Bottom Feeder

 ”Always,” he screamed at me. “She always calls me about a body when I’m trying to eat dinner!”

I paused, holding the battered appetizer I’d lifted to taste – the perfection of deep-fry timing at the best Japanese restaurant Rumor, Wyoming has to offer – there, inches from my lips.  Beyond this perfection, his pig-red, puffing face meets my paused glance.  To respond or to bite?  This is the question considered. 

I bite the tempura shrimp in half and lower the tail away to use like a conductor’s baton, shake it with some ferocity over stemmed chardonnay and screw my head around to snap back in a nod that says Ab-soh-LUTE-ly!

“If only she had your heart, your sensibilities,” he mewls, complexion faded to a near-normal fleshy pink.

I pout my lips as if to say, Now Charles, she’s your wife and you picked her out, all on your ownsome, from a whole fleet of Wanna-Be-Mrs.-Charles-Hueter’s all docked at the Hueter Mortuary and Funeral Services Franchise Corporate Offices; I finger-feed him the next shrimp.  He takes it off at the tail, right at my fingertips, his breathing moist on my knuckles.

Without saying a word, I will maneuver this big fish into my boat.  His wife is already a “body” – they just don’t know; no one knows the notches I have on my creel.  Or how often I’ve slipped through the nets of the system.  (A wink will do wonders! And a pout has more clout than words.  Ask me!  I have tales . . . Sh-h-h – not here.)

Watching for Whales Out of Season

From a turnout, Loretta watched the ocean.  Water, water, everywhere. Even when her sight detected no movement, she knew they had tides, oceans did, not to mention currents.  They had a circularity of motions.  Just like her blood, how it left the heart one way and came back another.  Her womb might be empty, the incision stapled shut behind her stillborn child, but that didn’t mean squat. 

Phantom motions still curled inside her.

How rollers below hit the shore in roaring white foam was a mystery – might be rocks or divine sand.  Footing was precarious but she leaned out, nonetheless

Blast Blocks Sun — 100 word story

                       

Late Cretaceous Period Bio-Moment: He was nameless then.  So was she.  And the island where they browsed was green and wide.  Some raptors had been bullying, causing neighbors grief, but for them, for him and her and the egg they shared the care of – life was more than good.

When Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra trembled continents, she looked up and found him looking her way with concern.  They both looked toward their egg; it was safe.  Then, ash blocked out the sun for centuries. 

Museums coldly label them as Iguanodon-A, Iguanodon-B.  Egg – not yet found.

The Wife of the Romanian

She stares at the stool where he is supposed to sit, at the gray sunlight’s slant on the yellow stool, yellow guitar, the bad yellow of light on wood when screened through cracked sunscreening film, a gray shadow effect that’s been flaking off small triangles to leave bright holes for pure sun to spangle through, cast straws of light into the neon-lit shop she owns with her sister.  Her sister who is both a saint and a slut—a saint at confession and kneeled next to her girl for prayers, a slut in the kitchen, a whore with the janitor, the yeast, anything that holds, inside, the ability to rise. 

Two suits wait outside Rhonda’s bakery and one of them has pressed his forehead to the film-covered glass door and cupped his hand so October sun won’t interfere with his view inside.  He is the one who pecks on the glass, points to his watch, knocks again.  He is the bran muffin suit and behind him is the croissant man and while she is nodding them through the door with no word of apology for her shop door unopened at 6:50 a.m. she spots the sleek secretaries rounding the corner in sports tennis shoes and caminas shawled over silk or faux silk or cotton; the saggy skin just above her elbows chills in the doorway opened out on October’s crisp mood.  She fills white paper sacks with orders and fills cups with coffee, lattes and cappuccinos, keeps the smudges and prints polished from her counter as shop regulars come and go.  By eight, the glass cases are two-thirds empty, the line to her counter is three-thirds empty, and only one of her five tables is occupied by two elderly lovers who will be in the same chairs near the front window until she turns the sign over again at two and waits with her back leaned into the opened door, woody hands cupping opposed elbows of arms crossed over, holding herself in and together at the end as at the beginning.The lovers are good tippers and pretend she is not there while they sit and sometimes let their knuckles touch or the knuckles of one rest close to the wrist bone of the other or slide one foot so the instep of one crepe-soled sandal anchors alongside the length of a Capezio boot like dissimilar boats tied off side by side that tip one way and then the other with swells and calms in their table talk.  The tables are small and glass-topped, napkins coarse linen and sunflower yellow to match the single silk sunflower stuck in a narrow milk-glass vase, and through the glass table top the boats of their feet rest on the shop-narrow sea of black and white squares.  The squares are linoleum and from the front door stack out toward the stainless steel counter in points like a harlequin costume.  Her doe-eyed sister had installed the peel and stick tiles, had put real sunflowers in the bud vases, bringing them in five at a time the moment one showed a loosening petal, fed them with clean water, kept the tables sparkling, the napkins in perfect rectangular folds.  This sister she curses now, curses her doe eyes, how a doe ruts with any buck. 

