after words

One rainy afternoon in Lisbon there were male cicadas in the weeds.  Within seven minutes it got loud and the thunderclouds went in, and the long humans with wide feet in protective shells on the bottom opened single wings over their heads and abandoned the street.  Two stayed near and made mud-women like snowmen with their top feet unprotected and pink.  She and Buz could see them above on the ditch lip.  Buz sat on a rock.  He was stiff and green in the cold ditch.

Buz sang with dual tymbals in his abdomen for one reason.  She was happy to let him.  When he performed for her he elevated her with the cicada rhythm; and they had songs, amazing-fine songs.  She succumbed, quivering lightly upon a cattail so she would not click-clicky about things during the noisy, mating moment.  Before she learned to cling to cattails she used to make a racket and Buz would have to get back on the rock.  There were many other cicadas, and they all knew about it.  Not one envied Buz. 

Before she left for the ponds they hid under a Ford and played.  It was slick and oily, and there were other cicadas click-clicking.  They wanted to stay monogamous, but their genes might not allow - both had other instincts.  They saw through monogamy, for they witnessed human failures, and because of this they tried it.

Buz drummed her many songs that she never got until after her season.  Ninety came on the wind to the ponds and she picked through the clicks and sat quiet straight through.  They were all about the ditch, and how little he missed her and how it was lovely to sing along without her and how beautifully all the males click-clicked in the night.

Before her season they fought about her move to the River to lay eggs.  Buz would not join her until she had laid several thousand down the cattail stems and could come to the aqueduct to meet him.  It was understood she would not eat the eggs, and she would not give them to any frogs or fish in the River.  Only to lay the future larvae and be monogamous.  In the air between Lisbon and Mill Pond they agreed about him not becoming monogamous at once.  Not until when they rubbed hello, in the wild iris at Mill Pond, would he sing only her song.  This they swore in agreement.  She felt pink with envy about his singing to others like that.

She came to the River upon a leaf via the Aqueduct.  Buz went back to sit in a ditch on the outskirts of Lisbon.  It was raucous and noisy there, and a swarm of homopteran insects whirred near the water.  Loitering on the dry bank in the sun, the females of the swarm asked Buz not to sing, and he had never known mute mating before, and finally sent a relayed song to the River that theirs had been only an incomplete metamorphosing relationship.  He was glad, and he knew she would be too, and would soon thank him, and be envious of him, and he believed, without question, he would never want to sing again or be monogamous in his life.  He would mate her as before, but he knew now theirs was only a fragmentary union.  He wished her success with the thousands of eggs, but had doubts about her leaving them to drop and burrow.  He sang his one last note.

These females did not have seasons, and mated him in the winter, and all other times.  Buz heard a song, relayed from the River about her.  A short song about the long line of larvae she ate before they could burrow while celebrating his silence, which bloated her thorax until she exploded while clinging to milkweed beside the sewer.

[word count 653] [from the old files, May 1998, imitating Ernest H. style]

The plane was half full out of Atlanta; I took the empty last seats on the wide side, stretched into a loose question mark across the three narrow spaces, and snoozed.  A  mark of my exhaustion - the 727’s take-off startled me out of sound sleep.  But  even as we climbed and my body rolled tighter to the seat backs, I drifted out of real time again and was gone.

Sorry! someone whispered loudly, that kind of whisper you want to be heard but not in a startling way.

Wha . . . are we there yet?

Where?

“New York?  La Guardia?” I was feeling my voice now.  It was me asking questions.  My mouth making sounds.  I knew then I’d drooled - a big wet spot on the back of my hand, the one I’d used to pillow my cheek.  If the voice, the stage whisper voice that sounded vaguely like Morgan Freeman and flannel shirts and Polo aftershave, if the voice, that voice, saw the drool … eu.  I didn’t open my eyes.

“We’re circling La Guardia,” the voice offered.  “There’s a full moon in a gossamer haze out the window on the right, and the Lady in the Harbor holding up her light on the left.” 

And I felt the lightest touch brush a loosed strand of hair from my face … then, I heard the absence of him.  Drool didn’t matter.  Or embarrassment.  I opened my eyes.  No one.  And no flannel scents to guide.

word count = 249

Kelly stood silently watching the ripples spread across the water.  It was a toss up as to whether or not they would reach the kayak and Pat nearly hidden by the play of light and shadow on the lake face.  He was physically quiet, her brother.  The paddle, balanced and resting evenly in his relaxed hands, his forearms resting easily on the craft’s frame, seemed to say that his stillness traveled inside as well as out.  The flat stone Kelly had throne to skid the surface for nine perfect jumps had not broken his attention.  She knew he never heard it’s first ker-plunk or the puh-puh-puhs that followed in unison, fainter and fainter until it finally sank. 

