No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. No Kings.
When my real mother dies, I go looking for another one. The Catholic Charities counselor’s word for this other mother I want, after decades, to find is “biological”. Illegitimate is another word for people who end up like me. It’s what I feel now: unlawful, unauthorized, unwarranted here in this office that smells like antiseptic and rubber gloves, hot teeth drilled down to bone.
A weird and wondrous novel it is. The first sentence: “Sometimes, in Brandon Minamoto’s dreams, he found a globe or a map of the world with a continent he hadn’t seen before.” He has just left his boyfriend in the city and gone to live in a decrepit cabin in the mountains, seeking quiet. His military experiences and an incident when he felt forced to kill a research owl haunt him. Inner quiet and outer space are his quests. He hopes to be accepted into the space program as an astronaut. His life in the cabin moves as slowly as a glacier through fall, winter, and early spring.
In flashbacks we learn his history and gradually come to realize that you wouldn’t want this guy in a spaceship with you.
As a teen, he used to dream of a “round body of water the color of the sky” that echoes a fountain he had visited with his mother when just a toddler. During a visit to their paternal grandparents in Korea, he and his brother went to a shrine containing the relic of a monk who had been mummified after fasting to death.
Then follows a story (from inside Brandon’s mind?) of the monk’s long and agonizing journey into the spirit world through starvation. Brandon’s conclusion is “He wanted to be happy.
What more does human life have to offer?” Self-imposed loneliness, more dreams of a bodiless spirit nature, training his body to survive in space, and a brief foray into environmental terrorism follow.
In a refreshing twist, this is not a post-apocalyptic novel but a pre-apocalyptic one. The awareness of climate change, melting ice, rising sea levels, violent storms, food shortages, and animals going extinct, permeate the story.
Written in close third person making you feel you are in Brandon’s head, seeing with his eyes, feeling the cold, longing for space, this is a novel that might convince even a climate denier to have another look.
Not since Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl have I experienced such an intense second sight meditation on where we are headed. Except that in Not Dark Yet, the elegant symmetry between one man’s yearning and the demise of the entire race moves it several paces away from an eco thriller.
The tone is more like early J. G. Ballard. Deadpan recital of mundane daily events punctuated with explosions of disaster or Brandon’s surreal dreams. I finished the book and could not leave the world she had created for hours. I cleaned the house and tried to read another book. No go. This is why I read!
Judy Krueger has been reviewing books since 2009. She also runs a literary blog http://keepthewisdom.blogspot.com. She is a member of at least 5 reading groups and reads 7 to 10 books a month. Every now and then, she works on the autobiography of her life as a reader or on her novel in progress. You can follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/JudyJudykrueger.
they get hugs, handshakes, drugs, blow jobs,
the pantomime road to 100 euros for a double male twice penetration
gifted from sad eyed prostitutes in the whore houses of Mannheim.
They get the masque of love, another useless arrangement of letters
from broken sad men all bad intentions and outward deflection
lost and he only dark grayscale black /startled
juxtaposed against the flawless playwright scored fog-smoke,
mental architecture of gentle white and endless snowhousing your and your’s
only buzz-saw blue eyed angels baiting their breath with your heavy praise.
Your lost and found erections bleeding red with mistakes as blood always does
makes you look inward for a holy moment and realize you never spilled a drop.
Teddy Ray Bullard is a 39 year old US Army Veteran, former gov employee and proud father of two girls. He grew up in rural SE NC, tobacco country, in a fairly religious household. He was first introduced to “underground/controversial” authors by way of a Rolling Stone interview with Michael Stipe (wherein he mentioned the beat author William S Burroughs). That interview was the catalyst for what would become a lifelong obsession with literature and a deep, abiding love for writing, both as an art form and as a means of self-preservation /discovery. His favorite authors are Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Hemingway, Murakami, and Raymond Carver. https://fallinglettertears.wordpress.com/.
The outside hasn’t changed much. Still a low, squat building, all stucco and white brick; a smaller sign illuminated by four spotlights shines where the old neon used to buzz and hum. In the side alley, where a barber shop used to be, they’ve added a sort of gift shop where you can buy novelty items (mugs, glasses, key chains, car deodorizers, etc.) as well as signed glossy photographs and videos of the strippers. (They’ll make a custom video for a small fee.) My father owns a few tapes and though I’ve never watched them he has boasted long distance that a couple of the dancers are ‘local talent,’ girls I went to school with, women I could have dated, possibly even married, if I had “possessed half a backbone growing up.”
On a number of my visits home, I’ve driven by the place, and twice my father asked me to drop him off there. Both times he’s invited me in, once as adamantly as if he owned the place, and another time, viscous and drunk, clutching my shirt, begging me to join him for “one lousy beer,” then weeping and moaning, telling me to forget it, as if he understood the reason for my refusal.
You couldn’t pay me to go in that joint, not for an ice cold beer on the hottest day of the year. And not because of what it’s become, either. Since my own divorce I’ve been to my share of clubs, Gentleman and otherwise, and have had that one drink too many then drooled like a fool and spent more than I should. And personally I hold no ill-feelings against naked women, or the men who get a thrill slipping fan-folded currency into G-strings. I’m not against good old fashioned lust as long as it’s kept in check. No, I won’t go in this joint because of what the place used to be.
