book is a hint of your roots. Always reading and learning. And later, reading and teaching. Apparently, the science of eyewear lagged other technologies, even after atomic bombs, computers, and a moon landing. Your glasses have thick lenses that magnify your wide, eager eyes. They fill the whole circle of the frame and make you look like one of those tarsiers we saw at the National Zoo when we were dating in college. I guess I was pretty confident about how much you liked me, because I joked about the resemblance at the time. I can still feel the bruise on my arm where you punched me. I kept it to myself after that, but I’d still chuckle when I’d flip to this picture, and you always knew why I was laughing.

The back of this album ends with high school. The pictures are sharper, like still shots of a technicolor movie. I flip through your evolution from girl to woman, where your body starts catching up to your mind. You’re filling every sweater and there’s a curve to your hips that reminds me of a California coastline. And here’s where Tommy Riggs starts showing up. I’m not sure which one of these photographs irritates me the most. You’d think it would be the homecoming picture. You’re pinning a corsage to Tommy’s lapel. He’s looking down at you with this fake surprised expression like you stuck the pin into him through his jacket. You’re looking back over a shrugged shoulder with a coy smile and a raised eyebrow. There’s mischief in your eyes, but I know that night ended with nothing more than a kiss and a little heavy petting. No, the picture that probably bugs me the most is the one of you and Tommy and that damned convertible Corvair of his. He’s got his arm wrapped tight around your waist and you’re leaning into him with your hand resting on his chest. I didn’t even know you then, but the thought of you losing your virginity to that guy in thatcar always bugged the shit out of me. It’s enough for me to head to the kitchen for a glass and some ice. I need a whiskey to deaden the thought of all of it. I spend the next few hours pulling albums off the shelf and sipping my drink until half a bottle is gone and I fall asleep on the floor soaked in a milky-white bath of moonlight. And I dream of you like I do every other night.

I wake up as the sun is rising. I’m a little stiff and sore but it’s nothing that a hot shower and pot of coffee won’t remedy. I pull myself off the floor and shuffle to the kitchen. I splash some water on my face and rub the sleep from my eyes and leave Mr. Coffee to do his work. When I get back washed and dressed, he’s gifted me eight cups of black magic. That’ll get me through the last of my preparations. There are only a few things left to pack, the photo albums and a couple of shelves of books in the library, and the glassware and dishes I had to clean and dry from dinner last night and the small breakfast of toast and jam this morning.

Everything is neatly stacked and marked and should be easy to find and sort through. I asked Roger to stop by in a couple of days to check on the house. He’ll see the letter I left for him on my desk and figure out what to do. We were lucky to find friends like Roger and Anne. They were our constant companions and confidants. They were as much family to us as any blood relative could ever be.

It’s mid-morning now and time to get on our way. I take one last look around the house before walking out the front door. I pull it shut and lock it, and it’s like closing the back cover of a book. That story might be finished, but it still exists on paper and in time. And just like our story might one day end, our existence has marked the world like the spilled ink of that book.

We’re cruising west along Route 50 and by late afternoon we make it into the weatherworn mountains of the eastern United States. It’s amazing what time can do to the land. It can turn mountains into deserts and deserts into jungles. It can build continents and fill oceans and scar the landscape with fire and ice. Time has a similar effect on people. Our skin changes like the skin of the earth, marked by nature and happenstance. A wrinkle here, a blemish there. Black hair to white. Scars and bruises. Until, eventually, time wears us all the way down to dust.

The plan is to spend the night at that little motel we stayed in the first night after our wedding. I couldn’t believe the place was still standing and open. The lady who answered the phone when I called laughed at me when I tried to make a reservation. “Mister, you must think this is some big city establishment,” she told me between cracks of gum. “We haven’t taken a reservation at this motel for at least ten years.”

I told her we’d be there in a couple of days and asked for room 311. “Our honeymoon suite,” I mentioned.

“A sentimental journey then.”

“Something like that,” I said. I heard the scribble of pencil to paper through the receiver. “Does it still have the view?” I asked. A stupid question, of course. It takes longer than a couple of decades for a mountain to disappear.

“It sure does,” she answered cheerfully.

