written by Patrick Gaughan
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illustrated by Hanna S. Abi-Hanna
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Figment I

Jerry’s Birthday Wish



I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant. - Ursula K. Le Guin

If Billy from Manor Drive came over, he would want to play wiffleball, and Jerry didn’t feel like chasing the ball around the yard all day.  Wiffleball’s no fun with two people.  Tom from four doors down might be home, but he was much more interested in playing police games with plastic guns.  They would run around Jerry’s brick house, their little mouths making laser sounds, “Pew!  Pew!  Pew!,” until the inevitable argument would ensue: “You’re dead – I shot you a thousand times!”  “No way, you missed me” and so on.  There was Charlie from school, who had invited Jerry to his first sleepover a few weeks ago, but Charlie liked monster movies and Jerry almost shat himself having to sleep in the dark that night.

After this deliberation, Jerry decided to spend his seventh birthday alone.

“You’re sure?” his concerned mother replied.  “Your grandparents are coming for cake and ice cream.  You don’t want to have a friend over?”

“No,” said Jerry, as he lifted his bowl to his mouth to slurp the excess milk from his Rice Krispies.  He polished off a Flintstone vitamin with the last of his orange juice.

“I don’t have time today.  I need to concentrate on my birthday wish,” he informed his mother, and he retired up the stairs to his room, his sanctuary.

Inside were four tan walls, a window, a dresser, a desk, a closet door which he always kept closed so monsters who lived there wouldn’t get him, and a bed pushed against the wall to maximize play space in the center of the room.  All these things were fine, but to Jerry, the crown jewel of the collection was always the spread of blue carpet.  His favorite toys were his pirate figures, and that carpet was his ocean.

There the waves smashed on cliffs as ships cannoodled through coves, and the wind flapped a giant skull and crossbones.  Crew members scurried about the deck in their bandanas and peglegs, battening down hatches and spying ships off the starboard bow.  An entire afternoon would spill by with Jerry holding the little pirates in his little hands, his legs Indian-style atop the vast blue sea. His crew would climb the mountainous peaks of his bedposts in search of treasure.  From his desk, they would plot their next raid on the uniformed colonial soldiers, then leap with legs churning and flailing onto the enemy fort, slashing off heads as they landed.

Jerry wanted to be a pirate more than anything, and William Fly, the captain of the ship “Fame’s Revenge,” was his idol, his little plastic prophet.  When Jerry’s figurine William Fly climbed the mast, Jerry felt the splinters on his fingers.  Fly wore the coolest blue bandana and a ripped up shirt striped in red and black.  Heroic brown hair fell into his eyes.  And tonight, Jerry would use his birthday wish to ask the real Captain Fly to take him away.  He’d practiced the words of the wish for months, to be sure he’d get it right.  “I wish to be a member of Captain Fly’s crew.”

That night, Jerry’s mother shut off the lights, his stepfather held a camera, his grandparents smiled, his two-year-old sister, Laney, leaned in and they all sang in unison.  The candles illuminated Jerry’s face, turning it orange and evil.  He heard the first “Happy Birthday to…” and then he stopped hearing.  Gulls crowed and he felt the waves splash his cheeks and he smelt fresh gun powder.  All the possessions from his room at home sat behind him on the deck of the “Fame’s Revenge.”  He feverishly shovelled them up into his arms, as many as he could carry, and heaved them overboard.  His green toothbrush, piles of T-shirts, souvenirs from his family’s trips to Atlantic City.  Everything into the water.  He peered into the sea.  The last of the old Happy Meal toys and pairs of shoes bobbed once, twice on the surface until the water swallowed every last item.  Jerry wished as hard as he could, recited the words exactly as planned, inhaled enough air to sustain him until his eighth birthday, and blew out the candles.

Later, the wind danced the drawn blinds in his room, grabbing them by the neck, then slamming them against the window frame.

“You’re sure you can sleep with that noise?  Why don’t I close it a little?” said Jerry’s mother as she tucked him in.

“No, it needs to stay open.”  Because he’s coming for me.

She pulled the blankets to his chin.  “So what did you wish for?  You seemed so focused with your candles.”

“If I tell you, it won’t come true.”

“Such a secretive little boy.  Is there anything on your mind, Jerry?  Your father and I were a bit concerned when you didn’t want any friends at your party.  Is everything okay?”

“Yep, everything’s fine.”

“Well, if you need to talk to someone, you can talk to me or Dad, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I love you, Jerry.”

“I love you, too, Mom.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

Hours later, he still lay in the dark, waiting, eyes open and lost in the rhythmic banging of the blinds.  “They’re coming.  I know it,” he whispered.  He tried and tried, but eventually his eyelids fell and he was asleep.

The door creaked.

“Captain Fly?”

Hallway light spilled in.  A shadow crawled the wall.  The door opened further.  A human outline.  Could it be?

“Captain Fly!”  Jerry lept towards the shadow.  It grew a tricornered hat and drew a sword.

“I have you now, Fly!”  A colonial soldier jabbed at Jerry, and he darted against the wall, narrowly avoiding the blade.  Jerry yanked a broadsword from his hip, engaging the soldier.  “En garde!”

Jerry forced his foe into the hallway, their blades shrieking on contact, their feet shuffling for position.  Jerry spied the stairs in the corner and lured the soldier towards them.

