When the fence goes up, jackhammering can’t be far away
This piece was written to a prompt in an AWA workshop about two weeks ago. Is it a rant or a lament? You decide.
The squirrels can have my edits. Torn, tossed, soggy with rain or blown by bitter autumn winds, I don’t care. You didn’t believe me, did you? Fine. Continue. Square the circle, whatever that means, and purge. Continue the scrabble. No nest-making now, but nest-undoing. You thought you knew me, but you didn’t. And anyway, I ran away. Chicken bones near the curbs — evidence of unruly neighbors. Pork cutlet remains, too. Who eats a cutlet in the car and then tosses the bone out the window? It’s as astonishing as it is common.
Another page, another paragraph. Can I run screaming from the room now? He’s defeated. Wilted and decomposing before our very eyes, but still entrenched. The paralysis of immorality must be overcome. My toes are numb. I can walk. I can climb stairs. But it is hard for me to put on my sneakers. Hard to shove the lower veggie drawer closed with my right foot. I have to stop and think: “Not right foot. Left.” Marching orders. Unanimous consent. A disappointed pixie. Short jokes from someone 4’11”? I’ll take them! Like the one about a good snowstorm in Chicago swallowing Bovino whole. Lake-effect weather vs. a little beast in tactical gear. Who knew whistles on neck ropes would become essential urban wear and PS not purchased from Target or Amazon? Costco delivers, I’ve discovered. Two shirts on their way. Somehow I don’t have many long-sleeved shirts anymore. Not sure how that happened. When is the BIG BOYCOTT by the way? “The Big Boycott” sounds like a federal bill or a boy band. Because we’re out of food. I’ll cook up cabbage remnants with red onion. Open a can of chic peas. Or something. In case today is a day not to shop. Nov 20.
Have you noticed the banners on Amazon? No, of course not. You’ve quit Jeff Bezos and good for you! The banners read BLACK FRIDAY WEEK. How to erode traditions and gut meaning, calendars, and sense with greed. Can’t wait to see the Met Gala this year. Maybe Lauren will show up wearing a fig leaf and nothing else. Betty Boop pumps and a black lace jumpsuit (unlined) will not do. Are long-sleeved shirts like socks now — vanishing into an inaccessible alternate universe? I’d like to go home, whatever that means. Years versus preference. For instance, I like the Berkshires and haven’t lived there for more than forty years. We were talking about boycotts and now all I can think about is Brodie Mountain Road, how it curved up and over and then down to home. THAT home. The one I lived in for all of a year, so make that make sense.
Shit in the attic. Shit in the basement. But only a few long-sleeved shirts and by the way most of the ones that remain are pink. How did THAT happen? “Love is as essential as air.” Who said that? Seriously, do you know who said that?
There’s peanut butter in the house. We won’t go hungry. Oh, and ravioli in the basement fridge. How bad can things be with peanut butter in the cupboard and ravioli in the fridge? Costco ravioli, it should be said. I put the pasta on a waist-high shelf so I wouldn’t have to bend and open a drawer or think about which foot to slide it shut with.
It’s cold out there and I don’t want to walk the dog but will. Walking the dog is one of those things that keeps me whole, offers up a physical prayer to the neighborhood, as if showing up on the streets religiously says, “Here we are world, making the rounds, grateful to be alive even with the detritus of pork bones and yet another house being torn down.”
“Another House Being Torn Down” could be the caption for my town. One chapter would be about the buildings coming down and another about the buildings taking their place. Generally: no traditional roof lines, no color, ugly siding. It’s a thing. A style? I call it “Dentist Office Chic” because that’s what these oversized homes look like — office buildings. It must be cheaper to skimp on clapboard and angled eaves because, you know, greed. Even if this town had felt like home before, the furiously noisy pace of tear downs and the questionable taste of their looming replacements would make me a stranger here.
This piece of flash fiction was written in class last week. The prompt was a few lines from a poem, describing the heart.
Priscilla — woman who dies; mother of Jeffrey
Jeffrey — estranged son of Priscilla, married to Nancy.
An unnamed dog
Unnamed EMTs
*** ***
It is a pump, a muscle, a churning engine, delivering blood and oxygen. The tasty foods of a lifetime line its pipes with plaque. Genetics has a hand. One day it will seize and though she expected it, its refusal to continue will shock her.