Thinking back, I can’t believe I convinced you to drive across the country for our honeymoon. You insisted we take the Polaroid. Those pictures are real, is what I remember you saying at the time. Like a whisper of a memory come instantly alive, is how you described it, if I recall. I have the journal you made of that trip sitting between us on the bench seat of the car right now. It’s the one thing, along with the mermaid box, that had to come with us on this trip. Led Zeppelin is playing on the radio and my right hand is tapping in rhythm against the scrapbook’s hard cover. It’s as much of a love pat meant for your thigh or backside, though you’re not in range for that type of affection. You’ve drifted over in your seat a bit, though still anchored loosely in the seat belt that’s tied around you. We weren’t too keen on seatbelts in the sixties and seventies, were we? Almost no one wore those things on long drives or short, and it made it much easier for young love and easy access. Imagine being so reckless now?

I do miss the days when you’d edge over onto my side, unrestricted and carefree. You’d curl up in the crook of my arm and wrap yours around my chest. I’d run my hand through your hair and rub your naked arm to keep you warm. You’d tell me how you could hear my heartbeat and that flutter that my mom used to always warn me about. And then you started to do that too, warn me about my heart when I’d get lightheaded or when I’d feel that catch under my sternum and in my chest. But that little flutter never did me any actual harm. My heart was always safe with you.

We were never out of love, I don’t think. But there were moments when we didn’t like each other as much. Sitting here thinking about things, I’m glad I never told you about Abigail. It didn’t mean anything. And by that, I mean I didn’t love her. I didn’t go looking for it. But that’s what all men say, isn’t it? You needed some time to recover and wanted some time apart, so you left for Lancaster to stay with your mother and sister. We’d been arguing the whole week before you left. “We can try again,” I urged. But you were resolved and there would be no more trying. Two miscarriages were more than you could manage, physically and emotionally. “It’s the universe telling us it wasn’t meant to be,” you said. If you’d believed in God, you might have blamed Him.

I was depressed and more than a little angry in the way selfish men can turn a woman’s pain and sorrow into their own tragedy. To be fair, I hurt too. But that wasn’t a justification for what I did. I was exhausted. There was a string of long, sleepless nights and a grind of endless and seemingly meaningless days at work. I still can’t figure how it happened. I didn’t think I was putting out any signals. But she read something in me. Boredom, maybe? Despair, for sure. We’d just finished a department meeting, and she followed me back to my office. I hardly even noticed. She closed the door and asked me if I was all right, and I just started sobbing, like a little kid who spilled his ice cream cone or broke his favorite toy. She pulled me into her, and I could smell the lavender in her hair, and I felt a sudden rush of relief. She offered to make me dinner and I accepted, eager to avoid another night of takeout and leftovers. I don’t remember much about the meal, but I do remember the music. We ate and drank to Bessie Smith and Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holliday, and I remember how their voices washed over me and comforted me. We sat and talked and smoked a joint to Joe Cocker and Janis Joplin, and then she got up, grabbed my hand, and walked me to her bedroom. We spent that night and a few others together while you were gone. But it all ended as soon as you called to tell me you were coming back. As much as I regretted all of it for what it would have meant to you, I realized later that it was something that I needed for myself. I’m not sure I would have been able to be the man I was for you from that time forward without my time with Abigail. Is that just a pathetic excuse for my behavior? Probably. But it is something I believe.

We get to the motel in the fading light of an autumn sunset. The sun is settling between two rounded peaks, and it sparks the sky when it hits the horizon, like a fresh-struck match between a fleshy thumb and forefinger. We check in and settle into the room, where I leave you to rest while I go out for some dinner. There’s a gravel path in front of the motel that runs along the road and leads to that diner we ate at that first night as husband and wife. I walk in to the ding of a bell and a flutter of turning heads and accusatory glances from the locals scattered about the dining room floor. Once surveyed and satisfied with my insignificance, they turn their attention back to their meals and conversation. A waif of a girl in a waitress uniform meets me at the threshold. “Are you alone?” she asks as gently as she can, revealing only a hint of the full breadth of her pity, as she points me to an empty seat at the counter. She tosses a menu down in front of me and tells me that the special tonight is liver and onions. “It’s pretty good, for liver,” she says while flipping over an empty mug and filling it with coffee. I politely decline and order the hot roast beef sandwich platter instead. It was always my favorite meal, and as I recall this place served a tasty sample with hand-carved beef and thick brown gravy that they generously poured over both sandwich and side. 