Years ago, before the whole downtown went to hell, that exact spot housed a Chinese restaurant called Lucky Luke’s. Among its distinctions was a marquee like a movie theater, valet parking, deep padded horseshoe booths, and a huge one-page menu the approximate size of a major league strike zone.
If I close my eyes, I can still see that menu, a poster-sized memory tacked into a small corner of my childhood. From about the time I could read, that giant menu filled me with awe. The scrolling fire-breathing dragons aside, there wasn’t a single price beside a single item, or any hint that money was involved. Even then I knew a thing or two about money. I knew we didn’t have any. I knew Lucky Luke’s wasn’t meant for people like us. Nevertheless, once a year my mother took me there for my birthday. Just the two of us.
I didn’t like Chinese food any more than my father, who year after year preferred to babysit my sister rather than come along, but I did enjoy my mother’s company immensely, and with the approach of each age relished the idea of having her full attention for a few hours. Just the two of us.
After dinner we’d take the long way home, strolling past houses we could never own, working our way down past the old mills, then back across the river, to celebrate with horribly sweet cake; and then I’d get to open my two or three presents, typically some cheap plastic toy I didn’t want, and some item of clothing I just happened to need. So in a sense I considered these private dinners — our annual date, my mother called it — the very best gift of all.
Usually I’d order the half-broiled chicken — listed under the small American Foods section of the menu — while my mother dined on a variety of exotic dishes, some of which arrived at our table still flaming. She’d always pay cash, taking money from a small book of envelopes with a red vinyl cover on which was printed BUDGET. I never got more than an upside down glance at the actual bill, and the one time I did the numbers only proved to make me dizzy.
Year after year my father grumbled at the unnecessary expense, saying we could eat for a week on what she’d be putting out for one night’s worth of “cat guts and noodles.” But my mother argued Luke’s was the best restaurant in town, and the only truly decent place within walking distance suitable for a proper birthday celebration.
If he tried to bully her, she pointed out that these private dinners had become a tradition. When called upon, I backed her one hundred percent. Even after I understood the dent this once a year extravaganza put in the family budget, I took her side, saying it was me who wanted to go. I knew firsthand the thrill she got from eating at Luke’s. I’d seen the shine in her eyes when the Chinese waiters, dressed in black silk pajamas, fussed over us like we were royalty. She adored how polite and soft-spoken they remained even when you couldn’t understand a word they were saying.
Mo warder, miss? Sum ting elks, miss? Howdah boy leek is chicken, miss? I ba-wing you for chun cookie, okey doe?
My mother cleaned other people’s houses for a living and sometimes had to assist at dinner parties and snotty little get-togethers; she’d have to dress up in a black house dress and a frilly white apron and walk around all night in four-inch heels carrying a tray of foods she couldn’t identify. Lucky Luke’s charged an arm and a leg for a breast and a wing, but sitting in their horseshoe shaped booths, with a frilly paper lantern overhead, a dozen willing waiters no more than a finger-snap away, made her, I believe, feel as wealthy and powerful as the people she scrubbed toilets for. Sometimes she’d point out a group of people and whisper, that’s Mrs. So-and-so, her husband owns the supermarket, or, There’s Mr. What’s-his-face. His company built the dry cleaners where your father worked, and they’re putting up that new donut shop beside it.
If somebody she recognized looked our way, she’d give a snappy little wave, and nod her chin while stretching her mouth into a tight smile. I can’t remember anyone ever waving back, and on a couple of occasions I pointed this out to her. She’d then insist, quite vehemently, that so-and-so had indeed made some sign of recognition but that I’d merely missed it. I was usually up to my eyeballs behind the huge menu, squinting at a dragon, guessing at the contents of, say, Egg-drop soup so I never doubted her for a moment.
My mother, you see, wasn’t hard to look at. Tall and slender (what my father called “leggy”) and with the delicate doll-like features of a ballerina, she was exactly the kind of woman most men stretched their necks to get a second glimpse of.
The night I want to tell you about, the night of my thirteenth birthday, someone not only spotted my mother but came over to our booth and slid in beside her. The man’s name was Frank Zorn and I later learned he was a big shot lawyer with a wife and two kids of his own. He sat down and smiled at my mother as if he had just returned from the men’s room and we’d been holding our breaths, and our orders, until his anticipated return. He was about the same age and build as my father, though much better looking, with more hair, and wearing red suspenders over an open collared flowery shirt. He held a ceramic pineapple from which a tiny pink umbrella sprouted, pitching and rolling in whatever fluid was contained therein.
“Emperor Qianglong couldn’t get waited on tonight,” he said, addressing the room at large.
From behind my menu, I watched my mother slide over a little. Her face was flush red, and her eyes were scanning the room. She shuddered a breath, then placed her folded hands on the table’s edge as if she were praying. She didn’t say a word.
“So, what’ve we got here,” Frank said, eyeing me over the top of his pineapple.
My mother cleared her throat. “This . . . is my son,” she said weakly. “We’re celebrating his birthday.” She closed her eyes, seemingly exhausted from this tiny speech. “Say hello to Frank, Marty.”
