where I need to go, soon

This is a retreat our family shares with some other families. Winter months are the best for this kind of getaway. I like to bring a large stack of books packed in a canvas bag, at least one notepad containing a story in progress, a comfortable beach chair, a cooler of Corona Lights, a sweater, a jacket, a couple of pairs of jeans that can get wet at the cuffs, a scarf in case I stay out til sunset, a suit and cover up in the case of an occasional warm day. When you are close to the surf, you get a breeze, and it is warm, but not unbearable. When children are entertained with other children, namely cousins who are staying there too or who are visiting, conditions are ideal.

I look forward to reflecting on the offering provided by Alicia Shondra Holmes at the Kerouac House last weekend. She was a refreshing shock to the system of the Orlando literary community when she brought us up to postmodern speed on entries into "nonrealistic" storytelling methods. Though this has been a rising literary trend nationwide, Holmes with her friendly, nonthreatening, knowledgeable approach and demeanor was a good conduit for this kind of an introduction in these parts, a stronghold, still, of more or less strict realism. After reviewing different aspects of nonrealistic storytelling methods as well as their rationale and background, participants read example excerpts from accomplished writers who have demonstrated moxy in this wide field.

When we had read and discussed these excerpts, we had an hour to ourselves to try our hand at something. I wrote a portion of a witch story I started last summer. I needed to work on some backstory I'd been fumbling but felt was necessary for the story's progress. "Jack's" porch is a nice place to sit and I had it to myself. Sometimes I like to sit on the bench in the yard but it threatened rain. After we wrote individually, we came together again as a group to share and discuss what we had created. It was an excellent group, full of unique voices and perspectives. It was well worth a Saturday and I've taken a liking to what I can find in the place where Jack was at at one time. Must be the good ju ju.

Here are aspects of nonrealistic approaches we discussed, along with the titles from which the excerpts were taken:


Miracles: from The Passionby Jeanette Winterson

Mythological Creatures: from "Children's Reminiscences of Westward Migration" in St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell


Place: (introducing a sense of unreality into a description of a real place) from the title story of The Hermit's Story by Rick Bass


Witches: from "Catskin" by Kelly Link in McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

Uncommon Abilities: from "Clarence and the Dead" in Let the Dead Bury their Dead by Randall Kenan


Timing: from The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter
            from Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1980)

Ghosts: from Hotel World by Ali Smith
            from Beloved by Toni Morrison

Myth: Retelling: from The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus by Margaret Atwood

The Grotesque: from Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

Surrealism: "The Dubutante" by Leonora Carrington from The Custom-House of Desire: A Half-Century of Surrealist Stories, transl. by J.H. Matthews

Nonfiction: From "Love and Death in the Cape Fear Serpentarium" by Wendy Brenner, Best American Magazine Writing 2006 [There was one sentence which stood out as being particularly nonrealistic, an unusual occurance, perhaps in nonfiction writing.]

Fairy Tales: "The Glass Coffin" from The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye: Five Fairy Stories by A.S. Byatt

Werewolves: from the title story of Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Science Fiction: from The Stone Gods by Jeannette Winterston

lions and tigers and bears and alligators

 

This sign greets us on our bike path and is not far away from where we live. 

dorothy and toto (sort of)

 

My hair is slicked back so I can wear my helmet. I am attempting to hide my body behind our ten pound dog.

free ride: our mighty Coton de Tulear, Queen Anne aka "Annie"

shoe and line

(For Kindle users: some of you who were early subscribers might already have this little story, but I'm putting it out there again for blog readers and Kindle users who haven't seen it yet. Also Kindle readers, there's a big picture of a baby shoe on my blog which you won't be able to see below and if there's a space created by this, move to the next page until the story starts. Anyway, I thought this story had some potential in the philosophical sense of Janet Frame's "Snowman, Snowman," but a fellow writer thought it completely inane. Au contraire. C'est tres bon, mais petite.)

                                                                                                       

A tiny shoe sits beside the white line of the four lane highway. It sits breathless as the cars whoosh past. Will someone stop to pick it up? Is the lady who stands at the bus stop waiting for her opportunity to cradle it in her dark hands, to kiss its dark polished tongue?   

- My life has not begun said the shoe, to no one in particular. I am not ready to die. He thinks of his troubles as he lies beside the painted white line.   

- I have it worse, says the line. I have never been in contact with a living being.   

The little shoe tades offense. What a ridiculous white line. But at the same time, he needs the line because no one will run over him if he stays close.   

- Why would you need what I have? says the shoe. You never die. You are renewed with white paint. You help the cars, the beasts.   

- You have held a place of privilege, says the line. Now you will see what it's like to be the rest of us.

- What are you talking about? 

- The anonymous. The merely dutiful. Or worse, the forgotten. You've thought yourself special, I can tell. 

- I have not. 

- You've thought yourself indispensable. Now you're like trash. You think that woman over there wants you because some other woman has? The first woman in your life only wanted you because you helped her son. That other woman over there is old. You probably remind her of something painful, like a child who has grown and gone astray or a child she has lost. 

- How do you know so much? You're a line. 

- I've seen enough. 

- You've seen the bottoms of tires. 

- I've seen people die. 

- Then that makes you the font. 

- Of what?


- Of wisdom, you idiot. It's a cliché. When you're out among people, you hear these things. 

- See the specialness creeping in again. 

- I have no such pretensions. I'm about to be squashed, besides. 

- You'll only experience the random nature of life. How some are chosen to be one thing and some another. How some live on, some die. 

- You make me feel so much better. 

At that moment, the lady from the bus stop rescues the shoe. There has been a break in traffic. She cradles its fine leather in her palm. The line looks on. He is jealous of the shoe, but he will not admit it. To admit his jealousy would not change his duty to be a line. Some thrive on admiration for simply being what they are. 

- Special boy, he mutters, to himself, but his whisper is drowned by shushing of tires.

Alicia Shandra Holmes at the Kerouac House

I am getting really excited about the next offering at the Kerouac House in College Park, the house where "Jack" penned The Dharma Bums. The Kerouac House regularly offers a residencies to emerging writers as an opportunity for them to work on their writing projects and as an opportunity for us as a community to benefit from their fresh perspectives. Alicia attended my recent reading, along with Mary Ann Stefano, the organizer of the upcoming event.  Mary Ann founded MAD about Words, which has been an invaluable resource to the Orlando arts community. We've had participants drive long distances just to participate in some of her offerings.


Below is a brief description I cut and pasted from an email. If I find more relevant information, I will add to it. In the meantime, I'm cleaning up for out of town company, which has involved, somehow, a massive overhaul of my books and my child's books. Well, this needed to happen anyway, but it's a busy day. Here's some information:

Alicia Shandra Holmes at the Kerouac House

This workshop will explore the techniques of non-realistic writing (magical realism, the New Wave Fabulists, and more).

We will discuss methods of incorporating non-realistic elements into your work, pitfalls to avoid, and markets for this kind of writing. You'll also have the chance to write and get feedback on a non-realistic piece of your own.

Alicia Shandra Holmes has published fiction in The Bitter Oleander, Rosebud, CRATE, Many Mountains Moving, and The Blue Earth Review.  She was a resident at the Sanskriti Kendra cultural center in New Delhi, India, funded through the UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists Programme, and the recipient of a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant for nonfiction. Holmes was a visiting writer featured in the 2009-2010 VOICES reading series at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.  She received her MFA from the University of Alabama.

For more information, go to MAD about Words website and navigate to workshops. There are only a couple of spots left.

what I am doing for Haiti

Every now and again, especially for special occasions such as birthdays and Valentine's Day, my husband and I will splurge on a night in a nice hotel in town. We really have so many of those here in Orlando. A couple of our favorites are the Ritz Carlton and the Grand Bohemian downtown. The latter has a plush jazz piano bar, deep velvet banquette style tables, and of course wonderful food, including the strawberries and champagne that await you in your room. I can't go there now. I'm not bragging either. We're like most other red-blooded American families with our load of debt and our tendencies to over-consume. But it occurred to me, finally, that some of these choices no longer seem appropriate. The giving of money to Haiti that we would have spent on this kind of celebration may not amount to a great deal at the moment, but it's something. I cannot imagine rich meats and sauces, a luxurious bed, a perfectly coiffed room knowing what I know now. Jesus said let your good deeds be done in secret. Sometimes I wonder, though, if there are times we should talk about them and encourage each other along.

There are different kinds of loves and this kind of love - philia - is no less of a powerful love than eros, and is in fact what binds us to life and to each other, and leads to a life that is happy.

On a lighter note: Janet Frame and Vampire Hunters (Como? Que?)

Dear Amazon.com Customer,
As someone who has purchased or rated Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame, you might like to know that Archangel's Kiss (Guild Hunter) will be released on February 2, 2010.  You can pre-order yours by following the link below.

	Archangel's Kiss (Guild Hunter) Nalini Singh Price: $7.99 Release Date: February 2, 2010 Other Versions and Languages Kindle Edition (Kindle Book)

Product Description
New York Times bestselling author of Angels' Blood

Vampire hunter Elena Deveraux wakes from a year-long coma to find that she has become an angel-and that her lover, the stunningly dangerous archangel Raphael, likes having her under his control. But almost immediately, Raphael must ready Elena for a flight to Beijing, to attend a ball thrown by the archangel Lijuan. Ancient and without conscience, Lijuan's power lies with the dead. And she has organized the most perfect and most vicious of welcomes for Elena...

pass the rejection please

The literary world is so populated with a few rising or established stars who unabashedly announce their joys and accomplishments, why not hear from some of the rest of us who are still in the trenches fighting hand to hand with the rejection machine? Are the wounded stuck for life if they complain of the lack of light down in those fox holes? I think it's best to have honesty all around. But that's just me. Besides, too much cheer sounds suspiciously close to self-promotion. But even in that, I do not fault anyone, too much. The literary pie is divided into only so many slices. More cheerful, grateful people get more perhaps, I don't know. Still, there are times when I feel like kicking up a little dust.

I have encountered what I might describe as a literary rejection machine to a degree of mechanization that people must have experienced at the beginning of the industrialized era when life was no longer what it was and a machine could take over the functions of a human being. This goes back to a conversation I was having with a few of my writing friends concerning the temptations and pitfalls introduced by the "submissions manager," a database that tracks the progress of manuscripts submitted to any one publication. Once you have set up an account with a literary journal who uses such a manager and have submitted your work using this vehicle, you can check your manuscript's progress as it moves through the review process. My friends and I have joked about the obsessiveness that can be a temptation once "interaction" with the submissions manager has been initiated. What if, we surmise, a journal tracks particularly obsessive submissions manager "checkers" and decides they're not worthy of publication just because of this very obsessiveness? They're not cool cats, in other words, true literatis, unphased, sure, confident, belonging before they "belong," "faking it til they make it."

Several weeks ago I received an email from one of the top literary journals in the country to which I had submitted which I believed, of course, was one of my finest to date. Of course! I've had some support and comfirmation for this. From friends. From mentors. Not everyone loves it, but still, I do. And the journal gave an early start to the likes of Russell Banks, for example, to whom I could have drawn stylistic parallels, but tastefully refrained, as is usually advised.

