Grief

By Kelly Easton

The woman had lost her son in the war.  It was never a clear war to her mind: a president, a dictator, a dry parched land, weapons of mass destruction that were there and then not.

She walked along the beach, empty except for a couple who sat watching the red and purple ridges of sky against the sea.  How foolish they were, she thought, joined together like twins, wallowing in sentimentality.

At the edge of the town was a small overgrown cemetery.  She walked the three miles there every day, stopping only at the jetty to catch her breath.  The cemetery was not of her faith.  Wooden crosses and artificial flowers littered the place; the occasional flag.  Of course, the woman’s son was not in the cemetery.  His body parts had been misplaced in the country where he died.  The government said that a faction was hiding them, but assured her that they would find them.

Still, the cemetery was a sanctuary shaded by dogwood trees whose pale bleeding petals scattered light against the headstones.  She would rest against the stones, and watch the orbs of blue and white light filter through the trees.  Beneath her breath, she’d chant the Kaddish, as if she were a monk and this her mantra.  Eventually, the words the light, all became one in an airless colorless swoop, and she ceased to think or feel.

Had there not been a caretaker, an old man who did little more than lock the gate at night, she may have even slept there.

The woman passed a fisherman drinking beer, and a young boy with a sheep dog who pounced toward her, then away.  She calculated a way to avoid the tacky boardwalk and its crowds.  If the tide were right she could take the beach, wading a few yards around the manufactured wall that divided one strand from another.

She reached her vantage point, but the tide was too high.  She would have to go around.

As spring grew warm, activity unfolded on the boardwalk.  Couples were occasionally arrested for copulating under the carousel.  The mayor had gotten drunk and peed on the wall of the fun house, but was forgiven by the easygoing residents.  The town, which virtually closed down eight months of the year, became alive with revelry.  She had come here, originally, for those eight months of silence muffled only by the waves.  She’d rented a room from a quiet old woman who brought her coffee in the morning and cheese and fruit at night, a glass of port.

And she liked the old town library whose antiquated books dealt with innocuous facts from the past–the cycle of the butterfly, a history of transportation—and the occasional obsolete novel.  She read one recently called The Face in the Mountain that told of how a mountain in Ecuador grew human features and spoke.  A native came upon it and the mountain guided him to an abandoned cabin where a skeleton stood in front of a calendar, as if marking off the days.  According to custom, the native dutifully buried it.  When he returned to tell the mountain, though, the features, the voice, melted into nothing.  The native was disappointed; it was as if he had lost a friend, a lover, a child.

The woman reached the boardwalk.  Sailors strolled in packs.  Fisherman jeered.  Young girls flirted.  Children ate cotton candy while their parents drank in makeshift bars.  A juggler tossed bowling pins and cans of beer. Throughout her life, people had watched the woman.  It had brought her pleasure at one time, or was that really her.  Even now, against her will, she appeared very stylish.  With faded cords, Cape Cod jacket, and wild black hair, the woman was a presence.  She moved through the crowds not noticing the attention.  The town idiot leapt after her, touched her jacket.  The stench of popcorn, hot dogs, beer, and urine reached her and she walked more quickly.  The lights of the Fun Zone flashed on.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” the psychic had asked, and the woman answered, “No.”

“You don’t have to believe for them to speak, get it.  Reality is not based on what you perceive.”

The woman merely shrugged.  Her husband, always a pleaser, replied, “Of course not.  Who knows what reality is.”  Then his feelings took him further down the stream of his thoughts.  “He is our only son. An A student.  He was a boy scout.  We took him to the lake every summer.  He could catch a trout in two seconds flat.  Something about him.  The trout just came…”

“You are a doctor?” the psychic asked.

Her husband nodded, impressed.  The woman remembered a Swedish movie, about an old man, a doctor.  He faces his past in a series of vignettes and finds that he’s been exceedingly harsh.  In a nightmare scene, he replies to an examiner, “A doctor’s first duty is to beg forgiveness.”  The word duty turned her to stone.

“Can we get on with this?” she pressed the psychic.

“Everything continues,” the psychic offered.  “There is no beginning, no end.”  And when she was a girl, the woman had written an essay on God.   God is heat, she had written, the sun on your back.  God is the month of August.  God lives on in memory.

The jetty was getting closer.

“Are you going to kill yourself?” her husband asked when she was leaving, his body blocking the rectangle of light at the door.

“If I thought that it would end something, that the hole, the falling, the space would be filled, I would.  But no.  I don’t believe that it would end anything.”

“Then why are you leaving?”