“Hello Frank,” I said.
Frank instantly sat up, thrusting his shoulders against the high cushioned seat. His face took on an expression I can only describe as outright shock at my ability to speak.
“Well, now,” he said “Isn’t he the polite little guy.” He set down his pineapple and reached across the table. Before I knew what he was doing he’d seized my right hand in both of his. He held it as if it were a dead sparrow that had just crashed head-first into the table top. I looked at my mother for help. Frank’s fingers were ice cold and somewhat clammy, but beyond that I was generally opposed to hand-holding, period, particularly with a man.
My mother sighed heavily. She couldn’t have looked more bewildered if Frank had brought out a meat cleaver, chopped off my hand at the wrist and begun to eat it in front of her. Fearing something along those lines, I pulled back, a blundering move on my part, because Frank mistook my second, more forceful tug, as an invitation to arm wrestle. He tightened his grip and effortlessly brought my hand closer. I felt the seat of my pants lift and the table’s edge cut into my belly. He might have succeeded in pulling me out of the booth entirely if a smiling waiter hadn’t appeared.
“All set for ardor?”
Frank released his hold on me and I flopped into my seat. He showed the waiter his pineapple.
“Yea. Another shanghai,” Then he smiled at my mother, who at the waiters appearance had picked up her menu and was using it to fan herself.
“You want a shanghai, babycakes?” Frank said.
She shook her head. It was more of a tremor, really. The “babycakes” had startled me and I examined her face for some reaction. Once, at a bus stop, a man who’d been ogling her legs had called her “sweet stuff” and she’d threatened to take his eye out with her umbrella. I couldn’t believe she was letting Frank get away with “babycakes.”
“You want to ardor food now,” the waiter said.
“No,” my mother said, finding her voice. “Not just yet, thank you.”
The waiter smiled, then bowed, then moved off. I watched him stop at another booth and launch, whole-heartedly, into a similar routine. When I looked at Frank, he was thumbing through a folded stack of crisp currency. The outermost bill was a hundred and my eyes shot open. I held my breath as he flipped past a number of fifties, pulled a twenty from the middle, and tossed it nonchalantly across the table.
“Hey Marky boy. How ’bout doing me a tremendous favor and getting me change for that.”
I looked at my mother who was pinching the bridge of her nose. Her cheeks had drained from red to white. I waited for her to explain that my name wasn’t Marky boy, or Marky anything, but Marty, more preferably Martin, plain and simple. Her own name was Rose and she’d bite your ear off if you stretched it to Rosy.
“So whadaya say,” Frank said. “Can you do that for me?” His left hand disappeared beneath the table.
I watched her focus on the paper lantern suspended above our booth. There was a snaky red dragon, shaped like an S. It was diffused by the light, slightly pinkish, but it was the same dragon from the doors and the menu. She was starring at it as though she’d never seen a dragon before.
“Yo!” Frank said. “Earth to Marky. Come in, Marky.”
“My name is Marty,” I said through clenched teeth. I didn’t take my eyes off my mother. If anyone was in orbit, she was, and I’d firmly decided I wasn’t running any errands until she gave the okay.
“Didn’t I say Marty,” Frank asked. “What did I say?”
I was about to tell Frankie Boy what he’d said, when my mother picked up the twenty and handed it to me. “Go on,” she said, blinking. “See if they’ve got change.”
At that moment a scream of laughter erupted from the booth behind us and I stretched my neck to look. I glimpsed a woman in a tight silvery dress that appeared to be made of metal squares raise a stemmed glass high over her head. “To Custer,” she said, “and to the savage bastards that cut his hair!”
Frank said, “So, how ’bout we take a little walk. Just you and me. I want to show you my new car. Va-room, va-room.”
My mother leaned into him just as I whipped my head around. She replied something I couldn’t hear above the howling group behind us, but Frank’s face revealed an obvious refusal to his invitation. “Come on,” he said, pleading. “Ten minutes. Then I’ll buy you and the kid dinner.”
She was looking straight ahead– not at me, not at the group behind us, but at something or someone far across the room. Frank raised his pineapple. He smiled at me, as though suddenly realizing I hadn’t left.
“You don’t mind if I borrow your mother for ten minutes, do ya, son?”
It was a face-freezing question. I felt my jaw lock up as I quietly slid out of the booth. I couldn’t have answered if I’d wanted to.
As I zigzagged through the maze of clustered booths, making my way toward the register, I glanced back once. I wasn’t tall enough to get a clean look but I’m almost certain Frankie boy had an arm around her. It was the unsettling after-the-fact type of certitude that makes one wish they’d been born blind.
At the register a stunning Asian woman asked me how I wanted my change. She had straight black hair that fell past her hips, and for a dozen or so heartbeats I was honestly more concerned with her huge eyes and prominent white teeth than with the breakdown of Frankie boy’s twenty. When she asked a second time, I stammered, “Quarters, please.”
“Oil quotas?” she said.
I nodded at a butterfly curved around her breast.
She handed over two orange rolls. I clenched one in each fist, and as I made my way back, I worked my arms like I was flexing dumb bells.