She had aimed the stone to skip clear of the kayak and, surprisingly, it did.  More surprising than the accuracy of her throw was that she bent to pick it up in the first place.  She was 58 years and 3 days into this new year of living and bending was not a thing she did with ease or grace — not anymore.  Pat, on the other hand, still did all things with ease and grace–it wasn’t fair.  He seemed never to age and would frown at her for saying as much, but she didn’t actually ever come right out and say it.  And her thoughts, she would tell you if asked, were hers to own even if she was the youngest.  

What was he thinking now, so unmoving out there, his head cocked back just slightly as if he looked from under the khaki hat brim to study some thing or movement a bit further along on the shoreline?  More than once she tried to follow the general direction of his gaze, but she saw nothing to hold her attention. 

Dividing her time between searching out another flat stone to throw and watching him watch the shore, she sometimes lost him in the dazzle off the lake.  Her pulse would take up a race with itself where, if she had a brown paper bag to breathe into, she would . . . but then the shade would shift again and the burn of bright water subside. 

There! There! Did you see it?  Kel? Did you see it?  Do you? Can you?

Pat is as silent as ever out on the water.  What Kelly hears is a playback inside her head; Pat’s voice, that’s for certain, but from more than forty years back, when he’s a senior and she’s a freshman and they’re on summer break from high school, taking in some Ohio sunshine on a raft anchored offshore from this very spot. 

“Old” Kelly looks out beyond Pat in the kayak, but the place where the raft used to be is just a flat few acres of more water, a still lake face with no wooden respite for weary swimmers to climb aboard and sun dry. 

Where have all the flat stones gone to, that’s what I want to know.  It wasn’t the first time Kelly had asked herself this question; it wouldn’t be the last.  She would bring stones with her next time.  She would buy an extra bag of those shiny decorative stones she used around the ficus to keep Tygger and associates, both known and unknown, out.  But instead of glossy brown, she’d buy white.  The one skipper she’d thrown today was white.  Not that color made one whit of difference. 

Lord knows she had thrown every color of natural stone nature made flat enough to skip over the years.  Point in fact: they were all out there in the lake now. Lots of things out there in the lake.  Lots of things.  Kel never saw whatever it was Pat saw that day back when she was thin and could bend like a swan or a jackknife in dives from the raft or the pier.  She never did know what he saw.  Wishes she had seen it too, with all her old heart, she really does wish she knew – but she doesn’t and Pat, once they brought him up, well, he never said.  He never did.  But they came here, Kelly and Pat, often enough. 

Sometimes, when the shore was white and the trees heavy with snow, they just sat in the cab of Pat’s old Dodge pick up with the heater running and watched mist rise off the water.  It was quiet then, even quieter than now.  Snow put a hush on everything.  And sometimes, not every winter, but sometimes the lake froze up for a good distance out, further than Kelly could even think about skipping a stone.  These were the most worrisome times because Pat would hardly have it but that he walk out there, testing fate every step of the way. 

But, when the weather was good, like it was today, they hauled the kayak up and Pat rowed out safely enough.  If he went too far, and sometimes he did, Kelly’d call out, “Bubbba! Don’t make me get wet now, you hear?” and he would turn the kayak back, mindful of her worry.  He was the kindest of brothers; always had been; always would be, and Kelly adored him.  She just wishes she knew what it was that he saw back then, on that day, that one particular day, in the lake. 

the loons are hushed
one after another
my heart pretends to sleep  
     ~ M. Wilkie

The difficulty began when pretending stopped being fun and the loons, one after another, stopped laughing at dusk.  A particular stranger noted the silent pond, the frayed stars, a place in the shallows where the water was pink.  What made the stranger particular was his youth:  his long bones had not finished growing, freckles ruled his face, a cowlick ruled his hair.   

What made the water pink was paint, water-based paint, a gallon bucket tipped and run out like thick ink on the shore.   

He was the boy, this stranger with buckets of color, who might have been.   

Now the stars fray further, all but unravel over the pond gone entirely pink with fading day.  Wounds heal.  My heart pretends to sleep.