She had only shrugged.  A couple of phrases from books popped into her head.  Call me Ishmael.  Tomorrow is another day. And even Achilles returned the body of Hector; his heart grew merciful from Priam’s tears.

The jetty moves toward her.  She climbs the slippery rocks.  The edges are sharp against the sole of her shoe.  There is nothing that can stop the sensation of alive, and the psychic’s eyes had rolled like some epileptic.  “I’m receiving the message.  Your son is fine.”  Her husband’s sigh of relief.  “A handsome boy,” the psychic continued.  “Happy and laughing.  He is thinking of you.”

“Our son is alive!” her husband repeated.  She knew in that moment that he was dead.

“Two hundred dollars, please,” the psychic concluded.

She knew that he had died for no reason.

The woman leans back against the jagged stones.  The tide pulls against her fingertips.  She closes her eyes against the bright sun.  The spray from waves sprinkles on her face, her hair.

In a hospital corridor, her husband huddles.  His white coat gleams in the artificial light.  There are patterns to the x-ray, which only he can decipher, a secret code of bones and cartilage.

Against her will, the woman shivers from the water.  Her forehead itches.  She resists the urge to scratch it.

Drowned by the sound of the waves, she doesn’t hear footsteps as they move toward her.  A man seizes her, yanks her to her feet, then he stumbles backwards when she struggles.

“I’m sorry,” he says.  “I thought that you were dead, or half-drowned.  I’m not being melodramatic.  We have found people out here.  The bodies get caught on the rocks.”

She peers at him, his lined face.  He is one of the year-round residents, an astronomer of some sort, if she remembers correctly.

He wonders is she’s deaf; she stares at him so long.  Her face is very beautiful, from a far away time.

“No,” she finally assures him.  “I’m not dead.”

_______________________________________
Originally published in Frontiers, volume XVII

Filed under: Kelly Easton, Short Fiction Stories, Words, Fiction, Grief, Kelly Easton, Short Story, War

BOOKS: A Love Story

By Kelly Easton

1

Because you’ve been told you need to do something with your life, you decide to buy a bookstore.  You’ve always loved books: the glossy covers, the pages like fresh leaves, the photograph of the writer, accompanied by a blurb: “…lives in Vermont with her two children and cat; writes for Atlantic Monthly between trips to France; has seven children and an art gallery.” The blurbs give a tickle of the portentous life, something to grow into like a sister’s prom dress.

Wendy, your friend from high school, who you see when she’s between men, supports your latest endeavor. “It’s a great way to meet men.  They have to read sometimes.”  She lowers her Cosmo:  “Have you made friends with your labia?” she reads.

You don’t answer, your mind on more sophisticated matters:  book signings, authors, ideal locations, how the $150.00 in your checking account will stretch to fit your dreams.

On your days off from Household Goods at Target, you scout the city for prominent storefronts, access to coffee houses and restaurants, adequate parking.

Evenings, in your childhood room, you practice constructing book displays.  In your mind, Salman Rushdie risks mortal danger to give the first reading. He stands atop a pile of his novels in his bullet proof vest and publicly compliments your charm, the way you are happy to present greatness without greedily wanting it for yourself.

2

Inevitably, though, you settle for less. It’s what you’ve always done. The rent in the chic district is five figures. A stock of new books is even more. So you open a used bookstore in a shabby part of town next to a shop with a broken window. You open a used book store because a C.P.A. with a formidable suit tells you that the chains have a monopoly on the new: Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Waldenbooks, the Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and McDonalds of the mind.

Your books are not glossy, leafy, or crisp. They look and smell like the lace on Mrs. Haversham’s wedding gown. Still, your wardrobe is in sync with your venue: a vintage dress, a beret, the Birkenstocks you can’t bear to part with. Besides, the economy is diving like Alice down her hole; soon everyone will buy used.

At night, you dream of yourself on your high wobbly stool, your elbows resting on a display case of Kipling’s Just–So Stories with the original illustrations. During the day, you sweep the mouse droppings from the shop and move your belongings from your mother’s house to the small apartment above. It is sparse and narrow. The curtains have the sheen of a used car seat. Like Scarlett O’Hara, ripping the emerald curtains for her dress, you tear yours from their hangers. The sun flows in through the open window.

3

Two months later, when your mother calls to inquire about your success, you tell her that you have a new lease on life. The old one never really expired, but you want her to feel positive about the ten thousand dollars she’s loaned (but really given) you, about your six years in college without being able to focus, about the time spent living at home beneath her disgruntled gaze.

It’s true that you feel a new purpose.  Recently, you’ve been to a restaurant filled with shelves.  When you went to pull a book down, you found a facade; cardboard with bindings painted on.  Your shop is a vindication to just that kind of impudence.