When I saw my mother alone in the booth, with Frank no where in sight, I stopped pumping the quarters and picked up my pace a step. I took a short cut between two identical waiters talking gibberish beside a small rocky island of fake greenery. The area was divided by a narrow stream of running water, with wavering blue lights beneath, to give the effect, I assumed, of the ocean. As I stepped across, I hoped we’d seen the last of Frankie boy. I slid into the booth, put the quarter rolls on the table, and immediately realized we hadn’t. He’d most certainly be back for his change. I frowned at my mother, who angled her menu to shield herself from my accusing eyes.
“So where’s what’s his face,” I said.
“Excuse me,” she said, in a voice shaky and weak.
“The asshole,” I said.
She slapped her menu down, and thrust her face forward. “Watch your mouth, Marty. For god’s sake, remember where we are.”
She looked like she was deliberating wiping the look off my face, and suddenly I thought of my father, at home, eating tuna from a can, and feeding Cheerio’s to my sister while we sat in a fancy restaurant where no one spoke English. “Who is that guy,” I said.
“Lower your voice, please.” She picked up her menu again. “It’s not important who he is.”
I fired a warning shot across her bow. “I bet dad doesn’t know about him.”
She lowered her menu halfway, revealing all but her chin, then dropped it to her lap.
“That man,” she said, “not that it’s any of your business, is Frank Zorn, a very respected attorney, and a former selectman. He and I went to high school together. On occasion I see him at the parties I work at.”
“Well, he forgot his money,” I said, pushing the quarters at her. She stopped them from rolling off the table, then relocated them to the center. She straightened up a bit, looking wounded and hurt.
“For your information,” she said, “he left that money for you. He told me to tell you happy birthday.”
“I don’t want his stupid money.” I said, and rolled the quarters at her again.
She picked them both up and put them in her purse. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll keep them.”
“Fine,” I said.
“And the next time you want spending money, you can think about the twenty dollars in quarters you threw away.”
I positioned my menu so I wouldn’t have to look at her. I was afraid I might say something I’d be sorry for.
“All set for ardor now?”
I looked at the waiter. His perfect smile made me want to puke. What the hell were these people so god damn happy about, anyway?
“I’ll have the mandarin duck,” my mother said. “Chop suey, small. An order of egg rolls, and a bowl of won ton soup.”
The waiter smiled as she handed him her menu. He put it under his arm and smiled at me.
“I’m not hungry,” I said and handed him my menu, too.
“What do you mean you’re not hungry?” my mother said. “Marty, it’s your birthday.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
The waiter looked at her then at me. He held our menus as though we might want them back.
“Marty, why are you doing this?”
“What?” I said. “I’m not hungry.”
“Marty, please don’t be like that.”
“Like what? I’m not hungry.”
“Marty?”
The waiter said, “You wan mo time, miss? I give you mo time.”
“Yes, please. Thank you,” my mother said. She held her smile until he’d moved off.
“Marty, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I want to go home.”
“But why, Marty?”
“I feel sick. This place makes me sick, okay? I want to go. I don’t want to eat here. I don’t like the people here. I want to go home. Take me home,” I said.
“All right, Marty. Okay. If that’s what you want to do, that’s what we’ll do.”
“It is,” I said.
On our way to the door she pinched the sleeve of another waiter and told him to please cancel our order. “I’m very sorry,” she said. He smiled politely, glanced over at our table, then bowed at my mother, as though the two rolls of quarters she’d left were meant for him.
Outside on the sidewalk, she held my arm and I walked beside her for a while, matching her step for step. I kept my head down, my eyes on the sidewalk. I tried to step on every crack.
As we turned a corner she suddenly stopped and said, “There’s still cake, you know.” She smiled weakly. I stared at her, my eyes like slits, until her smile faded. As we crossed the street, she released her hold on my arm and without looking at me, she said, “Now when we get home, don’t do anything stupid.”
“Stupid like what?”
“Like shooting your mouth off about things you don’t know anything about. Remember your father’s blood pressure,” she said.
I gave her what I hoped was a mean and vicious look — as powerful a look as I could manage in the days before I learned what love and marriage and heartache meant, before divorce taught me the pain of losing someone who’d vowed to love you forever. It was probably my most painful look to-date, and I’m sad to report my mother missed it entirely.
We walked the rest of the way in silence. I lagged several steps behind, watching the shine of her patent leather heels in the glare of streetlights. Outside our building, when she stopped to fix her lipstick, I ran ahead. I bolted up the stairs, leaving her a solid two flights behind. I knocked on our door and waited. There was no sound on the stairs. I imagined my mother admiring her reflection in a grease-fogged window. I pounded on our door until my father opened it. His hair was wet, wild looking, and he was holding a box of blue candles.
“What’s happened,” he said.
I watched his face and tried to control mine.
“Where’s your mother?” he said.
After an exchange of dead-eyed stares, I threw myself at him. He wrapped me in his arms.
“Hey now,” he said. He smelled of tuna fish, Old Spice, tobacco. “What’s all this?”
I heard the click-clack of my mother’s heels on the stairs.
“Rose,” my father shouted. “What in hell happened?”