The email I received from them said it was changing my user name to my email address. This was puzzling because my email address is what's usually requested as a user name at journals who have a submissions manager. I ignored the email for a while, but then I thought I would begin checking stories who had been in possession of my work from anywhere from 3 to 5 months, a not unheard-of amount of time, but, having recently read Lance Olsen's take on this in Rebel Yell, I was going on his premise that no news can simply be no news and sometimes the biggest favor you can do for yourself is to follow up, as long as you are sticking within the follow-up time parameters provided by the individual journal. One wants to be proactive, not obnoxious, after all.

Well, when I checked the status of my story, my email address was indeed the user name. According to the manager, the story had been received, but there was no further word on its status. Five minutes later, my story was rejected. The coincidence of these two events struck me as more than coincidental, especially after having waiting three and a half months for a response. Maybe it was coincidence, but it began to not feel that way. It dawned on me slowly, after not having put things together at first - like the slowly dawning realization that you have been burned by a hot iron; the burn takes a while to set in and make itself known - that I may even have finally and at last produced my first self-generated rejection. Maybe I had checked its status only so many times and that was all the system would allow or tolerate and as sure as the bank receipt that shows you have spent your last dime because you have withdrawn too many times, that receipt is coming out at you to tell you some sort of truth you'd like to shove back into that little slot because you almost feel like it's something the bank has done to you when indeed, it's something you've done to yourself. Or somehow, you suspect, because it's bad news, surely the bank has made a mistake but it's midnight and there's no one to talk to, not a human person around, and you wanted to get that Coke and candy bar at the convenience store to stave off the loneliness of a long night meeting a deadline. Even if you went into the bank the next day, could you really quibble about ten dollars you were so certain you had?

The literary journal discussed here says they receive 1,000 stories a month. What are the chances that if they don't recognize your name, they will protect your ego from the inevitably bad news until you are ready to hear it or until you believe they've read it? How can I believe they've read it if I get a form rejection the moment I check in with my "new" user name, which was really not new at all, but was perhaps somehow, some way, set up or encoded to trigger the rejection machine?

the reading last night

I am pleased to report that my reading went well last night. I got my revisions and practice run-throughs done in just the nick of time, before spiffing myself up. I met my husband and mother-in-law at the reading which is held at a local funky tea joint. There were quite a few people there and they were generous and attentive, which makes it a pleasure of course. I received lots of laughs in response to a very irreverent piece, and I was quite relieved, frankly. (My friend who read with me did wonderfully. I think it was a good mix.)

I called my mother-in-law this morning to ask her if she was praying for my soul, and she laughed all the more. I don't do funny all the time, but this one just came together. I guess when material concerns one's own subculture, some of the work is already done. I'm still deciding the next step with the piece. That's the first time I've read something that is not completely finished, but giving up on perfectionism is something I'm working on and having fun is something one just does, no? For this piece, at least, this is largely what's involved.

irresistable composition

I'll be reading tomorrow night in a nice little venue with a good friend. The story I'll be reading is a George Saunders' style Civilwarlands-in-Bad-Decline type of piece which I have loosely and unapologetically imitated but I use less violence - although I don't know, I'm still working on it, so I guess that could still happen - but I hope I can endow it with half the wit and poignancy of a piece by Saunders, a recent favorite of mine. (If I could do even a quarter of what he does in his stories, I would be happy.) For my setting, I use a recreated Holy Land set in the midwest, a Holy Land that takes some inspiration from the actual recreated Holy Land here in Central Florida. The important thing for me is not to say clever things about American kitsch, and even worse, religious American kitsch, but to try to find the characters within those trappings and make them real, make them sympathetic, explore their problems, which come in an acute form but which are blunted constantly by this religious overlay - or I should say Christian evangelical overlay - this desire that all things should be "right."

I went to seminary moons ago. I thought I might be a minister. But even public readings practically freak me out, so I cannot imagine being in front of people all day, having them look to me for some sort of definitive guidance. (Let's just say I know my limitations well.) My seminary professor, a man with whom I translated the book of Ruth from the Hebrew and who tried to teach all of us everything possible about the Old Testament in a couple of quarters or less - I was definitely the weak link - asked me what I was doing there, exactly. He was a nice man, so his question disarmed me. He was a perceptive man too. Though I was good with the languages, I was good with little else and had little respect for literal interpretations of anything or what I thought was oversystematized theology, though my respect for theology has increased since my experience there. But in terms of a ministerial candidate I was hardly the "package deal."

I will never forget how nice he was to me, though, or how much I enjoyed those afternoons with a  large volume of what would appear to a non-Hebrew reader as a page of unrecognizable jots and scribbles. When I was a girl, I went to Egypt and I remember keeping a travel notebook full of the hieroglyphics tour guides pointed out on the walls of the tombs of the Valley of the Dead. In those days, you could go to the center of the pyramid where they used to bury the dead and my mother, father, brother, sister and I raced behind a tiny brown man as he raced for his tip and to show us what we would not see anywhere else in the world. I remember darkness in that little cave, but in the Valley of the Dead, the light was such that ancient scribbles were there for anyone who was interested enough to take note.

I don't know what this all is related to other than the fact that perhaps the power of words and symbols and musical notes, even, have always held an attraction. When my husband and I visited Barnes and Noble recently I bought classical guitar guide though I haven't played the guitar in ages. (The idea has been on my mind for a long time and he doesn't know it yet, though he'll know it soon enough - that I'll be asking for a nylon-string guitar for my birthday.) I have never understood playing by ear, "messing around," the kind of stuff he and my son do together, but I understand symbols on a page and that, when they come together in the proper sequence and with proper technique, they make beautiful sounds, much like the beautiful sounds of a string of words penned by an author using symbols and read to others later when the labor is complete.

Excellent composition -whether it be a piece of music, a work of visual art, a perfectly-rendered story, a beautiful meal, a well-arranged vase of flowers - is irresistible. Why is that? I think it is the love the artist has for both the work and for those who would see it, hear it, taste it, partake.

writers - to make and eat - and for readers who want to read more and not cook all night

Roast Fish, an Italian version

My recipes are kind of free form, so go with it.

- one filet of white fish per person. I used cod, but in my neck of the woods, I could have bought local tilapia or grouper.

- olive oil, what you need for the pan, not too much, not too little.

- 1 lb or more cherry tomatoes, halved

- pitted black olives to your heart's content. I love kalamatas. My husband - not so much. But guess what? He liked them in this recipe, thank goodness. (It's hard to cook Italian in this family. Also not liked: sun dried tomatoes, sardines, capers - some major staples for many dishes.)

- pine nuts. however many. I find I usually have to toast pine nuts first or they can have a funny effect on my tummy. I toasted them a little first, but not much. They were warm when I used them but still light-colored.

- generous handful fresh basil leaves

- olive oil, just a bit more to drizzle (I like first cold press, extra virgin)


1. Heat oven to 280C/180C fan/gas 6 375 F. Season fish. Warm a heavy nonreactive pan that can go into the oven. Add oil and warm. Do not smoke, but coat, and get hot so sizzles when sprinkled with water. Cook filets 2-3 minutes. (Don't panic if skinless fish falls apart. you're going for flavor. the olives and tomatoes and pine nuts and basil are about to make it look fabulous.)

2. Scatter delicious cherry tomato halves, olives, and pine nuts around the fish. Season again.

3. Roast 12-15 minutes until fish flakes easily. (when it comes time to take it out of the oven, don't forget the handle is hot!!! I've burned myself this way a couple of times. Put an oven mitt over it like the handle is a hand and leave it there while on the top of the stove and while you are serving the dishes. That way you won't forget - although you can't leave it there while it's in the oven, you know. Also, keep Neosporin by the stove at all times. I swear to you a quick rub down with this all over your hand as soon as you are burned will take the sting out, at least for the more superficial burns. It's incredible stuff.)

4. OK, barring that you did not burn yourself, you can now proceed effortlessly to the final steps of this stunner. Simply top with basil leaves and put on warm plates. Drizzle each with just a tad of olive oil and whatever drippings are left in the pan and call yourself a genius. You will have spent less than half an hour on this warm, simple, subtle meal. Buon appetito!

the pleasures of the text

Roland Barthes cannot get here quick enough. I am too comfortable and producing work that sounds too comfortable - "prattling" he calls it in The Pleasures of the Text. Oh that the mailman will come on Monday and rescue me with a box containing this book. To recapture what is honest and awkward and odd as odd and passionate as new love or an old love rekindled. Fire. Nothing less...

seeing red

One day last year I attended a workshop at the Kerouac House. Our writing exercise helped me further the writing of my Little Red piece. The assignment was to write about "an item of clothing you remember from childhood or an item of clothing that is important to one of your characters." Since I had yet to write of Little Red's cape, this seemed like as good a time as any to pursue this little nugget.

Although the syntax and diction of the contents of the exercise doesn't seem to fit with most of the rest of the story, doing the exercise helped me begin thinking about Red's identity and the way the story is told. Starting with the section describing the red hood, Red's way of speaking is that of an educated grown-up, looking back, maybe someone born white cracker with some Seminole heritage, although here I throw in Timucuan heritage. Sadly, the Timucuans may be too far gone for this story. I will have to continue research concerning the existence and history of both indigenous tribes as well as their beliefs about the spiritual realm and animal world to know if this is the direction I should pursue. (I also have to research more about white cracker houses - many were built on stilts - hunting methods, alligator behaviors, etc.) So here's what I've got so far. The diction/syntax shift will be apparent. Also, all of this is based on very little knowledge, so don't quote me, but I have it on good authority that deep into those glades run roads that trail off into Lord knows what. The mystery, to a certain extent, may work in my favor:

"Mama makes the bread. She makes the bread that rises in the pans and overflows their edges. She tears pieces from the most irregular loaf and spreads butter on a piece. She gives pieces to me and my baby sister Ray and my brother Moon who sit at the table she painted green with blue flowers. They eat over their plastic saucers and mother allows me to eat over crystal at the big table. When the kettle sings, I steep the tea and when it cools I pour it in small cups for sister Ray and brother Moon. I want more bread, always more, and it is never enough that Mama gives me the biggest hunk with the most butter. She adds honey to my tea. She gives me a sugar stick from the jar, but it is the bread, yeasty and warm, the taste of it in my mouth, that I want more of. I do not like it when Ray and Moon get up from our table for she will say "Go away, Blossom, you will become too big. Go away baby doll, for surely you will burst.

"It is dark at night in our house along the waterway and Mama sits on the rickety porch swing smoking her pipe while Daddy and Ray and Moon troll the saw grass with torches, looking for gators. Never does a gator leave the water in the wet season when you are hunting them. Only when it is dry and they are hunting for water do they climb the porch and come into the house when we are sleeping, their tails rasping on the kitchen floor, their claws tearing at the heart pine laid down by my Daddy. We keep a wire lasso to pull over their heads, and rope to tie around their snouts, and burlap sacks to throw over their faces, for if they catch your eye you don't know who you are. Their narrow irises are a snare, says Mama.

