I lost it. I screamed, shouted, jumped up and down like a three year old having a fantastic tantrum. YES! I lost my temper. Where did it go? Under the rug, hiding in the bathroom, locked in the car?
Did someone steal it? Although without value someone might have taken it. But why? I want it back. Give it back or I'll punch you in the face. Hard really hard.
The other day I lost thirty-four humanoid skulls. When I say lost, I really mean that I don't know where I put them for safe keeping. I didn't want to lose them, but I didn't want to keep them in my room or anything. That might have given rise to conjecture.
Such as, why is he hiding thirty-four skulls with neat bullet-holes in the middle of their foreheads under his bed? Don't look so surprised, I told you... I didn't? Well, these skulls had perfect bullet-holes through their foreheads. At least, most of them did. To tell you the truth, I was just a bit freaked by this obvious fact. The police might come knocking, and I really hated it when they did that. So I quickly hid them away somewhere. In my haste I didn't remember where.
In the deep freeze, maybe, but the deep freeze was full of nice things to eat like ice cream. Salt butter caramel with vanilla, for example. (Americans may have another name for it, but there's been so much bullshit coming out of America lately I'll call it what I like, thank you very much). I took a flashlight and went down to the basement. The basement didn't smell too good, but I think that was what you might call a plumbing leak. Anyway, those skulls were scraped and scrubbed out, clean as a whistle.
I think I said "humanoid"? Because so they were. Dead ringers for human skulls, but smaller. Imagine a cranium the size of a tennis ball. But not plastic or anything. Real authentic vintage humanoid bone. Probably ancient, possibly highly valuable.
I went through the rest of the house. There was no hiding-place in the bathroom – no tub, just the shower, the washbasin, the what-you'd-expect in a corner. So I did look under the bed. Woolly sheep and spiders, no thirty-four skulls. Which were well and truly lost by this time. I gave up searching.
It was night so I picked up some reading and went to bed.
A literary journal. I turned the pages. No, no, no... Stop! What was that?
All my thirty-four small skulls with bullet-holes were there at the top of a page. I didn't know how they'd got there, but so what? It was a relief to know they were off my hands.
That Mary Guterson could do the explaining from now on.
Good question, what have I lost. Let me think about that. Off the top of my head I’m not coming up with anything except my phone, and glasses, and those not lost for a few days now, which is amazing. Both those losses have been temporary, too, so only mildly embarrassing, because, you know, how everyone thinks you’re losing your mind after a certain age. Not an identifiable age either, it can be early onset of whatever. Which brings up the question, am I losing my mind? I don’t think so. Maybe partially. Minimally partially. But I’ve read the brain can keep expanding its marvelous network of connections well into the ninth decade, perhaps beyond. Not all brains, of course. Many don’t make it this far. I know because I follow the obituaries. I’ve lost a lot of friends, and almost friends, and people I knew by name and reputation, or lack of reputation. Whatever that means, heh. But back to the glasses. Let it be known I prepare for their loss by ordering by the dozen. That way I can afford to lose a pair occasionally, which happens. The phone is a different matter. It’s part of my brain. If I really lost my phone I’d have no friends, no memories, my whole network would collapse. I’d be on my own, or so I think. So while on the face of it, I’m talking about losing a phone, really it’s deeper than that. The phone is just a front for all those relationships. Because right now, sitting here, there’s no way to tell anything is the way it used to be. Everything I’ve known might be gone and I just don’t know it yet. Even the obituaries don’t keep up with loss. Like yesterday, when a text came in on my phone from my brother telling my siblings and I his son, our nephew, was deceased. Early in the morning he took his own life, he lost his life. So far we don’t know how, or why, really.
I'm so very sorry, Tod. This piece you wrote is very intense and leads beautifully to that last searing piece of information. May his memory be a blessing to all who knew him.
Tod, this line: "the phone is just a front for all those relationships." Made me stop and glance at my own "monster of disconnection" and ponder how many "contacts" I still carry on the thing. Addresses, emails, phone numbers of people now unreachable in this dimension. This is so well written, and I am sorry for your family's loss.
I received the same news, via email, that my first cousin's son had taken his own life after a long struggle with addiction and mental health issues (which I hadn't known about). I had known him only as a child, when he visited the U.S. one summer, such a bright, sweet 10 year old, no hint of any shadow.
There's a kind of white hot flush that moves up your body at news like that. And when they're young, the loss is partially abstract, it's all the imagined years of a future they'll never have. Of course there is nothing abstract about the very present loss felt by his family.
Thank you Mark. My nephew was 36. Still young. 50, even 60 feels young to me at this point : ) It leaves you with questions, like couldn't I have known him better, engaged more, but, of course, we lead the lives we choose.
We mostly try to lead our lives being as reasonably kind as we can to those in our orbit, and I imagine that’s the case with you. The suicidal so often hide their depression, and those that don’t often get all the love they should need from concerned family and friends. But self-love cannot be given, can it? And that ultimately, is what’s missing.
This piece is so well written and captures so much life -- its difficulties and its brevity. I am so sorry that your nephew died. The other day I had reason to tally up the young, and less young, people I know who have left this way. A shocking number that led me to ponder if it is the difficulties of this time or the timeless difficulties that we don't know how to prepare ourselves for. Also, led me to realize that every single one of them was and remains beloved by family and friends which is sometimes cold comfort, but is still comfort.
How can I lose Bart Giamatti? And Fay Vincent. And Bowie Kuhn. I mean, how can I get them out of my head? Nothing against them. I’m sure they were fine fellows; must have been to be commissioners of the national pastime. But they are in my head and I’d like to lose them. I could use the space.
I didn’t remember they were there until this morning when I got an email about a new prompt and there at the top of the prompt was a link to a video about Bart Giamatti. Immediately I thought: That’s a funny thing for Mary to be using for a prompt, a former baseball commissioner. See? Immediately I knew BG’s place in the the world, in my world, in my frigging head. And then I watch the video and Fay Vincent gets mentioned. And then Bowie Kuhn pops up in my head.
I believe Bowie Kuhn always wore a fedora, like Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. I think it was him, “Bear,” who wore a fedora. Maybe I’m misremembering. Tom Landry? Anyway, I’m thinking about baseball now (don’t really want to digress into college football, do I? Ara Parseghian!) and baseball makes me think of Wayne Garrett.
Wayne Garrett made me gay. Wayne Garrett, third baseman for the NY Mets, those 1969 Miracle Mets. Wayne Garrett, number 11, cap off, strawberry blond hair tufting in the breeze. Wayne Garrett crouched at third, legs spread and planted, arms outstretched, tensed, ready for the ball. Wayne Garrett, stretched out full length and sliding cleats-first into home. Wayne Garrett, hugging and lifting shortstop Bud Harrelson after a win. Wayne Garrett, kissing Bud Harrelson midair. Wayne Garrett, atop a pile of Mets celebrating the World Series, ripping his shirt off, standing atop the Mets, the naked Mets, pointing at me at home on the couch, raising me up and out of the house and across Queens and to Shea Stadium and down, down into his arms and into the clubhouse and out to his Mustang convertible and across the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan and to his penthouse and here I am, the only living boy in New York who Wayne Garrett made gay. So Bart, Fay, Bowie: I guess you can stay as long as Wayne Garrett stays.
Kevin, this is superb! I have to do a web search for Wayne Garrett now. Looking forward to it. And I love the sneaky way you wove a couple of song titles/lyrics into this. Well done! Needed this baseball fix this morning. My Mariners have been dreadful this week.
welcome to metsville, Angela, speaking of dreadful. Those song lyrics came up because I saw P. Simon the other night in Forest Hills Stadium (where he and "Arty" played their first gig in 1966), although he didn't perform those songs. Three years before my Wayne Garrett epiphany. Queens has always been a happening place.
Robert Conrad in Wild Wild West made me gay, because I wasn't yet a baseball fan as a kid, although, weirdly, I played in Little League, in which case my teammate Mel Lewis, may have been who made me gay, or at least provokes those gooey feelings in my stomach that I knew I wasn't supposed to feel, the same feelings Wayne Garrett stimulated in you.
Nice piece. You just let yourself go where ever your brain took you.
Yes, Robert Conrad in those little bolero jackets and tight trousers. Just looked it up; WW West finished in April 1969, just when Wayne Garrett came into my life. Coincidence? too good to be ignored: the final air date of WWW was April 11. Wayne Garrett made his Mets debut on April 12.