The food does not disappoint, and I am pleasantly surprised by its quality relative to the condition of my surroundings. The walls of the diner are wrapped in wood paneling that’s coated with a thin varnish of decades-old grease and grime. The vinyl seats on the booths and chairs are faded and cracked, and the cover of the stool that I’m sitting on has a gash in it. I don’t think much of it until I shift in my seat and an edge of hard plastic cuts into me through my blue jeans. The table tops and countertops are covered in an aquamarine Formica held together by metal trim that’s pulled and dented, and the checkerboard black and white floor is blacker and grayer than it should be. There are a couple of old paintings hanging from rusted wire and bent nail that are so discolored they all look like winter landscapes. If they were worth anything, a restoration might reveal the bright greens, yellows, and blues of a summer mountain scene. Even the people in this place are affected. It’s as if they were drawn in charcoal and rubbed into the canvas of the diner with the artist’s thumb.

I spot a flash of bright red in a case behind the counter that seems so out of place it draws my attention. “Fresh cherry pie,” the waitress tells me, with a jab of her thumb, when she notices my interest. I decide to take a slice back to the room with me for tomorrow’s breakfast. It’s dark out by the time I leave the diner. I figure I’d be able to see a sky full of stars if not for the neon signs of diner and motel bracketing my path to the room. I undress and wash up and ready for bed. Before I slip under the covers, though, I take a seat at the small desk under the window and open your scrapbook.

The picture I’m looking for is resting behind a sheet of thin plastic on the first page. I took it the morning after our first night at the motel. We woke an hour before sunrise. It was a bold move, and perhaps a bit unwise, as it was, after all, the day after our honeymoon night. But we were young and romantic, and we had to get to Newlywed Point before sunrise. According to local legend, newlyweds that welcomed their first sunrise together from that spot above the valley were assured a long and happy marriage. We took it as a challenge and hiked the mile or so up the trail well before sunrise. The point was marked by a boulder that hung partly off the edge of the mountain and decorated in a colorful display of names and initials in hearts and love poems. We added our own names to the tapestry, which together with the other graffiti served as a sort of love note to the valley. We spread a blanket on the ground and made love as the sky brightened and then erupted in a bath of golden light. And after the sun breached the horizon, I took this picture of you sitting on the boulder. Your hair is pulled back and held under a red paisley-print bandana. Your cheeks are flush, and your lips are pink and full and curled at the edges in a knowing smile. And I knew in that moment that I would love you forever.

I set the alarm for 6:00 AM on the Sanyo on the nightstand and tuck myself in for the night. I wake up to music and roll out of bed ready to retrace our hike. I wash my face and brush my teeth and eat a few bites of that cherry pie before I get dressed. I make the bed and repack my duffle, which I leave on a chair in the corner of the room. I open my wallet and slide out my driver’s license and stare at a face eight years younger than the one I’m wearing now. I rub at it and slide the card back in the plastic window of the wallet and set it down on the dresser with my car keys next to the chained-down RCA television.

I open your journal one more time and take out that picture. I hold it in my hand for a minute or two and then tuck it in the pocket on my shirt. I flip to the back of the journal and reach into the pocket you built into the cover. I pull out your red bandana and tie it around my arm. I put on a jacket and an old baseball hat, and I pick up the mermaid box off the desk. I shut the front door behind me, but there’s really no reason to lock it. We head around to the back of the motel and find the trail that leads up the mountain. The stars are fading and the black of the sky is turning more purple. We race to beat the sun and after twenty minutes or maybe thirty I can see the outline of the boulder at the crest of the trail. We make it just as the sun peeks out over the valley and soaks it in soft yellow light. There are some houses down there now, along the narrow river that was once so mighty it carved a miles-wide path through metamorphic rock.

I set down the box on the boulder and rub the curves of the mermaid one more time. I open the lid and lift out a leather pouch from inside. I set the pouch down next to the box and reach into my shirt pocket for the picture. I put the picture in the box first and then I untie the bandana from my arm and fold it and put that in the box as well. I close the lid and pat the mermaid like I might a pet to tell her she’s been a good girl. I look for our names on the side of the rock, but most of the paint has been worn away by wind and water and there is little left of the love note we all left behind. I pick you up and together we stand on top of the boulder. A red hawk circles overhead and lets out a cry. The bird turns left and then right, and I see a feather loosen from its tail. The feather spins and flutters until it catches itself and begins to drift down in a gentle cadence. I look back out in front of me and open the pouch and empty it over the edge and out over the valley. A gust of wind catches you and carries you in a swirl that surrounds me. I feel you once again against my body, and I let you carry me off the boulder, and instead of falling it feels like I am drifting in the current with you in my arms.