“Tonight, Fly, you die!”  Down came the soldier’s sword, slicing through the bannister.

Jerry dipped to the side, kicking his enemy from behind.  The soldier’s momentum tumbled his body down the stairs, his red coat flailing until he thumped into a broken heap at the bottom.  Jerry, pleased with himself, returned the sword to his hip.  Then he heard the soldier crying.

Down the stairwell, Laney, in her pony pajamas, lay unmoving except for her mouth bellowing.  Jerry ran into his room, slammed and locked the door.

He heard his parents scramble out, probably in bathrobes. “Oh my God, Laney!  What happened?”  He heard her rat him out between wheezes and wails, and them trying, shaking the doorknob and then pounding, “Jerry!  Jerry, you get out here!  Open this door!  You tell me what happened right now!”

But Jerry wasn’t hearing again.  He was lying supine on his floor, floating, weaving with the waves, gazing at the sky, allowing the water to consume him.

—-

Figment II

Hey Tom!



It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. -Henry David Thoreau

Tonight, Tom, I can see the past completely, even though I wasn’t there.  I know I came with you last year, but this year there was a picnic with Debra’s family and honestly, I thought I’d grown out of weekends camping in the knoll of the Pocono Raceway, motors circling us as we tried to stave off the real world by slugging back Coors, can after can.  So when you came to my door to plead, “Come on!  One last time, just climb in the back, Debra won’t care,” I sent you back empty-handed.  I waved goodbye from the porch as you slid into that same old Volkswagon Bus, Bill next to you, hitting the gas, the horn tooting “So Long!,” and you snagging Can #1 from the cooler and Pop!

Now I see you more often, but you’re a ghost-man, Tom.  Let me play back that weekend for you.  I see you and Bill jabbing away, clanking the cans together as you roll north up Highway 83 guzzling, Jimmy Page jostling the windows as you razz me behind my back, “Jer-Bear’s lost his cool!  The ball and chain’s bringing him down!” I know, I know.

Saturday hits, the cars blurring by.  You and Bill spinning.  The cans and the weed and the new friends in mesh hats and torn shirts, with those cars ripping all around. 
Time to leave that night and Bill calls out, “I’ll drive!”

“You sure, man?”

“Yeah, yeah.”  You curl up, head against the window as the traffic disperses.  And you didn’t wake up, Tom.  From the time you left that parking lot until you crawled into my head.  I see you sleeping like a baby as the night wears on, this time no music, no drunken-fever glee.  Bill’s head nods on the highway and he catches himself, then nods again until he doesn’t see the tractor trailer whose driver parked on the side of the road to sleep for the night.  Neither of you see it, but I see it now: the reflectors of the bumper glowing yellow and red in the VW’s white headlights, trying to scream at both of you.  Anything to get your attention, to open your eyes.  I see the truck as a tiny spot that’s growing and growing as the VW’s tires ease to the wrong side of the white line.

Those reflectors were right in front of you, Tom.  I see them.

That night, Tom, your dad called my house, woke Debra and me up and told me.  I was shirtless in my bed, but somehow drove to the hospital.  Bill was there, and your parents, the nurses, people.  Your dad went outside to smoke.  I went with him to get the hell out of there.  He leaned against a railing, blowing smoke and cursing Bill, trying not to cry until a tear would slip and I would pretend not to notice, for his sake.  I wanted to tell him that I saw everything, the whole weekend, and that it wasn’t Bill’s fault, but it didn’t seem appropriate out there under the hazy light in the hospital entryway.  The tinted bulbs turned the sidewalk orange.  Then some employee walked out with facial hair like yours, Tom, and I could of sworn it was you.

“Hey Tom!” I called out.  The guy didn’t acknowledge me.

Your dad turned to me, “Wait.  What’d you say?”

“Nothing.”

That was the first one, Tom, but there have been others.  I saw you buying Cup Noodles and orange juice at Weis Market.  Downing whiskey shots with some guys I didn’t know at The Eagle.  Playing second base for the Phillies.  Pumping gas into a Chevy, leering from street corners, at work asking me, “Jerry, what do you want for lunch?”

“Hey Tom!” I yell out.  Every time.

One time I did it in my living room.  You were reading the paper on my couch on a Saturday afternoon.  You put the paper in your lap and you were Debra.  Staring back at me, frightened.

“Jerry, why can’t you talk to me about this?”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing, it’s a big, weird problem.  If you can’t talk to me, fine.  But you need to find somebody.  You need to just let this out.  It’s been too long.”

The next day, Tom, I made an appointment with my parents’ priest, Father Mike.  I know, I know.

“I’m glad you came, Jerry.  Let’s go for a walk.”  We paced laps around the hall behind the church until all hours with me spilling it all, and whenever I ran out of words, he’d ask me something like “Do you blame Bill?” and I’d be off again, babbling my brain out, spewing the contents of my closet on the floor.  I told him everything, all about seeing you everywhere, and playing that weekend in my head, and how I don’t blame Bill and never will.

I told him about how that night, the night it happened, I drove to the impound lot and found the busted up VW Bus.  How I didn’t have to open the passenger door because it was flapping wide open and how I reached under the seat and took the weed.  I knew it would be there, I know you, Tom, and the last thing I wanted was the police to find it and send Bill, with his broken ribs and toothless mouth, to jail.  I don’t blame Bill.  I told Father Mike how I slipped the baggie in my pocket and left the VW behind for the last time with the sky all huge like I bet it is out West and how I knew you were proud of me.