I opened my mouth to speak. I wanted to answer before she did, before she scolded him for shouting in the hall then calmed him with some calculated lie. I wanted to explain that the world had changed. Our world. His and mine. But I was shaking uncontrollably, unable to catch my breath, and it was my mother who said, in a sing-song voice that resonated through our empty hall, “What can I tell you, Jack? The boy lost his taste for Chinese food.”
Bob Thurber is the author of “Paperboy: A Dysfunctional Novel” and other titles. Over the years his stories have received a long list of awards and honors, appeared in Esquire and other notable publications, been selected for over 50 anthologies and utilized as teaching tools in schools and universities throughout the world. “Nothing But Trouble” a story collection accompanied by photographic images, was released in April 2014 from Shanti Arts. Paperboy is being re-released and put back in print and made available in a number of digital formats, by Shanti Arts. Release date is ‘before’ May 1st, 2016. Bob resides in Massachusetts. For more info, visit: BobThurber.net[/author_info.
Hilary Crown
Johnson hadn’t been home in a week. Instead, he chose to sleep at his apartment on campus, which was fine because I didn’t really want him back anyway. I enjoyed my morning cigarette while standing in a clutch of trees at the edge of our property. The children picked flowers. The town’s tornado siren went off. We were on the far side of the pasture, the house floated on the horizon like a cruise ship, Tom and Victoria grabbed my hands and we started running. Dark skies closed in, the wind swirled, snatching anything not nailed down.
We made it to the shelter and closed ourselves in. Like a summer blockbuster movie the metal doors pounded. It was a huge monster that was outside trying to get in, and that’s what I always told the children. Victoria stood calmly against the wall of the basement while Tom clung to my waist. I hand combed his hair running my fingers through the strands. They were tassel soft. It was possible that everything would be gone when we got outside and then disappearing would be easy. The storm took us. Johnson wouldn’t know where to start looking. The siren stopped and as we crept outside, everything was okay. It was still a beautiful day and I felt nothing but disappointment. I counted on a light breeze that carried an anxious early afternoon heat, hoping it would go away once the darkness settled.
Like whirlpools the kids skirted around me, and moved through the obstacle course kitchen, chairs, table; Tom bumped the edge and the vase at the centerpiece wobbled. Victoria stopped mid-stride and glanced at me while touching it slightly, which kept it from falling over. She was loose and quick; perhaps one day she would become a magician. I was seeing grown up moments in them, tiny creases starting to form on Victoria’s forehead when she frowned, and the dimples in Tom’s cheeks, which were almost permanent since his reaction to most things was a smile. I tried to remember that this was temporary and they wouldn’t be young forever.
I set the metal teapot on the stove and began the water for tea. Mint was tastier with sugar, the Mason jar on the counter full of tiny white crystals. I often found Tom standing there dipping his finger over and over inside the glass, and sucking it clean. He repeated until the sound of my feet crossing the wooden floor announced his partner in sugar crime. There was a little bit of discovery for both of us but no one was saying out loud that sugar was a treat not a food group.
Steam curled off the mug, soft ripples of energy while I stirred in the sugar. I anticipated the bite, kick, and then I felt it in my eyes. It was too good, not excessively good, because then it’s just selfish. The taste improved with every bird sip, the water cooled, and minty aroma chased the sugar. Tom and I single handedly worked through a pound of sugar over the course of a few months. It felt like progress, something we did together. The house stirred in one spot, where the children played, and my action was inaction. There was nowhere for me to go but I felt a magnetic force pulling me to where they sat. Live through your children, which is what everyone says to you when you are mothering. When we went outside there was so much time left in the day and looking again it seemed like time didn’t even move forward. Just being there had to be enough. These kids needed me, and they didn’t even know it, and that’s what they don’t tell you about, the need. Children take so much for granted. Why shouldn’t they?
Victoria and Tom played side-by-side, cross-legged amid a sea of toys and surrounded by a sofa. The windows on the first floor wide open to keep the air moving, and until the phony tornado, it was dead calm. The storm had passed but the drapes still danced a little jig at the edge of my vision. Every so often I felt a trickle of wind.
With my tea I sat near them just outside their world. Victoria colored on a piece of paper and Tom stared at a pile of Lego bricks. Like a surgeon finding the right artery to cut, he put pieces together. Light filled the room, and I picked up my camera and focused on their faces. Their eyes glowed. It was a cliché to think that their power was from somewhere deep inside them but it was. They started to heat up and through the viewfinder they gained a substance. Stepping in closer, no longer camera shy, they ignored me. Victoria pulled back her bed head hair, tucking it behind each ear, knowing she was having her picture taken. Tom looked at her with awe; he was still a very young seven years old. At eight, Victoria begged to be taken seriously but was still afraid of the dark. They both recognized a photo-op.
They weighed heavy, often in tiny ways. Some days after getting them fed, “Mommy is taking a shower, alone.”, I would inform them as I slowly climbed the stairs. It was a matter of telling them where I was in the house; they were old enough to sit and play by themselves. It wasn’t like I was asking them to shingle the roof. Victoria and Tom took turns bursting into the bathroom, crossing that line which we had agreed upon, ripping the shower curtain open like a Christmas present. Tom didn’t even say, “Excuse me.” I wanted to lock the door and put in earplugs and sleep in the tub. They wouldn’t starve. Keeping your eyes on other people for every waking moment was the challenge, and no one told me that either. I learned with Victoria. She followed me around like a duckling. Tom arrived a year later and I was suddenly outnumbered.
