Seventy: Susan

Susan wanted to live in a castle when she grew up, with hallways so polished she can look up her skirts, with rooms so large her shouts echo, with lawns so green you could eat them for lunch.  Instead she was sucked into the Adult vortex and had to rely on currency to fund her dreams, so she lives in a tiny brown bungalow near the woods.

Susan wanted to be captivated by Prince Charming, to be seen as that special girl out of all in the crowd, to be swept up on horseback and carried away into pink clouds of mist.  Instead, the mist comes from the shower, the horse’s back is the scarred and cracked pleather seat of a pick-up truck, and Prince Charming farts good morning to the world when he wakes up, always, too early.

Susan wanted to experience life, to have vacations where she could explore stunning vistas and vast lands, taste foreign cuisines and phrases, be lavish with her praise and her time.  Instead she clicks websites, chats up strangers for their stories, creates her own multi-webbed ideals of lives more interesting, more complicated, more immense than her own.

And she grows flowers.

Sixty-Nine: Louise

She tidied and dusted, cooked and baked, primped and changed and had a final look around before the guests were due to arrive.  Some were dear friends, others barely acquaintances, but she was charged with entertaining them all this evening.  The event was immaterial, but the decorations, the canapes, the ice enfolding the beer, all had to be perfect.

She entered the kitchen and gasped because her three boys, ages ten, six, and four, were ogling the three-layer coconut lemon cake she had just finished decorating an hour ago.  “Don’t you dare touch that!” she warned them.

“We’re not, we’re looking at the fairy,” the eldest replied.

“The wha–?”  She clacked her way around the center island to stand behind them.

“See, Momma?”  The four-year-old poked a pudgy finger at what definitely did appear to be a tiny, half-inch tall fairy struggling weakly against the sticky cling of the frosting which had ensnared its wings.

“It’s nothing, only a gnat,” Louise said, shooing them out of the kitchen.  She silenced them with cookies and a promise of extra videogame time, then returned to the cake.  It really did look human, with long delicate legs dangling helplessly beneath a pert tiny body.  It’s wings resembled a lacewing’s green filamentary appendages, only smaller, so much smaller.  She was ready to dig out the magnifying glass when the doorbell rang.  She jumped, smacked her head on the cabinet, and in vexation, grabbed a knife and whisked the gnat-fairy-whatever off the cake.

“So much for that,” she said as she wiped it onto a napkin.

Sixty-Eight: Cheri

Carefully she maneuvered the Bunsen burner from the black countertop into the accessory sink, turned the flame on low, and carefully fed the pages of her textbook to the fire, one at a time.  It took almost two chapters for her teacher to notice, and she was summarily dismissed to the office.

While she waited for her upbraiding from the principal, she quietly tore out the interior of her Great Expectations text.  The secretary noticed the slowly building pile of printed snow beside the girl’s chair and yelled for her to stop.

“Why?” Cheri asked calmly.

“You’re destroying the school’s property!”

The principal came out and returned the girl’s question to her.  By way of reply, she took off her shoes, climbed up on the counter, and jumped out the window.

Instead of falling, she flew away.

Sixty-Seven: Kate

Kate was irritated over the length of time it was taking her to flesh out the draft for her final paper.  Irritation seemed to be the natural flow of her emotions, lately.  Why did she have to be stuck indoors with psychology, when she’d much rather be riding her bike?  Or walking her dog, or reading something other than boring perspectives of brains that were wired differently from the common man.

She wished hers worked differently.  Maybe it did.  Maybe she was the one unique thinker on the planet, only because she was drowning in the banality of everyday existence, her special talents hadn’t been discovered.  What would she have for a talent, anyway?  She had always favored writing, so assumably it would be something along those lines.  Fiction?  Perhaps.  Long, though.  Non-fiction?  She looked at her Psychology text.  Definitely not.  She’d lead the crusade to burn it all if there was an election for that.

