The last time I saw my mother, she was dead. She looked her same old self, except that she was no longer breathing. Or smiling. She wasn’t opening her eyes wide like an owl. She wasn’t saying anything, like, your thighs are so big. She wasn’t moving in her usual way, which was always bouncing up and down, up and down. I said to my mother, I love you, mom, and—as usual—she didn’t say anything in return. Well, she was dead. I paid a therapist a zillion dollars to answer me one question: did my mother love me? Well, sometimes yes, and sometimes no. Up and down, up and down. When we put her in the ground, I didn’t expect her to bounce back up, but here she is, most days, looking me in the eye, tutting at my thighs, asking me about my hair. I say, ma, I don’t want to hear it, but good luck with that. The dead mother is in my backyard right now. I’ve locked the doors, but I can hear her out there, jumping up and down.
Please forgive this, but I wonder about changing the order of the start slightly.
The last time I saw my mother, she looked her same old self except that she was no longer smiling. Or opening her eyes wide like an owl. She wasn’t saying anything, like, your thighs are so big. She wasn’t moving in her usual way, which was always bouncing up and down, up and down. I said to my mother, I love you, mom, and—as usual—she didn’t say anything in return. She was no longer breathing. Well, she was dead.
Interesting idea! I like declaring her dead upfront, but I can see how you might prefer it the way you've offered it up here--delaying the news, and thereby making it a surprise. Thanks for the input!
Yes - I quite like declaring her dead upfront too, and I see why, and I thought probably you'd made the call on purpose.
I'd be really interested to hear more about why you prefer that, though, over another way, not necessarily or only the way I tentatively mooted. Not out of disagreeing, but out of genuine interest in the choices a writer makes.
How to explain my preference for the way it is? Hmmm. Well, the point of the "story" is that the dead mother lives on. It seems important to me to establish right away that she is dead. I don't need to surprise anyone with that information. i find it stronger to say right up front: she's dead. and THEN the surprise INSTEAD is that she's still hanging around. That's the point of the story. Also, I like writing about "the dead mother." I've written other pieces about her, snippets about "the dead mother." She just haunts me, and I call her the dead mother all of the time. So, i just started right in with that. Does that make sense? Feel free to ask me more questions!
A little like Kafka's Metamorphosis? Just get the big idea out there right up top, and then get on with the interesting work of following the consequences of the idea?
So generous to have your decisions described here.
I am not yet at the stage of making any re-drafts or the sentence-level re-workings that GS describes. Before you started What Now I had literally not the confidence to write anything, and have told myself that I will spend at least the year doing each week's prompt, to continue working the muscles of putting those first words down.
But I am starting to think about the next stage, which will be making those more conscious progressive decisions, so it is SO helpful to hear your thoughts.
Feels a little like being a fledging, nervously stepping up on to the branch, then retreating back into the nest, up on to the branch, back to the nest. Not quite ready to make the jump, but preparing, watching.
I'd say to give each piece space and time. The main thing is to really mind-meld with what you've written--see what is actually there, ask yourself what was your (subconscious) purpose in writing it? What is the story? What were you telling yourself when you put down those words? See if the beginning and ending meet up. They should dance together. And cut ruthlessly. Try to cut every unnecessary word.
This very closely describes a lot of what I've been working with/through/out.. and how What Now has been unfolding for me this year. It's been so helpful and interesting to listen in on this thread - so interesting about order and - so far as these things can be explicated out - what is was that motivated a particular choice.
There's something so wonderful here that I can't put my finger on very precisely, in terms of how it's working so well, but I think it's to do with the set-up of the title - and then this big piece of information given in the first sentence - and first off, not knowing yet how that will relate to the title - and then the way that it comes through. Plus, both of the trampoline moves (or maybe there are even more?): the up and down of love/not love and the up and down of haunting/still and in the ground.
Thank you, Danielle. Yes, the title does a LOT of work here. What was fun for me was starting with the title and then writing from there. I don't usually do that--but maybe i should more often!
oh, thank god i'm getting better! I was getting in a very bad mood! I'll have to think about your scary comment. I can see how you would write/think that, but it honestly didn't occur to me. So interesting! Thank you!
Wow. Man alive. I loved reading this. It's crazy how you capture that feeling, how we are never "over" these things, not really. They shaped our brains, our parents, all of us, for better or worse.
I was a lullaby, and then an eensy-weensy spider. I was bubblegum pop, followed by rock-and-roll with a whole lotta shaking going on, followed, gloriously, by the Beatles. I told my father to please just chill out, for god’s sake.
I was Dylan, waiting for the times to change, and then Dylan again, once the times had changed and everybody must get stoned. I was free because I had nothing left to lose. I gave peace a chance. My father asked me why I changed with every new day, and I asked him why he never did.
And then, oddly, I became Thelonious Monk and stayed there. Monk was enough for me. I was impressionist, I was shifting, fractured colors, I was stride and blues and bebop. I was spaces in between the notes. I was starting and stopping without warning. I was never knowing where I was going but ending up there just the same. There was so much change in Monk that I didn’t have to be anything else.
My father asked why I couldn’t be more serious, now that I was grown up. I asked him why he had to be so predictable. He denied being predictable; rather, he was consistent. Without consistency, he said, how could you get anything done? I said that consistency was only an illusion, and spontaneity was essential for creating anything.
I was wrong, though. Many years after he died, I listened to Beethoven’s late quartets, and in those muted and conflicting tones I finally heard my father's voice: dry, precise, intelligent, discursive, and profoundly sad.
That's brilliant Masha! I love how you give us the shifting stages of your life through music. It's a clever device because we all know the music and can identify with your growing up through it. And the final para is so moving. Well done.
Like how character is revealed through the tempo of the writing. The "I was..." prefix effectively driving the narrative through imagery the way a song itself might.
My partner and I have a long-running marital feud.
He does not like having cleaners invade his personal space.
He also does not like to tidy up, preferring to create elaborate organizational schemes that he expects to be self-cleaning.
After a few months of cleaning up his socks which propagate around the house like little soft animals with dust bunny tails, I get angry and insist that we hire a cleaner.
This arrangement lasts a few months after which he fires the cleaners because he doesn’t like the quality of the work.
He promises that he will share the cleaning, which lasts a few months. Then we repeat the cycle.
The arrival of an unexpected overabundance of small children accelerates the frequency and amplitude of this cycle.
He organizes the toddlers into a cleaning brigade with buckets with their names on them filled with scrub brushes, spray bottles of various cleaning fluids, and rechargeable drills with brushes affixed to the end. They are suited up in safety glasses and neon rubber gloves that reach their arm pits. They think it is huge fun to whir the drill brushes across the tiles, aim bright blue squirts into the toilet, and then get paid in Legos. The toddler cleaning brigade lasts a month.
After spending 5 hours of my precious Saturday mornings cleaning the filthy house, I am filled with primal rage, and we again hire a cleaner.
The cleaners come once a week, my favorite day, arriving home to a tidy, peaceful house.
The next day, it looks like a pack of robbers has broken in, ransacked the house and left with nothing.
May i suggest you read the book Liars by Sarah Manguso? I can't promise you'll like it (it is RAGE-filled) but there's quite a bit in there on this same topic. I love your piece, by the way, and especially that last (hilarious) line.
His own metaphor for anyone who darted around place to place, project to project, story to story–you get the idea. She googled the term once. Appalachian origin? Midwestern? He had never been to Appalachia as far as she knew. The metaphor was actually “fart in a skillet,” but this was the man who read a line from “Little Miss Muffet” to their daughters as “eating her curd away” instead of “eating her curds and whey.” In a situation with no real difference between one choice or another, he would proclaim “Six is to one and half a dozen is the other.” She had given up correcting either one.
There were bigger concerns, after all. Like the stairs on one side of the deck. Weathered and old, needing replacement. So when did he pull them off? Three days before they left on vacation. “Oh, I have the wood. All I need are the brackets.” Several weeks later, she was still teetering on the edge, every time habit and necessity moved her in that direction.
The back gate disappeared two years ago so he could sand, refinish, and rehang it. It was in the barn, leaning against one wall, spiders spinning webs around it. A cucumber trellis almost fit the space, now.
His orchard. Apple, pear, and plum trees planted with great fanfare 7 years ago. Several pre-emergent organic mixtures and sprayers later, he attended a talk given by a local orchardist. The clay powder for a protective coating on the tiny emerging apples? In the barn. Unopened. The mesh bags? One tree (one of 6) was festooned with bright green mesh bags to “protect” the fruit. Their chicken flock, denizens of the orchard during the long, warm days, were feasting. On the wormy fruit without bags and the bagged fruit. Right through the bags to also wormy apples. Apples for everyone! He brought four wormy specimens into the kitchen yesterday. Now sitting on the counter. “We can cut around the worm holes!”
He was a Gemini. Someone once told her that Geminis were spontaneous. She looked it up.
“These hyperactive air signs have short attention spans and are most satisfied when they can move fluidly from one idea to the next.”
“Fluidly.” She pondered the adverb as she teetered once more on the edge of the deck.
Animatedly. Energetically. But never dull or boring.
love the way you captured this marriage. So many good intentions! Fart on/in a skillet is a new one on me. Makes no sense, but then it absolutely does.