Staring at my wet and naked body, Tom laughed. I blinked between the rivulets of water; I felt his humor. I focused on him, then he would smile and bound away like a kitten. “Other room!” he would say, his eyes never truly on me, just staring at my steamy presence.
Victoria would peek in, and I would catch her flat gaze as it settled on my waistline. The flesh fold that never snapped back, my unkempt hairy crotch, she focused on it. She knew how to judge before she could walk. They sat on the bed and watched me dress; looking at me, you would think the secrets of adulthood could be discovered in the button and zipper on my jeans. My presence was important to them and it created a harmless place to be. I was losing time which crept into my fingertips like a mosquito bite. They didn’t care about art. Picture taking. Tom and Victoria only worried about television and the next snack. I often dragged my own wants to the foreground, past the kids. Make a list of five things you want to do and then if you get one done you have succeeded. I just picked one thing and did it. Skipped the list altogether; it was overwhelming.
I always tried to shake it off and realized that getting something accomplished usually erased the guilt. Boredom arrived in bunches and the immediate solution was to change my surroundings. Look at something else and take my camera. I wanted to drop Tom off at school with Johnson so I could take Victoria to the mall to get her ears pierced. She was young enough that I could talk her through the pain and old enough to appreciate that this was a means to an end.
At the bus stop they waited in the shelter. I watched them through the viewfinder and got a moment of recognition from Victoria. She straightened up her back and stuck her chin forward, and Tom preferred to slouch or pretend to look away when he was really waiting for me to take his picture. I stopped, they weren’t movie stars, and waited until that moment when these children had forgotten about me. I almost put them on the bus alone just to see what they would do next.
The bus engine thrummed under our seat as we moved down the road. Tom sat across the isle and Victoria leaned against me and looked out the window. We jiggled along until our stop and walked off like a family of ducks. The heat draped over us like a wet blanket. I could only think about the next place I wanted to be and not spend even a second in the moment – another thing I’m sure some wise old mother wrote down on a stone tablet. When they get old enough and figure out gravity, where and when things can hurt them, children tend to protect against the coarse world. They don’t really want any help.
The halls at The Kansas City Art Institute were lined with bad Xerox’s of bad Xerox’s for parties, lost dogs, apartments, and meditation seminars. Air-conditioning slapped my face, and with it came my own sigh of relief as Tom and Victoria walked ahead with renewed energy. In the studio there were large tables under skylights and prints that I recognized laid out. Images from the time he spent with that surfer in California, the work that made him and his name as an up-and-coming photographer. Johnson’s assistant stood over the prints staring at them. I could see she was a devout worshiper but I recognized a practiced endurance that spiraled from her eyes when she dropped back to take in our frayed arrival.
We were not part of the equation in the studio but I didn’t care. I was Johnson’s wife, and would not even slow down for a second to interact with this person. She was too young to be anything threatening but she didn’t even smile when we arrived or try to greet us. I just needed some level of recognition, a sliver of respect – bullshit can be faked, even if we all know its bullshit. She was his type. I desperately hoped to find a pang of jealously; instead I just stared at this woman like she was another student.
I knocked on the darkroom door next to me. Victoria stood with her arms crossed. “We’re going. Your assistant is here with Tom,” I said and turned to the thin woman who seemed so impressed with her own presence, which wasn’t grotesque – her face was off white like she had taken a shower in baby powder. I stepped closer and could see she wasn’t wearing make-up. Her skin was actually white and the V-neck of her shirt revealed more of her cleavage.
Offering her a pained smile, “What’s your name?” I asked.
She touched her hair brown with both hands and I noticed her firm cheekbones.
“Elizabeth,” she uttered softly. Then her hands hung at her side. She looked like a student awaiting instructions. Her black t-shirt and dark blue jeans were on purpose, casual but sexy. I wanted my husband to burst out of the darkroom at that moment, hoped he would take charge and show some interest in our son.
“Elizabeth is here,” I yelled, and then she smiled knowing this meant we were leaving.
The revolving door spun and Johnson emerged from the darkroom. “I’m working.” He barely opened his eyes, adjusting to the light. Scruff on his face, he avoided looking at me and focused on his shoelaces as if they were untied. Then the telltale giveaway, he looked Elizabeth up and down and then over to me.
The children just stared at him, not even a whisper to their father.
I had already turned back to the studio’s main entrance. “Your son is staying here while you work,” I said, as Victoria and I moved down the long hallway.
I could hear them talking. Tom asked Elizabeth, “Are you an artist too?”
Back on the bus Victoria sat next to me again, this time holding my hand. It felt like a connection to have her reach out and not just hold my hand but take it from me and actively squeeze it. There was a kind of solid completion building in my stomach. Parenting these children felt hard won. It was too on-the-nose but it was clear to me that these were accomplishments: taking pictures of them, earrings, riding the bus. All details that made up the day. Riding in the cool air made things suddenly very easy and our simple plans became a pleasure.