What about poetry?  She’d never really tried more than some trite rhyming romances back in high school.  She knew that real poetry was everywhere, could be molded from death or snatched from the clutches of babes.  She looked around her desk but saw nothing worthy of poems.  Wait, what did that say?  “To our loyal customers:  Please Use Caution, this beverage is extremely hot.”  Gee, that reminded her of a poem she’d studied back in freshman year, some famous guy who talked about eating the plums out of the fridge.

What else was around?  “The simple, authentic goodness and satisfying crunch / you love at an affordable price–that’s TRISCUIT”.  Was that iambic?  Dactylic?  Her memory wasn’t that good, and anyway, dactyls always sounded like something from the Paleolithic.  She loved the cadence of the words, though, and the images they conjured.  Simple, authentic goodness.  That’s what was missing from her life.  From everyone’s lives.  No one wanted simplicity, or authenticity, and goodness was only mentioned near Christmas.

While the afternoon trickled down to a whisper of dusk, and the time for her submission came and went, Kate scoured her small kitchen pantry for evidence of the literary and the inspired.  By 11:30 that night she had read every single label, including everything in the fridge, and was convinced that her path lay in advertising.

Sixty-Six: Charity

Charity broke the rules by giving away all the chalk in the cupboard, then the erasers, then the pencils.  When the school master questioned her, all she said was, “There was need.”  He disapproved mightily, and for the rest of the semester Charity had to prick her fingers so the children could write with her blood.  They worked on many orations that semester.

Charity broke the lease to her apartment by letting too many people share her small townhouse, until the neighbors complained that every time they looked into her windows, all they could see were bodies milling about.  When the landlord came to investigate, 13 Mongolian immigrants, 4 Indian nationals, 7 Puerto Rican migrant workers, 4 Bosnian asylum-seekers, and 6 homeless veterans greeted him at the door.  Charity was at the grocery store and the squatters were cleaning her apartment, washing her clothes by hand in the sink, praying to the west, divining a mate for their kind protectress, and seeking jobs in the local paper.  Charity was given a week to leave, but she made sure that everyone else found shelter first.

Charity irritated her father by giving away the entire sum of her trust fund within the week it was established, instead of letting it rust in its paper trail and accumulate interest.  “There is interest for this money right now,” she replied, as she purchased wind power in Kansas, rescued rainforest acres in the Amazon basin, paid for neuters and spays in Mexico, and fed children in Peru.  Her father wrote her out of the will, but as he was not dead Charity did not think this was such a great loss.  Whether or not her name appeared on a document was of little concern for her.

When the men asked Charity late one night for all she could give, she opened her purse and handed out wallet, keys, phone, pens, and gum.  She offered her lipstick for the tall one’s girlfriend, a comb without offense to the smaller one, and promised to clean out the crumbs from the bottom of the bag so the wide one would have something to give his mother.  They needed more, so she gave off her shirt, her slacks, her shoes and socks.  She apologized that the colors were not more coordinated, the cut not more trendy and new, but she did not have much mind for fashion.  Finally, when all their needs had been met, Charity watched as the stars dropped down and became part of her eyes, her lungs, her skin.  “Thank you,” she said.

Sixty-Five: Pat

Pat looked around the room at his brothers and sisters, his extended family, his parents.  He could remember things about each of them:  how they had met, if in-lawed; how they’d slept in the same room most of their lives, the boys; how the girls had needed protecting and guiding and annoying; how the folks had gotten old so gradually that now it was a shock to see them only every three or four months.

He looked at his older sister, a maid in a nearby hotel.  Three divorces, that many children, and no prospective future to speak of.  She held on, she managed, and her children were smart and well-fed.  Did he feel better than her?  That was a hard question to ask.  He felt removed from her, though there was this platform of mutual memory that tied them together.  There was this table of their parents’ that they sat at and broke bread together, twice a year.  She never asked the family over to her place, that would have been absurd.  Her place was three rooms large, and none of them could accommodate seventeen people.

