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Post by Froststar on Mar 7, 2012 20:02:14 GMT -5
Hiding (revision)
At the time we didn’t know what, but we knew something was wrong with our mother, so we hid from her. That was when we lived in the rental house on Moultrie Road with the long, gravel driveway, the house on the hill no one visited, the house my father left us in. That house.
The basement was forbidden. She kept the entrance from the house locked, but there was a door from the outside that she forgot. In we’d go, the three of us, my sisters and I, guiding the creaky door shut behind us, showing our way with a flashlight. The room was huge and carpeted, a pungent mossy green, smelling of mothballs and lemon drops.
The old woman who owned the house was visiting Asia again, and she set the rent low enough so she could store her things in the basement until she returned, low enough that my mother could afford it without my father’s help. What she left behind filled the basement, squeezed into the dozens of circular racks packed into the room. I would set the flashlight on the coffee table with the empty candy dish, the table near the rack stuffed with business suits and umbrellas, careful to face the light away from the stairs so mother could not see it under the crack in the door, and by this faint light we tried on the clothes again and again, the clothes that made us believe we were somewhere else, somewhere far away from this, from them, from her. I would lift the mink shawl from the back of the chair where I left it last time and pull it around my shoulders, growling like a bear as I pawed the floor, chasing Mary Grace as she ran, the little white elephants on her scarf coming to life as the cloth fluttered behind her. Lizzie, though youngest, was smarter, and would hide in the racks so I couldn’t get her, though I’d gnaw and scratch and charge at the metal cage of the rack she had chosen, pretending I would tear her apart or eat her for supper. She squealed quietly, throwing shoes and hats to keep me away.
Sometimes I would wear the wedding dress since I was oldest and got first pick, and Mary Grace would grab the top hat and cane from the dresser near the stairs. I would dress Lizzie in the white kimono with purple flowers, and we would cover ourselves in costume jewelry and take turns dancing with each other as the third sister sang softly: “If only if only the woodpecker sighs, the bark on the trees was as soft as the skies…”
That night in July, I was barely ten years old. My uncle was dead, had died at the end of May. We went to his funeral, my first, and saw his suited body in the casket, his face pasty with makeup that almost hid the damage from the windshield. That face haunted my dreams until I was thirteen and decided that I didn’t believe in ghosts. That night he was there again in my room, and my fear forced me to flee into the hall.
The porch light was on at the end of the long hallway, and I could hear my father’s powerful voice, angrier than usual. “It’s not about the money, goddammit!” he screamed at her. “It’s you, Laura. Why do you do this to me? Why do you do this to us, to our girls, Laura?” And I knew she was crying and could imagine her covering her face and the tears just dripping onto her purple silk nightgown and long, brown hair. I snuck back down the hallway into my sisters’ room, and turned on the overhead light. They were awake and crying, and knew without me saying anything that we needed to hide, we needed to hide now before she came looking for us.
We went out the screen door, the one that opened towards our only neighbor’s house, and ran down the hill in bare feet, around the corner, and into our hiding place. We didn’t bring a flashlight but it didn’t matter. We knew our way through the maze of boxes and furniture and racks, and Mary Grace held my hand as Lizzie held hers, like the line of cloth elephants on Mary Grace’s scarf, tail to trunk, fluttering under the dining table, through the dusty plastic shelves, and around the colored-glass floor lamp, squeezing ourselves into the rack farthest from the stairs, the one in the corner near the grandfather clock frozen at 3:45. There they pressed themselves into my arms and we finally cried. Through my tears I told them it would be ok, everyone fights. He would come back to us one day and we would all be happy, happy like the Swiss Family Robinson, and we’d move to California and go to Disney Land every day, and everything would be the way it should be.
Harsh light flooded the room as the door screeched open and slammed against the wall. I held them close, squeezing the air out of us so we couldn’t gasp and give ourselves away. The light switch flicked, and I blinked away the red spots and the tears, holding them closer and closer, feeling our pulses throbbing in my hands. She descended the stairs with uneven steps, falling off the last with a bang that shook the floor. We could hear her legs dragging against the carpet as she crawled, smacking clothes out of her way, tearing at the racks like she was wearing the mink shawl, but shoes and hats would not keep her away. She didn’t call our names, maybe because she didn’t remember them, just breathed haggard breaths, breaths that clawed out of her in fishy gasps. We could smell the evil on those breaths from across the room, and I squeezed my eyes shut because the evil was really strong tonight, dear Jesus, please make it all go away, please don’t let her find us.
The back door slammed and she was howling for us into the woods, and we huddled there until we heard her go up into the house, and didn’t leave the basement until the house grew silent above us.
The next day, both doors were locked, and we could never hide again.