“That’s what best friends are for,” said Father Mike as he draped his comforting arm on me.  We finally walked back to his office, and he said, “Goodnight, Jerry” and I said

“Goodnight, Father Mike.”

“If you need anything else, you come talk to me.”

I shut the door to his office and the weight on me since your dad woke me up that night left, all except for my guilt about hiding from Father Mike that I never want another best friend.  Debra’s brother always invites me out for breakfast with this buddies on Saturdays and Charlie, my new business partner, really tries, on fishing weekends and at happy hours, but I won’t betray you, Tom.  Don’t worry.  I’m okay enough that Debra and my parents and everybody don’t worry anymore, but I don’t want you worrying either.  I know you wouldn’t want me abandoning you.  I know, Tom.  Just chug a Coors and relax.  I see you.

—-

Figment III

What You Think About When You’re 73



My alphabet starts with this letter called yuzz.  It’s the letter I use to spell yuzz-a-ma-tuzz.  You’ll be sort of surprised what there is to be found once you go beyond ‘Z’ and start poking around! ~Dr. Seuss

When you’re seventy-three and she spends her evenings in the living room and you spend yours in the basement, you need to break things up so you think about being young.  When I crawl in next to Debra, who has already been snoozing for two hours, I pull the covers close, shut my eyes, and think of Abbie.

Down the empty hallway of my high school one day after a Peer Counseling meeting, I catch up to Abigail Morliny on the way to her locker.  Bill used to date her, all her freckles and curly red hair, and we’d asked him, “Are red heads more fun?” and he’d said, “Hell yeah!” but all that had been over for awhile now.  So, partly because I think she’s the cutest girl that no one really fussed over, partly because I’m almost sure she’ll say, “Yes,” and mostly because I know Susan Kellar, my crush for years, is going with Charlie Seidel, I tap Abbie on the shoulder and ask, “Hey Abbie, do you have a date for the Snowflake Ball?”

“No, not yet.”

“Do you want to go with me?”

“Yeah, Jerry, that would be great.”

“Cool.”

And even though I was really only looking for a date to the dance, Abbie starts treating me like a boyfriend.  The next day, when I see her in the hallway, I smile sheepishly, but Abbie takes my arm and asks, “Hey you, how’s your day?” in a tone a bit deeper and stronger than I’d noticed before.  When we arrive at the door to Mrs. Carrol’s English class, she kisses me on the cheek saying, “Call me tonight,” hands me a piece of paper, and shoves me playfully into the class, the paper reading, “I’ll be home after seven, 545-4787, Abbie,” written in green ink, the ‘i’ dotted with a heart.

Now she’s everywhere.  Not the surface Abbie who flatters teachers and wears her hair up, but the Abbie with curls who grabs me by the tie and kisses me harshly, swerving her tongue without worrying about teeth.  Her kisses don’t tease.  They’re determined, purposeful.

She asks me, “What’s your favorite part of a girl?”  I can’t really say breasts because Abbie doesn’t have much there, but her legs are knockouts, so that’s my answer.
“Is that right?  Jerry, the leg-man?” She grips my arm stronger and wears short dresses the rest of the week, only for me.

For my seventeenth birthday, Abbie comes early to help my mother set up napkins and plates and chips, soda, pretzels.  Once everyone leaves, she gives me a wrapped present, a blue sweater that looks too small and isn’t my style and I know I’ll never wear it.  “Thank you, I really like it.”

“Good, I’m glad.”  A minute later, the sweater’s on the floor and so is her shirt and I see freckles everywhere. My fingers clench the red curl nest.  They weave through red mazes, grabbing and possessing.

She touches me.  I hadn’t been touched before.  Her hands aren’t smooth or graceful or seamless like I’d envisioned.  They’re coarse, they pull and shake and plead with me, “Love me, Jerry, love me!”  She doesn’t say it, but I feel it.  You can’t own me, Abbie.  I won’t let you.  I’m tense.  I shrink.

The Snowflake Ball is Saturday.  I’ll take her, but I’m determined not to try.  I even forget her corsage at my house on purpose.  Her father answers the door and tells me she’s in the next room, waiting.

When you’re an old man lying in bed watching a memory play that’s almost sixty years old, all that remains are still photographs in your head.  You piece them together with remembered feelings and make a flipbook, and if some photos are missing, you replace them with composites that are ten times better and more romantic than the reality ever was.  When you’re seventy-three, the past is cinematic.

I round the corner to the living room.  She stands before me.  It’s all orange and twilight bounces off the couches and she’s imperfectly beautiful.  My Abbie.  Her black dress would be classic on anyone else, but on Abbie, with her freckly shoulders exposed and her hair up, I see it strangling her.  She smiles because she’s done this for me, tried her best to look traditionally beautiful, tried to look like Susan Kellar because she knows that’s what I’d rather have.  But I know the real Abbie is all love and freckles and legs and curls, and in that moment, she wins.  I finally love her.

This is where the pictures stop.  The rest isn’t a vision, only facts.  A week later, I called Abbie over to my house and broke up with her.  She felt things so much deeper than I ever could, and it was scary, suffocating.  She left a four page letter in my locker pleading for me to take her back, saying, “What is it?  Talk to me.  We can change it.  Talk to me.”  I never replied because I didn’t know how.