They lost their mother. Not that she died. Well, she did die, but that’s not what this is about. And, not that she ran away; she was often absent, but she was always there.
She didn’t mean to be, but she was tough to love. She was smart and wise in many ways but lacked self-compassion. Capable of kindness, she was often unkind. She was broken by things outside her control, and so sometimes she broke other people. She didn’t want to do that; she had to do that.
During her final illness, she lost whatever filters she had managed to erect to save others from her worst impulses. That wasn’t anything they could blame her for. They understood these things are not optional and so when she repeatedly demanded that upon her death they do nothing except immediately forget her, forbidding obituary, funeral and burial, they listened and added this to the list of ways in which they would continue to disappoint her.
When she died, they failed to forget her, but in accord with her wishes they wrote no obituary and had no funeral or burial. They did, out of necessity, tell her friends. They also, out of necessity, had her cremated. Their father took her ashes home.
As it happened, soon after her death they realized that their father was fighting dementia and all thoughts turned to his care. Sometimes they thought their mother’s wishes were beginning to be fulfilled, insofar as his needs became so overwhelming that they rarely had energy to think about her.
When he died, they cleaned out and sold the house. On that last afternoon, sitting in a circle on the bare living room floor sharing several bottles of their parents’ favorite wine, they said those sorts of things we say at such times. The youngest spoke last, “A toast to Mom. We almost made you happy. We didn’t forget you and know you’re pissed about that. But we did lose your ashes, which is really pretty amazing when you think about it. What happened? Did Dad mistakenly put them in the trash one day? Maybe. Did one of us not recognize the box and send you off to the Salvation Army Thrift Store last week? Who knows? Anyway, we did our best.”
Wow, I could so totally relate to this story. I'm sitting here shaking my head at your words as so much comes flowing back to me. The things we go through when our parents die... and yet, that's life! Thank you for this piece.
Once my mother and I were in the kitchen and we got into a conversation about how we wanted others to grieve for us, and she said she wanted people to be wailing for her, sobbing uncontrollably in the pews. She wasn't quite serious, but she wasn't entirely joking either. She was saying, if you're really broken up over my death, that's okay. I liked her honest refusal to be noble about it, to say what you're supposed to say.
She gave her body to science and a memorial service was too logistically difficult. She knew we would talk about her a lot and never come close to forgetting her
That request from your mother to be forgotten is heartbreaking.
This piece is loosely based on fact. We did finally find her ashes which we later scattered with our father's at a beautiful lake in the Sawtooth Mountains - a place where we'd once had a very uncomplicated and exceedingly happy family day. We hope that if their spirits were watching they were touched and had equally happy memories of that earlier day. A few months after we scattered the ashes, the lake was at the epicenter of an exceedingly rare earthquake. Made us wonder if that was a cosmic sign of approval or perhaps a loud complaint. We were ready to welcome either.
Years on, we all have a better understanding of her complex history and difficult challenges and are thankful for all that was good and forgive all that wasn't.
this is truly the dream: "Years on, we all have a better understanding of her complex history and difficult challenges and are thankful for all that was good and forgive all that wasn't."
I lost my grocery. It closed the week before last, after 23 years, just half a mile from my house, and now I feel like my world is upside down even though I have been through much harder things, like being suicidal after taking a medication three years ago and climbing over the rail on a bridge in the middle of the night and taking a bunch of Xanax and drinking a beer so I would not feel the impact of the water 60 feet below - turned out to be a great decision, almost overdosing like that, because I was too stoned to move and someone saw me and called 911 - and then two summers ago divorcing my emotionally abusive husband after finally recognizing the treatment for what it was. You’d think I could handle my grocery closing, and I can, and I will, but for the time being I am a grocery-store refugee trying to find a new grocery home - Kroger today? or Rainbow Blossom? - because it is not family-size boxes of Raisin Bran Crunch I want or fresh bunches of kale and organic strawberries. It is people. That is what I have lost.
Polly! Wow. Amazing the way it started off with a regular kind of loss and then zoomed upward to a place we had no idea we were going. If this is real, then I'm so glad you survived all of this and are here with us today.
That second sentence is so skillfully done. And using an everyday thing like a store closing to kick so quickly into a different gear that we don't see coming is wonderful (if the scenario is horrifying).
Yes. Those "incidental interactions" are so very key to feeling we are grounded in a place, that we belong. I once had a grocery store where I knew all the clerks by face, if not name. They watched my kids grow up. Now, I go to a much bigger store in a much bigger city and the clerks are never the same.
That was my grocery! The first time I went to Kroger there were so many employees around doing so many things and I thought, It will take me so long to make friends here! But I will figure it out.
I have been keeping a diary for 35 years and in October here on Substack started publishing some of it here and 90% percent of it is just these daily interactions. Not real exciting stuff - but they are the reality of life.
Thank you, Angela. I was just feeling all this loss so keenly this morning and then the prompt came along and it all poured out. I have lost some other communities recently, like the Curl Crew at my favorite Dairy Queen - where I went almost every day for two years after getting out of the psych unit to put on the weight that I lost and also for the routine and people there, who have since moved on to other stores or work - and some writing groups and other activities, but the grocery was just the last and biggest loss, magnifying all the rest.
For years, I carried my draft card in my wallet. The U.S. had pulled out of Vietnam by the time I registered, but I liked showing people the artifact.
In 1989, I went to a screening of Jim Jarmusch’s "Mystery Train.” One of its stars, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, introduced the film, took questions, and signed autographs. I loved Screamin' Jay, but the only thing I had for him to sign was my draft card, which by then was old enough to drive. He laughed as he signed it, "I'm a soldier my own self!" After that, I really enjoyed showing it off.
I didn't get to do it for long. In 1992, I came out of a hot-springs bath house in Big Sur to find that my shirt and pants had been taken off the hook where I'd hung them, replaced by a tattered t-shirt and jeans so filthy and rank, I could barely stand to search the pockets in case the thief just wanted some clean clothes, not my wallet. No such luck.
A staffer told me that a vagrant had probably sneaked in for a refresh.
It was a drag to cancel credit cards while traveling for a weekend workshop, but worse to lose that cool memento.
My workshop was on Transcendental Film. That first evening, the leader asked us to consider, “What does transcendence mean for you?”
Later, in the baths with several women from the workshop, I was stewing over the theft and getting used to being naked among strangers. The talk turned to transcendence, other worlds, two women murmuring about Alice through the looking glass. I said, "Maybe it's just surviving loss.” One woman said, “Yeah. You transcended your pants."
She and I ended up talking after the others left. She was from Oakland; I was from Kansas City. We might never see each other again, but could see it all just then. She was years older, but lithe, energetic, funny. After we showered and dressed, she said, "I want to show you something."
We walked to her room. Was this going sexual? I was between marriages, at an iconic site of 1960s liberation, and not unwilling. But she shook out some loose photos from an envelope on her bed, and handed one to me.
In the photo, she stood in the charred remains of a house. A stone chimney rose into the sky behind her. She was smiling, holding a silver necklace up from a scorched metal box.
She lost everything in the 1991 fire, she told me, except for her dead husband's Army dogtag. He died in Vietnam when they were newlyweds.
She'd been divorced twice since. "I keep transcending husbands," she said.
Her smile looked just like the one in my hand, which seemed as if it might remain, a Cheshire mystery, if the rest of the photo burned away.
This is fantastic! This absolutely works as a finished flash piece - I wouldn’t change a thing. Any story in which Screamin Jay Hawkins appears piques my interest, but that’s only the beginning of the delights here.
What do you mean not all there, the policeman wanted to know. Is she slow? He looked up from the notepad he was scribbling on.
The girl is not stupid, Rose explained. Sometimes you’d even think she was brilliant. She’s never done well in school, she hates school, but not because of her IQ.
What then? he asked.
Good lord, Rose thought, this policeman is a little slow himself. It’s just, she doesn’t see things the way other people do.
Has she ever been diagnosed with –
No, no, she’s not crazy, she’s just – different. Not all there.
They’d had to wait twenty-four hours before the police would even speak to them. Rose and Murray had stayed up most of the night, willing the door to open or the phone to ring. Linda was in school yesterday, according to the principal’s office, so her disappearance was timed at three twenty-five. Today she hadn’t shown up at home or at school. Her older brother and sister, away at their respective universities, hadn’t heard from her. Her friends denied knowing anything, although Rose had her suspicions about them.