At the mall the young Asian woman looked like she had just smelled steaming compost. Bent at the waist, her pants slid down slightly to reveal her ass crack, her olive skin smooth and unblemished. She held a freezing gel on Victoria’s left earlobe. It took a minute to take effect and I found myself in the reflection of the Gap store window across from the jewelry stand. The gun went off. Victoria didn’t flinch. There was very little to it, just a tiny bit of blood.
The Asian woman’s silky black hair fell off her shoulders and her face was lost inside a curtain of it as she fastened the back of the studs. Victoria didn’t move. The Asian woman tucked Victoria’s hair behind her ears; a smear of blood streaked a loose strand.
I started coughing again, hacked up phlegm, and looked for a place to spit it out. A garbage can filled with bloody tissues next to the chair where Victoria sat was the only option. I spat into it when the Asian woman looked away.
I returned to my reflected image. My body was round; the curves seemed permanent, almost too soft. People could see that I was a mother, especially when I had the kids with me. But when I was alone, so rare that I could count on one hand how many times that happened – did everyone automatically know that I was a mother? I stared at the mannequins and wondered who they were trying to fool with those styles. Did anyone wear them? Clothes looked better on skinny people. Like fast food commercials, you never see fat actors in those. I couldn’t escape my shape. Any outfit, no matter how carefully chosen, seemed like blankets and fancy bedspreads on me with holes cut out for arms and legs.
Victoria and Tom never noticed, and Johnson certainly didn’t care. They ate and my cooking made them happy. This was motherhood and if those great mothers who came before all others had actually shared this, I probably would have become a lesbian or gotten a dog.
When I was growing up, I never recognized or even noticed these things. Children are so self-centered and only worry about themselves. I wondered if my own mother had these same problems. She was present, part of my life, but I never once thought about what she was thinking or feeling when I was growing up. She lived through me, just like I was doing. How would Victoria see this moment, if she even remembered it? This was part of being a parent, and my own mother did it without pause.
I did not think about any of this until it was happening and then afterwards almost not at all. It was infuriating that one generation never handed down the experience to the next. A type of anxious anger built up in my chest and I had no interest in hearing from this woman. We paid and left the little kiosk. She did her job, and I wanted to slap her. I don’t know why that was. She did nothing to me or Victoria but when I passed a perfume shop and a twenty-something wearing clothes a size too small with a thong peeking out of her jeans stepped out to offer me a squirt of perfume on my wrist, I caught my reflection again in a mirror behind her. I was tire shaped; it made me sick to look at myself.
The perfume girl said, “Would you like a sample?”
Looking away from my image to her, “Fuck you.” I said and took one last glimpse at my body. I seemed to be modeling a kind of homeless slob look. My hair needed conditioner, and I appeared lifeless and pale. My clothes were so out of style that perhaps I had traveled through time to get them. The perfume girl receded and Victoria blanched at the profanity. It was okay, she’d heard worse. It should be obvious that swear words were okay in certain situations.
When we returned to the school, Tom was outside with Elizabeth. They stood on the large green lawn throwing a Frisbee back and forth. She threw it, Tom returning it to her poorly, letting it fly like a drunken pigeon. Victoria and I waited for the traffic to break, and we jaywalked our way towards Tom. She threw the Frisbee high; Tom chased it and ran into the street. He leaned down to get it and in the near distance I saw a car coming. Letting go of Victoria’s hand, I ran towards Tom. The car saw him, skidded to a stop and as he lifted his head to the sound, the bumper connected with his forehead.
He snapped back and held his head, then fell to the ground and lay on his back. I was five feet away when it happened. I missed stopping it by three seconds. Tom started breathing hard and then wept, a scared cry, breathing in gulps. I grabbed him in my arms and ran towards Elizabeth. Everything fell away and stopped in that tiny moment. Tom’s eyes were closed and then they flickered open. My heart bounced around inside my chest. I felt a huge vacant lot where my stomach was only moments before. I started to shake as my mind broke in one direction away from this scene to the nearest thing I could see.
“Get a car. Take us to the hospital, now!” I screamed at Elizabeth and she suddenly jumped to life, running off. It wasn’t fast enough. I didn’t know where to go, and had no idea where the hospital was or how far. I pressed his body to my chest and my other hand was free to cover the wound on his forehead as blood leaked between my fingers. His tears started to dry, my heart beat wildly but I could feel Tom’s heart going faster. I ran towards Victoria who stood on the grass staring at us. Tom was hard to carry and I almost dropped him.
“You know where your father is?” I said to Victoria. She couldn’t speak but nodded her head.
“Tell him to meet us at the emergency room.”
While I waited, in that moment I thought he had died. My child had been taken from me, no warning, like snapping my fingers, it was that fast. There were spots in my vision; my breath seemed broken and hard to get up the windpipe. I stared at Tom, willing his eyes to open, and then they did. I breathed, almost vomited on him, joy washed over me. I felt light, as if I had lost fifty pounds. Tom was hot and sweaty, beads of my own rolled from my forehead and dropped to his checks as he smiled up at me. I began to cry, turned to sobs, and I pulled him closer. She pulled up in a car and while I waited for her to open the passenger door I felt the raging desire to punch her in the face.