I don’t have photos in my head of Abbie hiding tears in my bedroom or of the night Tom told me he scored with her and I didn’t talk to him for months or of two years later, when we were out of school, and Bill told me he heard she was already pregnant and living with some guy in Chicago.  Those are simply events that happened that I remember.  But the things that change you brand themselves in, the extreme highs and lows, the pirouettes and ambushes, and they loop and fight and morph on their own.  Colors thicken, words amplify, crashes deepen, love swells, and memories that were never there bubble to life.

These daydreams are the last thing keeping me real.  I have a grandson, he prefers the full Jerome to Jerry, and I know to him I’m no more than an endearing old fart carving up a turkey on Thanksgiving, laughing at my own stupid jokes.  When I walk in my neighborhood with a scarf on my throat and feel the seasons changing and my legs slowing, I know he’s right.  So to keep afloat I need to know those curls are still as red as I remember, even though I’m sure they greyed years ago in some dot of a Midwestern town.  When you’re seventy-three and you don’t feel like watching TV anymore, that’s what you think about.

I roll over in bed and steal some covers back from Debra, who mumbles “Goodnight, Jerry” in her sleep.

“Goodnight, Debra.”

Goodnight, Tom.

Goodnight, Abbie.  I’ll see you tomorrow.

Tags: Memory Patrick Gaughan Hanna S. Abi-Hanna Car crashes Ursula K. Le Guin Dr. Suess Henry David Thoreau Short Story fiction
February 7, 2009 at 12:27pm ∞

By Lillian Pontius-Goldblatt

She was watching a science fiction TV show with her grandmother in the house on the very steep hill. The night before she’d lain on her back on top of the sheets on her bed listening to the saddest song on a very sad album over and over. She’d cried some, but not very much or for very long (though the music was up loud enough, no one would have heard; she made sure of that). This was the first time her grandma had come over; they had only moved into the small house on the very steep hill a week before.

She was learning to read tarot cards. She had read her grandmother’s cards and the Death card had shown. She had assured the older woman that the position of the card, along with its ambiguous connotations, points towards change and adversity rather than what its namesake suggests. Her sense of death, its reality, was much like that card’s. To her the difference between death and leaving was a narrow gulch. She was 12.

“Con? Do you smell anything?”

She, Connie, sniffed the air without looking away from the science fiction show. She shook her head no. The space ship’s doors opened with a hiss and a shapely woman with a fish bowl on her head stepped out a long, red leg, her foot meeting the pebbly surface of the alien planet with a crunch.

“I smell gas.”

Connie shrugged and her grandmother leaned forward on the couch.

“Can we wait until the show is over gramma? Ten more minutes.”

“Con, honey, I’m going to go make a phone call.”

Connie’s grandmother called 911 and told the operator she smelled gas. They told her to leave the house immediately, as they are wont to do.

“No, Con, it’s dangerous. We have to leave.”

“Fine!” Connie ran upstairs.

“Conchetta! Where are you going?” Her grandmother’s heart began to flutter. As a young person, an early career woman and late mother, she’d frequently known the anxiety that made her feel as if her chest was a vacuum sucking the lint from her head. She felt this again now with her granddaughter running upstairs into a house slowly filling with toxic fumes. “Conchetta!”

As the old woman pressed down the panic, Connie came clomping down the stairs, looking into a black box the size of a loaf of bread.

It was a battery powered TV on which she continued to watch the science fiction show.

**

Connie’s father came home at 11:30. His mother had not called him about the gas leak, so as he pulled up to the small house on the very steep hill, he was surprised to find his mother and daughter huddled on the stoop, their faces flickering in the light of the tail end of a nightly news program broadcasting from the bread sized TV.

A gas man had come. It was something having to do with the pilot light. The man had fixed it, but the girl’s grandmother, his mother, had not felt safe bringing her back into the house, still smelling the way it did.

This moment, seeing his mother and beautiful daughter on the three and a half step stoop on the steep hill, wrapped in the rainbow afghan Connie had won in a Christmas raffle, is what made the decision obvious.

**

Since Greg and Fleur had separated, Connie had missed quite a few days of school. Her teachers had been notified of the situation and alternatives were proposed. Connie was loath to do the work they sent home and most of the teachers made allowances for that also. Most.

She’d missed so many days, on her own accord and her parents’, that when Greg announced that they’d be driving to Memphis on Monday and he wasn’t sure exactly when they’d be back, she barely flinched. Academically, the year was already a wash.

“We’ll go on vacation, just a little one, a couple of days, a week maybe, we just need a little vacation.”

“What’s in Memphis, dad?”

“History’s in Memphis, Conchetta! Elvis!”

**

The first thing Greg had done after he moving out of the house in which he lived with Fleur and their daughter was trade in the car. The only way he could get a comparable quality vehicle (efficient, foreign, with modern amenities) was to switch from automatic to manual. Though he had learned to drive on a manual transmission pick-up truck in the early mall parking lots of his youth, he hadn’t driven one in years, and had forgotten the difficulties living on a very steep hill can present to one unaccustomed to driving in that fashion.

Connie was still too young to be thinking about her driving but he worried that he was making a bad impression, always dinking the neighbor’s bumpers.