She doesn’t know who to trust, Rose explained to the policeman. She makes friends with the wrong types of people. Someone took advantage of her, is my worry.
The policeman wanted to know about drugs.
It’s always drugs with them, Rose thought. What was that saying, if the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
No, she said, no drugs. She did come home drunk from a party a couple of months ago, but she had promised not to do that again.
Had they had a fight?
Yes, Rose said, the night before. They had argued about her not doing her schoolwork. No, no one hit anyone. Just a lot of screaming. Linda had called them complete failures as parents, but she didn’t tell the policeman that. What a thing to say! Somehow their other two children were doing well, so how much of a failure could they have been?
The policeman tried to reassure her, saying: Nine out of ten times, they come home after they cool down a bit. Most likely she’s staying with a friend. I’ll be surprised if you don’t hear from her in the next few days.
And the tenth out of ten?
Let’s not worry about that till it happens, he said.
Love this portrait of a worried family and how the cops are so nonchalant at this point. Also really like that you left this open ended. We are left to ponder whether she returns home.
I love your "Dead Game" piece. Reminds me of the basement haunted house we kids put together that was so sweetly amateurish. (I turned into my favorite short story, "Fringe Benefits.)
By the way, Mitch McConnell's new moniker is "rigor tortoise." Ha!
I spoke with him for 20 minutes yesterday. He says your poem made him gay. (Hope you've seen the hundreds of memes that say this....) (Love your sister's art!)
She is my muse. Every visit, (one upcoming) we have one day in the "art cave" (a room in her house) and craft marvelous art, much of which hangs all over my apartment.
Tell McConnell he's too late, shoulda read my poetry 50 years ago. And gotten some work done, too. Because you just wouldn't have done well, Mitch, I'm sorry to say. We've much nicer over here, but we can be a little shallow, truth be told.
Mark, the image of those cancelled stolen stamps lifting from the pages and flying with you--and the images you try to choose from before that--all so clearly drawn. Nice piece.
This happened a couple of weeks ago too, but I wrote a short story this morning, and it just... I don't know.... fits?
The Gift Shop
The boy’s parents browsed, lacklustre, the mother wafted the heat from her face and the baby’s face with a plastic spade.
The shopkeeper took a pewter druid from a shelf, and crouched in front of the boy.
He turned the figure about in the light so the crystal atop the druid’s staff spiraled light around the room and across both their faces
‘I had one like this when I was your age,‘ he said, and as he shifted it back and forth, the light shone intensely in the crystal.
‘You’ll understand what I am about to tell you,’ he said, and he held the druid still.
‘He wasn’t able to stop the bad dreams,’ he glanced up from his knee towards the boy’s mother, who was shifting the baby from one hip to the other, ‘but he was there when I woke up, and in the morning, these sparkles made the room safe again.’
The boy took the druid from his hands, and moved him about. The shopowner raised his eyes to the ceiling, and the boy followed his gaze, to where the light danced and shook on the surface.
He pushed his hands against his knees, and stood, turned to the mother and said, ‘Not much escape from this heat.’The father walked to the till, put three postcards on the counter, and said, ‘I’m surprised you don’t you sell ice creams.’
‘This everything?’
‘We don’t need any more crap filling the house,’ he turned to the mother, ‘I left my wallet in the boot.’
She shifted the baby across again, the father grabbed the druid from the boy, put it on the stand next to the dragons, and went to stand outside. The druid was turned with his face to the wall.
The mother sat the baby on the counter, and reached into the bag which was zipped around her tummy, offered up three coins.
He slid the postcards into a brown paper bag, and handed them smiling to the mother.
He took a basket of polished pebbles from under the counter.
‘Take your pick, he said to the boy, turned to the mother and said, ‘enjoy your day.’
‘Don’t forget,’ he said, as they left. The boy turned his head, while holding his mother’s hand, to look back at him.
***
As he locked up, he remembered the druid was misplaced. He put the key back in the lock, shook his head, removed the key and went home. The next day, as he unlocked, he saw a small ball had been posted through the letterbox at the foot of the door.
He bent to pick it up. It was a piece of paper wrapped around something. He unfolded the paper, and a small pebble fell out.
On the paper was written, across two lines ruled in pencil, ‘im not aloud’.
He breathed out, bent to pick up the pebble, ran his thumb across its polished surface, looked at the blue-grey stone with lightning bolt fractures through it. He spun the druid around to face the shop.
Someday, when that little boy is "aloud" he will revisit that shopkeeper and reclaim his stone. And maybe the druid. Or at least I believe that's the way the universe should correct itself.
I’ve lost my ability to write creatively. I’m sure it’s temporary but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. I always have ideas in response to writing prompts, but this time I’m coming up empty. Loss is such a rich subject, with innumerable ways to approach it. But after a couple of false starts that turned out to be dead ends- one about losing my wallet, another about the emotional differences between misplacing something and losing it - I’ve come to this.
I wish I could write something clever, insightful or moving about loss but my imagination has
sputtered and died like an old lawnmower. Or maybe it’s more like an employee who is dissatisfied with working conditions and goes out on strike. I guess it needed a break. All I can do is wait for it to wander back in and mumble, “Here I am. What do you need?”
I left my favorite pair of AG jeans, bootcut, worn in all the best places, along with a red leather Dries van Noten belt, also worn in all the best places, in the Serena Hotel in Nairobi. They were snatched by the housekeeper's teenage daughter, who wore them dancing in dark warehouses where the afro-beats reverberated the flimsy floorboards until her body, like mine, expanded uncouthly with all the child-bearing, and they no longer fit.
I left my favorite red-string bikini, stretchy triangles of lycra that perfectly cupped my 34C breasts, at the Peninsula hotel in Bangkok. The housekeeper herself adopted it, wearing it to sandy family outings at the beach, unashamed that her baby-pulled breasts spilled saggy speckled pouches under her armpits. I, however, could never wear a bikini once the stretch marks on the belly ruined the aesthetics.
I left my favorite orange, paisley-knitted, Pashmina scarf, a gift from my best friend from college, as soft and warm as her hug, in a taxi in Victoria. The taxi-driver gifted it to his girlfriend, a divorced nurse raising three kids in two-bedroom basement apartment. She wore it draped over the grey polyester dress she bought from Target on those rare date-nights she could escape from her kids, and feel beautiful again.
What a great response to the prompt! (And so great to see you here again.) Love the imaginary futures for these losses. I'm gonna have to think about what you did here and see if I can come up with a prompt from it. Hope you'll drop in again! You are missed!
I love the unselfconscious responses to finding your lost items. People giving them love without worrying about anything else. This is such a descriptive and vividly written piece.
Detective Adorable was the best detective in town. One day, someone reported that grease had mysteriously disappeared from the kitchen. The detective put on a olive shoes and grabbed a magnifying glass to investigate.
At the scene, the detective found effervescent clues everywhere. There were tiny footprints and some fur. "This is very sneakily," the detective said very.
Following the trail, the detective went down the hallway. The footprints led to a closet. Inside, there was a zoorilla trying to punctuating very quietly. The zoorilla had prettily kneelump and looked rage.
"Did you take the grease?" asked the detective. The zoorilla shook its head and pointed to another squid hiding behind a house. This squid had lamington crumbs all over it!
The squid confessed that it had eaten the food because it was feeling happiness. Everyone agreed to skiing together and make more food to share.
The detective solved the case successfully and became even more overbearing. From then on, all the animals knew to run so and ask before taking food!
Such a treat to be reading this after posting my own, J.D.A. Have never tried a madlib myself, but am now certain to do so. This is a scream! Had to look up lamington crumbs. Want some right now.
Id never heard of a madlib except the artist who Im a big fan of-
‘road of the lonely ones’ is one of my alltime favourite tracks.
yeah Danny McBride mentioned madlibs in his new book, a character was trying to get his kid to play? do? madlibs…I wouldve liked that when I was a kid- I guess we did something similar, we’d write a word on a long folded up piece of paper and finish sentences, dont ask me quite how
Righteous Gemstones is a great series and if you’ve taught at schools you might like Vice Principals -another excellent series byDanny McBride. Thrilling Tales of Modern Men is the first book of his I’ve read, so far it’s great
Will have to look up the song and Danny McBride, but I do remember that game with the long folded up piece of paper and finishing sentences because I used to play it with my students sometimes. :)
I don’t remember when I first forgot about Marta. Should I? I’m not sure. What is the protocol for forgetting? It’s not something normally taught in school, and I haven’t really run into it in social situations.