Rhonda replaced the real flowers with silk two days before Michael left for Romania to attend his mother’s funeral.  But not the stool, she did not replace the stool, and not the guitar, and not him, not yet.

At 9:55 the lovers examine the napkin-lined basket for crumbs. The scones had been orange-raisin and they know that sometimes a last white raisin can be found in the folds of yellow. The fingers of one retrieves this last treat and deposits it on the tongue of the other. There are no smiles between them, only slight nods, as their chairs slide back and strap purses lodge on their shoulders, and another nod from one, the taller one, to the baker who stands bracing the door open as they pass through and out under October’s sun, old feet in old shoes crossing the calm asphalt to cruise the shaded far side of the block where the boy in a khaki green apron sells fresh sunflowers and Peruvian lilies by the bunch.

Rhonda has turned the deadbolt and the sign, has moved through the angled straws of pure light to the vacant stool and yellow guitar. In less than an hour the guitar will be brown again, blonde brown, and the sun pouring through the tears in the film will cease to pour but only glimmer there a little bit through each hole, each triangular shape of lost film. She thinks that perhaps by the time she is a very old woman of fifty the little holes will have overtaken the window, that there will be more light than protection from light. Or perhaps she will have to be ancient, near sixty, before all the sunscreen flakes off to this point. One heel is on a rung of the stool and she sits calm and still, slumped around his guitar, cheek pressing its shoulder, arms hugging its waist, wrists crossing, woody hands hung loose as wings without the will to fly.

By 5 a.m. she is straightening her back, a tin of cranberry scones held between hand mitts, no salt on her face from tears she did not bother about when he failed to return as his itinerary stated he would, no expression at all, not from her approval of the perfected aroma rising from the tin, not from the glass cases already three-quarters full of what she had formed of dust and binders, lemon zests and poppyseeds, yeasts, cinnamons, slivered almonds, crushed pecans, crescents of guitar-colored cashews.

She is straightening up and squaring herself, facing the open oven, mechanically moving to store the tin on a tall, chrome rack of open shelves when she blinks to an exterior sound.

No one knocks on the front window this early; this early the air outside is the same gray as the cracked film; this early the sun is still moving from ending one horizon before it can open another; this early the wall of dim gray is hardly a step up from the harlequin darks on her shop floor and she does not turn to the door but deposits the tin of scones on the rack, retrieves the next from the oven and the next.

The cooling racks and the glass cases full, the face of each yellow silk flower pointed to face the door, her steel counter glimmering under the overhead lights, she waits, avoids the corner with the stool and guitar, studies the wall of dark gradually becoming less dark, gradually allowing the sun to streak thin shafts across the room.

The large pump carafes are full, but she checks them again, tests the flavor of coffee from each. Outside a funnel of air has swept up stray leaves and from inside she thinks at first they may be gray birds playing circular tag above the street; then the movement passes. Except for something caught on the handle of her shop door.

She had already made up her mind the gray birds were not birds but dead leaves and that she will donate the guitar to the local high school’s music department, along with the stool that is only brown and not yellow under the neon lights, and that the something caught on her door is a leaf with a hook stem or part of the twig where the stem attached and this will not do.