When Interstate 5 replaced Highway 99, business life faded along a two-mile stretch running into and out of Snidely, California. Andre’s House of Beauty, Snidely Hardware and Feed, Kiki’s Stop ‘n Go, Adam’s First Rib Steak House—to name a few. A handful of these, Andre’s, for instance, reopened in the MegaMartSuper strip mall. The extra miles, less than six, were hardly a minor inconvenience to most; after all, these weren’t horse and buggy days; people did have cars.

“Beauty is moveable,” Andre would say during comb-outs, then cluck his tongue, tsk-tsk, for those less fortunate trades people “Unable,” as Andre would put it, “to bridge the gap, so to speak.”

Of a nature sensitive to the emotions of others, no tongue-clucking was heard when Kiki’s head leaned into his shampoo bowl. There were no casual sighs as to how decrepitly ramshackle and forlorn the Stop ‘n Go had become, nor mention of any boarded up buildings left behind.

Instead, Andre might ask after her dogs, “Paul and Mary? How are they these days? They must miss Peter. A shame, that.”

He might ask after other things, too, but stayed clear of the “old” days.

Serendipitous happenings occur—of this, Andre was certain, and would be for eons after his death. Take, for example, the accident. Any Wednesday at 9 a.m. would find Kiki in Andre’s chair, her head relaxed back into the retro robin’s egg blue shampoo bowl, his long-fingered hands massaging, coaxing conditioners in for body and bounce.

But Mary had been poorly on Wednesday morning; Kiki had taken her to the vet and postponed until Thursday at four.

Four.

Precisely the hour when a FedEx semi came through the back wall, moving Andre’s interior House of Beauty on through to the parking lot. MegaMartSuper shoppers glanced across acres of parking toward the mishap, then moved on with their business, as if wind at a window had rustled blind slats to draw momentary attention.

It’s not so bad back out on Old 99. No danger from big rigs, and that’s a plus. Rick, the dead waiter at Adam’s First Rib, had a crush on Andre from before, and the crush had not died when his auto immune system failed. Kiki, Rick’s older sister, always promised she’d bring Andre around to visit, albeit they all had pulses then, but . . . you take what you can get; that’s what Rick’s always says.

They wag their heads and cluck about how things might’ve gone, but never complain—not truly.

I watch them from the loading dock at Snidely Hardware and Feed, a fifty-pound sack of oats loaded now for a horse and the child who once fed her, a filly named Star who cantered in a pasture not too far up the road. It’s quite something . . . I shake my head everyday, half disbelieving . . . how the old neighborhood keeps gradually filling back in.

If only I hadn’t been looking for sea glass that Thursday on that beach, I wouldn’t have spotted what looked like a discolored tongue.  The beach was Pete’s Beach and for a Thursday the weather was Sunday good—maybe better.  Not an ominous crow in the sky or a gull in sight as I walked where the tide’s foam lip had just slipped back from licking forward, where the sand was tight and wet.  Even though it’s a walk out of distant memory, nearly a quarter century back, I still see the occasional small barnacled crab scrabbling across my path from one trail of seaweed to a stone or another clump of wrinkled, leathery flags.  The beach was littered with many such clumps, a few broken shells, a fair amount of scattered small stones—but no sea glass, or so it had seemed. Then one of those crabs, hardly the size of a quarter, bits of red showing through the craterlike growths on its shell, darted diagonally across the sand.  The sideways scrabble took the crab over the tongue-shaped rock, directing my search for sea glass right to it, the same way that old bouncing ball in Mitch Miller’s Sing-Along Hours moved the eyes of viewer’s right along to the next word of the song.  The crab jittered its sideways scurry straight to the gray-mottled-with-red, or red-mottled-with-gray surface of the beach debris.  It was shiny somehow, and frosty dull at the same time, and had that peculiar shape that reminded me of a tongue.  I had no choice but to pick it up.

            But the it I picked up wasn’t sea glass anymore than it was stone.  The it I picked up was a tongue.  An odd wedge of discoloration and deflated bloat that once was muscle and now was a grotesque, hardening mush.  Why it glistened in the Thursday sun like reddish sea glass—I do not know.  I can barely record these words.

            That Thursday that seemed Sunday good, that day when I put the tongue back on the tight, wet sand—has never let me go.  I was a programmer then and the walk on Pete’s Beach was a walk to free up the angst of numbers scurrying like crabs from one formulation to the next inside my weedy thinking.  I worked for a multi-national company with thousands, not hundreds, but thousands of other employees waiting for the tricks that would make their workdays possible.  Won’t even mention those employees’ end clients and what might or might not result from some glitch I made if my numbers were wrong—my programming numbers.  This was not a good time for a tongue turned or turning to mush in my hand on a beach in southern California.  I was from Des Moines.  Sea glass would’ve been magical to take home—but not a decomposing human tongue.  I put the tongue back where I’d found it.  The crab was gone.  And then I was gone, too.