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Post by Froststar on Mar 8, 2012 18:36:55 GMT -5
Haha, thanks much. ;D
Here's another one....still in progress. It's a revision of the earlier gnome story that I posted, which was a revision of yet another earlier story which may have even been a revision in and of itself.
Too many words. Here it is:
Deep In the Mud (revision of The Train)
He held the lit lighter for a few moments in front of him, staring at the flame, before pulling it closer and lighting the cigarette in his mouth. The dashboard clock read 11:44, which meant the train was due eight or so minutes from now, enough time to smoke down to the filter, and get through another, and possibly light up a third. The overhead light was off in the cab of the truck, and so were the headlights, but the old man could still see his reflection in the rear-view, illuminated by streetlights on either side of the quiet road. His image was so smudged with finger-prints and tar that it looked more like a close-quarters Rembrandt than a reflection, the curling smoke at the corners of his mouth like a mustache in the mirror, growing and turning up the contours of his rounded nose, framing his face for a moment before thinning out as it slithered bitterly out of the barely-cracked window. The cherry glowed vaguely through the thick grime in the glass, reminding him of bomb blasts in Vietnam, muffled by the ubiquitous mist.
He looked again at the clock on the dash which had begun to flicker. Carefully, he balanced his cigarette across the blackened grate of the ashtray, then hit the dashboard hard. The radio came to life, fully lit and singing, “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” until the old man forcefully pushed in the power button with his middle finger, killing it mid-word.
He became suddenly aware of the opaque silence around him and rolled the window the rest of the way down, each squeak of the crank a note harmonizing with the growing hum of cicadas and truck engine outside. He paused for a moment to watch the blue smoke waft through the open window and over the yellow faces of the streetlights, imagining it hiss as it made its escape, though it was soundless. Then he delicately lifted the cigarette from the ashtray to his lips, and took a long slow drag, exhaling noisily through his teeth. After a few more puffs, he flicked the spent cigarette out the window with a practiced thumb, squeezed the pack of Winstons from his jean pocket, and lit up another. As he exhaled, he reached his arm around the back of the headrest of the passenger seat and smiled, the cigarette angling up in the corner of his lips.
He looked over at the seat beside him, and his smile widened, causing his glasses to rise slightly on the bridge of his nose. He didn’t see the rust-red shoes standing on the seat, but a pair of white heels, feminine and curved, delicately crossed at the ankle. He didn’t see the baggy ceramic trousers, but long legs, pantyhose shimmering in the soft light overhead. He didn’t see the once-green shirt, now the pastel yellow of a dried rose, but a wedding dress with a ribboned waist and floral-laced breast. He didn’t see the faded hat resting on sheepcurled hair, but a ring of blue flowers crowning a red braided bun. No, he didn’t see the antique garden gnome, chipped and faded, but Jenna, his Jenna, the way she had been on their wedding day, only weeks after Nam.
The man moved his hand from the back of the seat onto the gnome’s shoulders, his fingers sliding comfortably across its smoothed back and resting on its neck. He slightly curled and uncurled his fingers, and then slid them down its arm. Its fingers were curved and open, the paint chipped and cracked and stained at the palm, evidence of a hoe long ago decayed. But he saw her long, pale fingers, softened with jasmine oil and bearing his ring, open and waiting, so he closed his hand tenderly around it, the cold ceramic warm and alive against his skin. He crumpled the half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray and then slid the tips of his fingers across the rim of the gnome’s hat, seeing them instead tucking a wisp of hair behind her ear. One of his fingers caught one of the flowers of her crown, and it floated down slowly like a cloud in a dream. She stretched out her right hand and caught it on her finger, then looked back at him as if to say, “Do you remember? Do you remember John?” like she did almost every day she was alive.
She had always loved her flowers, calling them by name, lovingly tending them like the children she never had, and expecting him to do the same. As he drove her to the train tracks that day forty three years ago, looking to him as she did now, she told him that the flowers in her hair were Myosotis sylvatica, “forget-me-nots, so you’ll never forget, no matter how hard you try,” that little smile on her lips, her eyes wide and playful and blue, the same blue as the flowers. All that week, as he moved the furniture around in the house and organized books, Jenna was in the garden, churning the earth with her bare hands. Their wedding day was the only time he had ever seen her with clean nails. She told him it was the only time her hands felt at ease, pushed deep into the earth, and her fidgety fingers were evidence of this, always moving, like basa fish in a fishing boat, their mouths and gills opening and closing as their pale bodies beat against the curved, wooden floor. But in the earth, her hands were at home, digging and pulling at roots, pushing potted plants into the soil, and searching out grubs. By the time he had finished putting plates into cabinets and arranging the den according to the image in his head, she had organized what seemed to him a haphazard and colorful explosion: lamb’s ear and forsythia, hydrangea and daylilies, fennel and hosta, clematis and phlox, all in concentric circles, the smallest of which was reserved for a thick patch of forget-me-nots. She spent at least an hour in that garden each day, often more than three, carefully watering and pruning and spreading fertilizer.