"When we catch one in the house, we stay up all night roasting it over the spit Daddy constructed in the fashion of Mama's Timucuan ancestors. We stay up all night because we have to kill it, to crush its scheming head, to tie it with palmetto cord to the wooden spit. If we allow it to live, it gets ideas. It gets comfortable with our flesh. We make alligator stew, roasted alligator tail, alligator fritters. We eat until we're full and we share with our neighbors and in this way remain blessed.

"No swamp child stays ignorant in the ways of getting by. Gators hate the sight of red, everyone knows that, and so I had my mother make a cape for me of shimmering red gossamer fabric, a fabric the train brought down and my Daddy picked up on the mail boat from the coast. She would make a hood to protect my face and if necessary, my gaze, from the wild eyes of beasts.

"Blossom, you will always be my foolhardy girl," she said, for she knew by my request of the cape on my tenth birthday that I planned to venture out. I planned to protect my grandmother, who kept her own house but who needed food and company, for she was alone after the death of my grandfather.

"My mother stayed up deep into the darkness of many nights cutting and piecing together a garment inspired by lines in my Daddy's book of poetry: "The gossamer wings of angels, the powdery lightness of butterflies." I wanted to fly, to float, to soar. The owl feather being the most rare and treasured was placed between the  shoulder blades, as a guide to my movements and the tiny feathers of finches, the fleetest of all birds were aligned along the yolk and down the sleeves in rows of three so that when I ran through the forest or even lifted my arms it was as if one hundred birds lifted me, necessitating the touch of my feet using only the slightest pressure. And when I leapt over a log or dashed up a tree to the first branch and then higher, I had only to lift the arms of my cape and the garment itself knew my intention and wanted to please me. I had seen my mother up one night, having at last completed the garment. I spied her through the window in my room. She was dancing in the fire and she held a smoking branch of anise to the cape that swayed from a cypress branch.

"It is said of beasts that each will chose a home to prey upon until the members of the family unite in courage to defeat them. In my grandmother's home, this was never achieved. It was said the gods were unhappy with the marriage of a Timucuan descendant and the descendant of an invading Spaniard. Only my mother and grandmother had escaped while my grandfather, uncles, and aunts were not spared for their blood was too rich with Spain, a country who ruined our people. However, their blood cried out for my revenge. But I did not share my plans with Mama. I only prepared myself, learning how to make a bow from palm wood and cat gut. I shot my arrow at logs, imagining the gator who hunted my family and who may one day come after my grandmother with its jaws lustily full of human flesh. No matter the danger, said my grandmother, she would not leave her home. Her husband built it with his two hands. Her dead babies were ever-present. Though the full-throated songs of frogs and night birds, she sang her sleeping songs to them. She would die, she said, among memories that rose up like ghosts and danced before her aged eyes."

rejection, response

I was surprised the other day to get a rejection by a press I hadn't heard from in a while. I had asked them to consider a collection which had interested them. They provided no reason for the rejection and so when I asked for one, they said upon further consideration, the stories did not have a "couldn't-put-it-down" sense of immediacy. This is interesting, but I respectfully disagree.

I'm not sure what they're comparing my work to. If one watches "Lord of the Rings" on a widescreen high def TV with the sound turned up so high that the windows rattle, stories which require some measure of concentration sustained over time - at least for the course of 5,000-8,000 words -  and which occasionally employ the restrained or nuanced voice of a first, second, or third person narrator, could possibly strike said viewer/reader as less than "stimulating." It is my fault, perhaps, that I did not do my research.

While I'm complaining, a trend among journals seems to be a 3,000 word limitation, even a 1,500 word limitation. Granted some of Eudora Welty's best stories could be told within the span of the former limitations and quite a few of Chekhov's were penned within the latter, innumerable stories have dripped out all over the place, spreading and meandering and doing things that not even conventional stories are supposed to do and been exciting expressions of fiction, even if some insist on not labeling them "stories." Dwelling within that cathedral like world of fiction's own invention lies an adventure of possibilities and new thought.

Rejection is hard to take, even if there is good reason for it, and in this case, it was a mismatch. It is harder when you don't know that rejection is within the realm of possibility, but I quibble. My stories, when they are complete, have all the tension that necessary to draw the alert, well-rested reader and keep him/her asking questions until a resolution that, for me, lies somewhere near the end. Rarely are there pyrotechnics, sexually explicit content, unsolved murders, conspiracies, although I have no substantive objection to these dramatic elements. I do, however, have a weakness for magic, dreams, and ghosts. That's about as far as it gets. How boring.

apologies

My husband caught a few typos reading back through a few old posts. (He has some catching up to do.) What I wouldn't do for a blog editor! I couldn't afford one, but still...He's a good one though. I apologize for the mistakes that have slipped my attention and know I constantly go back and try to make corrections but still there are some that sneak past. Also, it takes a while for corrections to go through, so patience, dear reader, I beg of you. Thanks!

why everything is not literary

Christmas is a good time. It was good this year. We unexpectedly enjoyed the presence of even more young relatives in our house and I cooked and cleaned dishes about every two hours, as often as they were hungry. One of these young relatives likes to cook, particularly sweets, and so we made chocolate dipped strawberries.

As part of the post-company clean-up and preparation for a new school year, we cleaned up a couple of rooms and made a give-away pile. As I sat in my study contemplating the ethical questions of using a culture indigenous to Florida to tell a fantasy and reading research gathered for this purpose, my child surprised me by handing over a picture that will no longer be on his door. It is one he drew of the two of us playing football. To my recollection, I have never played football with my child, though we have played our share of board games. But this picture with its disproportionately small goalposts, large hands, and labels that say "tush down," "fut boll," "feld gol," "Gaders" was at one point drawn by my child and has hung on his door for the last couple of years. It was returned to me today because he thought I might like to have it.

It made me cry to have this picture back. Maybe there is something literary in it after all in that stories, no matter what their subject, should be equally affecting, reminding you of what you once were to someone and how time will not be still.

yellow dog

(For Kindle users: This was posted on the first version of my blog. If you are getting this again, I apologize. It's late and I wanted to post something from my Little Red Riding Hood story, but I have to go to bed now and there's more involved in that project than a simple cut and paste. Besides, I still like dogs that are yellow and that walk along secretly in the dark, so here he is again...)

What I want to know is that yellow dog moving through the trees across the street while now at midnight on my porch I sit to smoke in secret. How many nights has he moved through the trees. He descends briefly down the bank of the waterway. He is a bear. He moves up again to the streetlights filtering through the trees and he is a yellow dog. He moves past the neat row of office buildings as if he were not moving before a cultivated waterway, as if he were a dog in the woods. Every midnight while I sit to write in my study a bird, some bird, will sing very close by in a tree and I cannot figure what kind of bird sings at that hour, and his song is very short, but it makes me feel as if I have gotten on the wrong side of the day. And while I watch the yellow dog on his own venture without human companion, the bird by my porch reminds me of the unnatural hour, my unnatural witness to what happens between and among trees and dark pavements.

I am getting smoke in my small white dog's hair, the one who sits beside me on my porch. I must freshen her up if I'm going to get away with a secret cigarette, OK, maybe two. In my son's clutch as we drive to school in the morning, he will notice she smells of smoke. My husband will notice the smell of smoke on me. He has allowed me to get away with it once or twice, he has even laughed at my occasional vice, but he doesn't like it. In the kitchen, walls apart from the yellow dogs and unnatural birds, I rub my small white dog down between two dryer sheets and then I rub my own hair, knowing full well I will not get away with anything. When I am in bed, I think of the dog who is yellow in the dappled lamplight. As I close my eyes, he is entering his house through a door which is really a flap. Tomorrow, unaccompanied, free, he will go out again when it pleases him.

Seminole doll

Racial Identity and Little Red Riding Hood in the Everglades

In reading about the Florida Maroons in Kevin Mulroy's Freedom on the Border as part of my research for a Glades version of Little Red Riding Hood, I found out that though the Seminoles and the Maroons banned together for warfare against the United States, there was little cultural intermingling between them, so my earlier idea to have Red's great grandparents be a mixed couple, thus introducing complication and mixed cultural identities, was perhaps a bit unrealistic, at least for that place and time. The preference of each group occupying Florida was a separation of culture, land, traditions, peoples. To go back a little to my motive for this research: I like to figure out the ancestry that goes into defining characters, ancestry that can reach back as far as great-grandparents, if not farther. Sometimes doing this helps me come up with my story line. "Accidents" of fate can contribute to the formation of destinies. I usually do not explicitly use this material in the story, however, and I can only look on in awe at those who create family epics or sagas. (Larry Woiwode comes to mind here, and Reynolds Price.)

Anyway, as far as my story is concerned, perhaps my protagonist's great grandparents were married around the time of the Maroon free colony and before the United States forced them to move to the Texas-Mexico border. The Seminole nation is matrilineal, which means that membership in the tribe is passed through the mother. Therefore if my protagonist's great-great grandmother was Maroon and married a Seminole man, the protection, privileges, and rights of full membership in the Seminole nation would have been compromised. (There were exceptions made, especially for Seminole men, and maroon women were often adopted into the tribe if they married a Seminole man, but let's just say this may not be one of those exceptions, or perhaps an exception was enjoyed by the couple and they remained in the tribe, but as the relationship progresses, racial differences add to later tensions in the marriage.)

By the time Maroons and militant Seminoles were forced to leave Florida for Texas, the unity between the two groups was severed. They had banded together for different reasons. The Maroons, most of all, wanted freedom, and over the course of time some of them had become enslaved to the Seminoles, though they enjoyed more freedom as slaves to Seminoles than as slaves to whites. Still, the Maroons did not want to be slaves of any kind, and promises of freedom by the United States should they should move to Texas with the Seminoles who were believed to be their "owners" were too difficult to resist. Furthermore, they aided the United States by bringing in Seminoles for removal and cooperating in other ways, which created tensions with the Seminoles, leading the tribe to accuse the Maroons of looking out for their own interests only. (The Seminoles' alliance with the Maroon colony had helped them defend the place they lived, a welcome place to others seeking to live in peace, but a home that would have been precious to them with their history of flight from war and oppression years before.)

By 1842, there was a tough band of Florida Seminoles - about "301" (!) - who stubbornly resisted removal and the United States finally decided to let them have a piece of the swamp, in the southern section of the glades. I am imagining this is where the present reservation is today, in Glade County. Furthermore, my historian makes note: "Black removal ultimately had superceded Seminole removal on the American list of priorities." But what about my protagonist's great-grandmother, a Maroon? Was the government really able to track the number of Seminoles down to the ones and so they knew for sure all blacks had been removed? Do I really believe those government guys? I mean, if they can't remove 'em, how are they even going to get 'em in one bunch long enough to count 'em? And I wouldn't put it past those guys to put marks on them like you'd track an animal, but I doubt that kind of thing was being done, although I guess I could be wrong. That number - 301 - cracks me up. A character made up that number, someone trying to convince the government guys they'd done their homework so they could pack up and go home. The footnote seems to suggest the count had something to do with Billy Bowlegs, who was high up in the Seminole tribe and who negotiated with the United States when it came to the movement of his people. (My server is slow tonight. I'll have to double check this info. later.)