Never heard of fart in or on a skillet either but I love the other malapropisms and the disastrous DIY. I know people married to men like that - unfinished projects all over the house and garden! Takes the patience of a saint to live with one! Or as he might say a patent saint . . .
I've heard the expression (in England) : "like a fart in a colander, can't find a hole to get out". Said of a useless, ineffectual person, quite possibly charging around and getting nothing done.
Angela, what a great piece! I can see all those half done projects. Our front door had a pile of stones waiting to become a step for as long as I Remember.
Dad was brandy glow. Flushed red in the face of an evening. Drawing you in. People and fireside animals wanting for a piece of human warmth. One of us would get too close and get burned. The glow would fade. We would see it more for what it was: An enticement that closed the striking distance between you and the fire. Not kindness and not entirely a part of him, but kindled into existence by a foreign agent.
He was battery talker. His charge in free-fall, green percentage bar fading to red, wording himself into silence and armchair snores.
He was navy butter, invalided off the English fleet, spread thin across hobbies and responsibilities. Falling short and letting down.
He was barn limper, the time when he went to see to the lame horse. The wounded animal kicked him, in the process miraculously curing itself of its injury. He emerged wearing its limp like fancy dress that he couldn't take off. Don Rouse, waiting at the barn door, said that he did not know who best to shoot, and so broke the shotgun.
In the big rig, he was road eminence. Bright and beautiful in the church where he married his second wife. The marriage did not last. The relationship with God did not survive the marriage.
When he died, he was penny veil. Barely enough left to sow grass seed over the grave mound.
Take all those bits and pieces: A stained cork, a defunct battery, an Anchor Butter wrapper, reed of barn straw, and rear mirror air freshener whose pine scent has turned to vinegar and dust. A Bible with its multitude of pages dog-eared not by human hands, but from being forced into the bottom of a rucksack under dirty clothes.
Put all of it in a drawer of odds and ends, to organised on a later date. To be turned out on the carpet when you are gone, by someone who will not see how these pieces fit together to form a man.
These descriptions: "wording himself into silence and armchair snores." "He emerged wearing its limp like fancy dress that he couldn't take off. Don Rouse, waiting at the barn door, said that he did not know who best to shoot, and so broke the shotgun."--just shine off the page. So well done. And that final paragraph! Hits home. I have drawers and boxes of stuff that no one will ever fit together.
I generated some random two-word anagrams and fit the story around them. I knew I wanted something abstract- barely tangible as a contrast with the reality.
I wanted to avoid obvious metaphors. I also wanted something quite clipped. I began by pairing random words from a dictionary. That didn't work so I started putting these pairings into an anagram generator to make different pairings. I picked out the ones that showed promise and wrote very short stories around each one. It's a bit of a round the houses way to go about things.
Her limbs are outstretched covered with ornaments. Three satin stars stuffed with cotton and embroidered with the names of her children – Tino, Pete O and Stevo. Our names didn’t actually end with an O but my mother liked the charm of ending with the O, as if we were puppies called to the kitchen table for Cheerios , or as if a gift had just been opened, the surprise revealed, and we exclaimed: “Oh! just what I wanted!” Lincoln Logs. An erector set. A kit to fashion earrings with round corks, sequins, and tiny pins.
On another limb, she dangles a wooden moose with one red eye. My mother loved to knit a red eye on animals in sweaters to show her prowess, a mistake planted on purpose to show they were handmade, to plant a bit of wink, oblivious to the red eyes our dad showed up with each night from the bar.
Then there are the tinkling glass parachutes. They quiver when she shivers. The baskets are empty. There is no one parachuting to safety after ejecting from the land of forgotten promises.
At her top, the angel no longer lights up with the good news of deliverance. But my mother cannot abandon her, this angel who once proclaimed good tidings and now presides over a silence deep as a snowbank.
Underneath the tinsel, the tinsel that looks like hundreds of cascading tears, lies a root ball bound in burlap. My mother is practical. My mother intends to be planted outdoors after this is done. My mother will live outside where there are no ornaments, no stars, no angel, no moose and definitely no parachute.
She will peek into the window on Christmas morning for the next 30 years where there will be no Christmas tree, no celebration, just a kitchen table with a daily reader open to the page that says “the good news of the kingdom: Jehovah’s promised land.” Her ghost children long gone, the children who could not accept that one year there was a Christmas tree and the next year it was gone, the ornaments proclaimed as pagan and tossed into the trash.
This is so moving Christine. Your identification of your mother with a Christmas tree is perfect, such an abundant symbol of family, love and generosity, all too often deceptively so. I feel for her disappointment, her ejection from the land of forgotten promises and the cascading tears of the tinsel, very beautifully done.
Now my mother is scrapbook of yellowed newspaper clippings. Now she sits in a mason jar among a shelf of unvarnished trophies while we wait for delivery of a new urn to replace the one I smashed. Again.
What was swept up among her ashes this time? Hair. Mine, the cats. Dust. Cookie crumbs. Popcorn.
It was her explicit request NOT to be sprinkled or buried anywhere, but to live on a shelf wherever I lived. So too bad. This is how its going to be.
I’ve tried hiding her behind plants, but my mother is not a person to stay hidden or quiet. Three years gone, still calling, still needing, still finding the light, the lens.
My mother is a scrapbook of clippings now, but once she was The Cats Meow. The Bees Knees.
Her black framed glamour shots graced many a deli wall.
This time I’ve ordered her a metal urn. I’ll protect her. From my grief. My rage.
Wow. Consolation for what, is right. Love the rage in this one, the pain and anger. And that first apology, waiting so long for it, only to have it diminished a moment later. Mothers!
So well done! I love how the mother's explicit request means her remains are subject to the ravages of living. And the fact that she will not stay hidden--a brilliant detail.
Morose no problem. The memories of those we know rarely so readily disappear I think after the person is gone. Haunting us through objects. I learned about something called Post-memory a few years back when reading Art Spiegelman's Maus. Postmemory "describes the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before-to experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right."- Marianne Hirsch, https://postmemory.net/
I can empathise with this Dinah, it chimes somewhat with mine, and it carries echoes of Mary's too. We all seem to be obsessed with difficult mothers, particularly after they're gone. I love the image of the ashes being swept up with the cat's hair, dust and cookie crumbs.
My sister and I tiptoed around, never knowing when the next one would detonate. The field was full of green grass and daisies and buttercups pushed up their heads. If we were careful we could sit amongst them and make daisy chains or check under each other’s chin for the glow of butter-love. Our little brother seemed to have an inbuilt knowledge of safe spaces and would dance around us, teasing, laughing. We still loved him. As we grew older the explosions became weaker. Rose bushes grew, then saplings of sycamore, beech, oak and even a monkey-puzzle. We learned to climb into their canopy, wearing strong black boots, away from danger. We danced and we sang, seeded fields of our own. Sometimes our brother would join us, climbing like a monkey but always returning to the ground. We still heard rumbling from below and visited the field that was our mother only on sunny days. For a while we lived like this, scars from our childhood hidden beneath bright clothes.
One day my brother, full of youthful ambition, climbed so high. And fell.
The bomb that exploded left a crumbling crater, shrapnel triggering another and another, and the field that was my mother became a scene of devastation. My sister and I returned to plant flowers. But the seeds died as they fell, turned to shells, opening old wounds, creating new ones.
My brother still lies in that crater. Like brambles he grabs at the lowest branches, clings as he looks up, dreaming that one day he will fly again like the monkey from tree to tree. But the field that is my mother can do nothing but let him cling to her as she picks berries to throw at us, juices staining, thorns scratching. My sister has left the field. Sometimes, wistful, she looks over her shoulder, but splinters beneath scars itch, bleed from scratching. She dresses them again, turns back to tend her own garden. But I can’t stay away. Memories of dresses hung with tiny pegs on a doll’s washing line tempt me back. So I have invested in a suit of Kevlar. It keeps me safe and numbs me from the blast of the mines that are left.
Thank you for reading it! I have been following this page for a little while and started a few stories, but never posted. Reading your beautiful story about your mother made me think (as I do a lot) about my own. I knew straight away the metaphor for my mum, and the story just flowed. I might try my dad next! Thank you, for this great page!
My mother liked to say her role in life was to be the lemon on the oyster. She was referring of course to the traditional way to check that the soft flesh was alive and kicking before being eaten. Certainly she shared some of the qualities of a lemon, having been, in her heyday, the zest at many a gathering. Like the sun-filled fruit she brought a note of French flair to the dull grey Dublin of the late 1950s. Her elegance, intelligence and acerbic tongue cut a dash about town. But just as a slice of lemon suffices to perk up a drink, glamour is best appreciated in flashes. A whole evening, let alone a week, of partying and parrying smart repartee can curdle the stomach and the head.
Later, when she had returned to Paris, her first home, my mother’s wit turned bitter with disillusionment, which is after all, a short step from delusion. The world had failed to take notice of her in the way she had imagined it would and should after those early years of acclaim in what was then a provincial town. She needed admiration in order to live but she forgot that beauty, like the lemon flower, fades. Hence the oyster and the lemon juice. If heads were no longer going to turn when she entered a restaurant or a party, she would damn well get herself noticed with her acid remarks. She had to make everyone around her, even those who tried to love her, flinch.