The day of the car accident was in late August, the end of “the hottest summer in decades,” the headlines claimed, and Jenna had taken her wood-paneled station wagon to Taylor’s Nursery across town for some black-eyed susans, though he knew she would probably buy a lot more than just that. She got lost in that greenhouse every time she went, and would spend hours smelling flowers and reading labels on bags of mulch, but as the shadows lengthened across the yard and the temperature dropped to a bearable level, he couldn’t help but worry if she was alright. But those were the days before pocket-sized cell phones and “instant” messanging, and all he could do was sit by the phone in the kitchen, his heel thumping against the linoleum floor.
But even when the call did come, even when he expected the very worst, he still was not prepared for the emotionless words:
Jenna’s car had flipped, and her seatbelt held her unconscious body suspended. In the time that it took for someone to hack through the door and squeeze her out of the crushed carcass of the car, she had slipped into a coma, and had to be rushed to ICU.
For twelve days, the doctors managed to keep her alive. He spent many hours of these by her bedside. He always brought forget-me-nots from the garden, which he tucked into her hair, trying not to see her bruised and swollen face, the deep lacerations in her neck, her shaved head, her bandaged body. Each day, he held her hand to his heart, and promised her that he hadn’t forgotten, that he was still tending her garden, that he had kept it alive, and that she would be back in it soon, he just knew it.
He spent the days and nights after the funeral in the garden, chain-smoking menthols and doing his best to keep her garden alive, only going into the house to change his sweaty clothes or prepare meals. The day of the funeral, he had pushed his chest-of-drawers from their room into the kitchen, then closed all of the doors in the house except for the door from the kitchen to the backyard.
Despite his constant efforts, the old man was ill-equipped against the heat. He watched as his wife’s garden first wilted, then browned, then blackened from the outside in, until most of it had died in the pitiless sun. By the end of the third week after her funeral, only the middle circle, which he had moved all of his focus to, remained alive, and he vowed that that he would not let it die, could not let it die.
At least two more weeks passed before it finally rained. Even now as he sat in the truck parked by the tracks, he could feel the pungent soggy leaves sticking to his feet as he paced back and forth around the perimeter of the blue patch, the third cigarette that hour waning in his clenched teeth, the ash growing long and fragile until it couldn’t cling on any longer, finally fluttering onto him and mixing with the spitting rain and tears, pasting his dirty clothes and skin, then the sharp pain in his foot as he stepped on something sharp, freshly uncovered by the rain. He hadn’t seen it though he was looking down, seeing only the gray tiles of the hospital floor, just pacing and pacing and not going anywhere, waiting for her doctor to come and tell him that she would be alright, that everything would be alright, and he was in Vietnam as the pain gripped his belly and his knees pressed deeper and deeper into foreign mud, as they now sunk into the soft dirt of the garden, the darkness which took him in Nam threatening to overtake him now, and the bright stars all around him like gunfire and explosions, unpredictable and disorienting, and then he was falling face-first, his body crumpling onto the patch of forget-me-nots, the cigarette in his lips falling as he opened his mouth in a voiceless scream, feeling the weight of his body driving the flowers deeper into the earth where their little mouths filled with thick mud.
There, face-first on the ground, on the remnants of the his wife’s flowers, the remnants of her body, of her soul, he felt around for the culprit, the one responsible for all of this, for the draft, for her accident, for the coma, for his fall, for God’s cruelty and pitiless face in the sky, scorching everything which was good in his creation, when his hand closed down upon on the thing, and he pulled up hard, with all of his weight, the mud puckering in resistance, squelching noisily until it was free. He got up on his knees and threw his arm back, ready to hurl it at the sky, when the shape in his hand caught his attention. Bringing it in front of his face, letting the rain fall on it, helping him loosen the mud and clutching leaves from it, uncovering the blue of the forget-me-nots, of Jenna’s eyes, “Do you remember, John? Do you remember?” and then it was in his hands looking up at him: the garden gnome, his Jenna, alive.
There, in the rain, his knees deep in the mud, he finally cried.
The last time he had cried before that was the night before he left for Vietnam. He had driven her to the tracks to watch the train which signaled the end of the day, perhaps the end of their budding relationship, the end of his life. He had told her that four years was a long time, that it was long enough to forget and move on, to find someone else, and she had squeezed his hand and sworn she would always remember him, that she would wait for him to come back, and that she knew he would marry her someday, that he was the only one she could grow old with. The sat in darkness and silence for what seemed like minutes, but must have been hours, until finally the light of the train shown in the distance, growing brighter and brighter as it came closer to the car parked in front of the tracks. The vehicle shook as the train chugged past, and he felt her pushing her face deeper and deeper into his neck with each passing car, her hot tears rolling down the collar of his shirt as his vision grew watery and blurred, and the tears dripping from his chin and beading down her hair like dew on flower petals.