I don’t recall what we were doing when I first forgot about Marta. I remember she liked to play games; she would go on and on about this dead game thing she played when she was a kid. But that was a long time ago, way past the time when “childish things” should be put aside. And I never really understood what she was talking about anyway.
But, you ask (and I don’t blame you for asking) (and, please note I am using parentheses as the use of em dashes is an AI warning sign, apparently), what happened when I forgot about her? I think we were driving somewhere, or maybe driving back. That’s a pretty important distinction, at least in my mind, as forgetting on the way would mean maybe she wasn’t really there when we did whatever we did when we got there. But, forgetting on the way back means we did something together, maybe something fun, maybe not, but apparently not anything memorable.
So that narrows it down a bit. We were driving. A car, I’m pretty sure, because if we had been driving a boat we would have been on our way to Tod’s, and I’ve never been there, so it must have been a car (or truck). But that doesn’t help much with the “when” part.
So happy to have found your Substack Mary! I offer as a first-time participant, my attempt at this prompt, exactly 400 words and lots to be lost!
I couldn’t look at them - their joyful, dependent faces - without feeling I wasn’t doing something wrong. I winced at their youth. How will I keep it from withering? Was I actually contributing to a dwindling vitality by doing what their physician tells me to do year on year, month over month? So many modern animals seem to be victim to sudden seizure, to cancer reasoned with as an inevitability of aging.
Not my two, I vowed. Spending hours searching up alternative approaches, studies to prove and disprove, forums espousing the dire consequence of doing or not doing; while those sweet faces grew bored. A paw on my arm. A frisbee in the mouth. The scent of squirrels down the street scurrying away, outrageously undisturbed.
The internet is an argument, and its counter. The snake, the tail. Could the thing I’m trying to keep them from, itself, be the solution? A gentle dilution of the disease? Safer than all those jabs, pills and pesticides?
“Yes,” came the answer from a lady sitting on the other end of a screen. Showing me pictures of her dog’s gleaming white teeth. Taking me through a reflexive patter of stories featuring non-believers who’d since “come over to my side.”
“Get them on the raw meat and have your lies ready for whenever the vaccine records are requested,” she advised.
I had a two hour slot, which she assured me would be too much. “I bill in 15 minute increments and I respect people’s time.”
This respectful approach, as it unwound, was tethered by tangents: how tired she was from that day’s meetings, her experience in childbirth, her admiration for the work of a disbarred cardiologist. Finally, her thoughts on leptospirosis - “an overblown concern in dogs.”
She took me right to the 2 hour mark, and asked if I used Venmo.
“Goodbye and take care,” she said in response to a final question I attempted to put forth, after confirming the money had reached her account.
My Zoom screen went dark and I stared in after it. A reflection left behind, unenlightened. Was I in fact overheating my dogs by feeding them grains and chicken?
My little girl whined, pawing at her beloved red rubber frisbee. I looked over at her impatient pale eyes and asked her to please wait while I continued my research, desperate to discover how I could have more time with her.
Well done--and welcome to the club! I'm so glad you've joined us. This was a great little tale. I enjoyed the way it unfolded and finally revealed its secrets!
Poor furries. I love this line: "A paw on my arm. A frisbee in the mouth. The scent of squirrels down the street scurrying away, outrageously undisturbed." And then all the measures taken to extreme. Nicely done!
Jessica had lost her way. The GPS voice didn’t admit it. She kept repeating herself, directing the red Honda in a circle around the same overgrown block. The voice sounded utterly confident every time she said “Go past this light. At the next light turn left onto Russell Avenue.” But the left at the next traffic light was unmarked, and the voice kept sending her back around the deserted block. There were no numbers on the decaying houses. Nothing sparked a memory.
A dog trotted past, looking purposeful, and disappeared into the brush at the side of the road.
Perhaps the house on Russell was a stop Jessica was not supposed to make. Maybe there were secrets she wasn’t supposed to find. It just wasn’t there anymore. She had lost nearly all recall of the place, though she’d lived there until age fifteen; her long-term memories of other places weren’t much clearer. With the help of ChatGPT, she’d recently concluded that her memory loss might be due to an undiagnosed concussion on the eve of her bat mitzvah. Chat had suggested returning to the scene might spark some recall.
She’d fallen down the stairs in the Russell Avenue house and hit her head so hard she felt her brain bang against her skull. She remembered that impact, remembered denying she felt dizzy or nauseous, remembered running water hard in the sink to cover the sound of vomiting. “I’m fine,” she told her parents. After all, it was her own fault. She’d been warned about running down the slippery stairs in socks.
The patient hours the cantor had spent teaching her, the insecurities her mother had unearthed working on the guest list, the money her father had invested in Swedish meatballs and nova and the best bagels on the Island – she couldn’t let them all down. The show must go on. She made it through the service and got through the party. She knew this part, because there were pictures. A vague memory of her mother crying in the upstairs bathroom might have been from that day, but it could have been from many others.
Fifty years later, she said, “Siri, we’re lost.” The GPS tried sending her around again, but Jessica turned it off. Some things she wasn’t supposed to remember.
The dog trotted out of the woods looking satisfied. Jessica followed him back to the main road, heading home.
I lost it. I screamed, shouted, jumped up and down like a three year old having a fantastic tantrum. YES! I lost my temper. Where did it go? Under the rug, hiding in the bathroom, locked in the car?
Did someone steal it? Although without value someone might have taken it. But why? I want it back. Give it back or I'll punch you in the face. Hard really hard.
too funny. Kind of a lost/not lost story.
This captures my rage. I get so mad looking. I said to my husband, well are you gonna help me find it? As if he were the problem.
Yeah, I feel this.
So scared I'll give you a like.
thank you!
Oooh I have had days like this one.
The other day I lost thirty-four humanoid skulls. When I say lost, I really mean that I don't know where I put them for safe keeping. I didn't want to lose them, but I didn't want to keep them in my room or anything. That might have given rise to conjecture.
Such as, why is he hiding thirty-four skulls with neat bullet-holes in the middle of their foreheads under his bed? Don't look so surprised, I told you... I didn't? Well, these skulls had perfect bullet-holes through their foreheads. At least, most of them did. To tell you the truth, I was just a bit freaked by this obvious fact. The police might come knocking, and I really hated it when they did that. So I quickly hid them away somewhere. In my haste I didn't remember where.
In the deep freeze, maybe, but the deep freeze was full of nice things to eat like ice cream. Salt butter caramel with vanilla, for example. (Americans may have another name for it, but there's been so much bullshit coming out of America lately I'll call it what I like, thank you very much). I took a flashlight and went down to the basement. The basement didn't smell too good, but I think that was what you might call a plumbing leak. Anyway, those skulls were scraped and scrubbed out, clean as a whistle.
I think I said "humanoid"? Because so they were. Dead ringers for human skulls, but smaller. Imagine a cranium the size of a tennis ball. But not plastic or anything. Real authentic vintage humanoid bone. Probably ancient, possibly highly valuable.
I went through the rest of the house. There was no hiding-place in the bathroom – no tub, just the shower, the washbasin, the what-you'd-expect in a corner. So I did look under the bed. Woolly sheep and spiders, no thirty-four skulls. Which were well and truly lost by this time. I gave up searching.
It was night so I picked up some reading and went to bed.
A literary journal. I turned the pages. No, no, no... Stop! What was that?
All my thirty-four small skulls with bullet-holes were there at the top of a page. I didn't know how they'd got there, but so what? It was a relief to know they were off my hands.
That Mary Guterson could do the explaining from now on.
Ha! Yeah, you'll have to take it up with the editors over at HAD. That image is actually on every page of the publication. No idea why!
Oh, I wash my hands of the whole business. :D
Too late. I called them and they are sending you 33 of them in today's mail. The 34th they are keeping for sentimental reasons.
BTW, Dead Game is very good. Skulls 'n' all.
Thank you, John.
My home address was a treehouse in a region that burned down last week. I am sleeping rough.
You won't get me!
Dead Game is great, Mary, particularly the last image of Mrs Drummer twitching in the casket.
thank you, Janet.
How often do the police come knocking?
MYOB
Love this.
I raced through each sentence to get to the next!