She leans for some minutes against the opened door, bracing it open with her back, holding not a leaf but a penciled recipe on a brown paper bag for Mama’s Good Black Bread, had found it tied to the door’s bar handle with a yellow-orange bootlace from one of her husband’s Romanian boots.

Then the suits came, bran-muffin man tapping his watch face as he squeezed by where she leaned against the opened door, and the secretaries came and the boy from the florist’s shop and other early regulars arrived. She wipes down her counter after every exchange.

Later, when the elderly lovers arrive they find the glass door propped open and a wide path of day laid straight from the outside in.  Chords of Verdi’s Autumn make their way past them to loose themselves on street traffic, wind between the cars and pedestrians moving through another October day, crisper than the one before.

Today the lovers sit side by side, watch the guitarist’s plump, unlikely fingers handle the movements, control the strings, lift his wide face to them, his widely spaced blue eyes, begin a smile where a glimpse of gold shows and then vanishes behind thick lips compressed as he begins again, thick neck bent, intent on his fingering.  He does not notice the taller one nod toward his missing bootlace, or the shorter one’s answering shrug; he is thinking about his American wife, who, tomorrow, with luck, or maybe the day after, will serve him a warm slice of good black bread.

The Romanian Horse 1.2

The sixth year his wife replaced real sunflowers with silk replicas and her sister’s name was never spoken between them.  Not even when she shared the same table with them at dinner at their mother’s home where they all wore harness and blinders, except the grandmother, who was beefy and big and retired from toting any carts she chose not to pull. 

He imagined that his tiny mama in Romania was the best friend of this big American grandmother, and when he spoke with his son and daughter, he spoke to them in his Moldovan dialect sometimes and sometimes he spoke to them in English and sometimes a mix of both, but baba was the name he used when he talked of their grandmothers, their American one and the one who lived where the sunflowers bloomed so very far away, and who, during the seventh year, died.

His American wife told him “Go home,” and he touched her face with his calloused fingers, studied the skin where his fingers stayed for a moment, the watery brown tone of her eyes and imagined sunflower centers, multitudes of variations on brown, flecked with gold, flecked with sienna, flecked with the strings of Verdi’s Summer, a vibration of music somewhere, a sounding board that he could not find, had not found, until that single moment peeled away, just at the instant she turned from his touch and said again, “Go home, Michael, Mikail, whoever you are, go home.”

The tiny apartment not much more than a cell where his mama had lived was already occupied by new tenants when Mikhail disembarked from the plane.  They did not allow him inside, but shoved a sack filled with soft things and tied off with a length of cord at the top into his arms, and also a stiff paper box big enough to hold a guitar, heavy enough to hold some typewriters or a sewing machine. 

He stood for a long time, as much as an hour, on the curb of the narrow street below the apartment.  The walls of the buildings ran black with pollution and tall, the sky was a pale slit high overhead but he wasn’t looking up; he was looking at the cobbles paving the road, and he wasn’t seeing the cobbles but the harlequin squares of the floor in his American wife’s bakery shop. 

Before leaving Pittsburg, he had stood for a long time, as much as an hour, in the center of that floor, staring at the black and white points and the stool in the corner, trying to make up his mind whether or not he should bring his guitar with him, whether or not he could, or even should, play for his mama even though she was dead — and had decided he could not take the guitar from its corner. 

Now, in this black and dismal place with a box and a bag of her world, he believed he had made a mistake.

He pawned his prize leather coat, found lodging and menial jobs until he could pay for his mama’s ashes, buy back his coat, and a return ticket for Pittsburgh. 

He had been gone for two months when he boarded the plane in Bucharest to begin his return.  In the deep pocket of his coat he could feel the crumpled brown paper bag he had used to print his mama’s good black bread recipe from Romanian into English, had found the recipe in her strong hand in the heavy box the new occupants had shoved his way, had not wanted, should his checked luggage be lost, for that tangible piece of their past to be gone to him forever or for a day.  He was, perhaps, heavy-hoofed, plodding, but this thing of his mama’s, of his children’s baba, was the one basic good gift he could offer his American wife. 