OK, I have since found out that the original Billy Bowlegs was a major leader against the United States during the Second and Third Seminole Wars, although I don't know for sure yet if he had anything to do with that count of "301." After his death, other Seminoles adopted his name to honor him. His Seminole name means "Alligator Chief" and "Alligator Dance" was written by Billy Bowlegs III, an African American Seminole leader and a relation of the first Billy Bowlegs. Bowlegs III lived on the Brighton Seminole Indian Reservation and became a tribal historian and leader. He lived until 1965. The recording I listened to last night of the dance is of him singing this song. Free downloads are everywhere on-line if you want to check it out, but I can't find any lyrics in English. Billy Bowlegs III was himself quite the hunter of many animals, including alligators.(Alligators will strongly come into play in my Red version, and one big one in particular, so some of this seeming bunny trail of research will likely become quite relevant.)

So, back to the discussion of the removal of Maroons. It seems unlikely that every Maroon was removed. Or maybe my protagonist's great-great grandmother was already mixed blood when she married her Seminole husband and so her appearance did not serve as significantly identifying marks of her race and she was therefore passed over during removal. Whatever the case, there might always have been conflict between the protagonist's great grandmother and the tribe because of her racial identity and the history that helped create the rift with her husband's people. In a country who would own people and treat them as less than human, who would pursue them to death and dislocation rather than see them free because freedom for would threaten a way of life for others, alliances the oppressed forge politically and in family life often dissolve. Whole selves are often crushed. Stubborn, tenacious rebellion, stealth, and fighting the powers that be to the teeth were the only ways some could preserve themselves, and the Seminoles who were granted freedom in the Everglade territory managed this, whatever their tactics. (They must have been ingenious.)

The grandmother whom the protagonist, Little Red Riding Hood, must protect, is a descendant of these forces and difficulties. What has shaped the grandmother's life is partly what comes out of the past and partly what she makes of her present circumstances. I wanted this grandmother to be a little more vulnerable than most women in a Seminole tribe would be. Her mixed blood past informs her current choices and she chooses to live in a dwelling that is separate from that of her family. She chooses to live in the older kind of hut fashioned by her husband while the rest of her family is up for something that is a bit more hurricane-proof. 1910 has been a convincing year, although while the hurricane ripped through the glades, she did give up her hut for a while and stayed with her children and grandchildren.

But having the grandmother be of mixed race ancestry gives me even more leeway, perhaps to have her make choices outside the norm of her tribe, while at the same time opening the door to the convention of cause and effect, the linking of consequences to choices. Grandmother is different. She is somewhat out of it when it comes to the tribe because of her heritage. Furthermore, she exacerbates things by making herself different, by not willing herself to fit in and live with her children like most Seminole grandparents do. Will something come out of this? Will some ill fate befall her? There should probably be more to the story than this, but this'll get me going.

As is common in families, Little Red Riding Hood looks up just as much to her grandmother and her more distant great grandmother as she does her own mother. She feels a reverence for her grandmother and finds in her personality something of an explanation for her own wild, independent, unsettled nature. Red will not, let us say, be the victim in this situation. Much like Lozen, a female Apache warrior who fought with Geronimo, she will fight her own battle with a foe that is formidable for a twelve year old, and therefore no less formidable than armies of men.

I have yet to make it through "The Snow Queen." Can you believe it? I'm taking it in small chunks as I research and think about my particular Red Riding Hood story and its history, setting, and characters. But I like it that it is Gerta that saves Kai. (And why not? As I seem to recall, female protagonists of pre-Grimm versions of fairy tales were often strong and resourceful.) Anyway, this tidbit about Gerta makes me brave as I forge a strong female Red.

If you are an expert in Florida history, a member of the Seminole tribe, a descendant of Maroon ancestry, the author of the book Freedom on the Border, the first chapter of which I read and dogeared and discuss in cursory fashion here, have mercy I implore you. I have enjoyed being able to think out loud about what little I know and how much I don't know, and more research will be ongoing, even after beginning the first draft and during the months of revisions to follow. This is a little about how I think about making a story or building a character. If you have read this entry to this point, you are a tenacious and kind person indeed.

Freedom on the Border: the Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas by Kevin Mulroy

Gathering no moss

After talking to a writing friend today, I've decided to return to a story that will require more research regarding Native American culture in the Florida Everglades. Since I have had trouble finding much in the way of systematic research on religious beliefs of tribes living in this area, I have decided to throw in an extra component to my research which may open avenues for a richer yield. I will probably scramble around between research projects for various stories until enough builds up for one to really grab me.

I have an enormous stack of the research I conducted for my short story on Chinese immigrants. And I have lots of books and memoirs written by the people of this place. My MFA mentor was interested in my turning this into a longer piece, but I don't see how I can do this without, at last, visiting. And there's something about the short story. It is intense, and can handle, and should include, I think, all the research thrown its way. The story will be coming out in Avatar Review. I have not received notice about the date, but will certainly announce it. In the meantime, what should I do with my stash about China? It is interesting to sit down and read in and of itself, even if I don't use the material to expand the story. It is hard for me to throw it away and yet, I almost don't have time, or feel I have time to go back and look at it and read it again or read more carefully the material that wasn't as useful to me but that was fascinating nonetheless.

In the meantime, however, I feel the next pile coming on involving the maroon free colony in the Everglades, set up among the Seminoles. I am working on a particular strong female character and I may use a female warrior who fought with Geronimo as a possible model, whose heritage would nonetheless be mixed heritage - maroon and Seminole. It involves some fantasy and have written the introduction a while ago. Research will likely correct it a little bit because I don't want to be too far off the mark of culture and religion for either group. For example, when I read it to a writer's group at the Kerouac house for a workshop I was taking, the participants too easily read fact into the Native American details. It is very tricky when you are Caucasian. My research "stack" will be as tall as my stack for China, if not taller.

gift in song

Two downloadable Christmas songs by one of my favs out of Seattle, Robert Deeble:

http://www.reverbnation.com/tunepak/2118504

Robert's web page:

http://www.robertdeeble.com/

Mary Queen of Scots, a bust of her head in the Tower of London. You should see the chopping block not far from here in its own glass case, very ominous, and oddly gleaming and worn.

To begin dealing with some of the challenges and conflicting feelings concerning the direction of my writing, I've decided to start a separate blog in which my "nonsense" stories can have a place and in which "fantasy" can comfortably reside along with it. My new blog is called "The Drinking Bottle" and takes its title from the bottle in Alice in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, the bottle from which she drinks and inexplicably grows. I don't know whether to post those stories in both of my blogs or post them on my "children's writing" blog only. The blog will be accessible through Typepad and will also feature pretty pictures in homage to Alice's complaint in that very first line of Wonderland: "What is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations!"

The point of the blog is to give me more freedom. I know, intellectually, I have this freedom in adult literature too, but partitioning off the "genres" of realism and fantasy may loosen me up even more, and I never have had a problem with the notion of more loosening. Do you like a little nonsense in your reading life? Do your children? Since my son was very young, we have always enjoyed reading Edward Lear. Roald Dahl is another hit with us on most occasions, his poems especially. And last week when I was actually sitting down to read Anderson's Snow Queen and found animals and inanimate objects talking to each other in his fiction, I found myself completely and utterly jealous. I mean, how much fun would that be? (I'm jealous of Wilde too. Hate him.)

So, it has gone to far with me, really. Time to exercise some initiative. And I'm not going to worry if this direction makes me a child. I also can't worry that it is hard, at this point to classify my work - realist? absurdist? children's writer? fantasy writer? a ball of fluff and air? I just want to write, be crazy, be free. Maybe something will come of it, eventually.

Here is the site of my additional blog:  http://dreamsinsong.typepad.com/blog/. Come visit me. Leave a comment if you'd like. I wish I could give you one - or all - of those chocolates on the table, but there's a nice bunch of roses there to brighten your day.

I will still be writing my more realist fiction and putting it on this site. Tomorrow maybe it will occur to me how best to proceed, but I have been nursing a sick child all week, I have stayed up late hours because I've craved time alone with my books, my computer, but now have made myself sick and exhausted. I had plans to get all glammed up before Christmas: an appointment to get my hair cut on colored on Wednesday, an optometrist's appointment on Thursday for a renewed contact prescription. Now I might even miss tomorrow's rescheduled hair appointment. Oh, I know, whine, whine you middle class suburbanite, that's what you're saying eh? Well, I may get up and erase this complaint tomorrow, but for now, I'll take my whine and run with it.

Nigh nigh.

Tuesday a.m.

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After discussing finishing my short story "Lightning Man," I began thinking about how to complete or finish other stories. I often think about writing for both children or for adults, or making the cross permanently to children and I sometimes wonder how the two might be similar. You write something fantastical for adults and call it "magical realism." You do the same for children and call it "fairy tale," or more generally, a "children's story." I love both fantastical stories and "children's" stories, those that deal in alternate realities, have their own internal set of rules and patterns - in both the worlds they create and the structure and "rules" of the storytelling itself. It seems there are quite a few "adults" and quite a few "children" who enjoy dealing in alternate realities. (And even I can't seem to figure out how to categorize what constitutes being an adult and what constitutes being a child in that psychological sense.) The imagination's play in other realities might jar us into thinking of our own lives and dilemmas in new ways or it just provides much needed relief from the stress of that world that confronts us every day, relentlessly. For example when, as a writer, I emerge from being "elsewhere," I feel more able to confront what "must be done" in the here and now.

Therefore, this Christmas, I propose you find time to give your mind and your body a moment's rest in a fictional world. Even if you only have time for an old favorite Christmas book enjoyed from your childhood, or one you wish you had enjoyed at that time, why not find a cozy spot, light a candle, put on your favorite socks, make some cocoa, and turn down the noise a little bit so you can read your book? You can savor it and use your imagination. It's OK. No one's watching. Picture it as a gift the writer has given to you. No writer, I dare say, writes without the hope that one day someone will enjoy what he or she has written and you will be doing her/him a wonderful favor, even if the writer has moved on from this life, if you find something to enjoy in their words. Here are a couple of my favorites - short, beautiful, packed with symbols, rich images, wonderful writing, and sometimes complete with pictures, depending on the edition: O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi (see Lisbeth Zwerger's illustrated edition, for example); The Velveteen Rabbit; Isaak Dinesen's Winter Tales (more for grown ups and not so sweet and "simple," but crystalline, perfect, like prismatic ornaments); Norton's collection of classic fairy tales; Lars Gustafsson's Stories of Happy People (not Christmas stories, per se, nor stories for "children," but not stories that make you want to jump in a river with a pocketful of rocks). Hardly an exhaustive list. I'd love to get your contributions.