And there are the customers, who also wear sweaters in summer, who lounge on the floor in ecstasy over a first edition of The Grapes of Wrath. They gaze at you over the Kipling illustrations with a shared sense of destiny. And some of them are not too bad looking.

The man, for example, the one Wendy imagined. He comes in seeking Martin Buber and a German edition of Thus Sprach Zarathustra. True, his choices are a bit bleak. You’d think it a better sign if he were seeking something uplifting like Norman Vincent Peale or Alice Hoffman. But in his sensitive brown eyes, you divine a quality of balance. He’s not overly handsome, fat, or pretentious.He’s just right, like Goldilocks’ third bowl of porridge.

“I’m about to close,” you say.  You mean this as an invitation.

“I’ll go then.”

“No.  It’s okay.  Take your time.  I have paper work.”  You put the closed sign up, then lock the door.

The man wants to be a writer like everyone else who comes in only he’s not as deluded as most:  “You see, I know that I won’t make any money,” he whispers, “and I probably won’t even get published.  It’s the desire to get published that ruins art anyway, the American desire for fame.”

You quite agree.  You have accepted since day one that you were not born under a famous star.  Your Apgar scores were below average.  Your father had his heart set on another boy.  No one’s expected much of you. No one’s been disappointed.

The man leans forward, looks into your eyes.  You trace a yin yang design on the dusty cover of Nietzsche.  “When Nietzsche wrote about the superman,” he says, “he was in the tertiary stage of syphilis.  It’s my intention to make a connection between his theories and his etiology.”  It turns out he’s in a master’s program in science education, although he must be at least thirty-five.  He’s been around too: Mali, India, Tibet.  He is definitely the type you thought you’d meet on the job.  “Well, I’ve kept you long enough.” He lays his purchases on the counter.

“Do you want a glass of wine?”  One of your customers, a woman who lives with many cats, has brought you a gift.

“Okay.”

“Oh no, I don’t have a cork screw.”

“Watch this.” He takes the wine bottle, and then bangs it against the side of a bookshelf.  The cork withdraws in increments.  You stop yourself from pointing out the phallic nature of wine bottles and corks.  Instead, you comment on his obvious talents, hoping the less obvious ones will soon be apparent.

The shop is closed.  Dusk rolls through the windows.  If you smoked, now would be the time; instead you take off your Birkenstocks and let down your hair.  Together, you sip from the bottle in French Literature, just beneath the shelves full of Proust.  You would never commit a sacrilege like calling literature “Lit.”  But you would exchange swigs from a bottle of Mouton Cadet on a dusty carpet.  You would let your hand wrap around his, on accident, more than twice.  You would stretch out among thousands of years of thought and open yourself up like a kite on the breeze.

4

You have a history like everyone: a dad whose head was an open newspaper, whose hand was a glass of scotch, a mom whose arm was a Hoover and a game of bridge, two brothers with freckles and certain bad habits: crying in the dark, pissing in the sheets, hiding under the table to hear obscenities during bridge. The youngest asked the oldest, “What happens when you die?” The oldest replied, “Choose one of the following: nothing, absolutely nothing. Burn in hell. Come back again as a house fly or a lizard.

You were middle. The filling in the sandwich. The one who missed braces, spankings and marriage. You hid under the table and read: Bronte, Dickens, Kafka, and Dostoyevsky. For a science project you tied a bell to your desk and pretended it was ringing in the fire station. You wore glasses that slid down on your nose, mouthed the words in chorus, kissed boys behind the slide, were bad at math.

5

But now you’ve found your niche: the stool, the lines of shelves, the display window at the front, the dusty carpet on certain select occasions. With a business to run, you have less time to read, but you accumulate ideas anyway. Like Edgar Cayce, the Christian psychic who slept on medical books and discerned the cure, you find yourself knowing about a miscellany of things about which you’ve actually read: African butterflies, Iranian Art, the painful history of obstetrics.

You have regulars with whom you become more intimate than the members of your family. There’s the cat woman, the ex-professor from Cal Tech with tobacco stained teeth, the man, a couple of feminists who have found love with each other. You build a special section just for them; advertise for lesbian erotica and poetry. There is a how-to book on pleasing your lover. They bring it in to donate, placing their index fingers on the illustrated spots that will bring a woman pleasure.

6

The neighborhood improves. A coffee shop opens. True, it’s for truck drivers and old men in baseball caps. But it’s something, a start. You add magazines about cars and tools. A few wander in, spend a dollar or two.