            I was gone from that beach on that day.  I was back with my programming numbers.  I was back in Des Moines by week’s end.  The crows are plentiful in Des Moines, always communicating what I had done on Pete’s Beach.  The sky was full of what I’d done, or failed to do.  The sky was the only witness other than the small quarter-sized crab.  Sometimes the little crab is there in my dreams to be plucked time and again by the crows and swallowed down in a gulp.  But he comes back like that god, Prometheus—the one who stole fire to give it to man and got chained by Zeus to a rock somewhere for a bird to pick out his gut.  He comes back like Dionysus.  And like Jesus.

            If only I hadn’t been looking for sea glass, I might have a chance at redemption.  At resurrection, too.

[word count 642]

The girls knew that on the moon mohair sweaters were everywhere, sometimes folded and sometimes not, but in either case settled lightly on the powder and weighted with tear-shaped fishing sinkers so as not to rise, float out of sight.  Although moon sweaters ranged in color from bubblegum pink to peacock, the majority fell into the cheese color family-edam to jack, cheddar to gouda, and all the lovely yellows and oranges in between.  Weavers were, had always been, partial and wool providers made no bones about their bias toward all things mellow and ivory where the moon’s woolens were concerned.  But, generally, the sweaters the girls were most desirous of were out of sight, round the curve there, away from the light.  The coffee-colored cardigans with coffee-colored pearl buttons.  The midnight plum pullovers with low V-neck plunge!  The ebony shrugs saturated with onyx seed beads to replicate meteor showers on a black night. 

The girls coveted the sweaters in the keenest of ways, and they argued among themselves as to how they might successfully fold them into their private closets, wear them on their private backs and shoulders and breasts.  They possessed sweaters they could not live long enough to wear, even if they obeyed every rule, ate every right thing, moved every right muscle in just the right way, forsook games with the opposite sex (including the approaches to same, start ups, blast offs, entries and re-entries, hard and soft landings, all)-even if they gave up transportation all together, avoiding accidents by car, train, plane and bus, and lived in germ-free bubbles-these girls could not live long enough to wear them all.  It was scientifically impossible.  So, they wore what they could, often times two and three different changes between rising and noon lunch: a sweater to match the marmalade on a muffin at breakfast, another one, white, to post the letters at ten, and something pale blue for eleven.  Girls, all of varying heights and shades, some paler and frailer and others more robust and red.  Or brown and leggy.  Or twiggy and black.  They were, these girls, all of that and, additionally, every shade in between-both in skin colorations and eyes and mood.  Yet, in spite of all they had both in common and out of common-they, every one, coveted the moon mohairs on the dark side.

 In town on a June night, the mothers, talking with other mothers, would mention the past as if current gossip had lost all its juice.

The Ferris girl: You recall how it was when she come home . . . they would say and nod.

That second girl of Harriet Striker’s:  Turned Harriet’s hair plum’ white.

                             Did not.

                             Did so.

                             It was already there.

                             That was gray; now it’s white.

                             You are right about that, Berniece.  I’d forgot.

And the girl nobody could remember except that she had been Ellen’s only child:  There’ll be no grandbabies there . . .

                            What ever happened to Ellen?

                            Can’t say.

                            Don’t know.

                           Haven’t heard.

The strong possibility that they would come to no good if they ever set into motion any one of their plans for reaching the far side stared the girls in the face at every turn.  Blacked eyes and missing teeth with their coupon books in Safeway lines.  There was a big price to pay for a “pretty” you might not live long enough to wear.

And the mothers nodding agreements between themselves and eyeing their own, making connections that could come to pass:  You could wind up like Jenna Ferris.  That could be you . . .

The girls all knew it could.  They knew it the same way they knew there was magic in that ebony shrug showered with onyx , knew it like the moon’s pull on the tides, even when out of sight, when fully eclipsed by the earth and all things in earth and on earth and of earth, yet the tides move in and back out, rise and fall, riseandfall-they cannot do otherwise.  Same with the pull of those mohair sweaters upon the girls who don’t recall a mother named Ellen or her only child, a girl, floating just off the powdery surface on the back side of the moon.