I realise now that in truth she was more like the oyster. She was naive and lacking in self-esteem, traits that made her easy prey for the many men who abused or took advantage of her. Even in her latter years she could not step outside her apartment without being fully made up and impeccably dressed, the shell protecting the susceptible flesh of the oyster. She was lonely but, she said, never bored because she loved to read. Alone in her shell she was her truest self and she knew it. Once, she apologised for performing in front of me and my husband, people she should have been at ease with but by then the habit was so ingrained, she had to keep squeezing that lemon even when she was running out of juice and there was no oyster to react.
I felt quite sad at the end of this one. Really tough stuff. And so well done--that she wanted to be the lemon on the oyster, adding a bit of a kick, but turned out to be the oyster itself.
I like that you start with your mother's own metaphor for herself. And then turn it on its head, as you learn to understand her choices. Aaah, mothers and daughters. There's a whole book of metaphors waiting to be written! Maybe on this page.
So well written! Love the metaphor, and the final line is so devastating. "she had to keep squeezing that lemon even when she was running out of juice and there was no oyster to react."
Well, if he were a meal, he would come served on the stoneware you get at a deli, just a couple shades off white. Resistant to chipping. Well thought out in advance, in that way. And what would come atop this plate but a spiky sea of bright yellow french fries. Very likely not hand-cut. Very likely from frozen. Delicious in the way nostalgia is always delicious, MSG-level delicious, in the way that repetition can make it difficult to discern if you really are now, mid-bite, actually having this experience or are only resuscitating some memory back to life, like you would add water to an instant powder.
And what, pray tell, would come riding high alongside the fries? The entrée -- which could be changed out for any of the 46 other options on the menu of the ideal greasy spoon of your mind’s eye -- it would be served on a soft roll. That is for sure. Almost potatoey, so soft, really as if designed for children. So satisfying in how it gives its space up for the main event. Which is? A scoop of ground beef, simmered long in onions and a tomato-based sauce. An envelope of some kind of dried herb blend was mixed in, too, at some point. So, a sloppy joe.
But don’t get me wrong. It is not a lack of specialness or uniqueness. Each singular person in the world is some meal, but there are not hordes of sloppy joes running around. He is the sloppy joe of the world. And he is not even sloppy. He is at certain moments suddenly all I want. Often late, often after some drink, yes.
And so we all eat each other. We all are some meal, but then we are also the ones who are eating these meals, because otherwise how could it mean anything? You need a mouth to know about flavors. And I would eat him entirely up. I wouldn’t feel well after, but I would already know that beforehand. It’s not a sexual thing, well of course it will sound that way, but. Forget about the devouring part. He’s still standing at that table and waiting for me, even though it’s been a good fifteen minutes now, and he hasn’t texted or anything - so sloppy joe him is just there, and still perfect, sitting high on the waitress’ tray.
Thanks, Mary. That was the line to come out of it that I liked the most! (So interesting when these things match up.. and also so interesting when they - even more often? - absolutely don't.) (: Hope you're feeling well!
My mother was a bulldozer. This was often necessary since she had eight children, a very small house, and never used Pampers. We had a laundry chute from the second floor to the basement. On certain days, if you stood underneath that chute and opened the latch, you could be crushed to death. I remember going down to our basement on days when she literally stood in mountains of dirty laundry.
Sometimes I have dreams about the laundry my mother did. And she did all of it. For years. Of course my sisters and I helped by folding and putting all the laundry away and ironing. I remember being five or six and trying to fold sheets with my older sister—it required two little people. And when my mother finally left the house she’d lived in for fifty years to move into assisted living, she made sure she went through all the stuff in that house and got rid of everything she could.
This is one episode, an example of her nearly insane force of will to get things done. It was winter, early in her dementia. She’d made a list of things she wanted to accomplish while I was home visiting, one of which was to find some styrofoam from a Walmart or Lowe’s. She wanted to use styrofoam from an unpackaged appliance, something as large as a refrigerator or stove, to insulate an area under her kitchen sink that sometimes grew drafty in winter. I thought she was a little crazy but I went along with her to the Walmart. We found a man in back who gave us an enormous sheet of styrofoam. My job involved getting it outside, where it had begun blizzarding, and into her van.
“You can do it,” she said when I looked doubtfully at the wind blowing snow across the parking lot.
I maneuvered the bed-sized sheet of styrofoam out the automatic doors and into the maelstrom. The styrofoam acted like a sail, propelling me across the icy blacktop so that the sheet cracked off in my hands and flew into the shopping cart bins. I managed to retrieve the styrofoam and tacked my way back through the wind to the van. I stuffed it in.
To help me finish my investigative report on rates of missed surgical diagnoses, the hospital administration assigned me a librarian to be my gofer. They were too short on staff for a recent graduate in digital humanities research to come my way, so they gave me the only librarian in the vicinity who was available to take on my project, a staid old lifer who when he wasn’t finessing his core at our free basement gym for employees worked part-time for me. An was a strong, squat fellow in late middle age with long black hair and tawny skin, the same burnt umber shade as the glossy figurines on the whack-a-mole board at the Chuck-E-Cheese where I used to take my son for classmates’ birthday parties. I found it hard to make eye contact with An’s dead and beady puppet eyes, even as I prided myself on my specific description that labeled him closely without assistance from my wife’s color-matching booklet of nail gels. (Librarians, I laughed, were for cataloguing.) Anytime I identified a historical source of interest, An interrupted me with a wordless cough and popped up from behind his desk to serve me stacks of works in two open hands. In numerous configurations were knowledge on a platter of skin. An showed me work I might want to check, then wouldn’t leave till I did like he held me in his crosshairs at gunpoint. His reasons for secrecy eluded me; this information science expert made damn sure that I knew nothing about him. I could cringe at him on the days his knee shorts rode far up his bubble-butt from too much time doing squats at the bench, but that was all.
That was never it for the reading, though. If I obliged An, he’d walk stiffly to the back of the stacks, his quadriceps disproportionately large compared to the rest of his body, and mobilize his thick cylinder physique to tip his chin up so I saw a sharp, carved chin and elfin ears. As I read, he’d circle my cubicle, which made me afraid, in truth. More than once I choked up on my pencil like a velvet mallet, sure as science that I was going to beat him to another great source and nail him, but then off went my friend again, ferreting into a hole, squeezing his way into a musty open column to the recesses below the game board.
We’d lost my brother. We’d looked in all the normal places, so I went to the library, which is a pretty good place to look for my brother, plus it gave me a chance, finally, to speak to the librarian.
‘Can you be a bit more specific?’ she said.
‘Well, he’s kind of a treatise, I guess.’
‘Hmm. So, philosophy?’
I nodded eagerly.
‘Yes. Yes exactly. Analytic philosophy, I’d say.’
She seemed pleased. She led the way to the lift.
‘After you,’ she said.
‘No please!’
She pressed the number 3 on the panel.
We waited silently until the doors edged shut.
‘Thanks so much,’ I said. ‘For helping find my brother, I mean.’
‘Does he often go missing like this?’
‘Well, he’s pretty hard to pin down, you know? You think you’ve got him, then,’ I made a puff of air gesture with both hands.
‘That’s Analytic Philosophy, for you.’
I laughed and it sounded too loud in the metal compartment, and then we waited the rest of the ascent in silence again. In the coppery mirrored surfaces reflecting upon one another, it’s hard not to make eye-contact. There are infinite angles of reflection, so in the end you’re always staring into each other. I had to look at my feet.
She led the way through Natural Sciences, Ontology, and Philology where I thought I saw my Uncle, though it can’t have been him as he’s been dead for some time. Just as I was shaking the illusion from my eyes, we arrived.
‘This is my favourite section,’ she whispered, and trailed her hand along the shelves as we stepped through. I was supposed to be looking for my brother, but I couldn’t stop looking at her fingers as they tickled the spines of the books.
‘Do you see him?’ she asked.
I shook my head.
‘He’s just been re-issued. Third reprint, I think.’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘You’re proud of him.’
‘Oh, yes. The whole family is so proud, mostly. He’s the first work of real academic significance in the family. It’s just…’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s just he’s such a worry to mother. She’s so protective over him. Our father has never been able to accept him, ‘I don’t understand you, boy!’ he bellows, and we all say, ‘Isn’t that the point, father?’ but it enrages him so. And then, there are these disappearances, the re-issues so he’s barely recognisable. I -‘
‘Hmm,’ she’d reached up to pull a book from a shelf and her sweater had lifted and revealed her midriff. My voice dried up. She opened the book and traced her fingers down the pages.
Hear hear! More of this would be such a pleasure! I love "‘Oh, yes. The whole family is so proud, mostly. He’s the first work of real academic significance in the family."
He wasn’t always a chameleon. In his younger days, he was a thunderstorm. You knew he was coming when the wind picked up and the temperature dropped. He commanded attention with his high winds, his sudden intense rainfall, his thunderclaps, his lightning bolts. When he passed, he often left destruction in his wake: a fallen tree, a flash flood, a power outage, or even, when he managed a direct hit, a life ended or at least changed forever. At the same time, he could be so beautiful. You’d find yourself standing under an awning or at a window watching him exercise his power. And, often, at some point, as he passed a rainbow would appear above his gray bulk.