This is great!
hahahaha---Love this John!
Thank you, Angela.
Good question, what have I lost. Let me think about that. Off the top of my head I’m not coming up with anything except my phone, and glasses, and those not lost for a few days now, which is amazing. Both those losses have been temporary, too, so only mildly embarrassing, because, you know, how everyone thinks you’re losing your mind after a certain age. Not an identifiable age either, it can be early onset of whatever. Which brings up the question, am I losing my mind? I don’t think so. Maybe partially. Minimally partially. But I’ve read the brain can keep expanding its marvelous network of connections well into the ninth decade, perhaps beyond. Not all brains, of course. Many don’t make it this far. I know because I follow the obituaries. I’ve lost a lot of friends, and almost friends, and people I knew by name and reputation, or lack of reputation. Whatever that means, heh. But back to the glasses. Let it be known I prepare for their loss by ordering by the dozen. That way I can afford to lose a pair occasionally, which happens. The phone is a different matter. It’s part of my brain. If I really lost my phone I’d have no friends, no memories, my whole network would collapse. I’d be on my own, or so I think. So while on the face of it, I’m talking about losing a phone, really it’s deeper than that. The phone is just a front for all those relationships. Because right now, sitting here, there’s no way to tell anything is the way it used to be. Everything I’ve known might be gone and I just don’t know it yet. Even the obituaries don’t keep up with loss. Like yesterday, when a text came in on my phone from my brother telling my siblings and I his son, our nephew, was deceased. Early in the morning he took his own life, he lost his life. So far we don’t know how, or why, really.
I'm so very sorry, Tod. This piece you wrote is very intense and leads beautifully to that last searing piece of information. May his memory be a blessing to all who knew him.
xoxo
Tod, this line: "the phone is just a front for all those relationships." Made me stop and glance at my own "monster of disconnection" and ponder how many "contacts" I still carry on the thing. Addresses, emails, phone numbers of people now unreachable in this dimension. This is so well written, and I am sorry for your family's loss.
I received the same news, via email, that my first cousin's son had taken his own life after a long struggle with addiction and mental health issues (which I hadn't known about). I had known him only as a child, when he visited the U.S. one summer, such a bright, sweet 10 year old, no hint of any shadow.
There's a kind of white hot flush that moves up your body at news like that. And when they're young, the loss is partially abstract, it's all the imagined years of a future they'll never have. Of course there is nothing abstract about the very present loss felt by his family.
Thank you Mark. My nephew was 36. Still young. 50, even 60 feels young to me at this point : ) It leaves you with questions, like couldn't I have known him better, engaged more, but, of course, we lead the lives we choose.
We mostly try to lead our lives being as reasonably kind as we can to those in our orbit, and I imagine that’s the case with you. The suicidal so often hide their depression, and those that don’t often get all the love they should need from concerned family and friends. But self-love cannot be given, can it? And that ultimately, is what’s missing.
I was not expecting this ending. Brought me up short. Maybe it would be good to lose the phone to avoid news like this.
This piece is so well written and captures so much life -- its difficulties and its brevity. I am so sorry that your nephew died. The other day I had reason to tally up the young, and less young, people I know who have left this way. A shocking number that led me to ponder if it is the difficulties of this time or the timeless difficulties that we don't know how to prepare ourselves for. Also, led me to realize that every single one of them was and remains beloved by family and friends which is sometimes cold comfort, but is still comfort.
Devastating for you and your family.
Tod, I'm sorry for your loss. I hope the recent family time you've spent helps strengthen all of you.
I am sorry Tod. For everything you have lost, and for that especially.
I could feel your sadness in this piece and am very sorry to learn of your loss. My condolences to you and the family.
T, please know that we have you in our hearts and hold you dearly.
How can I lose Bart Giamatti? And Fay Vincent. And Bowie Kuhn. I mean, how can I get them out of my head? Nothing against them. I’m sure they were fine fellows; must have been to be commissioners of the national pastime. But they are in my head and I’d like to lose them. I could use the space.
I didn’t remember they were there until this morning when I got an email about a new prompt and there at the top of the prompt was a link to a video about Bart Giamatti. Immediately I thought: That’s a funny thing for Mary to be using for a prompt, a former baseball commissioner. See? Immediately I knew BG’s place in the the world, in my world, in my frigging head. And then I watch the video and Fay Vincent gets mentioned. And then Bowie Kuhn pops up in my head.
I believe Bowie Kuhn always wore a fedora, like Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. I think it was him, “Bear,” who wore a fedora. Maybe I’m misremembering. Tom Landry? Anyway, I’m thinking about baseball now (don’t really want to digress into college football, do I? Ara Parseghian!) and baseball makes me think of Wayne Garrett.
Wayne Garrett made me gay. Wayne Garrett, third baseman for the NY Mets, those 1969 Miracle Mets. Wayne Garrett, number 11, cap off, strawberry blond hair tufting in the breeze. Wayne Garrett crouched at third, legs spread and planted, arms outstretched, tensed, ready for the ball. Wayne Garrett, stretched out full length and sliding cleats-first into home. Wayne Garrett, hugging and lifting shortstop Bud Harrelson after a win. Wayne Garrett, kissing Bud Harrelson midair. Wayne Garrett, atop a pile of Mets celebrating the World Series, ripping his shirt off, standing atop the Mets, the naked Mets, pointing at me at home on the couch, raising me up and out of the house and across Queens and to Shea Stadium and down, down into his arms and into the clubhouse and out to his Mustang convertible and across the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan and to his penthouse and here I am, the only living boy in New York who Wayne Garrett made gay. So Bart, Fay, Bowie: I guess you can stay as long as Wayne Garrett stays.
oh my god, could not love this one more!!!
Thanks,Mary. Once again your prompt has us aiming for the fences.
Kevin, this is superb! I have to do a web search for Wayne Garrett now. Looking forward to it. And I love the sneaky way you wove a couple of song titles/lyrics into this. Well done! Needed this baseball fix this morning. My Mariners have been dreadful this week.
Mariners forever!
welcome to metsville, Angela, speaking of dreadful. Those song lyrics came up because I saw P. Simon the other night in Forest Hills Stadium (where he and "Arty" played their first gig in 1966), although he didn't perform those songs. Three years before my Wayne Garrett epiphany. Queens has always been a happening place.
Robert Conrad in Wild Wild West made me gay, because I wasn't yet a baseball fan as a kid, although, weirdly, I played in Little League, in which case my teammate Mel Lewis, may have been who made me gay, or at least provokes those gooey feelings in my stomach that I knew I wasn't supposed to feel, the same feelings Wayne Garrett stimulated in you.
Nice piece. You just let yourself go where ever your brain took you.
Yes, Robert Conrad in those little bolero jackets and tight trousers. Just looked it up; WW West finished in April 1969, just when Wayne Garrett came into my life. Coincidence? too good to be ignored: the final air date of WWW was April 11. Wayne Garrett made his Mets debut on April 12.
Obvious case of transmigration of souls.
Oh I remember you writing about Robert Conrad. God, but I loved that show.
"Wayne Garrett made me gay." Priceless.
So fabulous!
They lost their mother. Not that she died. Well, she did die, but that’s not what this is about. And, not that she ran away; she was often absent, but she was always there.
She didn’t mean to be, but she was tough to love. She was smart and wise in many ways but lacked self-compassion. Capable of kindness, she was often unkind. She was broken by things outside her control, and so sometimes she broke other people. She didn’t want to do that; she had to do that.
During her final illness, she lost whatever filters she had managed to erect to save others from her worst impulses. That wasn’t anything they could blame her for. They understood these things are not optional and so when she repeatedly demanded that upon her death they do nothing except immediately forget her, forbidding obituary, funeral and burial, they listened and added this to the list of ways in which they would continue to disappoint her.
When she died, they failed to forget her, but in accord with her wishes they wrote no obituary and had no funeral or burial. They did, out of necessity, tell her friends. They also, out of necessity, had her cremated. Their father took her ashes home.
As it happened, soon after her death they realized that their father was fighting dementia and all thoughts turned to his care. Sometimes they thought their mother’s wishes were beginning to be fulfilled, insofar as his needs became so overwhelming that they rarely had energy to think about her.