No tunnels of light. No slideshow of memory. Just a clamping pressure that will not let her breathe. No more breath.
Lying on the floor, clutching her shoulder, there will be no one near to offer compressions, no paramedic with electric paddles to try and shock that muscle back into a working rhythm.
Her last thought was typical of her — criticism, bordering on complaint. She thought, I wish this would go a little faster.
The silence that follows her last breath is not golden, secret, rich, or even personal. It’s a blank page that is not in a hurry. Whether another actor comes along with ink and turmoil isn’t of any concern to the blank page – it could hold its absences indefinitely.
But a dog climbs up the stairs. Noses the body in desperate repetition. He howls. He howls and a little spit lands on the face of his friend. She does not move, his friend.
By the time any human notices that Priscilla is gone, her body will be cold and past rigor mortis. Had she been alive to count the endless hours, she’d have felt a mighty sense of grievance, but since grievance is allotted only to the living, the discovery of her body is a mechanical matter. Not her business. Doctor to pronounce death, certified documents to be signed, the gurney to be hoisted up the narrow, definitely not-to-code staircase.
“At least she’s not a 300-pounder,” one of the EMTs remarks. A Worcester pick up the prior weekend had necessitated employing extra hands, revving up the extra wide van, and hauling out the reinforced gurney. Some people impose all manner of inconvenience, even after they’re gone.
No, Priscilla (they’ve been trained to avoid calling corpses “it” or “the body”), no, Priscilla is a scrawny old bird and all of the men secretly wonder how a heart attack felled one so rail thin.
Priscilla is incinerated according to her wishes. The son she hadn’t talked to in 13 years took care to contact the life insurance company and a realtor days before he arranged to turn her into ash.
Making her wait satisfied him. Being in charge of her body felt like retribution, one that offered scant justice, but justice nonetheless. She waited in one of those stainless steel, chilled drawers at the morgue.
While on hold with State Street Bank, Jeffrey, though not given to thinking abstractly, thought that a cramped and chilly dark drawer was a pretty good metaphor for his childhood.
Will he tell Nancy about the metaphor when he gets back to Houston? No. No. Because she would then insist on details and when your survival strategy has been to move on, never look back, supplying metaphorical details is not in your playbook.
But being in Priscilla’s house, talking to her insurance agent, her estate planner, and going through her papers and drawers makes his blank-slate-approach unworkable. Unworkable. He will have to confront his past whether he likes it or not and his stupid belief that all the hundreds of thousands of dollars coming his way would offer a kind of balancing pleasure was wrong, wrong, wrong.
One of the best aspects of writing historic fiction is going down rabbit holes. Hey! It’s research! And, since you never know what information is gonna turn out to be important, no rabbit hole is too weird.
For instance, writing The Weight of Cloth, I found a record of Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s will, which of course listed the enslaved “property“ that she was bequeathing. To see names of people written out like this was one of many moments that drove home the inhumanity of chattel slavery. But also, the testamentary disposition provided me with a list of names, and I used many of them for secondary characters in the book.
In another rabbit hole, I found the terms of Sarah Rutledge’s father’s will, which informed how I crafted her character. These are just two examples.
On Saturday (Nov 8), I found a PhD thesis written by an archaeology student about the Fairbanks household in Dedham, Massachusetts. In it, he mentions that either Ebenezer Fairbanks Senior or Ebenezer Fairbanks Junior (Jason’s father and brother) (or both) enlisted to serve in the Revolutionary War. The very next day on Sunday, the magazine section of The Boston Globe covered Ken Burns’s upcoming documentary about the Revolutionary War. There was mention of an Ebenezer serving. Now his Ebenezer wasn’t from Dedham, but the echo of Ebenezer soldiers in less than 24 hours was a moment of synchronicity that made me sit up and pay attention. Moments like these are always affirming.
So that’s the thing in writing historic fiction — historic fact is both limiting and propulsive.
So many gorgeous shots of colorful night skies around here from Tuesday and Wednesday. The Cape, Rhode Island, New Hampshire. I didn’t see or capture any color.
Today was cold. Not as cold as yesterday but still. Continued to bring plants into the house or the shed.
Writing might be gaining momentum, fun rabbit holes and all, but I am wondering what it would be like to abandon a historic timeline and just write? I honestly don’t know if I can do it.
I’ll keep you posted.
“We just have to keep on grinding,” Aaron Glenn, coach of NY Jets. On TV now.