Kara fell in love with him at the peak of his thunderstorm years. She loved the drama and the frisson he incited. Marcus had never been loved like this before – loved for just who and what he was. Unlike prior lovers, she never tired of the volatility, never asked him to quiet down, never quailed in the face of his power. Instead, she fed on his energy, becoming her own, albeit less intense, storm.
That was thirty years ago. Since then, time has had its way with Marcus and Kara. Life threw its all at them. Births, illnesses, worries, hopes, setbacks, triumphs, deaths. Eventually, the downdraft cut off the updraft leading to dissipation.
When the downdraft had fully sapped his energy, Marcus became pavement. Flat and hard, repelling water, not feeling anything, even heavy trucks as they passed over.
Perhaps because she’d never been quite as intense as Marcus, Kara’s storm did not dissipate in the same way. She became quieter, but not flat. She became the soft calm air that follows the storm. And, because she still had some energy, she poured it over and around Marcus.
Eventually, her soft, now quiet energy, softened Marcus. He regained dimension. No longer flat, but certainly not what he had been. Thus began his chameleon years. He found himself both active and inactive. Actively absorbing the energy of others, taking on their colors. But, inactive insofar as he struggled to create his own unique color.
And so, it is for now. Kara the calm. Marcus the chameleon.
“I had a stroke,” said my father Frank thinking he may as well be a ghost.
“If you hadn’t gone to the hospital twenty years ago Dad you wouldn’t have known you needed open heart surgery and you wouldn’t be here today,” I said.
“Well I’m…fine.”
“But your speech?”
“Mild…stroke.”
“Scan came back negative.”
“Scan…can miss.”
“But the symptoms don’t match.”
“I’m not going.”
“Listen…Dad?”
He had hung up.
The next day my father fell and we admitted him semi-involuntarily. Tests revealed a tumor on the parathyroid. Its removal did not help.
“The surgeon says something else is happening Dad. He gave me the number for a neuromuscular neurologist. I made a..."
“Cancel it,” he said.
“Why?”
“And keep going to doctors all my life?”
“No just this time.”
“I want to go home.”
“I know but...”
“I’ll live…like this.”
“How? Jill’s worried if you choke or fall. This new doctor...”
“No!”
“But he’s a different...”
“I’m not going!”
“You ever had a colonoscopy?”
“What? Why?”
“Preventative.”
“I don’t have colon cancer.”
“How do you know?”
“I know my body.”
“What?? You get tested early for polyps to prevent cancer.”
“Did YOU… have… a colonoscopy?”
“Yes and they found polyps. And I had them removed.”
“Well I’m… seventy-seven. I don’t have cancer!”
“What’s seventy seven matter? You can still get it. Prevention is kinda like looking both ways before crossing the street.”
“I don’t need to.”
“Need to what?”
“Look both ways.”
“How do you figure?”
“I use my hearing and peripheral vision.”
“You don’t look both ways?”
“No.”
“What if you hadn’t gone in? They wouldn’t have found the parathyroid.”
“And what good… it did me?”
“If Mom hadn’t gotten tests they wouldn’t have found the lump.”
“She died anyway,” said Frank unhesitatingly.
“Well,” my saliva thickened in my throat, “at least it gave her more years. There is something else going on.”
“They’ve got you trained… to thinking nothing’s true…. if it’s not in a medical journal!”
“Me trained? You’ve always believed in science. You’re an engineer for Christ sake. A goddamn atheist!”
“Oh I get it. You work out the rules, the rules don’t fit, then it doesn’t happen?”
“What? No. I mean yes… science adjusts…medicine…”
“They’ve got… the rules wrong then!”
“Then they change the rules!”
“Just like that, huh?!”
“Yea, just like that. They keep trying. But--you don’t--go--backwards,” I said deliberately.
It was a struggle to come to a title. I like your suggestion. What I think I was looking for was a metaphor for a guy who believes one thing his whole life only to apparently dismiss it at the end of his life.
I think this particular exercise works best if you decide on the title FIRST and then sort of "write into" the title and see what happens. Deciding on the metaphor first will lead you to all kinds of places you didn't know you were going to go!
Such abundance from the teeming womb of loving Mother Earth! Such plenty of rich fruits, leaves, roots and tubers, popping pods of peas and beans, orange pumpkins hanging from adventurous vines, yawning yellow flowers of squashes and courgettes inviting gleaming black bumble bees speckled with golden grains of pollen into the depths of their nuptial chambers! O peppers sweet and raging! O melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, aubergines, artichokes, chards! O lettuce, spinach, endives, leeks, garlic, onions! Such mint and basil, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme! Such entropy and rebirth! Such a virtuous circle, such recycling of matter, such mighty nourishment that feeds the stubborn stems, the glossy leaves, the rebranching deepening roots! Such a horn of plenty, such a gift!
"Ain't it just pretty, eh? Shouldn't a gone to such trouble just for us, mate! But now it's there, don't mind if we do."
O giant slugs, shit brown, mottled greasy grey-green, one-two-three-four, no, ten, twenty, forty! O delicate baby snails, one hundred to each artichoke housing project!
O pyralids and their crambid cousins, moths that fly silent on the evening breeze, laying eggs on flowers such that the hatched caterpillar is enclosed in the growing fruit, tomato, pepper, and will slowly crunch it from within! O innocent sunshine fluttering of Cabbage Whites whose thousand larvae turn green making fine lace of brassica leaves! O Leptinotarsa decemlineata from the heights of Colorado, whose little red worms strip potato leaves to nothing in a night's busy mastication!
O burrowing mole, seeking rich garden soil in which earthworms abound! O valiant voles, who follow the black and velvet mole and build their own citadels of interconnected tunnels! O hours and days of combat chasing the little earth-diggers out with lemon eucalyptus!
O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
Something seems to have gone wrong in the Garden of Eden...
Two weeks of not-Covid, but a first-diagnosis of ear infection, amoxicillin... No effect except tiring. Second diagnosis shingles, so antiviral drug. Tiring.
I had chickenpox seventy years ago, never had shingles. But that's what it seems it is. Half my head's painful.
Viruses. Put them critters on the Eden shitlist.
Great thread here, and I haven't read everything yet.
Oh, dear, i am so sorry to hear you're battling shingles. The worst, really. I hope the anti-virals do the trick for you. Got my shingles shot (the first of two) last month. That was whopper enough--and they say the second shot is worse. Feel better soon!
I've not had shingles, but I had to sit back and watch my daughter suffer through them. It was horrible. Yes, the shots are a vaccine. It's called Shingrix here in the States. You get two of them spaced a few months apart. There was an older vaccine that I got a few years ago, but this new one is supposed to be much more effective. I really hope your case of shingles isn't terribly severe and that it goes away VERY soon. Thinking of you--
Hope you feel better, John! My doctor has been pushing me to get the shingles vaccine because I too had chickenpox as a child. Apparently once you have chickenpox the virus stays in your body and can reactivate as shingles.
Such magnificence! I love "O giant slugs, shit brown, mottled greasy grey-green...forty!" and "O pyralids and their crambid cousins"! And - I also find that "parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme" just roll all together for me, like when singing "LMNOP".. I'll start picking from one to add to a meal, and the song just automatically prompts me to pick the others as well..
My Mother is a Trampoline
The last time I saw my mother, she was dead. She looked her same old self, except that she was no longer breathing. Or smiling. She wasn’t opening her eyes wide like an owl. She wasn’t saying anything, like, your thighs are so big. She wasn’t moving in her usual way, which was always bouncing up and down, up and down. I said to my mother, I love you, mom, and—as usual—she didn’t say anything in return. Well, she was dead. I paid a therapist a zillion dollars to answer me one question: did my mother love me? Well, sometimes yes, and sometimes no. Up and down, up and down. When we put her in the ground, I didn’t expect her to bounce back up, but here she is, most days, looking me in the eye, tutting at my thighs, asking me about my hair. I say, ma, I don’t want to hear it, but good luck with that. The dead mother is in my backyard right now. I’ve locked the doors, but I can hear her out there, jumping up and down.
In my experience locks don’t keep mothers out.
nothing will keep a mother out
Mary, if it’s not one thing, it’s your mother!
Always!
What did they say in Romero's "Dawn of the Dead"? "When there's no more room in hell the dead will walk the earth."? Or trampoline it.
This is really good, Mary G. You covered a lot in a short writeup.
Glad to hear you are continuing to get better!
Thanks so much, Vishal!
Please forgive this, but I wonder about changing the order of the start slightly.
The last time I saw my mother, she looked her same old self except that she was no longer smiling. Or opening her eyes wide like an owl. She wasn’t saying anything, like, your thighs are so big. She wasn’t moving in her usual way, which was always bouncing up and down, up and down. I said to my mother, I love you, mom, and—as usual—she didn’t say anything in return. She was no longer breathing. Well, she was dead.
...
Just a wondering.
Great metaphor.
I love playing with the order of information. It reminds me of one of Mary's earlier prompts to tell a story backwards.
Interesting idea! I like declaring her dead upfront, but I can see how you might prefer it the way you've offered it up here--delaying the news, and thereby making it a surprise. Thanks for the input!
Yes - I quite like declaring her dead upfront too, and I see why, and I thought probably you'd made the call on purpose.
I'd be really interested to hear more about why you prefer that, though, over another way, not necessarily or only the way I tentatively mooted. Not out of disagreeing, but out of genuine interest in the choices a writer makes.