He would always be the horse; she would never feed from his hand; but they could, he imagined, become something very good, and he liked very much imagining this, and had, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean about three hours after lifting off from Paris, smiled such a smile in his reverie that the gold tooth his wife had replaced that first year caught a ray of light from the window, winked at all who sat near.

The Romanian Horse 1.1

In Romania he was a horse—a muscular horse of great potential, white blaze on his forehead that translated as white from head to toe to his mama, who, in turn, made him believe he would one day have the run of the fields, the stables, the mares.  She prepared her good black bread for him every week until she starved and nearly disappeared after Tata disappeared because he was a friend of Sasa’s and Sasa disappeared because he helped Ionid with a heist and the communists did not like this.  A saddle was cinched on then, cinched on tight, and later a harness and blinders, carts of refuse to pull everyday, moldy hay and not much, and no good black bread, so that his blaze disappeared, his hair thinned and his patience.  He lost a tooth in a brawl, lost his gaits—his canter, his lope, his gallop—bad hay made him fat, dimpled his hooves.  A carrot was waved from a far fence, far beyond the acres of sunflowers he once grazed, and he married the American woman.

He was 29 and she was older.  A white apron held her perfume which was flour, and if he still had an imagination he perhaps would’ve pictured a Reuben’s Madonna hiding under her starched cotton shirt, starched cotton pants, starched cotton apron that if he did still have an imagination, and the will to use it, might have shown him, his hands, patting the apron where it wrapped around his new wife’s hips, an aura of flour dust rising to surround them, wrapping them in a halo of fine powder, the scent of a basic element suspended about them that could, perhaps, if brought together with the right other elements, become very good.  But he had used his imagination up when his tata taught him classical guitar, had used it up as he watched those beloved fingers fly across the strings, imagined his own creating the same magic out of vibrations leant to the air, realized those imaginings in time to lose them again hauling shit and his heavy heart through the Carpathian mountains and back again, imagining his tata still played, had never known Sasa and Sasa had never met Ionid.  He had no imagination left when the carrot appeared.

His mama had placed the ad with his photo and accomplishments.  His mama brokered the wedding with the American.  He followed the lead of her reins like any well-broken horse would do.  Yes, he would send money home; yes, he would send for her too, when he could, when he could he would do this for her.

A good son and always remembering the mama who had grown so thin he thought she would also disappear, he went to his wife’s bank, which was also his bank, every Monday that wasn’t a holiday and deposited short stacks of dollar bills and coin rolls packed firm with quarters, dimes, and nickels he had counted out in stacks from his tip jar.  The tips sprinkled into his jar when he played his guitar for his wife’s bakery patrons. 

On the first Monday of every month that wasn’t a holiday, he withdrew what he could in larger bills, usually twenties, but also sometimes a Ben Franklin, wrapped them in thick paper and sent them to his mama in Bucharest.   He was good for his wife’s business.  Even his first year there, in Pittsburgh, when he only swept the floors, washed a few cups, the accoutrements of a baker, he was good for the bakery and had asked for a small amount to send to Mama.  His wife the baker had smiled in her fondness for him, and instead of the money, arranged to have his missing tooth replaced by the dentist who occupied a small office upstairs. 

The second year, his wife him a son; the third year, a guitar.  With the guitar he began to imagine his tiny mama’s thin fingers opening the long envelope and unfolding the thick paper to reveal what he would be able to send.  He was still a horse, not white, and without a blaze on his forehead, but not hauling shit.

She was not unpleasant, his American wife.  At night they would nicker in their shared stall, make small exchanges, and sometimes she would doze with her neck laid across his wide back.  The fourth year she gave him a black leather coat.  He wore it like a prize.  The fifth year her sister gave him a daughter and the nickering stopped. 