He could fit them all at his place, and did every Easter for a big ham dinner.  He’d show them his improvements to the house, the new bulbs coming up in the yard, the new speakers for the PC in the media room, and then they’d start talking about all those memories, all those events and whispers and kittens that had been rescued and boyfriends that had been run off.  And in the end, it was what kept them together.  It was nothing, and it was all.

Sixty-Four: Angela

She pressed the seeds down into the dirt held in place by a white styrofoam cup.  She was careful to point the black tips down and keep the paint brush end up.  Her mother hummed and tidied the kitchen.  When Angela was done she said, “Now what?”

“Now we wait for them to grow up, and they will make happy yellow flowers.”

“What if they don’t want to?” asked Angela, in what seemed like a perfectly reasonable way.  Certainly not any way that should have made her mother laugh so, but she did.

“Everything grows up, silly,” she was told.  Angela always recalled the way her mother declared this, like it was a universal law, a thing that cannot and should not even be thought of as otherwise.

Angela trotted out into the backyard and looked at the grass, the clouds, the upside down world as she hung from her knees on the swing set, and wondered what it would be like in thirty years.  Maybe she could become a professional swing set hanger.  People from all around the world would come to see her perform her tricks on a magnificent golden swing set.  They’d sit all around the backyard and drink lemonade and play with her dog, who would walk around and serve cookies from a tray on his back.

When Angela was ready to leave school a man asked her, “What do you want to be when you grow up?  What about college?”  Angela hated school with a passion reserved for needles and vindictive cousins, with a singular resentment that involved copious planning for escapes and never-ending vacations.

“Do I have to?” she replied.  The man misunderstood the question, and passed her job applications for industries nearby.

Angela instead hunkered down in a secret cave and survived for many years on words, daydreams, and birdsong.  She let the love of mankind pass her by, because with it also came hatred and judging of things like size, worth, and how well one could cook turkey.  She solidified her plan to avoid the whole growing up thing like the plague, and dreamed about the time when everyone else in the world was dead, how she would go down to the library and see exactly what was in that back room that no one could enter, and peek right in the windows of every house she wanted to see if their lamps had as much dust as hers.  In the meantime, she learned how to blend in with the prevailing crowd, how to imitate their speech and dress, and how to behave like one of them.

Sixty-Three: Robert

Robert had a heart that was filled with longing for open spaces, new encounters, laughter-filled sunlit afternoons on clay-tiled piazzas with beautiful, raven-haired women.  He tried to fit all of these hyphenated encounters into a decade of travel, and learned many important things about life, love, his fellow man, the secrets of the cosmos, and how to make the best lemon-lime daiquiris.

Robert began to tell his stories, which, because he was a fluent and accessible writer, became very popular and well known in the social culture.  He developed somewhat of a reputation for delivering on the goods, so to speak, and rose ever higher on the best seller lists.  He did not seek out these accolades, but because money came with them, he was delighted because it meant he could travel even farther.

Robert was dismayed, however, because it seemed the messages of his stories was constantly being overlooked for some grander, wilder plan of the reviewers or those who called themselves “fans”.  It got to the point where he hated to hear his works discussed at all, because it seemed the more people got to talking about them, the further away the discussions seemed to stray from his intended points.  “No, no,” he wanted to argue.  “You’ve got it all wrong.  The book about Israel was not about global disarmament.  It was about love, don’t you see?”  But somehow he knew that even if he said these things aloud, he would be ignored.

While traveling through the middle eastern desert one week Robert became disoriented and lost his supplies.  He wandered fitfully from outcrop to shadow, searching for the simple answer:  where were his things?  Along the way he found the bigger solution to the question he had not realized had been asked:  what did he mean?