How to explain my preference for the way it is? Hmmm. Well, the point of the "story" is that the dead mother lives on. It seems important to me to establish right away that she is dead. I don't need to surprise anyone with that information. i find it stronger to say right up front: she's dead. and THEN the surprise INSTEAD is that she's still hanging around. That's the point of the story. Also, I like writing about "the dead mother." I've written other pieces about her, snippets about "the dead mother." She just haunts me, and I call her the dead mother all of the time. So, i just started right in with that. Does that make sense? Feel free to ask me more questions!
Thanks.
A little like Kafka's Metamorphosis? Just get the big idea out there right up top, and then get on with the interesting work of following the consequences of the idea?
So generous to have your decisions described here.
I am not yet at the stage of making any re-drafts or the sentence-level re-workings that GS describes. Before you started What Now I had literally not the confidence to write anything, and have told myself that I will spend at least the year doing each week's prompt, to continue working the muscles of putting those first words down.
But I am starting to think about the next stage, which will be making those more conscious progressive decisions, so it is SO helpful to hear your thoughts.
Feels a little like being a fledging, nervously stepping up on to the branch, then retreating back into the nest, up on to the branch, back to the nest. Not quite ready to make the jump, but preparing, watching.
I'd say to give each piece space and time. The main thing is to really mind-meld with what you've written--see what is actually there, ask yourself what was your (subconscious) purpose in writing it? What is the story? What were you telling yourself when you put down those words? See if the beginning and ending meet up. They should dance together. And cut ruthlessly. Try to cut every unnecessary word.
This very closely describes a lot of what I've been working with/through/out.. and how What Now has been unfolding for me this year. It's been so helpful and interesting to listen in on this thread - so interesting about order and - so far as these things can be explicated out - what is was that motivated a particular choice.
So painful and haunted. I had to read this three times. And the need to lock the doors! So well written.
Thank you, Angela.
There's something so wonderful here that I can't put my finger on very precisely, in terms of how it's working so well, but I think it's to do with the set-up of the title - and then this big piece of information given in the first sentence - and first off, not knowing yet how that will relate to the title - and then the way that it comes through. Plus, both of the trampoline moves (or maybe there are even more?): the up and down of love/not love and the up and down of haunting/still and in the ground.
Thank you, Danielle. Yes, the title does a LOT of work here. What was fun for me was starting with the title and then writing from there. I don't usually do that--but maybe i should more often!
That's funny but kinda scary too, Mary, especially the last line!
Glad you are recovering Mary - that was a bad bout you got. Take it easy.
oh, thank god i'm getting better! I was getting in a very bad mood! I'll have to think about your scary comment. I can see how you would write/think that, but it honestly didn't occur to me. So interesting! Thank you!
So good Mary … and glad you are back.
Thanks, Julie!
Wow. Man alive. I loved reading this. It's crazy how you capture that feeling, how we are never "over" these things, not really. They shaped our brains, our parents, all of us, for better or worse.
oh, thank you so much, Sea.
My Father Was a Beethoven String Quartet
I was a lullaby, and then an eensy-weensy spider. I was bubblegum pop, followed by rock-and-roll with a whole lotta shaking going on, followed, gloriously, by the Beatles. I told my father to please just chill out, for god’s sake.
I was Dylan, waiting for the times to change, and then Dylan again, once the times had changed and everybody must get stoned. I was free because I had nothing left to lose. I gave peace a chance. My father asked me why I changed with every new day, and I asked him why he never did.
And then, oddly, I became Thelonious Monk and stayed there. Monk was enough for me. I was impressionist, I was shifting, fractured colors, I was stride and blues and bebop. I was spaces in between the notes. I was starting and stopping without warning. I was never knowing where I was going but ending up there just the same. There was so much change in Monk that I didn’t have to be anything else.
My father asked why I couldn’t be more serious, now that I was grown up. I asked him why he had to be so predictable. He denied being predictable; rather, he was consistent. Without consistency, he said, how could you get anything done? I said that consistency was only an illusion, and spontaneity was essential for creating anything.
I was wrong, though. Many years after he died, I listened to Beethoven’s late quartets, and in those muted and conflicting tones I finally heard my father's voice: dry, precise, intelligent, discursive, and profoundly sad.
Oh, this one is so good.
That's brilliant Masha! I love how you give us the shifting stages of your life through music. It's a clever device because we all know the music and can identify with your growing up through it. And the final para is so moving. Well done.
So beautiful.
Ooooh. Love the ending! Nicely done.
I love the way this keeps changing, even when the song remains the same.
Like how character is revealed through the tempo of the writing. The "I was..." prefix effectively driving the narrative through imagery the way a song itself might.
My Toddlers are a Pack of Robbers
My partner and I have a long-running marital feud.
He does not like having cleaners invade his personal space.
He also does not like to tidy up, preferring to create elaborate organizational schemes that he expects to be self-cleaning.
After a few months of cleaning up his socks which propagate around the house like little soft animals with dust bunny tails, I get angry and insist that we hire a cleaner.
This arrangement lasts a few months after which he fires the cleaners because he doesn’t like the quality of the work.
He promises that he will share the cleaning, which lasts a few months. Then we repeat the cycle.
The arrival of an unexpected overabundance of small children accelerates the frequency and amplitude of this cycle.
He organizes the toddlers into a cleaning brigade with buckets with their names on them filled with scrub brushes, spray bottles of various cleaning fluids, and rechargeable drills with brushes affixed to the end. They are suited up in safety glasses and neon rubber gloves that reach their arm pits. They think it is huge fun to whir the drill brushes across the tiles, aim bright blue squirts into the toilet, and then get paid in Legos. The toddler cleaning brigade lasts a month.
After spending 5 hours of my precious Saturday mornings cleaning the filthy house, I am filled with primal rage, and we again hire a cleaner.
The cleaners come once a week, my favorite day, arriving home to a tidy, peaceful house.
The next day, it looks like a pack of robbers has broken in, ransacked the house and left with nothing.
May i suggest you read the book Liars by Sarah Manguso? I can't promise you'll like it (it is RAGE-filled) but there's quite a bit in there on this same topic. I love your piece, by the way, and especially that last (hilarious) line.
Will read it Mary!
Toddler cleaning brigade is such a vision. Love this.
Great writeup, Julie. Loved the title!
Your description of the toddler brigade! And getting paid in Legos. I love this.
He was a fart on a skillet.
His own metaphor for anyone who darted around place to place, project to project, story to story–you get the idea. She googled the term once. Appalachian origin? Midwestern? He had never been to Appalachia as far as she knew. The metaphor was actually “fart in a skillet,” but this was the man who read a line from “Little Miss Muffet” to their daughters as “eating her curd away” instead of “eating her curds and whey.” In a situation with no real difference between one choice or another, he would proclaim “Six is to one and half a dozen is the other.” She had given up correcting either one.
There were bigger concerns, after all. Like the stairs on one side of the deck. Weathered and old, needing replacement. So when did he pull them off? Three days before they left on vacation. “Oh, I have the wood. All I need are the brackets.” Several weeks later, she was still teetering on the edge, every time habit and necessity moved her in that direction.
The back gate disappeared two years ago so he could sand, refinish, and rehang it. It was in the barn, leaning against one wall, spiders spinning webs around it. A cucumber trellis almost fit the space, now.
His orchard. Apple, pear, and plum trees planted with great fanfare 7 years ago. Several pre-emergent organic mixtures and sprayers later, he attended a talk given by a local orchardist. The clay powder for a protective coating on the tiny emerging apples? In the barn. Unopened. The mesh bags? One tree (one of 6) was festooned with bright green mesh bags to “protect” the fruit. Their chicken flock, denizens of the orchard during the long, warm days, were feasting. On the wormy fruit without bags and the bagged fruit. Right through the bags to also wormy apples. Apples for everyone! He brought four wormy specimens into the kitchen yesterday. Now sitting on the counter. “We can cut around the worm holes!”
He was a Gemini. Someone once told her that Geminis were spontaneous. She looked it up.
“These hyperactive air signs have short attention spans and are most satisfied when they can move fluidly from one idea to the next.”
“Fluidly.” She pondered the adverb as she teetered once more on the edge of the deck.
Animatedly. Energetically. But never dull or boring.
love the way you captured this marriage. So many good intentions! Fart on/in a skillet is a new one on me. Makes no sense, but then it absolutely does.
Thanks Mary.
Never heard of fart in or on a skillet either but I love the other malapropisms and the disastrous DIY. I know people married to men like that - unfinished projects all over the house and garden! Takes the patience of a saint to live with one! Or as he might say a patent saint . . .
I've heard the expression (in England) : "like a fart in a colander, can't find a hole to get out". Said of a useless, ineffectual person, quite possibly charging around and getting nothing done.
ha. Patent saint!
Angela, what a great piece! I can see all those half done projects. Our front door had a pile of stones waiting to become a step for as long as I Remember.
🤣
Dad was brandy glow. Flushed red in the face of an evening. Drawing you in. People and fireside animals wanting for a piece of human warmth. One of us would get too close and get burned. The glow would fade. We would see it more for what it was: An enticement that closed the striking distance between you and the fire. Not kindness and not entirely a part of him, but kindled into existence by a foreign agent.
He was battery talker. His charge in free-fall, green percentage bar fading to red, wording himself into silence and armchair snores.