When he died, they cleaned out and sold the house. On that last afternoon, sitting in a circle on the bare living room floor sharing several bottles of their parents’ favorite wine, they said those sorts of things we say at such times. The youngest spoke last, “A toast to Mom. We almost made you happy. We didn’t forget you and know you’re pissed about that. But we did lose your ashes, which is really pretty amazing when you think about it. What happened? Did Dad mistakenly put them in the trash one day? Maybe. Did one of us not recognize the box and send you off to the Salvation Army Thrift Store last week? Who knows? Anyway, we did our best.”
Wow, I could so totally relate to this story. I'm sitting here shaking my head at your words as so much comes flowing back to me. The things we go through when our parents die... and yet, that's life! Thank you for this piece.
Once my mother and I were in the kitchen and we got into a conversation about how we wanted others to grieve for us, and she said she wanted people to be wailing for her, sobbing uncontrollably in the pews. She wasn't quite serious, but she wasn't entirely joking either. She was saying, if you're really broken up over my death, that's okay. I liked her honest refusal to be noble about it, to say what you're supposed to say.
She gave her body to science and a memorial service was too logistically difficult. She knew we would talk about her a lot and never come close to forgetting her
That request from your mother to be forgotten is heartbreaking.
This piece is loosely based on fact. We did finally find her ashes which we later scattered with our father's at a beautiful lake in the Sawtooth Mountains - a place where we'd once had a very uncomplicated and exceedingly happy family day. We hope that if their spirits were watching they were touched and had equally happy memories of that earlier day. A few months after we scattered the ashes, the lake was at the epicenter of an exceedingly rare earthquake. Made us wonder if that was a cosmic sign of approval or perhaps a loud complaint. We were ready to welcome either.
Years on, we all have a better understanding of her complex history and difficult challenges and are thankful for all that was good and forgive all that wasn't.
this is truly the dream: "Years on, we all have a better understanding of her complex history and difficult challenges and are thankful for all that was good and forgive all that wasn't."
I love the idea of the ashes arriving at the Salvation Army Thrift Store. Not sure why, but that one really made me giggle.
I love the nuanced portrait of the mother, and the clear insight.
The line "...they failed to forget her but in accord with her wishes they wrote no obituary and had no funeral or burial"
the "they failed" is piercing
So real, and reassuring that they can agree that “our best” is plenty.
I lost my grocery. It closed the week before last, after 23 years, just half a mile from my house, and now I feel like my world is upside down even though I have been through much harder things, like being suicidal after taking a medication three years ago and climbing over the rail on a bridge in the middle of the night and taking a bunch of Xanax and drinking a beer so I would not feel the impact of the water 60 feet below - turned out to be a great decision, almost overdosing like that, because I was too stoned to move and someone saw me and called 911 - and then two summers ago divorcing my emotionally abusive husband after finally recognizing the treatment for what it was. You’d think I could handle my grocery closing, and I can, and I will, but for the time being I am a grocery-store refugee trying to find a new grocery home - Kroger today? or Rainbow Blossom? - because it is not family-size boxes of Raisin Bran Crunch I want or fresh bunches of kale and organic strawberries. It is people. That is what I have lost.
Polly! Wow. Amazing the way it started off with a regular kind of loss and then zoomed upward to a place we had no idea we were going. If this is real, then I'm so glad you survived all of this and are here with us today.
Yes, it is real.
And thank you.
That second sentence is so skillfully done. And using an everyday thing like a store closing to kick so quickly into a different gear that we don't see coming is wonderful (if the scenario is horrifying).
Thank you.
Thank you for writing this.
You are welcome
Polly, this is a devastating and well written piece. In the end it is people--people that we lose.
These incidental interactions are really fundamental to psychological well-being and not, in fact, incidental.
Yes. Those "incidental interactions" are so very key to feeling we are grounded in a place, that we belong. I once had a grocery store where I knew all the clerks by face, if not name. They watched my kids grow up. Now, I go to a much bigger store in a much bigger city and the clerks are never the same.
That was my grocery! The first time I went to Kroger there were so many employees around doing so many things and I thought, It will take me so long to make friends here! But I will figure it out.
I have been keeping a diary for 35 years and in October here on Substack started publishing some of it here and 90% percent of it is just these daily interactions. Not real exciting stuff - but they are the reality of life.
Thank you, Angela. I was just feeling all this loss so keenly this morning and then the prompt came along and it all poured out. I have lost some other communities recently, like the Curl Crew at my favorite Dairy Queen - where I went almost every day for two years after getting out of the psych unit to put on the weight that I lost and also for the routine and people there, who have since moved on to other stores or work - and some writing groups and other activities, but the grocery was just the last and biggest loss, magnifying all the rest.
Your keen sense of loss informs the entire piece you wrote. So good!
Mementos
For years, I carried my draft card in my wallet. The U.S. had pulled out of Vietnam by the time I registered, but I liked showing people the artifact.
In 1989, I went to a screening of Jim Jarmusch’s "Mystery Train.” One of its stars, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, introduced the film, took questions, and signed autographs. I loved Screamin' Jay, but the only thing I had for him to sign was my draft card, which by then was old enough to drive. He laughed as he signed it, "I'm a soldier my own self!" After that, I really enjoyed showing it off.
I didn't get to do it for long. In 1992, I came out of a hot-springs bath house in Big Sur to find that my shirt and pants had been taken off the hook where I'd hung them, replaced by a tattered t-shirt and jeans so filthy and rank, I could barely stand to search the pockets in case the thief just wanted some clean clothes, not my wallet. No such luck.
A staffer told me that a vagrant had probably sneaked in for a refresh.
It was a drag to cancel credit cards while traveling for a weekend workshop, but worse to lose that cool memento.
My workshop was on Transcendental Film. That first evening, the leader asked us to consider, “What does transcendence mean for you?”
Later, in the baths with several women from the workshop, I was stewing over the theft and getting used to being naked among strangers. The talk turned to transcendence, other worlds, two women murmuring about Alice through the looking glass. I said, "Maybe it's just surviving loss.” One woman said, “Yeah. You transcended your pants."
She and I ended up talking after the others left. She was from Oakland; I was from Kansas City. We might never see each other again, but could see it all just then. She was years older, but lithe, energetic, funny. After we showered and dressed, she said, "I want to show you something."
We walked to her room. Was this going sexual? I was between marriages, at an iconic site of 1960s liberation, and not unwilling. But she shook out some loose photos from an envelope on her bed, and handed one to me.
In the photo, she stood in the charred remains of a house. A stone chimney rose into the sky behind her. She was smiling, holding a silver necklace up from a scorched metal box.
She lost everything in the 1991 fire, she told me, except for her dead husband's Army dogtag. He died in Vietnam when they were newlyweds.
She'd been divorced twice since. "I keep transcending husbands," she said.
Her smile looked just like the one in my hand, which seemed as if it might remain, a Cheshire mystery, if the rest of the photo burned away.
Beautiful. I just love this story.
I loved writing it. Thanks for the inspiration, Mary.
Nicely done. Some great lines: “…my draft card, which by then was old enough to drive” “I keep transcending husbands.”
Great piece. Enjoyed it immensely.
This is fantastic! This absolutely works as a finished flash piece - I wouldn’t change a thing. Any story in which Screamin Jay Hawkins appears piques my interest, but that’s only the beginning of the delights here.
Thanks, Wim. I've met a few one-of-a-kind American weirdos. He was definitely one.
What do you mean not all there, the policeman wanted to know. Is she slow? He looked up from the notepad he was scribbling on.
The girl is not stupid, Rose explained. Sometimes you’d even think she was brilliant. She’s never done well in school, she hates school, but not because of her IQ.
What then? he asked.
Good lord, Rose thought, this policeman is a little slow himself. It’s just, she doesn’t see things the way other people do.
Has she ever been diagnosed with –
No, no, she’s not crazy, she’s just – different. Not all there.
They’d had to wait twenty-four hours before the police would even speak to them. Rose and Murray had stayed up most of the night, willing the door to open or the phone to ring. Linda was in school yesterday, according to the principal’s office, so her disappearance was timed at three twenty-five. Today she hadn’t shown up at home or at school. Her older brother and sister, away at their respective universities, hadn’t heard from her. Her friends denied knowing anything, although Rose had her suspicions about them.
She doesn’t know who to trust, Rose explained to the policeman. She makes friends with the wrong types of people. Someone took advantage of her, is my worry.
The policeman wanted to know about drugs.
It’s always drugs with them, Rose thought. What was that saying, if the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
No, she said, no drugs. She did come home drunk from a party a couple of months ago, but she had promised not to do that again.