Traditionally, ghost stories were read at Christmas. Hence, the setting of the story that contains the story in Turn of the Screw. Although we have our American love affair with Poe, I think some of his lesser-known stories or less popular works are the best, hence my preference for the comprehensive The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes and Noble ed). Here you will find almost all of his poems, his popular works, and many works that are not read or talked about as frequently. To me, Nathaniel Hawthorne is unsung as a great American gothic writer of the Romantic era.My favorite collection is the comprehensive Great Short Works (Barnes and Noble ed). I've also been dipping into a little Fanu - In a Glass Darkly - as well as M.R. James - Count Magnus and other Ghost Stories and The Haunted Dolls' House. (While not a "ghost story," per se, Antonio Tabucchi's Requiem: A Hallucination makes an affecting, sometimes funny read. Really worth a look if you are into weirdness, wild flights of the imagination, surrealistic acrobatics.) Or what about a little Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?

For the religiously inclined, meaning Christian - I'm sorry I cannot recommend too many works outside of this tradition at present -  I highly recommend Shusaku Endo's Deep River, William Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows, and George MacKay Brown's Hawkfall: And other Stories. While these are not didactic, nor are they necessarily "Christmas" stories, they explore how faith weaves into the fabric and families of the communities, families, and individuals they explore. In each case, there is an opening up to larger possibilities, rather than a closing off. It is a literature of the highest calibre.

If you go to the beach, lucky you, you might want to have on hand a small book that's been in print for most of the second half of the 20th century: Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea. While it holds universal appeal, especially for middle class women, there is wisdom to be gleaned from its pages and it makes a nice, easy, but thought-provoking nonfiction read. Men can get bunches from it too and it's a gentle push, perhaps, in the direction of New Year's resolutions, getting on with life, turning over new leaves.

Four collections which I've purchased this year but are dying to be read are as follows: Tales of a Chinese Grandmother: 30 Traditional Tales from China by Frances Carpenter; Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling; Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino; and Hans Christian Andersen: The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, translated from the Danish by Erik Christian Hauugaard. Do you have any massive collections or books you want to read in the coming year? I have others. That is a start. I would like to hole up in my study for a year and just read, but I can't seem to make that happen. Why does life have to frustrate that plan?

Right now, however, I am simply trying to simply get through Andersen's The Snow Queen as I race about, trying to do all those Christmas things. I am also reading the very interesting commentary by Wolfgang Lederer: The Kiss of the Snow Queen: Hans Christian Andersen and Man's Redemption by Woman. The commentary is interesting, and fun, mostly a psychological analysis of Andersen and his creations, or biographical reading of the story back through what is known about Anderson through writings and other stories.

Best wishes in your trimmings of hearths and settings of tables. When I get to my story for children - or adults? - I'll send it along.

And p.s. If it seems like I'm "preaching" when it comes to telling you to take time out of the busy holidays for  a good read, I am only talking to myself. Maybe it is my way of wishing myself into the life I do not lead, so excuse my little directive missives. They are nonetheless fun for me to write when I feel too overwhelmed to write fiction and hopefully they are not too boring to read, though I feel self-conscious when I know former teachers and esteemed colleagues are visiting this site. Ah well.

(my son calls this another of mom's crazy pictures)

checking in

I told myself my blog wouldn't be too chatty. Pure story. You know. But creative energies have been waning as family responsibilities have increased. A very important family member needed emergent heart surgery, a situation none of us were anticipating, and I have been slowly picking up the pieces ever since. I have thought about the blog a lot, but story ideas have not been coming together quickly. Crying and writing do not go well together. (Despite what Diane Keaton's character seems portrays in the the great movie "Something's Gotta Give.") Anxiety is not married to an even flow of ideas and inspiration.

Just today, several weeks after leaving off blogging, I have begun to return to an earlier interest I've had in revising a story I began four or five years ago. Beginning a story includes the time I spend beforehand dreaming of it and wondering why a particular character or situation is haunting me. It also includes pre-research which, in my work so far includes books and movies, and the more documentary-like the better, although sometimes another's artistic spin can offer helpful details.

My story "Lightning Man" is about a girl and her two brothers who discover a man living in the woods behind their home in Florida, a state which receives many homeless because of the clement weather. The story was partially inspired by a home my family toured when we were house-shopping and were told sometimes, beyond the fence-line, homeless people illegally squatted. The house itself was a bit strange, I thought, and I wanted to put it in a story. It had literally not been redecorated since the seventies, or so it appeared. It was pretty bad and would have required a lot of work. (And if you knew me, you would know I don't mind a little funkiness, but this was bad.)

Another thing that inspired me was a documentary about a homeless man who lived in Orlando and who had a makeshift shelter and who had financially discovered odd ways to stay self-sufficient, albeit homeless. I never could find the production company who made the movie although I believe it was a Sundance production and was called "Brother John." I often, perhaps unwisely, pick up people who need help on the street or if I see a suitcase stashed in the woods, will leave food there if I have something in a container that will keep. It's not much and I'm not bragging, but this is the toughest life anyone can live.

Then I met a friend, who has remained a friend, from the postgraduate workshop. He has worked with homeless people in shelters and in other situations and felt my character was authentic. (This was one of many aspects that was "criticized" in my story, that my homeless guy was too "together.") My new friend also recommend that I read Chris Offut's "The Leaving One" from his collection Kentucky Straight. Chris was a workshop mentor moons ago and though I think I may have read some of his fiction at the time of the workshop - about 10 years ago - it was the nonfiction I was enthralled with at the time, works that would answer for me the questions: What motivates someone to become a writer? How do they go about doing it? And Chris did seem to be a bit of an iconoclast for me, a kind of writer I might look to if I needed an example of courage. Now my motives for reading are different and I seem to have more patience with the fiction, and I can honestly say it's been a wonder to re-read and savor Kentucky Straight. I guess I didn't know what was good for me when I was younger, just as sure as I didn't know how nice it was to drink your whiskey neat.

"The Leaving One" is mysterious and poetic and haunting. It is about family secrets and lore. What I found interesting in terms of parallels with my homeless man is that my protagonist wonders what it would be like to have become closer to the man she finds in the woods. She wonders if he could have become a kind of grandfather to her, a person she needed in her life to guide her through uncertainties and questions. In "The Leaving One" the unknown homeless man turns out to be the actual grandfather of the child who discovers him. He also turns out to be a spiritual person and a person who finds evidence for fallen stars in the shiny rock along the hollows. My homeless man knows his scripture well and has a relationship to lightning, having created a kind of strange theology in which the two are intertwined, perhaps due to his belief in the power of Christ over the cosmos.

Around the time of the writing of my initial drafts, I saw a magnificent sculpture at the Tate Modern in London in which the artist had welded ironing boards together to make a huge bolt of lightning that stood suspended almost seemingly in mid-air. Scattered about the bolt were representational figures in iron whose features would be illuminated should the storm occur at night. I couldn't forget the image of that huge piece of iron, so dark against those cream walls. Whether it yielded anything of value to the piece is irrelevant to its influence in my thoughts. It was there and I thought about its power.

I began the story in graduate school. It was semi-panned by my second mentor, and embraced by the third, but it required more work than I could give at the time. I had already exceeded the 100 page requirement for the creative thesis, and had created up to half of the creative thesis in the second quarter of my final year, the time limit given for all new material. In other words, I was exhausted, though appreciated my mentor's desire to want to push this final story. To me, it meant she saw something in it that was worth a salvage and a good rewrite, always a promising sign.

At this point, I'm not quite finished. During the postgrad seminar, I was told to either turn it into an experimental piece or do more with the scenes, or hey something, anything. When I spoke of another inspiration for the story - Graham Greene's strange man in "Under the Garden" - and the extremes of this character I was accused of wanting to write not "realistic" fiction, but "naughty fiction" in which people turn into other things or catch on fire or something. Hmmmmmm......I'm still wondering what's wrong with that.

Chris' story is an inspiration and I'm glad to have read it because I really recognize something of what I wanted to do. Translating this into something that is mine and that addresses the unique challenges of this particular story is what I must learn to do after every helpful, qualified person has been paid and editors only want to see the final, perfected product. This is the "gap" which not everyone is able to navigate through. It can be unclear and and let me just say that at times there are no markers, no signs at all.

neighborhood watch: a fictional diary

Chapter 1: glocks and virtual puppies

   
December 26, 2008, 3: 00 p.m.


A sex offender is scheduled to move into the house next to mine. We received a flyer warning us about this impending change yesterday. It was jammed into the space between the front door handle and frame. At the top it said: "Florida Department of Law Enforcement – Sexual Offender/Predator Flyer."

I saw a housekeeper leave from the side door this morning when my husband got back from doing errands. She looked like a regular housekeeper, not a sex offender housekeeper I said to my husband. He kissed my cheek and said that there was a car in the driveway but it didn't look like a sex offender car either. I gave him the deadest stare I could manage, the deadpan to what could possibly be his humor but which I am afraid is, more likely, his good and compassionate nature even toward sex offending neighbors.

We have a child and so, I am temporarily relieved to learn that the car he spied in the driveway does not belong to one who preys on children. It is Christmas and sex offenders are leaking through the cracks of good society, even living in neighborhoods where houses are $500,000 and up.

That afternoon, I try to read a collection of Christmas stories I used to find amusing. I stop at the story about a poor Irish boy who is disappointed that he only gets a book in his stocking and that his father is a drunk. My ability to engage in fictions about others' misfortunes has been stripped away by my awareness of our proximity to actual violence. 

I find myself wondering what the sex offender will do this afternoon, what life will be like from his perspective over the next couple of days. Does a sex offender, fresh from his offenses, move to a neighborhood to get a break? Does he just want to close his shutters and sit alone in his barely furnished house, the floors newly polished by the housekeeper, the shadows of what he has done moving along in the corners of his empty rooms, silent as long as he ignores them? The flyer announcing his arrival gave his weight, provided a picture. He has a big neck, no hair. He appears to be someone who would lumber as he walks. And for some reason, I picture him with a wife, but I don't know why. 

And how is it that one begins molesting children? Was he dissatisfied with his wife? Was she dissatisfied with him? Did they stop having sex? He is not attractive. A writing colleague calls and we talk about this. She says  people do not molest children because they are dissatisfied with their marriages, but she cannot come up with another theory. We Google "child predation, causes of." Our cursory research reveals nothing definitive. The only thing we could find was a study that showed how to curb this aberrant behavior:  Predators must perceive they will be caught and significantly punished if they act on their impulses.

My husband and son come back home as I am finishing up my phone conversation with my friend. I will not be able to see her over Christmas because she's with her family down near Gasparilla Island. My child and husband eat the lunch they picked up at our favorite Tex-Mex restaurant. They are planning to go on a campout, just the two of them, and I am not looking forward to being alone, but I don't want to spoil their excitement. I eat and listen to them tell me about the four-man tent they bought at a post-Christmas Black Friday sale. 