He did not blame himself, the sister, or her.  If he thought about blame or fault, Sasa was somehow involved.  But he didn’t.  There had been the fresh sunflowers, that was all; only five, bought by the sister and brought in a bunch to his corner where he was tuning his guitar, that was all, for later, when his wife would unlock the front door and turn the Closed sign to Open.  There had been the fresh sunflowers, that was all.  No explanation of how they multiplied into field after field after field so that by the time he looked up from the five in her hands, held like a bridal bouquet and tipped toward him to share each wide open face, his eyes had filled with another country, another time, another space.  There was no understanding the stems dropped and her hands pulling his face to her waist, or how they both dropped with the flowers onto the floor.  If his wife had been behind her counter polishing the stainless steel, he would not have known, would not have stopped his headlong gallop into a place without fences, forgotten.

He knew the mother of his wife and of his lover was the first, beyond the secret he and his sister-in-law shared, to notice the similarity of her grandchildren, how particular the blue of their eyes, how widely spaced in their flat round faces.  There had never been any mistaking the Slavic expanse of the boy’s face as that of his father’s; there was no mistaking the boy’s sister for anything other than his sister.  His American mother-in-law had cocked her head at him briefly one Sunday, wiped her hands on her apron, shrugged, and settled into a soft chair where the little boy sat in her lap turning pages as she read and the baby girl studied her every movement from her resting place in the crook of her grandmother’s left arm.    [more . . .]

Honeymoon Afternoon

“You know,” she says, “my dad used to talk about this place all the time,” and he says, “Yeah?”  and she says, “Yeah,” and moves to the window.  He thinks how, except for her mitten hands, she could be some silhouetted exotic woman in one of those posters to lure people to this hotel, this room with a wall of windows and white sand beyond that flows into blue and another blue that looks like a current but is, he thinks, where the sky flows into the gulf’s horizon.  He wants her in that honeymoon way grooms want brides but his mom has lectured him about sensitivity and listening and all about “delayed gratification” and how good, better than good, stuff can be if he’ll just remember to use his head to think with every once in awhile instead of his “privates.”  She’s a funny old thing, his mom, calling his dick his “privates” and all, but she’s a clever old thing, too, and he’s thinking that there might be something in the way his almost new wife moved to the window and the way she said “Yeah” that he should maybe be listening to. 

 ”So when was that?” he says, and she says “Back in the sixties.  Clean-up, you know.”  “Right,” he says and he’s vaguely recalling the little war his old mom calls The Day War that wiped out, or nearly wiped out, erased, that was it, erased Cuba and Austin, Texas. 

 ”And earlier, too,” she says, “in the fifties.  He worked back and forth between here and The Keys in the fifties.  He used to talk about those times mostly.”   She moves outside and her voice goes dim because despite all the open windows and doors there are some walls between them, and he wraps a thick cotton towel around his waist and presses the hooky-do tabs together with his stubby hands and goes where she is.  He is intent on listening.  “The Keys,” he says, “I’ve read about them,” and he thinks about mentioning how they were erased, but she has read the same histories he’s read and probably knows more than he does because of her dad and all.  He wants “good” to be even better, even if he can’t imagine anything better than the good he already gets.  So he says, “Must’ve been way different then, eh?” 

 When she turns to look at him, he sees the least little bit of surprise in her eyes, like maybe she’s realizing that he’s maybe more than a husband, sort of like a friend she can talk to, too.  “I guess,” she says.  “It was way different everywhere then, you know?” 

 ”I guess. Yeah.”  He’s not the kind of guy who thinks much about stuff, so thinking about stuff that’s like double his age back in history isn’t something he’s real familiar with, and besides that he’s looking at her and thinking about how she looks, in profile, with the white flower tucked behind her ear, and about how this shot would make a great poster, too.  And it sort of hits him from out of the blue about the posters they still put up in airports and places that have mysterious exotic beautiful photos with women and sometimes guys with arms, well, when he thought about it, like maybe almost half again as long as his, and all those long fingers, too, almost like they came from a different planet, the models in those posters.  He says, “Yeah.  It must’ve been way different then, like everywhere,” and she says “Yeah,” and what happens after, he thinks, is maybe not better, but man, it’s still just as good.

[wordcount 607]

Accidents and Meetings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four. 

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

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

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

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

[word count 476]

Flight Time

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

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

Wha . . . are we there yet?

Where?

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

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

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

word count = 249

The Loons are Hushed

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

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

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

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

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

[wordcount 136]