Had they had a fight?
Yes, Rose said, the night before. They had argued about her not doing her schoolwork. No, no one hit anyone. Just a lot of screaming. Linda had called them complete failures as parents, but she didn’t tell the policeman that. What a thing to say! Somehow their other two children were doing well, so how much of a failure could they have been?
The policeman tried to reassure her, saying: Nine out of ten times, they come home after they cool down a bit. Most likely she’s staying with a friend. I’ll be surprised if you don’t hear from her in the next few days.
And the tenth out of ten?
Let’s not worry about that till it happens, he said.
But she wasn’t reassured.
You've drawn such a picture of this family in the way this was written. Really well done.
Love this portrait of a worried family and how the cops are so nonchalant at this point. Also really like that you left this open ended. We are left to ponder whether she returns home.
Very real. If all you have is a hammer - great line that encompasses the entire conversation.
Well told. Very realistic and disturbing.
Talismans
I don’t know about you
but I spend an inordinate time
answering questions in my head
that no one will ever ask me.
If I was a castaway
allowed only one object
on a deserted isle,
what would it be?
An atlas or a dictionary?
Forgive my hesitation
in responding,
for I do not know
if I love maps more,
or words.
What if I had to choose between
the pawprint of my perfect dog
preserved to comfort me,
and a shrapneled pocket watch
reputed to have saved my grandfather’s life
in the Battle of the Marne?
I would be hard put,
very hard put,
they are both my sacred talismans.
Speaking of Grandpère,
he started a stamp collection
in 1909.
By the time he was dying
80 years later,
well, you can imagine its worth.
But the husband of his caretaker,
recently out of prison
found and stole this treasure
selling it off, section by section.
Thank God Marcel died before he found out,
because it would have killed him.
I love cancelled postage so much
I make art from it.
Perhaps I hope to summon
those stolen stamps
dispersed beyond recovery.
In my dreams,
they lift from the pages
where they never should have been glued,
and fly to me on that castaway island
so I would no longer be lost
but found.
MCO 2026
I think you found yourself. And maybe you love maps, but you clearly love words! Lovely poem, Mark.
The gorgeous artwork made by my sister accompanying this poem can be found here. https://thetrashwhisperer.blogspot.com/2021/12/talismans.html
I love your "Dead Game" piece. Reminds me of the basement haunted house we kids put together that was so sweetly amateurish. (I turned into my favorite short story, "Fringe Benefits.)
By the way, Mitch McConnell's new moniker is "rigor tortoise." Ha!
I spoke with him for 20 minutes yesterday. He says your poem made him gay. (Hope you've seen the hundreds of memes that say this....) (Love your sister's art!)
She is my muse. Every visit, (one upcoming) we have one day in the "art cave" (a room in her house) and craft marvelous art, much of which hangs all over my apartment.
Tell McConnell he's too late, shoulda read my poetry 50 years ago. And gotten some work done, too. Because you just wouldn't have done well, Mitch, I'm sorry to say. We've much nicer over here, but we can be a little shallow, truth be told.
ha!
Brilliant poem, brilliant artwork
the art is terrific and poems are super
Finally I realize what McConnell has always reminded me of! He is also my senator, alas.
The turtle comparison has been around for a LONG time, but you probably guard your sanity and don’t watch cable news like I do.
The artwork and the wordwork--so moving.
Mark, the image of those cancelled stolen stamps lifting from the pages and flying with you--and the images you try to choose from before that--all so clearly drawn. Nice piece.
Also love the art! Talented siblings, Mark!
Beautiful
Lovely. And now I know the source for your new edition's cover.
This happened a couple of weeks ago too, but I wrote a short story this morning, and it just... I don't know.... fits?
The Gift Shop
The boy’s parents browsed, lacklustre, the mother wafted the heat from her face and the baby’s face with a plastic spade.
The shopkeeper took a pewter druid from a shelf, and crouched in front of the boy.
He turned the figure about in the light so the crystal atop the druid’s staff spiraled light around the room and across both their faces
‘I had one like this when I was your age,‘ he said, and as he shifted it back and forth, the light shone intensely in the crystal.
‘You’ll understand what I am about to tell you,’ he said, and he held the druid still.
‘He wasn’t able to stop the bad dreams,’ he glanced up from his knee towards the boy’s mother, who was shifting the baby from one hip to the other, ‘but he was there when I woke up, and in the morning, these sparkles made the room safe again.’
The boy took the druid from his hands, and moved him about. The shopowner raised his eyes to the ceiling, and the boy followed his gaze, to where the light danced and shook on the surface.
He pushed his hands against his knees, and stood, turned to the mother and said, ‘Not much escape from this heat.’The father walked to the till, put three postcards on the counter, and said, ‘I’m surprised you don’t you sell ice creams.’
‘This everything?’
‘We don’t need any more crap filling the house,’ he turned to the mother, ‘I left my wallet in the boot.’
She shifted the baby across again, the father grabbed the druid from the boy, put it on the stand next to the dragons, and went to stand outside. The druid was turned with his face to the wall.
The mother sat the baby on the counter, and reached into the bag which was zipped around her tummy, offered up three coins.
He slid the postcards into a brown paper bag, and handed them smiling to the mother.
He took a basket of polished pebbles from under the counter.
‘Take your pick, he said to the boy, turned to the mother and said, ‘enjoy your day.’
‘Don’t forget,’ he said, as they left. The boy turned his head, while holding his mother’s hand, to look back at him.
***
As he locked up, he remembered the druid was misplaced. He put the key back in the lock, shook his head, removed the key and went home. The next day, as he unlocked, he saw a small ball had been posted through the letterbox at the foot of the door.
He bent to pick it up. It was a piece of paper wrapped around something. He unfolded the paper, and a small pebble fell out.
On the paper was written, across two lines ruled in pencil, ‘im not aloud’.
He breathed out, bent to pick up the pebble, ran his thumb across its polished surface, looked at the blue-grey stone with lightning bolt fractures through it. He spun the druid around to face the shop.
So, so sad. And so well-done! Love the dual meaning of "aloud." Great little story, Niall.
Someday, when that little boy is "aloud" he will revisit that shopkeeper and reclaim his stone. And maybe the druid. Or at least I believe that's the way the universe should correct itself.
Lovely and sad.
Love the idea of the safety in sparkles. I felt it last night as I watched a swarm of fireflies by the river.
I’ve lost my ability to write creatively. I’m sure it’s temporary but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. I always have ideas in response to writing prompts, but this time I’m coming up empty. Loss is such a rich subject, with innumerable ways to approach it. But after a couple of false starts that turned out to be dead ends- one about losing my wallet, another about the emotional differences between misplacing something and losing it - I’ve come to this.
I wish I could write something clever, insightful or moving about loss but my imagination has
sputtered and died like an old lawnmower. Or maybe it’s more like an employee who is dissatisfied with working conditions and goes out on strike. I guess it needed a break. All I can do is wait for it to wander back in and mumble, “Here I am. What do you need?”
I think this satisfies the prompt perfectly!
Yes, no sense looking for this lost thing, it will find you!
That sounded pretty creative to me.
That mower's not dead. Just needs a rest. When it's ready, just keep pushing it around the lawn.
I left my favorite pair of AG jeans, bootcut, worn in all the best places, along with a red leather Dries van Noten belt, also worn in all the best places, in the Serena Hotel in Nairobi. They were snatched by the housekeeper's teenage daughter, who wore them dancing in dark warehouses where the afro-beats reverberated the flimsy floorboards until her body, like mine, expanded uncouthly with all the child-bearing, and they no longer fit.
I left my favorite red-string bikini, stretchy triangles of lycra that perfectly cupped my 34C breasts, at the Peninsula hotel in Bangkok. The housekeeper herself adopted it, wearing it to sandy family outings at the beach, unashamed that her baby-pulled breasts spilled saggy speckled pouches under her armpits. I, however, could never wear a bikini once the stretch marks on the belly ruined the aesthetics.
I left my favorite orange, paisley-knitted, Pashmina scarf, a gift from my best friend from college, as soft and warm as her hug, in a taxi in Victoria. The taxi-driver gifted it to his girlfriend, a divorced nurse raising three kids in two-bedroom basement apartment. She wore it draped over the grey polyester dress she bought from Target on those rare date-nights she could escape from her kids, and feel beautiful again.