“Why did you buy a new car, dad? The old one was nicer.”

“No, honey, this one is nicer. It’s a manual transmission.”

“What does that mean? Why is that nicer?”

“As a driver you have more control, you can really feel yourself driving the car.”

Connie rolled her eyes.

**

“I packed for four days for you. We can always do laundry if we need to.”

“You packed for me? What did you pack?” Connie unzipped the suitcase and began pulling out t-shirts and underpants. “Dad, I hate all this stuff. Why did you pack for me? I’m not a little kid.”

Greg held up a pair of jeans splattered with orange paint.

“I thought you liked these.”

“Ugh, I haven’t worn those for years.”

“Fine, you pack. We’re leaving in the morning.”

**

Greg meant to leave very early. He had called up to Connie several times after hearing her alarm go off and brought his bags out to the car, along with a bag of the fruit and crackers and beef jerky he’d bought the night before.

“You dressed?” He rapped his knuckles on her door. “Connie?” He opened the door. At the foot of the bed was the bag he’d packed for her while she was at her mother’s the day before. Half of its contents were strewn across the floor; some new items had been tossed into the suitcase. Connie was asleep under a mound of blankets, the morning radio personalities yammering on at an obscene volume.

“Conchetta! You need to get up now! We should be on the road by now.”

He tore the blanket from her head and began shoving the clothes on the floor into the suitcase.

“You are so inconsiderate!” he yelled as she pulled the blanket back over her head, “so irresponsible!” He tore the cover from her hands. “Rude, Connie this is rude. I just want to do something nice!”

Conchetta climbed out of bed and pushed past him, entering the bathroom across the hall and slamming the door behind her.

“Ten minutes, Connie, ten minutes then we’re leaving, whether you’re ready or not.”

**

The highway heading west out of the city was bumper-to-bumper traffic. There is an inelegance to being stuck in traffic next to someone with whom you have been recently fighting: a forced intimacy, combined with a common and immense enemy. Connie turned up the radio. Greg honked at people that hadn’t done anything wrong.

As they crested a small hill they could see the bottleneck.

“I knew it had to be an accident. It’s not rush hour. Can you see?”

“It looks like a tractor trailer. It’s something big.”

They inched closer to the accident. Everyone had stopped honking at one another; there was a universal craning of necks.

“Yeah, it’s a truck,” Connie said, reaching up and slowly opening the moonroof. She undid her seat belt and hoisted herself up through the window in the top of the car.

“Careful, Connie.” Greg put is hand on her side. After a moment, she dropped back into her seat. There was a look of surprise and mirth on her face.

“A truck tipped over and spilled trampolines all over the road.”

“Trampolines?”

“The small ones, for kids, a million of them.”

As they squeezed past in the one open lane, the truck driver sat with his head in his hands on the back of an ambulance talking with a middle-aged police officer. Behind him a young officer bounced on one of the lost trampolines, directing traffic with a flickering road flare.

Father and daughter were both bullheaded, and refused to laugh aloud.

**

“I’m hungry and I have to go to the bathroom.”

“We’ve only been on the road for an hour.”

“You didn’t let me have any breakfast.”

“You should have woken up earlier.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Have an apple.” Greg reached behind his seat and pulled out the bag of snacks.

“I don’t want an apple, I want lunch.”

“Have an apple now. I know a place we can stop in half an hour.”

**

The place Greg knew was a diner twenty minutes from the highway in a small town called Symphony.

“You might have been too young to remember,” he said, “but I worked in this town for a little while.”

It was the parking lot that Connie remembered. Several houses before, there was a photograph that had hung in the foyer of the three of them in that parking lot. In the picture Connie was four or five, her mother on the left and her father on the right, each held one of her thin ankles. She hung upside down between them, laughing riotously, her small pink shirt drooping down exposing a round child’s belly. Behind them was the row of strange, bulbous lampposts that skirted the restaurant’s entrance.

**

By midday they were in the heart of the mountains, and still a long way from Memphis. Even in the full light of day the atmosphere was that of restless ghosts.

After the meal, the tension dissipated between father and daughter.

‘This was a good idea,’ Greg thought to himself. He imagined the clot that had been building in his heart was beginning to dissolve. Connie had drifted off to sleep, lulled by the rocking of the car. Before closing her eyes, though, she too felt the noiseless, ephemeral threat of badness and pain begin to drift away.

It was a long time before she woke up. Greg worried for a while, about taking time off from work, about Connie. He thought of Fleur. They had driven through the mountains once. She was from a small town further south. He’d met her family, that’s why they’d driven through the mountains. Turning a sharp corner Greg abruptly pulled off the road and onto the rocky shoulder.

He stroked Connie’s arm to wake her and nodded for her to get out of the car with him.

Their feet crunching the gravel was the only sound as they walked to the edge of the cliff, and when they stopped to look out at the curving body of the land, it was silent.
It was early spring and the white, green leaves were soft and small, rippling like cilia, feeling and smelling and understanding the world with tiny, ticklish fingers.

Greg felt the clot again in his chest. His shoulders shook, quivered under the wisps of cloud. He was not thinking of his daughter at all, though, until she took his hand and they stood together.