And then the train was gone leaving them in dark silence until she fell asleep on his shoulder and he drove her home and laid her in bed, and then it was five in the morning and he had to board the train, and was suddenly gone from everything he had ever known, had ever wanted to know, and was sadly convinced that no matter how many times she had promised, she could not remember him.
Then the war was over, and he was coming home again, and he arrived on the train in the morning, and she was there in blue, an endless smile on her face, her arms stretched toward him as she ran, and he held her close, his hand on the nape of her neck and arm wrapped around her waist. Less than three weeks later, they were married, and they returned to the tracks the night before they started their lives in the house with the garden, and fell asleep in each other’s arms on the sticky back seat of the rental car, her head on his chest as he whispered over and over into her sleeping ears that he loved her, and that he had never forgotten her, not when the commies were beneath his feet, not when they were hurling bombs into the camp, not when he had to kill the old woman because they thought she was a threat, not when he had to watch them cut open her body to find out that she was not a threat at all but in fact what she appeared to be, not when the young women on the dirt road of one of the villages spat on his shoes, not when he stayed awake late into the night holding the image of her face in his mind, forcing himself to recall every detail of her, every word she had ever said, holding the firm pillow of his cot to his chest the way he held her head the night they said goodbye, listening to the night-sounds of the jungle all around him which had already claimed so many lives like his, listening to it promise that he wouldn’t make it, that it would be his last night to dream, that he would never see her again, and that she had already forgotten.
And that jungle had almost claimed him once. If it hadn’t almost claimed him, it would have later, and he never would have been sent home, and he never would have seen her again, would probably have died like his barrack-mate, Sam, who was from some odd-sounding town in Kentucky and had a girl of his own who was beautiful and waiting on him, who he thought Sam probably imagined every night to keep away the terrors of the surrounding jungle, and every morning as he fought through a timed breakfast of rice and dehydrated mush, and every day as trees came to life and bullets ripped apart their superiors and friends and comrades, until finally he imagined her as he fell face-first onto a rice patty, the back of his skull grinning wide, spewing out his Kentucky blood so fast that he knew it would be most honorable just to leave him there to breathe in the mud while he was unconscious, because they could never save his life, they could never stop the inevitable letter to his girlfriend, Maria, somewhere in that odd-sounding town, who at that moment would be dreaming of battle scars and wedding gifts as her Sam’s last breath bubbled up through the mud, his mouth filling with grit, thick mist floating over his body, the closest he would ever have to a coffin.
Only days after he left Sam behind to die, John was hit in the stomach. It was shrapnel from a trip-wired explosion only yards away, they told him, but he didn’t remember, could only remember the pain in his gut and the bomb-blasts around him as his knees sunk deep into the mud, and then darkness, thick and welcoming darkness filling his head like the darkest mud, and he was sure it was over, and he was almost grateful, and then the harsh florescent lights overhead shone through, and he on his side in a medical cot at some hospital in Virginia, surrounded by nurses who told him and the sea of occupied cots around him that he was brave, so very brave, and that they had already notified his family by letter, and that he would heal soon and go home, that the danger was over. Even still, Grayson Scott, the Californian a few cots over, started pissing blood one day, and died, and he and everyone else knew that this place was just a continuation of the jungle, that the chatter around was like the chatter of birds and monkeys and insects, not to be trusted, possibly coded, that nothing was as it seemed, and for all they knew, they were asleep back in Nam and they would wake up in the morning to more rice and more bombs and more death.
But there she was at the train station, the pretty blue flower she was, untouched and unspoiled, like she had promised those years ago, as she reminded him almost every day for the next twenty-some years with her words and her eyes, and even with her unmoving lips as she lay in the hospital bed, and even now through the gnome, “Do you remember, John? Do you remember?”
Twenty years later, here he was, his spectacles foggy as he cradled the garden gnome in his arms, staring into its eyes, his Jenna’s eyes. “I remember,” he said, holding it close, feeling her tears on his neck again, her warm cheek pressed against his skin, and then the whole cab was illuminated by the light of the train as it thundered closer, and he looked at their reflection in the rear-view mirror, the side of her face lit up and clear, revealing even the light freckles across her nose and the thin whisps of hair loosed from behind her ears, resting against her face, her tears glowing in the light as they fell, her eyes softly closed, flinching slightly with each thump of the train cars passing by, steady and quick, like the heartbeat in his chest.
“Happy anniversary, Jenna,” he said, his voice thin against the roar of the train through the open window. “And many more,” he added, lighting another Winston as the last train car disappeared into the darkness.
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