What a great response to the prompt! (And so great to see you here again.) Love the imaginary futures for these losses. I'm gonna have to think about what you did here and see if I can come up with a prompt from it. Hope you'll drop in again! You are missed!
What Mary said.
Such a smart response to the prompt. Well done!
I love the unselfconscious responses to finding your lost items. People giving them love without worrying about anything else. This is such a descriptive and vividly written piece.
Gorgeous. So intriguing to imagine the lives of lost items!
I did a madlib, my first and got this story.
Detective Adorable was the best detective in town. One day, someone reported that grease had mysteriously disappeared from the kitchen. The detective put on a olive shoes and grabbed a magnifying glass to investigate.
At the scene, the detective found effervescent clues everywhere. There were tiny footprints and some fur. "This is very sneakily," the detective said very.
Following the trail, the detective went down the hallway. The footprints led to a closet. Inside, there was a zoorilla trying to punctuating very quietly. The zoorilla had prettily kneelump and looked rage.
"Did you take the grease?" asked the detective. The zoorilla shook its head and pointed to another squid hiding behind a house. This squid had lamington crumbs all over it!
The squid confessed that it had eaten the food because it was feeling happiness. Everyone agreed to skiing together and make more food to share.
The detective solved the case successfully and became even more overbearing. From then on, all the animals knew to run so and ask before taking food!
"Everyone agreed to skiing together and make more food to share." Key to the good life right there!
Good to be reading JDA again!
thanks Terry always good to see you pop up
Such a treat to be reading this after posting my own, J.D.A. Have never tried a madlib myself, but am now certain to do so. This is a scream! Had to look up lamington crumbs. Want some right now.
Id never heard of a madlib except the artist who Im a big fan of-
‘road of the lonely ones’ is one of my alltime favourite tracks.
yeah Danny McBride mentioned madlibs in his new book, a character was trying to get his kid to play? do? madlibs…I wouldve liked that when I was a kid- I guess we did something similar, we’d write a word on a long folded up piece of paper and finish sentences, dont ask me quite how
Just listened. So good! Only movie of Danny McBride's I think I've seen is Angry Birds Movie (again, with my students).
Righteous Gemstones is a great series and if you’ve taught at schools you might like Vice Principals -another excellent series byDanny McBride. Thrilling Tales of Modern Men is the first book of his I’ve read, so far it’s great
Will check these out. Thanks. :)
Will have to look up the song and Danny McBride, but I do remember that game with the long folded up piece of paper and finishing sentences because I used to play it with my students sometimes. :)
“The squid confessed that it had eaten the food because it was feeling happiness.” Happens to me all the time. Great stuff!
I don’t remember when I first forgot about Marta. Should I? I’m not sure. What is the protocol for forgetting? It’s not something normally taught in school, and I haven’t really run into it in social situations.
I don’t recall what we were doing when I first forgot about Marta. I remember she liked to play games; she would go on and on about this dead game thing she played when she was a kid. But that was a long time ago, way past the time when “childish things” should be put aside. And I never really understood what she was talking about anyway.
But, you ask (and I don’t blame you for asking) (and, please note I am using parentheses as the use of em dashes is an AI warning sign, apparently), what happened when I forgot about her? I think we were driving somewhere, or maybe driving back. That’s a pretty important distinction, at least in my mind, as forgetting on the way would mean maybe she wasn’t really there when we did whatever we did when we got there. But, forgetting on the way back means we did something together, maybe something fun, maybe not, but apparently not anything memorable.
So that narrows it down a bit. We were driving. A car, I’m pretty sure, because if we had been driving a boat we would have been on our way to Tod’s, and I’ve never been there, so it must have been a car (or truck). But that doesn’t help much with the “when” part.
[BTW congrats on the HAD story!]
Thank you, Mark! "I never understood what she was talking about anyway." Me, neither! Super fun story. I hope Tod sees it!
Quite a conundrum you pose here. I'd say it's likely unanswerable. Could have been a motorcycle, or a golf cart.
So happy to have found your Substack Mary! I offer as a first-time participant, my attempt at this prompt, exactly 400 words and lots to be lost!
I couldn’t look at them - their joyful, dependent faces - without feeling I wasn’t doing something wrong. I winced at their youth. How will I keep it from withering? Was I actually contributing to a dwindling vitality by doing what their physician tells me to do year on year, month over month? So many modern animals seem to be victim to sudden seizure, to cancer reasoned with as an inevitability of aging.
Not my two, I vowed. Spending hours searching up alternative approaches, studies to prove and disprove, forums espousing the dire consequence of doing or not doing; while those sweet faces grew bored. A paw on my arm. A frisbee in the mouth. The scent of squirrels down the street scurrying away, outrageously undisturbed.
The internet is an argument, and its counter. The snake, the tail. Could the thing I’m trying to keep them from, itself, be the solution? A gentle dilution of the disease? Safer than all those jabs, pills and pesticides?
“Yes,” came the answer from a lady sitting on the other end of a screen. Showing me pictures of her dog’s gleaming white teeth. Taking me through a reflexive patter of stories featuring non-believers who’d since “come over to my side.”
“Get them on the raw meat and have your lies ready for whenever the vaccine records are requested,” she advised.
I had a two hour slot, which she assured me would be too much. “I bill in 15 minute increments and I respect people’s time.”
This respectful approach, as it unwound, was tethered by tangents: how tired she was from that day’s meetings, her experience in childbirth, her admiration for the work of a disbarred cardiologist. Finally, her thoughts on leptospirosis - “an overblown concern in dogs.”
She took me right to the 2 hour mark, and asked if I used Venmo.
“Goodbye and take care,” she said in response to a final question I attempted to put forth, after confirming the money had reached her account.
My Zoom screen went dark and I stared in after it. A reflection left behind, unenlightened. Was I in fact overheating my dogs by feeding them grains and chicken?
My little girl whined, pawing at her beloved red rubber frisbee. I looked over at her impatient pale eyes and asked her to please wait while I continued my research, desperate to discover how I could have more time with her.
Well done--and welcome to the club! I'm so glad you've joined us. This was a great little tale. I enjoyed the way it unfolded and finally revealed its secrets!
Thank you so much Mary! Very glad to be here :)
Poor furries. I love this line: "A paw on my arm. A frisbee in the mouth. The scent of squirrels down the street scurrying away, outrageously undisturbed." And then all the measures taken to extreme. Nicely done!
Thank you very much indeed, Kevin!
Jessica had lost her way. The GPS voice didn’t admit it. She kept repeating herself, directing the red Honda in a circle around the same overgrown block. The voice sounded utterly confident every time she said “Go past this light. At the next light turn left onto Russell Avenue.” But the left at the next traffic light was unmarked, and the voice kept sending her back around the deserted block. There were no numbers on the decaying houses. Nothing sparked a memory.
A dog trotted past, looking purposeful, and disappeared into the brush at the side of the road.
Perhaps the house on Russell was a stop Jessica was not supposed to make. Maybe there were secrets she wasn’t supposed to find. It just wasn’t there anymore. She had lost nearly all recall of the place, though she’d lived there until age fifteen; her long-term memories of other places weren’t much clearer. With the help of ChatGPT, she’d recently concluded that her memory loss might be due to an undiagnosed concussion on the eve of her bat mitzvah. Chat had suggested returning to the scene might spark some recall.
She’d fallen down the stairs in the Russell Avenue house and hit her head so hard she felt her brain bang against her skull. She remembered that impact, remembered denying she felt dizzy or nauseous, remembered running water hard in the sink to cover the sound of vomiting. “I’m fine,” she told her parents. After all, it was her own fault. She’d been warned about running down the slippery stairs in socks.
The patient hours the cantor had spent teaching her, the insecurities her mother had unearthed working on the guest list, the money her father had invested in Swedish meatballs and nova and the best bagels on the Island – she couldn’t let them all down. The show must go on. She made it through the service and got through the party. She knew this part, because there were pictures. A vague memory of her mother crying in the upstairs bathroom might have been from that day, but it could have been from many others.
Fifty years later, she said, “Siri, we’re lost.” The GPS tried sending her around again, but Jessica turned it off. Some things she wasn’t supposed to remember.
The dog trotted out of the woods looking satisfied. Jessica followed him back to the main road, heading home.
what a great story! So palpable, so very real.
Thank you, Mary.
I liked the addition of the dog, it added extra poignancy to the story.
Thanks, John.