The drop was mighty, the rock below them ribbed with dynamite tracks where the hill had been blown apart to make room for the highway. Fear rose in Greg and he gave Connie’s hand a tug away from the ledge. The small, quick movement knocked them both into their bodies on the side of the road.

“Dad, are we going to make it to Memphis tonight?”

Greg dropped his daughter’s hand and scratched the small beard he had been cultivating in the last months.

“I’m not sure, kiddo.” They climbed back into the car and drove again, quietly.

**

Connie was telling her father about a boy at school who wore an eye patch and how the other kids made fun of him, how they called him a pirate and said “Aar” when he walked past. She also told him about a girl who was very pretty but wasn’t popular, and she couldn’t tell why.

“Are you popular, Con?”

She shrugged. “No, not really, well a little, more than other people.”

Since Greg and Fleur separated and Connie had begun missing school, she had become more outspoken. While it was not something she could easily tap while with her father (particularly in the recent past), Connie had a sharp wit, a rarity among girls her age. It was this wit, and its sudden, pervasive vocalization, that had brought about her new popularity. She said hurtful things to fellow students, to teachers, but they were funny things also so they were excused, for the most part.

“She’s going through a hard time now,” they would say in the teachers’ lounge. “She won’t be like this forever. You remember how the youngest Carmine boy was when her dad ran off.”

As her luck would have it, girls her age see meanness as an attribute of the upper class. This trait of hers had brought her to the attention of the small circle of students who spent their free time at the mall, talking on their cell phones.

Connie talked about her teachers, Mr. Stein the slave-driver, Mr. Colfax the senile, Mrs. Raddler the benevolent.

“There is a project we have to do by the end of the year. A research paper on whatever we want.”

“What are you going to do yours on?”

“Oh, I don’t know, divorce, maybe.”

The clot in Greg’s chest, which Connie’s talking had massaged almost entirely away, suddenly turned into a stone.

“Connie, I…”

“No, dad, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m doing my project on ghosts, anyway. The divorce thing was just a thought. I already started it.”

“Ghosts?”

“The ghosts of our town.”

“There are ghosts in our town?”

“There are ghosts everywhere. People haunt places where bad things happen and bad things happen everywhere.”

“You’ll have to let me read it when you’re done.”

Greg was breathing heavily in an effort to move the rock from where it rested behind his breastplate. He had lowered his voice half an octave, in an attempt to keep it from breaking apart.

The sunlight was reddening. It was not going down yet, but stuck in the place in the sky where the shadows it creates are long.

“I need to get a coffee, let’s stop and stretch our legs.”

**

In the bathroom of the coffee shop chain they found just off the highway, Greg stared at his reflection for a long time. He closed his eyes and reconstructed his daughter’s face as she said the word ‘divorce.’ How entirely without strength she must feel, he thought, how entirely without control, without love. He opened his eyes and felt sick. You cannot make this not hurt her. He rubbed his eyes, rubbed his eyes, rubbed his eyes and when he saw himself again in the mirror he looked a little more like he’d imagined, round-faced, like Connie, in fact a lot like Connie.

**

Connie sat in the car looking at the map.

“We’re close!” She seemed excited, tracing her finger along the snaking highway, reading the names of the small towns and jumping through the junctions. “Will we be there by dinner? We could get Bar-B-Q!”

Greg looked at the map. “I don’t know, hun. We’ll get there tonight, but probably not for dinner.”

Greg had not been paying close attention to how far they had come. Once, on the highway, you stayed there and drove, straight, for a long time. He thought perhaps his racing mind had somehow sped up their progress. The truth was, when he looked at the map, they were only a couple of hours past Knoxville.

**

The first hotel Greg tried was full.

“It’s the convention,” said the man at the front desk. “All week we’re booked.”

“Shit.”

The second hotel was booked too.

“We have the conventioneers sharing rooms, even.” The night clerk gave Greg a list, though, of Memphis area hotels and their customer ratings and price ranges.

**

The only room in the city, it seemed, was in a hotel called the Archeress several miles from downtown. Connie had long been asleep in the car—it was after midnight by the time they found the small, old hotel—and Greg carried her, draped over his shoulder, through the lobby and into the rickety elevator. Greg laid Connie on the wide, well-fluffed bed and sat down beside her, taking off her shoes.

“Pumpkin, I’m going to go downstairs for a little bit, get a cot. I’ll be back later.”

She made a small noise and twisted away from him.

**

Greg saw little difference between the night clerk behind the desk of this hotel and those behind the desks of every other hotel where he had ever spent the night. He was small and older, probably someone’s brother or cousin who needed a job because a shoelace factory or freight shipping company had closed down.

“Do you have a cot?” Greg asked.

The man looked up from a paperback he was reading under the desk and pointed to a small room just beyond the counter.

“In there.”

“Actually, could I pick it up later? Is there a place around here to get a drink?”

The man nodded and pointed at the door. There were long pauses between his gestures and their explanations.

“Out there, if you make a right down this street.” He stood up, came around from behind the counter and went to the large glass door. “There, you can see it, Pilgrim’s, on the corner. People go there.”

**

The bar was small and crowded, but not crowded the way bars are crowded in the busier parts of bigger cities. It was mostly men milling around the tables, standing and talking, patting each other, laughing over the low music from the jukebox. They smoked around a pool table, but no one played. The last bar Greg had been to, on the night of the gas leak, with a woman named Marina from work, had been full of young people with plastic cups. It had been a narrow bar like this one, but had had several floors, each with a live band, and each with a hundred people talking loudly, rubbing against one another.