He was navy butter, invalided off the English fleet, spread thin across hobbies and responsibilities. Falling short and letting down.
He was barn limper, the time when he went to see to the lame horse. The wounded animal kicked him, in the process miraculously curing itself of its injury. He emerged wearing its limp like fancy dress that he couldn't take off. Don Rouse, waiting at the barn door, said that he did not know who best to shoot, and so broke the shotgun.
In the big rig, he was road eminence. Bright and beautiful in the church where he married his second wife. The marriage did not last. The relationship with God did not survive the marriage.
When he died, he was penny veil. Barely enough left to sow grass seed over the grave mound.
Take all those bits and pieces: A stained cork, a defunct battery, an Anchor Butter wrapper, reed of barn straw, and rear mirror air freshener whose pine scent has turned to vinegar and dust. A Bible with its multitude of pages dog-eared not by human hands, but from being forced into the bottom of a rucksack under dirty clothes.
Put all of it in a drawer of odds and ends, to organised on a later date. To be turned out on the carpet when you are gone, by someone who will not see how these pieces fit together to form a man.
So well done. And so very true. All of the pieces, the odds and ends that won't ever make sense to anyone else.
Beautifully composed Sam, the accumulation of gestures that amount to your father and yet he slips between them all.
These descriptions: "wording himself into silence and armchair snores." "He emerged wearing its limp like fancy dress that he couldn't take off. Don Rouse, waiting at the barn door, said that he did not know who best to shoot, and so broke the shotgun."--just shine off the page. So well done. And that final paragraph! Hits home. I have drawers and boxes of stuff that no one will ever fit together.
I generated some random two-word anagrams and fit the story around them. I knew I wanted something abstract- barely tangible as a contrast with the reality.
Wow--can you tell me more about this?
I wanted to avoid obvious metaphors. I also wanted something quite clipped. I began by pairing random words from a dictionary. That didn't work so I started putting these pairings into an anagram generator to make different pairings. I picked out the ones that showed promise and wrote very short stories around each one. It's a bit of a round the houses way to go about things.
Love this! Thank you!
But it works so what the hell?!
My mother is a Christmas tree.
Her limbs are outstretched covered with ornaments. Three satin stars stuffed with cotton and embroidered with the names of her children – Tino, Pete O and Stevo. Our names didn’t actually end with an O but my mother liked the charm of ending with the O, as if we were puppies called to the kitchen table for Cheerios , or as if a gift had just been opened, the surprise revealed, and we exclaimed: “Oh! just what I wanted!” Lincoln Logs. An erector set. A kit to fashion earrings with round corks, sequins, and tiny pins.
On another limb, she dangles a wooden moose with one red eye. My mother loved to knit a red eye on animals in sweaters to show her prowess, a mistake planted on purpose to show they were handmade, to plant a bit of wink, oblivious to the red eyes our dad showed up with each night from the bar.
Then there are the tinkling glass parachutes. They quiver when she shivers. The baskets are empty. There is no one parachuting to safety after ejecting from the land of forgotten promises.
At her top, the angel no longer lights up with the good news of deliverance. But my mother cannot abandon her, this angel who once proclaimed good tidings and now presides over a silence deep as a snowbank.
Underneath the tinsel, the tinsel that looks like hundreds of cascading tears, lies a root ball bound in burlap. My mother is practical. My mother intends to be planted outdoors after this is done. My mother will live outside where there are no ornaments, no stars, no angel, no moose and definitely no parachute.
She will peek into the window on Christmas morning for the next 30 years where there will be no Christmas tree, no celebration, just a kitchen table with a daily reader open to the page that says “the good news of the kingdom: Jehovah’s promised land.” Her ghost children long gone, the children who could not accept that one year there was a Christmas tree and the next year it was gone, the ornaments proclaimed as pagan and tossed into the trash.
wow. This is so powerful.
This is so moving Christine. Your identification of your mother with a Christmas tree is perfect, such an abundant symbol of family, love and generosity, all too often deceptively so. I feel for her disappointment, her ejection from the land of forgotten promises and the cascading tears of the tinsel, very beautifully done.
Thank you Aisling.
a bit of a morose one...but here goes
My Mother is The Bees Knees
Now my mother is scrapbook of yellowed newspaper clippings. Now she sits in a mason jar among a shelf of unvarnished trophies while we wait for delivery of a new urn to replace the one I smashed. Again.
What was swept up among her ashes this time? Hair. Mine, the cats. Dust. Cookie crumbs. Popcorn.
It was her explicit request NOT to be sprinkled or buried anywhere, but to live on a shelf wherever I lived. So too bad. This is how its going to be.
I’ve tried hiding her behind plants, but my mother is not a person to stay hidden or quiet. Three years gone, still calling, still needing, still finding the light, the lens.
My mother is a scrapbook of clippings now, but once she was The Cats Meow. The Bees Knees.
Her black framed glamour shots graced many a deli wall.
This time I’ve ordered her a metal urn. I’ll protect her. From my grief. My rage.
When she was dying she apologized
It was a general apology, but still
A first.
Then she whispered
“You were my consolation”
For what? I asked
But then she was gone
Consolation. For what?
Wow. Consolation for what, is right. Love the rage in this one, the pain and anger. And that first apology, waiting so long for it, only to have it diminished a moment later. Mothers!
So well done! I love how the mother's explicit request means her remains are subject to the ravages of living. And the fact that she will not stay hidden--a brilliant detail.
Morose no problem. The memories of those we know rarely so readily disappear I think after the person is gone. Haunting us through objects. I learned about something called Post-memory a few years back when reading Art Spiegelman's Maus. Postmemory "describes the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before-to experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right."- Marianne Hirsch, https://postmemory.net/
I can empathise with this Dinah, it chimes somewhat with mine, and it carries echoes of Mary's too. We all seem to be obsessed with difficult mothers, particularly after they're gone. I love the image of the ashes being swept up with the cat's hair, dust and cookie crumbs.
Wow. Wow. Wow. The urn on the shelf! Priceless.
My Mother Was a Field of Unexploded Ordnances
My sister and I tiptoed around, never knowing when the next one would detonate. The field was full of green grass and daisies and buttercups pushed up their heads. If we were careful we could sit amongst them and make daisy chains or check under each other’s chin for the glow of butter-love. Our little brother seemed to have an inbuilt knowledge of safe spaces and would dance around us, teasing, laughing. We still loved him. As we grew older the explosions became weaker. Rose bushes grew, then saplings of sycamore, beech, oak and even a monkey-puzzle. We learned to climb into their canopy, wearing strong black boots, away from danger. We danced and we sang, seeded fields of our own. Sometimes our brother would join us, climbing like a monkey but always returning to the ground. We still heard rumbling from below and visited the field that was our mother only on sunny days. For a while we lived like this, scars from our childhood hidden beneath bright clothes.
One day my brother, full of youthful ambition, climbed so high. And fell.
The bomb that exploded left a crumbling crater, shrapnel triggering another and another, and the field that was my mother became a scene of devastation. My sister and I returned to plant flowers. But the seeds died as they fell, turned to shells, opening old wounds, creating new ones.
My brother still lies in that crater. Like brambles he grabs at the lowest branches, clings as he looks up, dreaming that one day he will fly again like the monkey from tree to tree. But the field that is my mother can do nothing but let him cling to her as she picks berries to throw at us, juices staining, thorns scratching. My sister has left the field. Sometimes, wistful, she looks over her shoulder, but splinters beneath scars itch, bleed from scratching. She dresses them again, turns back to tend her own garden. But I can’t stay away. Memories of dresses hung with tiny pegs on a doll’s washing line tempt me back. So I have invested in a suit of Kevlar. It keeps me safe and numbs me from the blast of the mines that are left.
There is so much in this tiny story! Amazing.
Thank you for reading it! I have been following this page for a little while and started a few stories, but never posted. Reading your beautiful story about your mother made me think (as I do a lot) about my own. I knew straight away the metaphor for my mum, and the story just flowed. I might try my dad next! Thank you, for this great page!
Happy you are here! I often read something and suddenly have to write something. Reading and then writing is a really good strategy. For me, anyway.
Layers. Layers of metaphor here. And so sad.
Yes. But life is full of pain and sadness. Stories get us through.
My mother liked to say her role in life was to be the lemon on the oyster. She was referring of course to the traditional way to check that the soft flesh was alive and kicking before being eaten. Certainly she shared some of the qualities of a lemon, having been, in her heyday, the zest at many a gathering. Like the sun-filled fruit she brought a note of French flair to the dull grey Dublin of the late 1950s. Her elegance, intelligence and acerbic tongue cut a dash about town. But just as a slice of lemon suffices to perk up a drink, glamour is best appreciated in flashes. A whole evening, let alone a week, of partying and parrying smart repartee can curdle the stomach and the head.
Later, when she had returned to Paris, her first home, my mother’s wit turned bitter with disillusionment, which is after all, a short step from delusion. The world had failed to take notice of her in the way she had imagined it would and should after those early years of acclaim in what was then a provincial town. She needed admiration in order to live but she forgot that beauty, like the lemon flower, fades. Hence the oyster and the lemon juice. If heads were no longer going to turn when she entered a restaurant or a party, she would damn well get herself noticed with her acid remarks. She had to make everyone around her, even those who tried to love her, flinch.
