March | 2014 | A Southward Tide

March 27, 2014

The Old Maids (Excerpt of new short story)

I saw her once after her brother died. She lay on the bed like a deflated bag, her legs like two sticks sticking out from under the comforter, her skin paper thin except on her feet where it was thick and cracked, her unclipped toes curving painfully inwards. The room smelled like rotting flesh. It was not quite the smell of death which I remembered when cancer had starved my father. It was the smell before death, the smell of bedsores and soiled sheets, the smell of old crackers and cookie crumbs caught between the corners, the smell of molded milk in brittle teacups and all the dusty porcelain pillboxes with their painted spaniels. Old age merged to illness merged to death and with it, a litany of smells.

When I entered, only a faint recollection traced across her eyes, which opened momentarily under the weight of drugged eyelids. She had been lost for some time, Richard had warned.

“Tante Brigitte, it’s me. It’s Marie, your niece,” I struggled for words, “I’m so sorry…”

“Sorry for what?”

“We were so sad to hear about Uncle Maxime.”

“What’s wrong with Maxime?” a heavy eye pried itself open.

Her brother Maxime had died three days before. He was in his late eighties and had been hospitalized for months. No one was particularly surprised but it was still sad. He had died alone, before Richard or I could arrive. The nurse told us he had been calling for Brigitte in the throes of death. He was confused, not remembering that his sister had been too feeble of body and mind to hold his hand during his final hours.

“He’s gone, ma Tante.”

“What do you mean?” her eyes rolled to the side.

I patted her hands, frail bones like dead birds. She would pass soon, I thought. Probably like her brother: drugged, demented, in solitude and fear. The sad fate of a certain kind of elderly person, marooned by their own choices, each twist and turn of a life balanced on self propulsion, dangling like a broken filament until all that remained was a blank ceiling and the vague recollection of a nurse wandering in and out of the room, the steady hum of painkillers and the ultimate arch of death rattling through their lungs.

March 18, 2014

Freedom is Bought With

I was twenty-three years old when I broke up with a long term boyfriend in Cairns, Australia. Six years together, I felt dead, suffocated, spit up and rehashed. On the great Australian expanse, I was walking in a cage. I thought it was him.

After the cataclysmic breakup, I travelled south, alone and against the advice of my family. Previously vegan, I started smoking cigarettes and living off ice cream and beer. I lost weight. I tanned brown. Somewhere along the Gold Coast, I hitched a ride out of some crappy backpacker town. It was a long road to wherever we were going next, maybe a day’s drive. The driver’s name was Pip. He had red hair and was kind. I cannot remember the others but the station wagon was full. Pip drove through a straggled eucalyptus landscape, a pale orange earth, snakes sunning on the strip. Sometime after dark, we pulled into a rest stop. It was dangerous to drive through the bush at night, animals on the road, kangaroos smashing fenders, cars in ditches, no ambulances for miles and miles. Pip fixed up a hammock above the picnic bench. Underneath, I rolled out my sleeping bag, a feeling of giddiness in my heart.

No one knew where I was. Not my family, not my friends. I was thousands of miles from the last memory of me and for the first time in my entire life, all the expectations, all the stories and lies disappeared. I was relieved of myself. Under the southern hemisphere sky ablaze with stars, a feeling of total freedom crystallized and with it, concurrent, at the exact same moment, I suffered the loneliest feeling of my life.

The following morning Pip took me aside and asked, “Are you okay?”

“Why?”

“You have barely spoken since we left town. But last night, you were so happy sleeping on the bench. You even smiled.”

“I just broke up with my boyfriend of six years,” I told the half truth and he seemed satisfied. Truth was, it was not the boyfriend that was breaking my heart. It was life with its gaping mouth and awful truths: freedom is bought with self. The freedom we crave is the freedom of little deaths. We pay with pieces of ourselves – the triumphs and failures, the dreams and delusions, even our loved ones, even our names. And without me, what else is there? Freedom is a feeling best left for the gods.

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March 18, 2014

Where do the Balloons Go?

Today I saw an deflated aluminum balloon land in the surf. It wafted down slowly until it was an inch above the ocean, swayed to and fro by a skimming wind. Finally its aluminum skin was gripped by the fingers of the sea and wrenched to the bottom of the breaking wave. How will circumstance make use of this aluminum intruder -how long will it roll along mountains of underwater sand before wrapping itself around a sea fan? A clown cluster floats into the sky, long filaments hanging behind to catch the wings of eagles and rubber to choke the great leatherback sea turtles.

I wonder if they all land in the ocean. Do some have enough gas to last them to the upper limits of the stratosphere? Do they just explode? Where do all the pieces land, the torn Spongebob faces and Happy Birthday letters?

I read recently that our world’s helium supply is dwindling. In thirty years, we will ration balloons to the rich only, fifty dollars for a single Thank You balloon, twenty thousand dollars for an MRI. What will the brave new world bring?

My one-year-old celebrated his birthday with a three-foot wide aluminum balloon. It’s still hanging about the playroom bouncing dutifully when his chubby fingers pull its string. The smile on his face is so wide, it is worth an uncertain future.

March 5, 2014

The Temptation of Eve

On rare occasion, I attend church. This Sunday morning, a young blond man educated by hard-bound textbooks from his local evangelical college, tertiary sources at best, gives a passionate sermon on the temptation of Eve by the serpent. He does a good job. He really does. But for me, it is not enough. It is never enough. These literal interpretations are unsatisfactory; the biblical stories are elusive, deep pools of meaning that leave much to be gleaned, much unsaid, and yet the sermon only offers one possible explanation. I wonder, could there ever be a scenario in which Eve refuses the forbidden fruit? Attempt the experiment a billion times over and she will always say yes. Why would she not? She is like an innocent child yearning for adulthood. At fourteen years old, I made a series of life decisions which put me on a path of certain destruction. But to do it all over again, I would always pick the forbidden fruit, I would always choose the fall, I would always seek the promise of greatness down the dead ends of the midnight hour. Only in our older age do we covet innocence, do we seek back the serenity of the garden.

These are some thoughts I have during the sermon. How did Eve have a choice? Original sin represents the first act of free will. Eve fell before the fall. Eve fell at birth, the first millisecond that her brain began making neuronal connections, her impeccable genetic material coding itself into human form.

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Month: March, 2014

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