What is presently unknown to my child is that my husband has borrowed a glock from my brother-in-law. I made him do this because there are wild boars, coyotes, bears, and wintering murderers – regular snowbirds - hiding out in the Florida woods. He got the gun from my brother-in-law Christmas day while we were with family. When I open the car door after having exchanged niceties with the society people my family pride themselves to be, I spot a black case on the passenger seat and I don't recognize it even though I had practically ordered its requisition. I feel out of place, like we are stepping into another era of our lives, or we are stepping away from our lives, falling off, falling down, tumbling into something dark and inescapable.

My husband makes shushing noises in case I say something about the gun. My son climbs into the backseat with his hand held video game of virtual puppies, a present he got in place of a gerbil. My husband is not quite ready to tell my son about the gun yet and he stows the heavy polymer case under his seat. When we get home on Christmas day with all of our presents and the glock, I sit on the couch in our study decorated with a painting of a hunting dog holding a pheasant and beige French toile curtains and learn how to fill the magazine and how to hold the gun and to aim, though I do this while the gun remains unloaded.

And then we read the flyer in the door, and then later that night after dinner and TV, my husband sleeps while I sit up, worried. I think about the string of neighbors we've had next door. The couple who lived there before used to have shouting matches people heard from the neighborhood pool, more than a block away. The woman's mother had a black eye at one point. A woman and her son - we think the man's first wife and child - argued with the man's wife out on the porch and the man's wife sent the woman, with her suitcase and teenage child, into the street. That time, I called the police. The dispatcher seemed to know them. 

After they moved out, they left a rubber plant on their patio which my mother, visiting from out of town, thought was glorious, given how large it was. It always struck me as obscene - something overly aggressive, masculine and fleshy. When my husband and I found out that the sex offender was moving in and the plant was staying, we began to wonder if the sex offender was somehow related to the loud, troubled neighbors who lived there before.  

My conjectures about the plant and the relationships between successive inhabitants are likely shaded by memories of curses penetrating our walls; late night sounds of the buzz saw and my fertile imaginings of what kind of shop our male neighbor had built in his garage; the hammering at midnight and my husband's going over at my pleading to ask him to stop. When our neighbor came to our house to ask me about something one day - I can't remember what he wanted now - I noticed his pupils were pinpricks. I knew little about drugs, but if I were to identify the eyes of a user, I may describe something like what I saw in him, those vacant skittery almost colorless irises.

When I told my husband about his visit and my certainty that he was stoned, he said the man was just a man who was disappointed in life and it almost felt as if my husband were describing himself. This conversation took place between us about the time when my wedding and engagement rings were indefinitely sequestered away at the jeweler's. I had them removed because they were cutting off the circulation in my finger but I could not bring myself, at that point, to make a decision:  Either I wanted another version of the rings or I didn't want them at all. I was just happy, at the time, to have them off my finger.

Chapter 2: A dangerous book for boys


December 26, evening

I walk the dog. I am certain I am now in more danger than my husband and son who are camping among alligators and bobcats and boars. I notice my neighbor's porch light is on but there are no lights on inside and there is no car in the driveway. Still, I wish I had kept the glock. 

My husband has a nature that makes me feel safe. I tend to underestimate the calming effect this has on me and when he is away, I remember I used to be a much more nervous person before we married. I also know it's why my son asks for my husband the minute I pick him up from school until the moment he talks to him on the cell phone at the end of my husband's work day.

I am not jealous of this talent of his, this ability to make others feel comfortable and my son's seeming preference for him. I tell myself we each give my son something he needs. I am the parent he wants at bedtime. I sing him songs I have sung to him since he was a baby. I make sure he hugs me and I say something reassuring to him, that I love him, that I am proud of him, and sometimes, that he is the best thing I've ever done in my life. When the ring was at the jewelers and my husband and I were fighting like curs, I could almost never say the last thing without a catch in my voice. But things have worked out. The diamonds were reset in a white gold bands that are more comfortable for my hand and my husband presented the new rings to me for Christmas. I think this is how my son can happily be in the woods in a tent with his father. Things are better now.

My husband calls from their campout. He thinks he left the gas stove at home and wants me to look around to confirm this. He can't find it in the backpack or the car. He wanted to do a "real campout" with my son and he sounds deflated. I cannot find the stove at home, but we talk through his options, including rigging a cooking pot over a fire using a coathanger draped over a tree limb. Given my husband's reluctance to try something that might not work as the darkness advances, he decides he should make use of the cabin on the hunting grounds.

He seems happier, as if he needed my endorsement of this sub-purist arrangement. I speak to my son who is ten and he is excited about the reconstituted beef stroganoff and double chocolate cheesecake he is about to eat. He has been sitting up in the new four person tent with a flashlight reading a book he got for Christmas: A Dangerous Book for Boys. He tells me in the voice that is still young and sweet that he is learning how to make go-carts and rockets and guns. The transformation is complete, then. They have done something that is "all boy/all man."

I watch a movie about a man who tries to get a new start in life after having been in prison. As a young boy, he was complicit in the murder of a girl. After his release, he is hunted by the slain child's relatives. They are not satisfied.

On Christmas Eve I watched a movie about a kid who gets in trouble in school and has to survive three months' house arrest and who, because of his boredom, makes an unwelcome discovery: His neighbor is a serial killer. I felt church-resistant that night and so we stayed at home and watched movies. I couldn't bear the hustle and bustle of trying to get ready for church, trying to look nice, finding a parking place, dealing with locating a seat. There is so much that feels contrived when one only goes to church only on the major holidays. You feel the need to look happy and like you belong, even though you are not comfortable in church most of the time. People know you're faking and so do you.

At one o'clock, I nudge my arthritic dog up the stairs and go to bed. I am tossing and turning. I have had too much pizza and the bed never feels as restful without my husband. I drift to sleep and am occasionally awakened. Is that a noise on the stairs? Did something scratch at my window? But my bedroom is on the second story and nothing but insects would be able to gain purchase on the clapboard exterior.

Chapter 3: Pink stroller alert

December 27, 2008 8:00 a.m.

I think I hear pounding at the door while I am still in bed, but it is understandable that I should imagine this sound, as sometimes my husband leaves his deadbolt key at home and I've been wakened, after he leaves early to buy us coffee, by his pounding at the door, often followed by a call from his cell phone that he has been locked out. I stop to listen and there is no pounding and no one calls. I remember the porch light at the sex offender's house the night before. I look out of my bedroom window to see if I detect any movement or the presence of any new items other than the rubber plant. Nothing. I imagine what it will be like the first time I see a light on inside.

I slip on my jeans from the night before and one of the many shirts draped over the back of the antique chair beside the bed. My dog needs to be coaxed back down the stairs. On our morning walk I think about Jesus' lesson about the good Samaritan and his answer to the wise young man's question: "But who is our neighbor?" Surely Jesus was not asking anyone to be overly solicitous to child molesters. 

I want a gun. I have been thinking about this long before borrowing the glock. I have imagined a hole I will have someone carve in the drywall right beside my side of the bed, a hole for the gun with a secret door so my son will not find it. Upon entry into our bedroom, an intruder will be shot on sight, by me, my hands clasped around the revolver which is small enough to fit into a purse. They say you just as readily end up shooting the ones you love by accident as anyone who is intruding when you keep a gun in the house, but I don't believe these people, whoever they are. They are just spouting propaganda to keep women from protecting themselves.

I make a full pot of coffee and sit down to my computer. My tasks are big today: a book review whose deadline is fast approaching covering a work that does not easily lend itself to facile analysis; a story whose ending I conveniently truncated by resorting to magical realism; a children's story as per my son's request, a story about an evil wizard named Joe who encounters a good wizard named Bob and is redeemed by this encounter. I sit down to my dining room table where I write, a table given me by my mother. It is French country and cluttered with Christmas decorations and Christmas plates, but from here I have a view of the street and a partial view of my neighbor's house.

I sit down and read over what I have written for the review. Through the open window, I spy an older man walking by on the sidewalk across the street, pushing a bright pink stroller. I stand up, almost hopefully, to look out of the window of the front door. Is this my man? Is this my neighbor? He is stooped slightly, the way I imagined the man to be and he walks with a slow gait for his legs look heavy and perhaps they are arthritic. The incongruency of the bright pink stroller is an alert of sorts, but there are several elderly and middle aged people as well whom I sometimes see pushing their lap dogs in these things as if they were babies.

Beside the stroller trot dogs with brown hair hangs down from their tiny bodies. Both are outfitted with decorative collars. The man sits down to rest on a bench under the large oak tree. The bench faces the waterway that divides the houses on our street from offices that are built to look like more houses.

In a few minutes the man will stand up. Will he proceed down the slope of the sidewalk and cross the street to the house next door? Will he take his place as the neighborhood sex offender? He stands and continues around the waterway with the pink stroller and the dogs. I am disappointed. He was old and doty and I do not think it would be hard to handle him. I recheck the description on the flyer: 5'8", 260 lbs, 3/6/1960. I am a large woman and not intimidated by size, but the birth date worries me, close enough to my own to mean he could be young enough still, young enough for the creative, energetic juices necessary for crime, for violence.

My husband calls to report that they have made it through the night and that they are going to do some target practice with the glock.

  
Chapter 4: Christmas hangover

  
December 28, 2008, 10:00 p.m.
 
As it turns out, there was only a microwave in the cabin at the hunt club, and it was still in the box and on the floor somewhere. The property is owned by a few guys, and they do almost nothing there other than call turkeys in the spring and shoot unsuspecting deer who feed at designated locations.

After my husband and child recount their wilderness adventure, they begin preparations for cooking the camping food with the gas burner they left behind on their over-night. They use the aluminum cooking kit they purchased at the camping store, unfolding it and screwing in the handles, placing it over the tiny blue flame.

If it would have been me, I would have at least heated the water in the microwave. I would not have waited fifteen minutes for a little gas burner to get a pot of water boiling. But my husband believes in following through and my son looks on in fascination as the tiny bubbles form. When it boils, his father will help him pour the hot water into a tin bowl that contains the dehydrated meal.

And maybe that's why I can imagine a world where people are not so generous while my husband still imagines a very pure place where most people, if given the chance, behave in ways that do them the most justice to their best intentions. No one is beyond redemption in his worldview, where in mine, most of us have been doomed since birth.

December 29, 2008, 9:30 a.m.

Nothing, nothing still. I am beginning to get comfortable again. I am the most relaxed I have been since getting the child molester flyer and I no longer think about moving away from this house and/or getting a gun. I'm a little bit depressed, as a matter of fact, as if I worked myself up for nothing.

As I sit here at what was once my mother's dining table, I see the man with the pink stroller walk by again. His dogs are going ballistic and I stand up to see what's going on. A woman is passing on the opposite side of the street holding the leashes of several dogs and the man's little brown dogs are squeaking and trembling with unabated enthusiasm.

I have begun the wizard story, the one I will write for my son. I am working on the review. I am skipping church, again, though I have promised myself and promised my husband that tonight I will attend communion. All is dull and flat and worn.


Chapter 4: The leveling effects of the flesh

January 5, 2009, 8:47 a.m.