She drove recklessly, looking over at me with a petrified gaze. Her long hair had come undone and she pulled it away from her face. Tom took turns looking at me, and her, then back to me. The blood on his head was only a trickle.
We stopped short at the door to the emergency room, “If I ever see you again I will kill you,” I said to Elizabeth.
I never took my hand off his forehead, his warm body wrapped around mine, his eyes open, staring off into space like he’d just seen a great white shark in the bathtub.
“It’s going to be okay,” I whispered in a panicked voice. Inside a nurse rushed up to us and I described what happened. She took Tom from me and I followed them to a bed at the end of a very long hallway where the nurse wheeled him away.
He was gone for an hour. Loneliness chased me around the room, and I was buoyed by the fact that when the nurse took him, he was alive. My eyes darted across the white drop ceiling of the emergency room waiting area. I counted the random dot grid of the tiles, wondered if a machine made them, and started to look for a pattern in each tile that was repeatable. I counted the tiles, lost interest, and instead stared at a television set in the corner that was tuned to the news. The nurse who took Tom from me arrived a few minutes later, my breath stopped as the words came out of her mouth, “Tom is fine, we’re doing an x-ray. You can come wait in the room.” She said and waved for me to follow her.
I was instantly filled with glee, sugar sweet and I wiped the sweat from my face, hands damp, I dried them on my clothes. “Jesus Christ,” I whispered aloud. I had dodged something very dangerous, and zigged when I should’ve zagged. It wasn’t luck or anything else but a kind of circumstance. I swore to be vigilant and never let him out of my sight. From now on I would be the good mother and he would know no harm. My stride stiffened as I followed the nurse. Putting on a good front for these people was my only concern. She showed me to a chair in the hospital room and then disappeared. I waited for Tom to arrive.
The doctor glided in first with the nurse behind him as she wheeled a calm and bandaged Tom back into the room. The doctor must’ve been a basketball player; his belt was almost parallel to my chin. I coughed again and lost my breath; I couldn’t stop. Finally the cough slowed down to a hack. He was very patient with us and Tom sat staring at me like his voice had disappeared.
“Tom is fine. Lucky. But he will have a nice scar on his forehead for a few years. X-rays reveal nothing. I’d like to keep him here for a few hours. We try to keep head wounds awake for a while,” the doctor said.
I coughed deeply, caught my breath, “Nothing to worry about?”
“No,” the Doctor smiled. “But that cough sounds terrible. How long have you had it?”
Coughing again, “Six months.”
He looked at my purse that was wide open on the floor. “Those aren’t cough suppressants.” He pointed to my cigarettes.
“I want to sit with him until he can go home.”
The doctor said, “If you have that cough in a week, the same or worse, you come back,” he smiled and walked away.
The coughing stopped for a while and Tom stared up at the ceiling. The nurse, who for the first time became a person in my eyes, came back with a deck of cards and a bowl of chocolate ice cream.
“You two need something to occupy your time,” she said, her fat face slippery with sweat. Chubby sausage link fingers handed everything to me. She was suddenly in focus, like a television that had quickly found reception. Her body was worse than mine and I’m sure she knew it. I felt her stare at me, her insecurity oozed. Her body was sagging, her chest was huge – a shapeless mass under scrubs. She disappeared and the shifts must have changed because we never saw her again.
Tom and I played Go Fish. Another nurse brought more ice cream, and Tom let me share some of it with him as I suddenly found my appetite. This nurse was thin, young, and must have been told something by the last nurse. Perhaps she was given a piece of advice, “Don’t make eye contact with the mother whose kid got hit by a car. She is your future if you aren’t careful.” I knew there wasn’t anything I could do about all of this and knew that I didn’t have to be nice to these people anymore.
By the time Johnson showed up I was almost asleep in the chair. He talked to Tom who was still awake. I peeked and could see a sleeping Victoria in his arms.
“What happened?” he whispered.
“I was playing Frisbee,” Tom said.
“I thought you got hit by a car?”
Tom sighed, “Yeah.”
Later, when I woke up, Johnson had fallen asleep in the opposite chair with Victoria snoring on his chest.
It felt good to see Tom laying in bed and talking to his father. Not because it was the right thing to be happening, my husband was suddenly revealing true empathy for his son, which should be natural for him. Now I had something on Johnson. It was me that kept our son alive. I brought him to the hospital and they saved him. It was me who reacted when he didn’t. Others might see it differently, I was there and he wasn’t. It was a little tug and pull between us and made me feel better. I was alive in that moment. He just showed up because of the guilt. There’s a difference and we both knew it.
Jason Rice has had his fiction published online and in print. Most recently a short story of his was published in Hint Fiction; An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words of Less (Norton). He is one of the founding editors of the blog Three Guys One Book.
sharp and golden—
roots for the sweetest flower;
knows her name by taste.
If I kiss you after our time empties
like a long river into the brackish
delta I do not think I’ll know you.
So whose name should I call
when you answer your phone tomorrow
when I cannot use it now to keep you?