And the man comes each night. He reads aloud from the dictionary while you close up shop. Lepidopteron–the order of butterflies and moths, leprosy–a disease of poverty. Your own poverty, neither of you takes seriously. The coffee shop is not bad for supper. For $2.99, there is a four-course meal. In the evening, you watch the streets empty out from the upstairs window of your room. When the news is too anxiety provoking, you turn on Besse Smith and Edith Piaf on your old Fisher Price tape recorder. The man brings wine from Trader Joes and a scarf that once belonged to Jean Harlow. He drapes it glamorously against your white sunless skin.

7

For three months you have been unable to breathe.  There’s a fist in your sternum, a whistle in your chest.  You go to a specialist with bushy eyebrows whose drawl makes you think he’s been sampling medications.  Tugging at the tie on the paper gown, he shoves you onto your stomach; your back becomes a dartboard for his demented experiments.  “The slang for this is scratch test,” he says.  “You’ll know why in a second.  Uh huh!  I’m getting a response!”

You ask him to scratch the spot between your collarbones, then the one just above your neck. He seems nonplussed when you yell at him, “Harder, harder, there, to the left.  Yes!”

“Dress,” he commands.  He leaves, and then returns so quickly that you have to jump behind the door with one pant leg on.  “You don’t have a deathly disease after all,” he jokes. “You’re just allergic to mould.”

“Mould?”  You picture the pre-penicillin bread you ate for lunch, the forest floor fungi (aka mushroom) growing out of a crack in your bathroom floor.

“And dust.” He shows you a picture of molecular insects that look like the monsters in Japanese horror movies. “Look at the little buggers. These are dust mites. Invisible to the eye, but murder on the lungs. Get an air filter in your house. Vacuum daily, but don’t sweep. Oh, and if you have any old books around, get rid of them.”

8

Nothing ever works for you. It’s like the time you saw your high school boyfriend buying an engagement ring at the jewelers. A week later, you saw the photo of the happy couple on the engagement page. You pasted your own picture in the place where she was, but it didn’t make the outcome any different. Or the time you tried out for cheerleader and learned the wrong routine. While the rest of the girls chanted “Push ’em back, push ’em back, waaaay back,” and jumped back, you chanted “V-I-C-T-O-R-Y!” and jumped forward.

You imagine yourself back at Target wrapping vases and coffee pots for impatient women with too many credit cards.  You call your mother and weep into her answering machine, but are cut off after 10 seconds.

At midnight, you tip toe down the back stairs and gaze through your beloved shop window at the street lit night.  Wheezing, you run your fingers along every single binding.

A face presses to the glass like a robber in a ski mask.  “Look what I’ve got for you!”  The man taps on the window. “A first edition of Brecht’s diaries!”

You reel him in. His hair is slick from a couple of shower-less days. His buttons dangle on their threads. Between stilted coughs, you pour over the volume with him, the diaries of Brecht’s escape from Nazi Germany, everything he went through as he wrote his most illuminating plays.

A slow thought weaves its way into your awareness.

9

You’ll make it work.

You’ll make it work because, even without enough oxygen, you dream words.

Didn’t Beethoven compose deaf?  Didn’t Orwell write with TB?   What’s a Tavis D addict next to that?

Unlike your brother, you don’t wonder what happens when you die, or what people think of you in town where you live. You have only the moments when you read and ideas weave through your mind like the tentacles of morning glories.

The doctor has given you medicine that you shoot into your mouth.  You dig it out of the trash and read the lengthy instructions.

That night, you clear all the books out of your apartment except two, while the man, exhausted from study, tumbles into bed. The man’s sleeping skin is warm against yours. His open mouthed breath adds oxygen to the room. You crawl in beside him and open Ulysses. Molly Bloom falls into the petals of her sensuality.
___________________________________
Originally published in Kalliope, 2006.

Filed under: Kelly Easton, Short Fiction Stories, Words, Book Store, Books, Fiction, Kelly Easton, Love Story, Short Story

Prayer

It was a dark and stormy night.  I was driving home from Newport Beach and after I had negotiated the transition from the 57 to the 10 and was maneuvering Kellogg Hill my car went into a hydroplane.

Huh.  Check that out.  Steering wheel doesn’t work, breaks don’t work, I’m in God’s hands now at 65 miles an hour in the dark and blindness.

So what do I do?  Do I pray to him that’s in apparent control?  Do I pray to Jesus?  Allah?

I start singing D’yer Maker at the top of my lungs over and over.  And you know what?  It totally worked cuz I’m here typing to you today.

Really, does it get better than Oh Oh Oh OH OH OH in a situation like that?

Filed under: Joanne Baines, Words, D'yer maker, Led Zeppelin, prayer, religion