I’m thinking about that song I wrote in high school. I used to practice it in the quiet of my bedroom and under the watchful and approving eyes of Jimi Hendrix and George Harrison, among others. That song was all of three chords and a rhyming chorus of words that sounded a lot like love to a teenage boy inexperienced in that fine art.

Another girl might’ve reacted differently if the quiet kid from music class picked up his guitar and started playing and singing to her. She might’ve flicked her hair or made a face or laughed the kind of laugh that makes your stomach turn with embarrassment and your eyes itch with shame.

But not you.

You were the kind of girl that sat quietly as that boy played. You listened to those chords and those words, and you felt what he was trying to say. When he finished, you smiled and reached out and touched his hand. That’s so sweet, you said. And then you leaned in and gave that boy a kiss on the cheek. That meant a lot to him.

I still have my guitar and I still play and sing a little bit, mostly to my little girl. The two of us come to this ice cream shop just about every Saturday. We’re sitting at a table outside and she’s working on a vanilla cone, trying to lap up every bit of melted cream as it spills over the cone’s edges and runs down her hand and onto the concrete patio. I turn away because it reminds me of the pools of wax left behind by the spent candles in the hospital chapel. How many of those did I light for her mother? It’s been a year, and I swear I still smell those damn candles.

And that’s when I see you walking across the street. I’d heard you were back in town, seeking refuge from a failed marriage, hoping that this place could make you feel safe again. You’re with your little boy. He’s clutching your hand, looking up at you like you’re his whole, safe world. The two of you get to the corner and wait for the light to change. That’s when I catch your eye. You smile when you see me and that song is playing, louder now, in my head or maybe not, and I feel just like I did when I sang it to you for the first time a dozen years before.

“What do you think about this?” my wife asks as she hands me a glass bowl filled with bleached white seashells. I balance the bowl in the fingertips of my right hand and study it like its Yorick’s skull. I feel the weight of it and consider its worth, which is far less in my estimation than the price that’s marked on its underside. She’s a cute little thing, my wife, with dirty blonde hair, come-hither blue eyes, and a shapely figure that keeps my attention even though we’ve snuck into our forties, and she’s using all her charm to convince me that that bowl of bleached white seashells is actually worth $29.99.

“Well?” she asks me with a hopeful smile. Her question lingers in the air and mixes with the misty haze of burning vanilla bean candles, and I’m getting dizzy like I used to from the burning incense of the Greek Orthodox Church of my childhood. Our priest would offer a Kyrie eleison and a plume of scented smoke with every swing of his censer, and now all I can muster in response to my wife’s question is a feeble Kyrie eleison of my own

“What?” she asks, confused.

“Lord, have mercy,” I say, and now I’m irritated because I think she should get what the hell I’m talking about and at least acknowledge all those Sundays I lost working as an unpaid, disgruntled altar boy. In a fit of frustration, as much about all those Sundays as that bowl of bleached white seashells, I lose any remnants of good judgment.

"If I wanted a bowl of stupid-ass seashells,” I tell her, “I’d go to the beach and get them myself.”

She’s glaring at me now. No more perky smile. There’s a noticeable flush rising up through her neck and into her cheeks and I’m sure it’s fire she’s breathing through those flared nostrils of hers.

“What?” I say back to her, incredulously, with the best shoulder shrug I can give considering that my left arm has gone numb from the two shopping bags hooked at my elbow and the pink Michael Kors purse I’m curling like a fifty-pound dumbbell. And, of course, I’m still cupping that bowl of bleached white seashells in my right hand. She turns and walks away from me, and I realize that I’ve just been sentenced to three to five nights on the couch with no conjugal visits.

I take a second to regain my composure and happen to notice another poor son-of-a-bitch carrying a wicker basket full of scented candles and bagged potpourri and a bright red handbag that makes me think his wife snipped off his nuts and stuffed those bloody suckers in there with her credit cards. He gives me a nod in solidarity and shuffles over to a petit brunette who’s standing in front of a white cabinet full of bleached white linens. There’s so much fucking white in this godforsaken wasteland of a store that I’m on the verge of snow blindness. I’m thinking I just might carve me some Inuit goggles from one of the pieces of decorative driftwood lying about the place. More shit I could find for free at the beach, I tell myself. I’m about to relay that bit of information to my still-cute-but-not-very-happy wife, but she isn’t around, so I’m left to ponder that particular observation all on my own. It’s at that moment that I finally lose grip of that bowl of bleached white seashells, and it falls and shatters against the hard surface of the bleached white tile floor.