The women in the bar were of two ages. There were girls with half-closed eyes, young and foul mouthed, in ill-fitting denim. They could have been in high school, some of them. There were also women a few years shy of the young ones’ mothers. These were working women. They spoke erratically and had wide rear ends. Greg sat by an older woman who was talking with a younger woman at the bar. He did not wish to begin a conversation, but would not have been averse to a conversation were one to blossom organically.

That was why he had come out for a drink, correct? Why else? Why was she, Connie, not enough? He loved her more then he had ever loved Fleur.

He looked at the woman next to him. She was speaking with the younger women softly, her mouth barely moving as if the weariness in her broad, strong body permeated even the muscles of her face. She had round, blue eyes and wispy hair dotted with light and dark notes from myriad home hair coloring kits.

Greg looked down at the dense hair of his forearms and his rotund thighs as they pressed down into the vinyl of the barstool.

The man next to him was alone too, wearing a white, plastic nametag dangling from a fold of his sweater. Doug. Doug was petite. Greg was not a tall man but Doug was nearly a head shorter. His body curled in, shoulders and rib cage like a clenched fist. His hair was dark and thick, but closely cropped with only a severe cowlick behind his right ear revealing it’s true nature, its wildness. The sleeves of the sweater were pushed up to his elbows and the pleats on the front of his pants were neatly pressed. There was something Greg liked about him.

The women’s talking slowed and he could sense a subtle looking over. ‘Who are these men?’ he felt them asking each other, ‘with their clean shoes and out of town faces.’ Doug turned and looked past Greg at the women, his eyes dark. He smiled. The younger whispered something to the elder and slipped from the chair, out into the dim light of the bar. The older woman smiled back at them, looking them each in the face. She turned back to the bar. Doug leaned forward on his seat, opened his mouth, closed it, leaned back, straightened his posture, began to spin himself around on the stool, stopped, and slouched back down over the bar, peering into his short glass. He looked at the woman sideways, then at Greg, pursing his lips into a small frown.

The young woman rejoined her friend but did not sit down.

“Come on, Doll, let’s go.” She said it loudly. The air was pregnant but Greg didn’t quite understand what was happening. The women left. Greg felt that he and this man next to him were now teammates alone on the empty field where a great game had once been played, but not for a very long time.

They sat silently drinking for a long time. Doug scratched his face, pressed fingers into his eyes and signed something indistinguishable but irrefutably profane. Greg shifted away from Doug, uncertain of him, but did not move seats. He felt committed and somehow tied to this man.

Doug motioned to the barman.

“Yes, sir,” the barman said.

“I’ll have another.” He lifted his glass as he said it, and shook it just a little too violently. The ice cubes and a half-inch of backwash whiskey swilled from the glass, landing squarely, wetly in Greg’s lap.

“Shit.” Doug snatched at a small stack of napkins lying on the bar mat. “Here, here, take these. A drink for this man.” He pointed to Greg and shooed the barman off. “Shit, I’m sorry. I’m flummoxed. I’m not myself.” He put the glass back on the bar and turned from Greg, back towards the bottles lined so evenly. Drinks were laid before them but they were silent. Again, the air was pregnant. Greg couldn’t take it.

“What is the convention?” Greg asked, indicating the nametag.

“Shit.” The man ripped at the badge, its claws popping a thread in his shirt, a small hole blooming where it had been. “Double shit.” He fingered the hole. “Don’t mess with it, Doug. You’ll just make it worse, Doug,” he whined in a sing song cadence with his lips curled up. “That’s what my wife would say. I just bought this stupid sweater. The Annual Conference of Geotechnical and Earth Movement Professionals.” He paused. “You asked about the convention,” he explained. A momentary look of accusation, distrust fell across the man’s face, and then quickly lifted to reveal resignation to the fundamental sadness and futility of consciousness so closely linked with drinking alone.

Greg nodded. “Sounds like a laugh riot.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“No offense meant, buddy.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m not myself.” He smacked his hand on the bar. “Doug.” He held out his other hand. “You can’t possibly be from around here, either.”

“No,” Greg shook his hand. “Greg. My daughter and I drove in today.”

“Graceland?”

“Graceland.” Greg nodded. “Of course, Graceland.”

“They asked me to come.” Doug waved to the bartender. “On me, another one of those for him and me.” He turned back to Greg. “They asked me to come, personally! You see, I do alternative energy: battery cars, solar panels. So they want me to do geothermal. They asked me.”

Doug fell silent, brooding. His hand was still splayed on the bar, a pale, dead fish. After a moment his muscles loosened.

“What is your daughter’s name?”

“Conchetta, Connie.”

“That’s a nice name. Let me guess, fourteen?”

“Twelve.”

“You left her in the hotel?”

“She was asleep. She’ll be fine.”

“Mom’s gone?”

“We’re separated.”

There was a pause.

“I gotta take a piss,” Doug said, “watch my seat.”

“My wife and I are separated.” Greg said it to himself. He had not been forced to say it aloud until just then. Somehow everyone he worked with had known without him having to say a word. His friends had known for a long time, before him even, maybe.

“My first wife,” he whispered, but shook his head. “My ex-wife.”