I realise now that in truth she was more like the oyster. She was naive and lacking in self-esteem, traits that made her easy prey for the many men who abused or took advantage of her. Even in her latter years she could not step outside her apartment without being fully made up and impeccably dressed, the shell protecting the susceptible flesh of the oyster. She was lonely but, she said, never bored because she loved to read. Alone in her shell she was her truest self and she knew it. Once, she apologised for performing in front of me and my husband, people she should have been at ease with but by then the habit was so ingrained, she had to keep squeezing that lemon even when she was running out of juice and there was no oyster to react.
I felt quite sad at the end of this one. Really tough stuff. And so well done--that she wanted to be the lemon on the oyster, adding a bit of a kick, but turned out to be the oyster itself.
I like that you start with your mother's own metaphor for herself. And then turn it on its head, as you learn to understand her choices. Aaah, mothers and daughters. There's a whole book of metaphors waiting to be written! Maybe on this page.
So well written! Love the metaphor, and the final line is so devastating. "she had to keep squeezing that lemon even when she was running out of juice and there was no oyster to react."
She had to make everyone around her, even those who tried to love her, flinch.
Loved that.
Well, if he were a meal, he would come served on the stoneware you get at a deli, just a couple shades off white. Resistant to chipping. Well thought out in advance, in that way. And what would come atop this plate but a spiky sea of bright yellow french fries. Very likely not hand-cut. Very likely from frozen. Delicious in the way nostalgia is always delicious, MSG-level delicious, in the way that repetition can make it difficult to discern if you really are now, mid-bite, actually having this experience or are only resuscitating some memory back to life, like you would add water to an instant powder.
And what, pray tell, would come riding high alongside the fries? The entrée -- which could be changed out for any of the 46 other options on the menu of the ideal greasy spoon of your mind’s eye -- it would be served on a soft roll. That is for sure. Almost potatoey, so soft, really as if designed for children. So satisfying in how it gives its space up for the main event. Which is? A scoop of ground beef, simmered long in onions and a tomato-based sauce. An envelope of some kind of dried herb blend was mixed in, too, at some point. So, a sloppy joe.
But don’t get me wrong. It is not a lack of specialness or uniqueness. Each singular person in the world is some meal, but there are not hordes of sloppy joes running around. He is the sloppy joe of the world. And he is not even sloppy. He is at certain moments suddenly all I want. Often late, often after some drink, yes.
And so we all eat each other. We all are some meal, but then we are also the ones who are eating these meals, because otherwise how could it mean anything? You need a mouth to know about flavors. And I would eat him entirely up. I wouldn’t feel well after, but I would already know that beforehand. It’s not a sexual thing, well of course it will sound that way, but. Forget about the devouring part. He’s still standing at that table and waiting for me, even though it’s been a good fifteen minutes now, and he hasn’t texted or anything - so sloppy joe him is just there, and still perfect, sitting high on the waitress’ tray.
"He is the sloppy joe of the world. And he is not even sloppy." So funny and good.
Thanks, Mary. That was the line to come out of it that I liked the most! (So interesting when these things match up.. and also so interesting when they - even more often? - absolutely don't.) (: Hope you're feeling well!
feeling much better this morning. Yay!
That's funny and poignant too, how we can love someone with all their imperfections and maybe even because of them.
Very true! And thanks so much (:
My mother was a bulldozer. This was often necessary since she had eight children, a very small house, and never used Pampers. We had a laundry chute from the second floor to the basement. On certain days, if you stood underneath that chute and opened the latch, you could be crushed to death. I remember going down to our basement on days when she literally stood in mountains of dirty laundry.
Sometimes I have dreams about the laundry my mother did. And she did all of it. For years. Of course my sisters and I helped by folding and putting all the laundry away and ironing. I remember being five or six and trying to fold sheets with my older sister—it required two little people. And when my mother finally left the house she’d lived in for fifty years to move into assisted living, she made sure she went through all the stuff in that house and got rid of everything she could.
This is one episode, an example of her nearly insane force of will to get things done. It was winter, early in her dementia. She’d made a list of things she wanted to accomplish while I was home visiting, one of which was to find some styrofoam from a Walmart or Lowe’s. She wanted to use styrofoam from an unpackaged appliance, something as large as a refrigerator or stove, to insulate an area under her kitchen sink that sometimes grew drafty in winter. I thought she was a little crazy but I went along with her to the Walmart. We found a man in back who gave us an enormous sheet of styrofoam. My job involved getting it outside, where it had begun blizzarding, and into her van.
“You can do it,” she said when I looked doubtfully at the wind blowing snow across the parking lot.
I maneuvered the bed-sized sheet of styrofoam out the automatic doors and into the maelstrom. The styrofoam acted like a sail, propelling me across the icy blacktop so that the sheet cracked off in my hands and flew into the shopping cart bins. I managed to retrieve the styrofoam and tacked my way back through the wind to the van. I stuffed it in.
“See?” she said.
Yes, I thought. I can do it.
Aha. You're a bulldozer, too! Nice job here.
Absolutely right Mary! It's the perfect turn at the end of the story/portrait.
“My Librarian Was A Game of Whack-A-Mole”
To help me finish my investigative report on rates of missed surgical diagnoses, the hospital administration assigned me a librarian to be my gofer. They were too short on staff for a recent graduate in digital humanities research to come my way, so they gave me the only librarian in the vicinity who was available to take on my project, a staid old lifer who when he wasn’t finessing his core at our free basement gym for employees worked part-time for me. An was a strong, squat fellow in late middle age with long black hair and tawny skin, the same burnt umber shade as the glossy figurines on the whack-a-mole board at the Chuck-E-Cheese where I used to take my son for classmates’ birthday parties. I found it hard to make eye contact with An’s dead and beady puppet eyes, even as I prided myself on my specific description that labeled him closely without assistance from my wife’s color-matching booklet of nail gels. (Librarians, I laughed, were for cataloguing.) Anytime I identified a historical source of interest, An interrupted me with a wordless cough and popped up from behind his desk to serve me stacks of works in two open hands. In numerous configurations were knowledge on a platter of skin. An showed me work I might want to check, then wouldn’t leave till I did like he held me in his crosshairs at gunpoint. His reasons for secrecy eluded me; this information science expert made damn sure that I knew nothing about him. I could cringe at him on the days his knee shorts rode far up his bubble-butt from too much time doing squats at the bench, but that was all.
That was never it for the reading, though. If I obliged An, he’d walk stiffly to the back of the stacks, his quadriceps disproportionately large compared to the rest of his body, and mobilize his thick cylinder physique to tip his chin up so I saw a sharp, carved chin and elfin ears. As I read, he’d circle my cubicle, which made me afraid, in truth. More than once I choked up on my pencil like a velvet mallet, sure as science that I was going to beat him to another great source and nail him, but then off went my friend again, ferreting into a hole, squeezing his way into a musty open column to the recesses below the game board.
ha! Such an interesting character you've created here
We’d lost my brother. We’d looked in all the normal places, so I went to the library, which is a pretty good place to look for my brother, plus it gave me a chance, finally, to speak to the librarian.
‘Can you be a bit more specific?’ she said.
‘Well, he’s kind of a treatise, I guess.’
‘Hmm. So, philosophy?’
I nodded eagerly.
‘Yes. Yes exactly. Analytic philosophy, I’d say.’
She seemed pleased. She led the way to the lift.
‘After you,’ she said.
‘No please!’
She pressed the number 3 on the panel.
We waited silently until the doors edged shut.
‘Thanks so much,’ I said. ‘For helping find my brother, I mean.’
‘Does he often go missing like this?’
‘Well, he’s pretty hard to pin down, you know? You think you’ve got him, then,’ I made a puff of air gesture with both hands.
‘That’s Analytic Philosophy, for you.’
I laughed and it sounded too loud in the metal compartment, and then we waited the rest of the ascent in silence again. In the coppery mirrored surfaces reflecting upon one another, it’s hard not to make eye-contact. There are infinite angles of reflection, so in the end you’re always staring into each other. I had to look at my feet.
She led the way through Natural Sciences, Ontology, and Philology where I thought I saw my Uncle, though it can’t have been him as he’s been dead for some time. Just as I was shaking the illusion from my eyes, we arrived.
‘This is my favourite section,’ she whispered, and trailed her hand along the shelves as we stepped through. I was supposed to be looking for my brother, but I couldn’t stop looking at her fingers as they tickled the spines of the books.
‘Do you see him?’ she asked.
I shook my head.
‘He’s just been re-issued. Third reprint, I think.’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘You’re proud of him.’
‘Oh, yes. The whole family is so proud, mostly. He’s the first work of real academic significance in the family. It’s just…’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s just he’s such a worry to mother. She’s so protective over him. Our father has never been able to accept him, ‘I don’t understand you, boy!’ he bellows, and we all say, ‘Isn’t that the point, father?’ but it enrages him so. And then, there are these disappearances, the re-issues so he’s barely recognisable. I -‘
‘Hmm,’ she’d reached up to pull a book from a shelf and her sweater had lifted and revealed her midriff. My voice dried up. She opened the book and traced her fingers down the pages.
No idea at all what's happening here. Just started, and hit the 400 words, then stopped.
Erm?
Fun though. Brain just completely switched off and words came without conscious choosing.
that's the absolute best way to write.