My husband has not taken the glock back to my brother-in-law. It still sits on the desk next to the back door. Now it seems no more threatening than the cups of pencils and the stationary organizer. The high excitement of the beginning of this diary is frazzling out into nothing. The two galvanizing objects of the narrative – a sex offender and a gun – will soon turn to red herrings, or worse, cheap ploys, if I do not begin a far-fetched invention. I have cut myself off from book discussion chat rooms and chat rooms in which fellow writers talk about what they're writing. This is so I can figure out what to do. I had counted on my neighbor to follow through so I'd have something to write about.

I saw a black garden hose curled up by the sex offender's garage when we were coming back from a party a few nights ago. That's a new hose, I said to my husband. No it's not, he said. He is growing tired of my observations. I had not seen the hose there before, I could swear by it. Why had I not noticed it, ever?

I wonder if the man is hiding somewhere deep in the house. The blinds remain shut. There are no lights on at night. Somehow it seems worse not to see him at all than to see him through the blinds or face him on the way to the garage as he stands in his yard or sits on his porch lawn chair. I have imagined him wearing clothes for warm weather since it's hot this Christmas. It is hard to look ominous or mysterious in clothes suited for central Florida, especially if you are an overweight white person like my neighbor, like me. You are bright and reflective like a big, puffy snowman. You can look angry unless you make an effort to smile all the time. Someone might think you're a mean person because of the look on your face when really, you're just struggling with to make it through your day. I think if I could have seen my neighbor like this, in his sweaty, unkempt state, struggling with the heat, in a body not too dissimilar from my own, I might begin to get a handle on my fear.

When they cut my wedding rings off at the jewelers, I cried. I don't know why I cried. Was it because my finger was literally in jeopardy as the tiny saw spun mere millimeters from my bulging flesh? Was it because it had quite simply come to this: My denial about my body was at an end? Was it because for the first time I was having severe doubts about my marriage? Was it that I never wanted a wedding band on my finger again? Was it that my finger was misshapen like those National Geographic photos of women who have disfigured themselves with tribal jewelry and the jeweler had to instruct me how to treat my finger over the weeks ahead, plunging it into ice, rubbing it, praying I had not done permanent damage?

How is it that a man becomes a sex offender? How is it that one's life comes to this? How is it that denial is so deep and the conscience so tucked away that someone gains pleasure from hurting an innocent? It is not about hurt then, it is about selfish desire, perhaps. It is about a desire as thoughtless and compulsive as eating a bag of chips, a package of cookies, half a pizza. Is that what it is, then?

My man with the pink stroller does not disappoint. He walks by as I am writing all of this. He looks sprightly and happier than usual, more handsome. The difference – it is obvious – is the presence of his wife. She strides out in front of him, her short cropped hair bouncing, her confident strides carrying her neat compact body down the sidewalk. My man wears a cap and an expensive looking black golf shirt and his gait is easier.

After they pass, a cardinal perches in my silk poinsettia hanging basket. I see him from where I sit at my mother's table. I can't believe the artificial foliage in my hanging basket fools him. Maybe he simply feels the attraction to a like color, the red silk petals. He turns to the side before flying away and I am a witness to the crown of his brilliant red head and his coral beak outlined by a line as black as a line of soot. 

January 9, 2009, 2:05 p.m.

I'm finishing this writing project. I have seen no sign of a sex offender. It is possible that he closets himself away in the house all day, the shutters closed, and keeps his car in the garage. Even though we live in a neighborhood in which houses are so close we can see each others' movements when curtains are drawn apart, it has been impossible for me to verify that the rooms next door are most definitely absent of human life. It is also impossible to deny a slight irritation at the closed blinds, as tight as teeth. Why were my expectations frustrated? But even more disturbing is to wonder why I now long for the fulfillment of my fears.

My man with the pink stroller walked by this morning sans wife. She must work or volunteer during the week. He looked ordinary again, and not as handsome. The love he felt for her had transformed him on that glorious Saturday I saw the cardinal and now he had reverted back to what he was.

I will never want a gun in the house again once the glock is finally gone. Hopefully it will go out this day, along with the Christmas tree. I will not put up the heavier drapes as I had planned. They would have provided some privacy, some protection, but they would have blocked the view as well, and I want to see, I want to look out. I want to know with my eyes the brightness of the day and the darkness of night and the neighbors that pass and the strangers that scare me and the birds who are drawn to fake flowers.


There is nothing extraordinary about me or my circumstances. I have no special power or distinction. The other day I recognized I might be doing my child harm by not going to church. I always knew this, but I am beginning to feel the edges of guilt I have denied for several years now. I prayed last night, after I had sung him his goodnight songs, that I would have the strength to do that which is hard and be the mother I have not been. 

neighborhood watch by Meg Sefton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

kindle happenings

A good Wednesday morning to you! I wanted to let you know if you received a certain email from Amazon saying that my account had been deactivated or my blog didn't follow the rules of something - and I wish they would separate out these things - that this is a temporary glitch to be ignored. True, I pulled out for a moment from Kindle when I was uncertain about how involvement in a short story blog will affect my ability to be published in other venues. If you will notice, the two stories currently on my blog have been published and publishing credits are duly noted and for the most part, this may be the wisest course.

But you may have received a note that read something like this. (I received this note too because of course, I subscribe to my own blog.)

"Hello from Amazon.com,

We are writing this to inform you that either the publisher for Among the Broken has stopped providing  Among the Broken to Amazon or the content of the blog no longer satisfies Amazons code of ethics and responsible publishing and therefore we are unable to deliver any further issues or updates. If you are in your 14-day free trial period, you will not be charged for your subscription. If you are past your free trial period, you will not be charged or will be refunded for the period you did not receive Among the Broken.

You can search for availability of this  publication in the Kindle store at a later time.

If you have any questions, please visit http://www.amazon.com/kindlesupport or contact our Kindle customer service team at 1-866-321-8851.

Thank you for subscribing to the Kindle Edition of Among the Broken.

Best regards,
The Amazon Kindle Team

Note: this e-mail was sent from a notification-only e-mail address that cannot accept incoming e-mail. Please do not reply directly to this message."


So, not to worry! I'm still here!

I do things like check my Amazon ranking for Kindle products and I guess sometime after this note went out "Among the Broken" slipped precipitously from the mid 80,000s to 244,000, something like that. Sure as true "writer" I'm not supposed to pay attention to stuff like that, but I'm human. (I was so proud of myself when the blog went to 9,000 at some point among the Kindle products. Again, I'm showing my true colors here! Oh well.)

I'll be back with a story in due time.

Meg

Deborah

(First appeared in Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression, vol. 2, issue 1)
   

When Curtis walked into the library straight up to your desk and your high forehead bent over a reference slip he knew what he was getting, being a man of few illusions. He wanted help with something simple but hard and this called for straightforward zeal. To demonstrate this, he wore black jeans, t-shirt, shoes. He needed a disciple, strong and true. He was not a man who would waste his efforts on some woman who had too much to lose by loving him. He had a cross with a wheel on it that weighed one hundred pounds. Would someone follow him and wipe the sweat off of his brow and refresh him with drink while he hauled it through town? He was going out to the places where women sold their bodies. Your Filipino boss who wore the flower on her dress twitched her bottom between the stacks. You left your desk to follow Jesus. Curtis had all the fire as in days of old when your father stood from the pulpit and the power and the glory showed and a tingling went over your skin like gooseflesh, except when this preacher was done he wheeled his cross to a hotel room and kissed you like you were his water. He laid you out and you were sure. He left the cross in your room. You were pure and intact. Dreams of white drifted down. A dress like snow, a crown of flowers.

***

You were not going back to your work at the library, where the homeless talked about electricity in the air, all around. It was strange how they always used to ask you for books, out of all the librarians there, and to you they spilled out their theories about invisible charges, as if you were some kind of conduit. Maybe your father made you that way when he shot you through with the Spirit and then left you empty or maybe Jesus made you vulnerable. It was the sad people who felt the love in you. You saw them coming, down a long row of books, their clothes slipshod and soiled, eyes darting like fish. No matter how high you piled the books on your desk, they found you and then they got you into the stacks and told you, forced on you, what they believed about the material world, its qualities visible and invisible, its causes and effects, existences and essences, their voices climbing to fever pitch, until you slipped them the thunderstorm book, somewhere between 551.5 and 551.6, the cover a dark sky and lightning bolt. That quelled them as if someone had wrapped them in a restraint.


You would not go back there. The tiny librarian who wore a polyester flower on her dress every day did not know anything about how you witnessed the words of the Holy issued from your father's mouth in a church just down the street. She only knew that you didn't fill out your reference request forms neatly so that the other librarians could read them. She's worked at the library for five years and just took her first vacation last year when the library forced her to. Some of the librarians said she still came in her jeans and did some paperwork but this was hard to imagine – the jeans part, not the part about coming in during a mandatory vacation. Every day you knew her, she wore hose and vinyl pumps and dresses with different patterns on them, sometimes a suit jacket if she had a department head meeting. She stood over you some nights and made you rewrite the reference slips. When she was not looking you slipped away to look up books on the Outer Banks, where your parents retired.


How bitter you have been. How you have despised the thought of your father playing golf with your mother in North Carolina. The indentation in the carpet where he used to stand and say goodbye to his parishioners with you was occupied by someone else every Sunday, someone you had never met. When you were the golden girl, you knew the secret place where your father kept his cup, a cup he would sip out of when everyone bowed to pray, right before the sermon. You used to feel its cool smoothness when you went up to the pulpit to play preacher. Who filled it before the service? Only that person and you knew of its existence. You pretended to sip and there was nothing there. Maybe it was a foretaste of what was to come, that you would get nothing, only air and memories.


Why was it that you held onto these dreams of when you were a girl? Was it because it was the last time you remember Jesus that solidly, as solidly as your father's knobby fingers, and his brown eyes kind and soft? You used to meet the copper Jesus in the columbarium on your lunch break and look for your father's face in the burnished cheek, the hollowed out eyes. Copper Jesus stood, no lap for sitting, and the hand he extended was far smaller than your own. You sat on the stone bench in front of the place where your brother's ashes were kept and wondered how your father could be thinking of his chip shot. You grabbed a knot of flowers from the feet of Jesus and scattered them, roots and all, at the foot of your brother's remains. There was no container for the flowers and you wished he were laid out in the ground, like people used to be. Your father helped design the columbarium and you had complained about the lack of flower holders, although by then it was too late. A redesign would involve a removal of the ashes and hence all kinds of permits and procedures. Perhaps no one had complained of it but you. No wonder no one had been winking at you when they came down the aisle, as a father might his daughter, or a groomsman his bride. You were always such a complainer.

***

On the second day of your discipleship, Curtis offered his mouth to yours. His breath was milky and sweet. You were lying on your back and in the hollow of your neck he placed something metal and small: a tiny silver ring with two hands clasping. More than the promise of marriage, it was a promise that bound you to the God of his mission. He held you like a lover, like Christ loved the church, and yes, you say, yes, yes. No longer were you the golden girl holding the sweaty hand of your father, sweaty from the long exertion in the high pulpit, sweaty when he shook the hands of the parishioners in the narthex.