**

They had several more drinks before Fleur came up again.

“My ex-wife, my second,” Greg said. “We didn’t even have to get a divorce. That bitch was still married to someone else. We didn’t even have to get that shit annulled, ‘void under the law.’”

“She was married to the two of you at once?”

“She’d separated from him but they’d never gotten a divorce.” Greg shrugged. “It was other things that ended our marriage but that made it a little easier, legally. We haven’t said for sure we’re going to get a divorce yet.”

“It’s that new, eh?”

Greg nodded. “A few months. I just moved out.”

“Fuck it, man.”

“I’ll have an ex-wife.”

“I said ‘fuck it.’ One day you’ll say it the way you say ‘Mrs. McMurry, my third grade science teacher.’”

“I’ll love a woman who I cannot be married to anymore.”

A man walked past, wearing another of the white, plastic nametags.

“You know,” said Doug. “I stayed this far out so I wouldn’t have to see those assholes more than I had to.”

“Were you a speaker? A presenter?”

“They are idiots.” The man shook his head. “I am a wind man. Wind energy, that’s what I do. I mean I could tell you about it all, I’ve researched it all, but I’m a wind man. And they bring me into do geothermal, fucking fire.” Doug laughed, tilted his head and looked at Greg with such confusion in his eyes. “Fire! I don’t do fire, and they throw a fit when I bring up wind.”

“It didn’t go over well? Nobody ever asked me to make any kind of speech to anybody.” More drinks were set before them.

“Oh, it went over fine, they just don’t understand. We poke holes in the earth and suck out its fire and we are still taking without replenishing. We are still leeches.” He made a slobbering, slurping noise, puckering his hands into claws and sucking at the air. “But wind! Everybody feels the wind blow, don’t you see?” the man asked. “We are all windmills. We use wind and it uses us, man. Don’t you see?”

Greg did not understand and suddenly realized that he was very drunk. The man had been buying a steady stream of drinks for the both of them. Greg had even smoked a few of the cigarettes the man had been offering. He coughed.

“I have to go back to the hotel. I left my daughter. I have to get a cot.”

“One more drink, man. I gotta go home tomorrow. I don’t want to do that.”

“No, my daughter. She is alone. I left her alone. It was good to meet you.”

**

The night had grown cold and a light frost had settled over the windshields of the cars lining the street. A neon illustration of a lady archer firing a golden arrow across the front of the hotel lit the street with seedy, nightmarish warmth. Greg was worried. He was thinking of the night clerk and his shifty night clerk eyes, his long pauses. He must have a skeleton key, a skeleton key in his bony fingers.

He was walking fast and his large feet were heavy. He looked at his watch; it was so late. His toe caught on the curb and he fell, his chin bouncing on the concrete. He felt the sandy crunch of a chipped tooth on his tongue. He scrambled there for a moment, his hands slipping on the thin ice, his legs wobbling with fear.

“Connie,” he muttered, “Connie.” He heard a car in the street; crouching on the sidewalk, he ran a hand through his hair.

“Buddy, you alright?” It was a young man’s voice, a teenager. Greg lifted a hand and waved the car away. “You sure, Buddy? You hurt?”

Greg raised himself to his knees then slowly stood, one foot at a time. He covered his face and waved again to the boy.

“Don’t worry, son, just a bit too much to drink.”

The boy laughed a little. He was with friends, a young girl, a few other boys.

“You be careful, buddy.” The car drove off. For a moment, Greg thought that the girl in the car was Connie. Then for a moment it was Fleur and the young driver was himself and he was someone else, some old man in the street who had fallen.

The boy drove away slowly, murmurs floating from the car. Greg’s elbows burned. He looked down at them; his palms were stippled with red beads. He brushed the gravel from his skin; the larger pieces left divots and pangs shot up his arms as he pried out the stones.

**

The night clerk was not behind the desk when Greg came into the lobby of the Archeress. Panic flew into Greg’s chest. He slammed his hand on the counter.

“Hello!”

Greg’s scraped up palm jabbed with a quick pain. A foot popped up on the other side and then swung down and Greg saw the thinning top of the night clerk’s head.

“Sorry.” He hoisted himself into the chair. “It’s my back. I lay on the floor.”

“Can I get my cot now?” Greg swayed.

The man stood, his hands pressing his lower back. The night clerk’s eyes ran a circuit around Greg’s face. He then shuffled into the small room he had indicated before. He rolled out a cot, folded in two.

“You drop this latch,” the night clerk explained, “then the other one and it should pop open. I’d do it for you, but my back.” He shuffled back to his post on the floor behind the desk, lowering himself point by point, then sliding a small, tubular pillow underneath the base of his spine.

“You know you’re bleeding?” he asked Greg from the floor.

Greg touched his mouth; a slim trickle of blood fell over his fingers.

**

Approaching the room, Greg was filled with fear again. He fumbled with the keycard and dropped it several times before he was able to get the door open.

“Connie,” he blurted as his eyes adjusted to the dark of the room.

There she was, still on top of the covers, one sock kicked off. She mumbled something in her sleep, shaking her head and swiping her wrist across her forehead to clear the lock of hair that had fallen over her eyes.

Photo by Janna Washington

Tags: fiction short story Lillian Pontius-Goldblatt
January 19, 2009 at 7:19pm ∞