“Alas, poor seashells!” I shout, to the displeasure of the mid-twenties salesgirl stationed behind the register in her bleached white sweater and blue gingham apron. She curls a lip and shakes her head.

“You’re gonna have to pay for that,” she hisses.

I dutifully slap down my credit card on the counter and point to another bowl of bleached white seashells. “I’ll take those as well,” I tell her.

I find my wife standing by our car in the parking lot. I hand her the bowl without saying anything and she accepts it silently and smiles, and the only other thing that means anything right now are the words spelled out in six-foot high black letters on the bleached white brick wall behind us. They mark me like a curse. And sometime in the future, when I tell my friends about this day, I’ll recall how I found myself standing alone in a Pottery Barn like some asshole, and how I ended up buying two bowls of bleached white seashells that someone else found on the beach for free.

There’s a woman standing on the corner outside my window. She has her arms crossed and she’s looking for someone. That someone isn’t me. No one’s looking for me anymore.

People used to care about me. They used to wonder what I was up to and how I was doing. Heck, I even had family. I had a brother, and he had a wife and two kids. I guess he still does. But I don’t know. He asked me to stop coming around, and then he stopped calling me and checking in on me altogether. That’s what happens when things happen. You know what I mean?

I do have a cat though. Well, she’s more of a kitten still. I found her in the alley behind the grocery store down the street. I was coming back from the gas station where I like to buy my cigarettes and lottery tickets. I scratched off a ten-dollar winner and treated myself to a six pack and a couple of chili dogs. I was all happy, humming some old standard my parents used to play on the record player in the living room of our old house. I was walking and eating and humming that song. And then I hear this little cry. It wasn’t even a full-blown meow. She didn’t have the lungs for that. No, sir. It was just a pitiful chirp, like a scared baby bird. But she was a scared little cat. Well, kitten, that is.

I bent down and she didn’t run. I was no threat to her, after all the surviving she’d already done in her short life. She propped herself on my wrist and I tore off a piece of that rubberized processed meat and she scarfed it down. She licked her little lips and cried for more. And I gave it to her. She told me her name was Annabel and that’s when we decided we’d be friends.

But now I can’t keep my eyes off this woman standing on the corner outside my window. She’s got this look I’ve seen before. Despair. That’s the look. When you’re hoping for something good to happen and realize it never will. Or when something really bad happens and there’s nothing you can do to fix it. That’s a look I know too well. I see it in the mirror every day. So, maybe I was wrong. Maybe someone is looking for me after all. Maybe that someone is me.

That woman standing on the corner outside my window looks a little familiar. But it can’t be who I think it is. That other woman isn’t around anymore because of the thing that happened. I didn’t hurt her, but she was scared. She was scared when I told her about the voices. And then she found the notebooks and letters. But it was that thing that happened with the mailman that sent her packing. That son-of-a-bitch dog of ours convinced me that the mailman was trying to kill us. I ended up chasing that mailman down the street and into traffic, and the poor bastard got himself hit by a car. He was hurt, but he didn’t die. I’m still not sure what all the fuss was about. It was just a misunderstanding, wasn’t it? I wasn’t going to use the knife. And it was all the dog’s fault anyway. He’s the one who told me to do it.

But that woman knew what she was getting into. I told her. My parents told her. My brother told her. We warned her about all of it. But she didn’t care. “I love you,” she told me. “I love him,” she told them. “I love you,” was the last thing she said to me before she turned away and walked out of my hospital room. And that’s when that man started showing up in my mirror. Despair.

But things are different now. I cash my government check and pay my utilities and buy my groceries. I can make myself a meal when I need to, but I’m not much for fancy food. I like a burger and fries or some fried chicken or pizza just fine. Everything is hunky-dory, as my momma used to say, as long as I take the yellow pill in the morning and the green pill at night. Sometimes I forget and things get a little hazy. I get myself into a little trouble now and then when I forget.

But now I’m a little curious about that woman standing on the corner outside my window and I can’t remember if I took the yellow pill this morning or the green pill last night. Annabel is licking her paw and saying something to me. She doesn’t like the look of that woman standing on the corner outside our window. Annabel doesn’t want her there anymore and I don’t think I want her there anymore either. I think maybe she’s looking for me, and I don’t want anyone looking for me.