You called your parents to tell them the good news. Your mother seemed not to hear. She did not know Curtis, did not recognize an engagement ring without a diamond. She described for you a party on a boat where there had been fire-eaters, magicians, a four-tiered chocolate fountain into which the guests dipped cake and fruit. Your mother, you were sure, had pulled your father into this. She had leaned on him until he no longer pounded on pulpits. It's called retirement she said when you complained, when you said he had a calling to preach the Word. You and your father, she said, with your notions and your dreamy dreams, your unrealistic expectations. You reminded yourself that she had lost a child, and sometimes you excused her. In the weeks after your brother's car crashed into the tree, your mother laid her head down on the spot where your brother had been found. She collected bits of glass and looked for small things that might have flown from the car.


On the day of your wedding, Curtis wore a tuxedo and his mother came too, dressed in soft pink, and so did his father, a man with a flat top, still from Navy days. Your parents did not come. It is all done improperly, most improper, objected your mother in that small mincing way. I love you honey, said your Dad. Then your Mom made him get off the phone. All the librarians were there except the Filipino who was likely adjusting her flower, somewhere in the stacks. Ms. Filipino would never marry, you heard the librarians saying, not if Deborah manages to pull this one off and that woman is trying so hard, twitching her backside around and laughing for the good looking men, taking her glasses off for them as soon as she sees them coming. I mean, Deborah of all people, they said, that forehead and that face, not trying to look good at all and then, boom, like grace, someone whisks her away.


The minister by Lake Eola wore a white robe, just like in your dreams, with a stole of intertwining vines. After you exchanged rings, the minister laid his hands over yours and they were warm and sweaty and his exertions made this more than his blessing on the marriage, but a testimony. Jane, the children's librarian, was baptized in the lake afterwards by her own request and this was proof to the minister that the ceremony had been more than the joining of two hearts but a sign of the Holy. Everyone had cake and sparkling grape juice. You were filled up and warm and sat around talking on the amphitheater stage close by the lake, you and your colleagues never having been close until that day - and now you could call them friends - and then someone got the idea to rent the swans that were really paddle boats with a swan facade and you with your new husband, you paddled around and then when you got to the fountain, you jumped in, your white dress floating around you, your feet slipping free of your shoes and everyone jumped in and you all laughed and floated and lost your shoes as if you were ascending.

***

You took up the cross when Curtis died. Someone avenging the trade of prostitution shot him. You sat in the dim apartment you shared with him for a scant three weeks. You ate the last can of vegetables and then you took the cross to the place where your father had once breathed out the Spirit. On Sunday morning, you wheeled it by the windows so that the parishioners would look out. The cross had a squeaky wheel and was not easy to listen to. You called your parents, the last call you made before your phone service was cut. You told them what you were doing for your Lord, your husband's mission. Your mother complained that you never call early enough, always when they were in bed and yet you were beginning to see what she was about and what she was up against and you told her no matter what, you would always be her daughter. She had been trying to rid herself of you, to be free from pain.


At three months, you could not ignore the change, the cessation of cycles, your growing stomach. Your parents came and you were in their good graces again. It was painfully transparent why: You had fulfilled their desires for a grandchild, but you didn't care anymore about your principles and battles. The hormones and God made you giddy, and you made the Filipino with the flower the godmother. Why not? You knew she will do the right thing by your child. She was so thrilled, she cried and became serious and gave up her twitching. A man finally fell in love with her velvety cheek and the large dark eyes behind her glasses.



You and your parents stood by the baptismal font, along with Angelina, Phillip's godmother. On the other side of a long row of windows where you used to wheel your cross was the columbarium. After the service, you took the cup that was in its secret place behind the pulpit. When no one was looking, you filled it with water from the font, asking God's forgiveness. You poured it on the flowers at the feet of the once ineffectual copper Jesus. Small though he was, he seemed more of a comfort.



Your fire will be a cooling one and in the stone court, your brother will reside in a believer's sleep.







Deborah by Meg Sefton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sunshine State

(First appeared Halloween '09 in Colored Chalk's "Decalogue" issue, no. 10. Check it out on line.)

He jumped off the train and went into the station, the conductor in the gray cap. He was shriveled and hunched, like a shrimp. It didn't seem to Julie he'd be capable of doing much more than riding up and down the rails, taking tickets, but he always had a coin for Buddy, a penny the train had squashed between Mt. Dora and Winter Park. Buddy fingered the oblong copper and put it to his lips as if it were a thick shaving of chocolate. Julie slapped his hand. The heat rising up from the pavement made her short.

On Wednesdays, she and Buddy came down to the station. They stood on the tracks and waited for the rails to vibrate with the motion of the oncoming train. It made Buddy coo to feel the shimmying metal tickle the soles of his feet and he put his face next to the track, his baby flesh on the forged steel. Julie tested herself to see how long she could wait before she pulled him off, how long she could stand it. She knew it was wrong to tempt fate this way but it felt as if the palm trees and the bushes and the sun itself held her. And then one time she saw the light of the train and she quickly, with a pounding chest, snatched him by the waist. After the train stopped, the shrimp man came to where they were standing. He had eyes with uneven patches and he seemed to be watching her through a pool of opaque pebbles. She thought he was going to say something, but then he gave Buddy a coin and brushed his check with a curved finger.

Julie liked wearing clothes from the thirties and forties. She shopped online and found dresses with flouncy sleeves and slingback shoes with open toes and platforms. She liked vintage hats and wore them to the station when she brought Buddy. It was not a place she was likely to see anyone from the Country Club or anyone her husband Frank knew. Frank asked her why she didn't go to Neiman Marcus or Bloomingdale's. She liked looking like ladies from old movies, she told him. Her mother died when she was thirteen. Though sometimes her husband Frank wished she were like other women, he liked the way she wore things only dead people had worn. People didn't invite them to many parties and if they did, they kept their distance and talked about them behind their highball glasses. Her mother died in a boating accident. Her father had been driving the boat. This was what happened and this was what people knew. That and the fact that her mother was from money and had lots of it. Now her father drove all over town in a restored Model T.

Julie took Buddy to the roses when the train wasn't due. He pricked his baby fingers on the thorns. She read the signs which told them their names: Louis Philippe, Belinda's Dream, Old Blush, China Doll, Clotilde. Sometimes he grabbed a fistful of petals and she slapped his knuckles. An old man usually watched her from the bench. He watched the seam on the back of her hose and he smiled when she bent to slap the baby and her rear jiggled. He wanted to reach out and grab her but he knew she was too fine for him, too fine, that much he knew, though he wore his Agua Brava and a linen suit, crumpled as a napkin. She knew he watched her. She didn't care. It was better than the college boys who whistled at her under their breath and told her what they'd like to do with her right there in front of Buddy, his pie face intent on the pink petals in his sweaty palm. She watched the boys, her eyes following them while her body stayed still. She stood in the rose garden until they were well past.

Last Wednesday Julie wore her hat that was open at the top. It showed the hair she had dyed a bright auburn. Buddy wore the coveralls with the choo choo. The suitcase was hidden in the bushes. It was vintage with straps like belt buckles. After the train pulled up, Julie scooped something into the suitcase. At that time of day, Julie had the privacy to do whatever she wanted. There was no one at the station. The train ran by the provision of the federal government. When the pebble-eyed man died, someone else would replace him, someone equally infirm. It didn't matter who took the tickets. No one was there to buy them. There were no bags to lift or arrange in the rack over the seat, no ladies to hoist up the stairs.

Julie expected to ride that day. She had come from a different time, before Buddy, before Frank even, before modern clothes made women look like men, like whores. She wanted to take the train to Hollywood. She wanted to be in the movies. She wanted to be a star.

The shrimp man tore her ticket. "Where's the boy?"

"Resting," she said, as she lifted her bag into the overhead rack.

He gave her the pressed coin. She put it to her lips, blotting her lipstick. "You keep it," she said. He turned. The back of his neck was a hollowed out place.

She closed her eyes and felt an ache in her belly. She drifted between the pain and her dreams. She was walking in a warm summer shower on a California beach. She would not think of the boy. She would not think of Frank.

They got her in Mt. Dora. The shrimp man had seen the first red drop fall from her bag onto her hat brim and blossom into a dark peony. He stood in the back and watched the incessant dripping of blood, like rain falling from trees. They would have to replace the seats. He called ahead to the next station to alert them as he slumped on his bench in the caboose. He felt for the paperwork for his retirement in his jacket. It was in there somewhere.


Sunshine State by Meg Sefton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

back again

I have wavered, quite honestly, on my commitment to the Kindle blog because as a writer who has always hoped to eventually be published in literary journals, this is the way leading in the opposite direction. (I know, I know. In an earlier post I said I only wanted to find readers, not necessarily be published in journals, but some days, many days, I want both, and why not.) If a short story writer wants a collection published she needs to demonstrate a solid publishing track record of said stories, and the publishing needs to take place in journals. There are several journals who are wonderfully open to publishing work that has been seen on the internet, but for the most part, the guidelines specify "no published work," and this includes stories published on a website, a blog, etc. Therefore, I tie my own hands by continuing to offer my stories here. But still, I like it. It keeps me working. It keeps me polishing stories I have and working on new stories I want to expand. It keeps my brain hopping, even if I'm worried if it may force me to hop unnaturally fast to meet expectations.

However, since Monday, I think, my blog has been unofficially shut down as I have been considering my options. At a certain point, you may have received a notice letting you know of its demise, although I don't think this has happened yet since its deactivation was still in progress as of this morning. But here I am again, publishing. I woke up this morning and told my husband "I'm keeping the blog." He has heard all the arguments for and against keeping it up and this new turn has perhaps driven him away for a few hours of sanity. I urged him to go buy something at the fishing store. He is eating lunch with his mother.

Since I deleted my on-line blog and all copies of my stories went with it, I will be re-establishing it. If you see some stories again here, please be patient. I will try not to let a previously posted story stand in for the story of the week - or two. And now that I've run through a lot of my finished pieces, you will get to see me invent whole-cloth, a process that usually takes several months since my stories tend toward the longer side. I am asking for patience concerning details and even changes to stories. I think of this blog as something that grows and shifts. Some stories are complete to me and do not require changes. Some, in response to editorial criticism, may be subject to a new treatment and in this case, I may post a completely different treatment of the story in a separate post if the changes are drastic enough to warrant this, or if I just want to experiment.

I thank you for hanging in there with me. It seems the only way to learn about this process is to experience it and see what feels right. Perhaps that's the only way to get through the world anyway. I am revisiting a story now and hope to have it posted soon, maybe even by tomorrow. In the meantime, I'll get some old stories posted while my husband is away and will not mind me hogging every computer for documents I have stored hither thither and yon. And perhaps I will have new visitors stopping by who have not read some of these yet. They vary quite a bit so if there's one you don't like, keep reading. There's always more to come.

Peace to all on this good Thursday.

Your fickle blogger,

Meg