Robert’s body decomposed quickly in the searing heat, and carrion birds had their fill before the meat ran to muck.  They plucked out his eyes, bit off his toes, strung his intestines along the ground to share with their nest mates and allies.  But they never ate his heart.

Sixty-Two: Lloyd

He carefully unpacked for his trip, making sure he didn’t forget anything or anyone.  It was harder these days to get around, what with Mae already on her way and folks not coming by as regular.  He didn’t make much of a fuss with cleaning, just took a swipe now and again if one of the daughters rang to say she was coming over.  He wasn’t much particular about how fancy things were.  He sure wished Mae had left the recipe for those pork chops, though.  With some biscuits and gravy, they were just the thing on a Sunday afternoon.

Little by little their world had narrowed, from the town of Rawling to the farm; from 250 acres down to 50; from five kinds of livestock to a few chickens and goats; to the last dog, the last cat, the last of the pears from the hilltop orchard.  The trees were still there, being slowly reclaimed by sumac and running raspberry vines.  Mae made great jam from those berries, though Lloyd would chop them down whenever he could find them.  The jam was all gone, too.

In each spot on the table was an envelope and a key.  The papers he’d had notarized and he put these under Bill’s envelope.  He was a CPA, close enough to a lawyer.  He’d see the place got sold off fair.  Under Lydia’s key was a stack of records, not the whole lot, just the ones he knew she’d spirit off to her room when she thought she could get away with it.  Lord knew how she’d play them with all the fancy new gear Lloyd knew she had at her place.  In Mary’s spot were some of Mae’s poetry books.  Lloyd couldn’t tell if they were any good, only that the two of them would go on and on about the mush they found in there.

In the last spot Lloyd hesitated, then placed a set of keys and a worn, wooden-handled screwdriver.  Brandon would take care of the old girl.  The Rambler lived in the locked shed–what the keys were for–and the screwdriver was Lloyd’s last joke on his beloved youngest.  The boy thought he’d gotten away with those stolen trips in the family car because he never took the keys, but jimmied the steering column with a straight-handled driver and some luck.  He was lucky he never wrecked Lloyd’s pride and joy, or there would have been sore words between them.  Now he knew that his son would know just how much measure a father should take.

The table looked like it did in the old days, when everyone was home.  The last thing Lloyd did was ring up the local sheriff and exchange a few words.  Then he went to relax in his favorite chair, which he had carefully covered in plastic for his trip.

Sixty-One: Damian

He tripped along the fence line, tapping a stick along the sway-backed rails, listening for the hollowing of termites or the industry of carpenter ants.  He whistled aimlessly, a blade of gone to seed grass wedged between canine and molar, the only two teeth snug enough to hold it.  He was in no hurry, or he walked purposefully; whichever it seemed depended on how one watched him.  He seemed utterly jobless, but his eyes darted across the meadow, read the treeline, checked the dusty trail and watched the horizon all at once.  This was his home.

When he reached the crumbled rails that had given up their chore and crumbled to the ground, he sat cross-legged near the opening and took out a canteen.  After a swig of warm water, he wiped his mouth off with a worn sleeve and took out his harmonica.  A nice tune or two, then the long walk home.  This was the closest his land came to the road, and he never turned out the cattle or seeded it.  It was an always empty place, an added buffer between him and the town.

After one song the brush stirred, and a gruff howl echoed his last quavering note.  He began again on the same note, dragged it out before grabbing a breath.  Yep, another visitor, he was sure.  He finished the song, threw out some biscuits from a wrapped pack in his pouch, and said calmly, “Go on, that’s yours.”  A skinny grey mutt, round-backed and tail-tucked, fearfully crept out of the scrub near the fence.  Not too bony, which meant it hadn’t been there long.  Damian remained still.  The dog gained courage enough to gobble up the cornmeal pieces and questioningly wagged its tail.  Damian smiled, showing teeth, and presented his knuckles.  The dog came forward and licked once, twice, then settled in a crouch beside him.