This is so wonderful! And so much fun. Love this:
‘Well, he’s pretty hard to pin down, you know? You think you’ve got him, then,’ I made a puff of air gesture with both hands.
‘That’s Analytic Philosophy, for you.’
Hear hear! More of this would be such a pleasure! I love "‘Oh, yes. The whole family is so proud, mostly. He’s the first work of real academic significance in the family."
"Isn't that the point, father?" - Great line.
Keep on going with this one!
Marcus is a chameleon.
He wasn’t always a chameleon. In his younger days, he was a thunderstorm. You knew he was coming when the wind picked up and the temperature dropped. He commanded attention with his high winds, his sudden intense rainfall, his thunderclaps, his lightning bolts. When he passed, he often left destruction in his wake: a fallen tree, a flash flood, a power outage, or even, when he managed a direct hit, a life ended or at least changed forever. At the same time, he could be so beautiful. You’d find yourself standing under an awning or at a window watching him exercise his power. And, often, at some point, as he passed a rainbow would appear above his gray bulk.
Kara fell in love with him at the peak of his thunderstorm years. She loved the drama and the frisson he incited. Marcus had never been loved like this before – loved for just who and what he was. Unlike prior lovers, she never tired of the volatility, never asked him to quiet down, never quailed in the face of his power. Instead, she fed on his energy, becoming her own, albeit less intense, storm.
That was thirty years ago. Since then, time has had its way with Marcus and Kara. Life threw its all at them. Births, illnesses, worries, hopes, setbacks, triumphs, deaths. Eventually, the downdraft cut off the updraft leading to dissipation.
When the downdraft had fully sapped his energy, Marcus became pavement. Flat and hard, repelling water, not feeling anything, even heavy trucks as they passed over.
Perhaps because she’d never been quite as intense as Marcus, Kara’s storm did not dissipate in the same way. She became quieter, but not flat. She became the soft calm air that follows the storm. And, because she still had some energy, she poured it over and around Marcus.
Eventually, her soft, now quiet energy, softened Marcus. He regained dimension. No longer flat, but certainly not what he had been. Thus began his chameleon years. He found himself both active and inactive. Actively absorbing the energy of others, taking on their colors. But, inactive insofar as he struggled to create his own unique color.
And so, it is for now. Kara the calm. Marcus the chameleon.
Well done! From thunderstorm to pavement to chameleon. So many life changes. Love that last line--who knows what will happen next?
What a lovely story of love!
My Father In His Foxhole Dreaming of Days Gone By
“I had a stroke,” said my father Frank thinking he may as well be a ghost.
“If you hadn’t gone to the hospital twenty years ago Dad you wouldn’t have known you needed open heart surgery and you wouldn’t be here today,” I said.
“Well I’m…fine.”
“But your speech?”
“Mild…stroke.”
“Scan came back negative.”
“Scan…can miss.”
“But the symptoms don’t match.”
“I’m not going.”
“Listen…Dad?”
He had hung up.
The next day my father fell and we admitted him semi-involuntarily. Tests revealed a tumor on the parathyroid. Its removal did not help.
“The surgeon says something else is happening Dad. He gave me the number for a neuromuscular neurologist. I made a..."
“Cancel it,” he said.
“Why?”
“And keep going to doctors all my life?”
“No just this time.”
“I want to go home.”
“I know but...”
“I’ll live…like this.”
“How? Jill’s worried if you choke or fall. This new doctor...”
“No!”
“But he’s a different...”
“I’m not going!”
“You ever had a colonoscopy?”
“What? Why?”
“Preventative.”
“I don’t have colon cancer.”
“How do you know?”
“I know my body.”
“What?? You get tested early for polyps to prevent cancer.”
“Did YOU… have… a colonoscopy?”
“Yes and they found polyps. And I had them removed.”
“Well I’m… seventy-seven. I don’t have cancer!”
“What’s seventy seven matter? You can still get it. Prevention is kinda like looking both ways before crossing the street.”
“I don’t need to.”
“Need to what?”
“Look both ways.”
“How do you figure?”
“I use my hearing and peripheral vision.”
“You don’t look both ways?”
“No.”
“What if you hadn’t gone in? They wouldn’t have found the parathyroid.”
“And what good… it did me?”
“If Mom hadn’t gotten tests they wouldn’t have found the lump.”
“She died anyway,” said Frank unhesitatingly.
“Well,” my saliva thickened in my throat, “at least it gave her more years. There is something else going on.”
“They’ve got you trained… to thinking nothing’s true…. if it’s not in a medical journal!”
“Me trained? You’ve always believed in science. You’re an engineer for Christ sake. A goddamn atheist!”
“Oh I get it. You work out the rules, the rules don’t fit, then it doesn’t happen?”
“What? No. I mean yes… science adjusts…medicine…”
“They’ve got… the rules wrong then!”
“Then they change the rules!”
“Just like that, huh?!”
“Yea, just like that. They keep trying. But--you don’t--go--backwards,” I said deliberately.
your title could maybe be something like "my father is an argument waiting to happen." ?? I'm trying to think of a good metaphor for this one...
It was a struggle to come to a title. I like your suggestion. What I think I was looking for was a metaphor for a guy who believes one thing his whole life only to apparently dismiss it at the end of his life.
I think this particular exercise works best if you decide on the title FIRST and then sort of "write into" the title and see what happens. Deciding on the metaphor first will lead you to all kinds of places you didn't know you were going to go!
I hear you and I tried that but couldn't find what I was looking for.
It's not a problem. You wrote a story and that's a good thing!
Good dialogue.
Our backyard is the Garden of Eden
Such abundance from the teeming womb of loving Mother Earth! Such plenty of rich fruits, leaves, roots and tubers, popping pods of peas and beans, orange pumpkins hanging from adventurous vines, yawning yellow flowers of squashes and courgettes inviting gleaming black bumble bees speckled with golden grains of pollen into the depths of their nuptial chambers! O peppers sweet and raging! O melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, aubergines, artichokes, chards! O lettuce, spinach, endives, leeks, garlic, onions! Such mint and basil, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme! Such entropy and rebirth! Such a virtuous circle, such recycling of matter, such mighty nourishment that feeds the stubborn stems, the glossy leaves, the rebranching deepening roots! Such a horn of plenty, such a gift!
"Ain't it just pretty, eh? Shouldn't a gone to such trouble just for us, mate! But now it's there, don't mind if we do."
O giant slugs, shit brown, mottled greasy grey-green, one-two-three-four, no, ten, twenty, forty! O delicate baby snails, one hundred to each artichoke housing project!
O pyralids and their crambid cousins, moths that fly silent on the evening breeze, laying eggs on flowers such that the hatched caterpillar is enclosed in the growing fruit, tomato, pepper, and will slowly crunch it from within! O innocent sunshine fluttering of Cabbage Whites whose thousand larvae turn green making fine lace of brassica leaves! O Leptinotarsa decemlineata from the heights of Colorado, whose little red worms strip potato leaves to nothing in a night's busy mastication!
O burrowing mole, seeking rich garden soil in which earthworms abound! O valiant voles, who follow the black and velvet mole and build their own citadels of interconnected tunnels! O hours and days of combat chasing the little earth-diggers out with lemon eucalyptus!
O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
Something seems to have gone wrong in the Garden of Eden...
I forgot the stinkbugs.
My brain is working? is not working.
Two weeks of not-Covid, but a first-diagnosis of ear infection, amoxicillin... No effect except tiring. Second diagnosis shingles, so antiviral drug. Tiring.
I had chickenpox seventy years ago, never had shingles. But that's what it seems it is. Half my head's painful.
Viruses. Put them critters on the Eden shitlist.
Great thread here, and I haven't read everything yet.
Oh, dear, i am so sorry to hear you're battling shingles. The worst, really. I hope the anti-virals do the trick for you. Got my shingles shot (the first of two) last month. That was whopper enough--and they say the second shot is worse. Feel better soon!
Thanks, Mary! I take it you've had shingles episodes before? And the shots are vaccine? I shall discuss this with my physician, as they say.
I've not had shingles, but I had to sit back and watch my daughter suffer through them. It was horrible. Yes, the shots are a vaccine. It's called Shingrix here in the States. You get two of them spaced a few months apart. There was an older vaccine that I got a few years ago, but this new one is supposed to be much more effective. I really hope your case of shingles isn't terribly severe and that it goes away VERY soon. Thinking of you--
Hope you feel better, John! My doctor has been pushing me to get the shingles vaccine because I too had chickenpox as a child. Apparently once you have chickenpox the virus stays in your body and can reactivate as shingles.
Sorry to hear that - hope you feel well soon. Some devious critters in the garden!
Just a marvelous ode to the Garden! (I have an upcoming prompt where we are writing odes and this would fit right in. But shhh, don't tell anybody.)
Silent as an urn on a shelf.
Ha! Let's hope Dinah sees this one....
Such magnificence! I love "O giant slugs, shit brown, mottled greasy grey-green...forty!" and "O pyralids and their crambid cousins"! And - I also find that "parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme" just roll all together for me, like when singing "LMNOP".. I'll start picking from one to add to a meal, and the song just automatically prompts me to pick the others as well..
It just rolled out for me too!
https://www.paulsimon.com/song/scarborough-faircanticle/