Fiction | 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.

November 17, 2013

A Mushroom in the Cupboard

[excerpt from middle grade children’s novel]

I am not making this up, I promise. There was a mushroom in my cupboard, more specifically behind the cupboard. Even more specifically, there were two of them, and they were in cahoots! But I only found this out later, when it was too late to point fingers and throw wild accusations.

After all, who would have believed me?

Growing up in the French countryside, I learned to fear two things: Gypsies and Merules. (Socialism was the thing to fear later in life – but for the moment it was Gypsies and Merules).

Gypsies stole children. This we all knew. When their distant bells tinkled through town, our neurotic nanny, Genevieve, would whisk us from the garden. We were untamed, my twin brothers and I – Gypsy children were probably better behaved.

Genevieve had the annoying habit of picking her teeth when she was nervous. During caravan-jingling-through-town times, up shot her left hand to scratch a front tooth and down shot the right hand to drag us to the basement kitchen. We were promptly set to some menial task like de-stringing green beans. Elbow deep in vegetables, Genevieve would launch into frightful tales of Gypsy thievery. Dogs, horses, children, cars, watches, wallets, you name it, they had stolen it. Storytelling soothed her because her tooth-picking hand would creep out of her mouth and dip into the English cream.

Merules were the other thing to fear – though I was not exactly sure why. I just knew that adults were terrified of them. These secretive mushrooms lived in the walls, and if they appeared, the roof could fall on your head. At night, I spent hours staring at the ceiling for any sign of collapse. Merules claimed their territory wherever they lay spore and did not discriminate in their destruction of the old homes of France.

November 10, 2013

The City is a Cage (Excerpt)

Last night I saw the saddest thing I have ever seen. I saw a homeless man talking to mannequins in the vitrine window of a lingerie store. The boutique was raised above street level and faced an old catholic church. He had walked up the bicycle ramp, leant backwards against the handrail and was holding court with immobile figures in perpetual pose, this hip cocked to one side, that thin forearm twisted outwards, a broken limb extending glued fingers in provocation. The street was empty; the cast of lamplight orange-hued on the brick of the church walls.

The man made small gestures with his hands and mumbled. Occasionally he nodded a half wit smile.

Maybe he was talking to his wife, the woman who left him after his cash ran out and his hallucinations grew fearful. He was telling her of that time she lay naked beside him while he braided a lock of her hair in two long twists. She laughed as she ran her fingers through his handiwork. She was always undoing things, always putting them back to the way they were. Later when he lost his job and his mind began to wander, he blamed her for the unraveling of things, but really all she had were those two strands in her hands, while in his own was his entire life, unwinding slowly.

As I walked past him, these fancies seemed ludicrous. Truth be told, I bet he was a dirty bastard, who just wanted to fuck the painted models upside down, rip off their lacy undergarments like he did to that whore once, back when he had money for whores, back before he went crazy.

I had seen him walking the block before, talking to himself in a stained Members Only jacket, or sleeping face down by the corner deli. In summertime, he walked barefoot. Now he wore dirty Adidas with the back heel crushed down like a pair of slippers.

Did it matter what he said? His face was streaked with dirt, his clothes stank – the point was that he was talking to mannequins dead behind glass. Off their pert uniform asses hung the price tags of the living – price tags for sex, price tags for cheaters and lovers, for real midnight whispers and real touches, not this cold cupped hand stretched towards him like a horror movie wax figurine.

When I got home to my studio apartment, I imagined him mouthing poems to the windowpane, a flight of autumn leaves floating his words skyward.

I opened a bottle of cheap red wine. It spilled down my throat, filling my stomach like lost phrases.

I cried myself to sleep last night.

(excerpt from short story “The City is a Cage”)

October 14, 2013

A French Summer

The plane landed at Roissy onto a tarmac that mirrored the drab June sky. Always the day of her arrival was unseasonable weather. The French shook their heads and said the same thing “Ah! Ce temps.” 55 degrees and overcast with a ninety percent chance of rain, a hundred percent chance of gray. Summer by no standard.

France was its most insufferably French during the first hours spent escaping Charles de Gaulle airport: the interminable wait for the bags, the queue of dusty taxis to ship her off on highways flanked by concrete bunkers and sloppy graffiti. The scenic roads of France. Supermarkets housed in lego-blocks with chipper names like Conforama and Bricolorama, factories resembling Ikea versions of corrugated tin shanties, barely alive plants peaking above plastic coverings. Further inland they drove, past the white-tiled tunnels with their overhead yellow-lit rectangles, past the wastelands of suburban brick flickering offside the highway barriers like images from a moving train. Resting her head against the taxi window, listening to the haggle on the radio, she felt acute disappointment.

And the countryside did not seem quite right either. It was more crooked and wobbly than she remembered. They passed cigarette-stained towns with peeling shutters and windowsill doilies, old ladies in black orthopedics and knee-length skirts, mending handkerchiefs and knitting stiff wool. France had let weeds grow along her roads, in her gardens, up her trellis; the bristly stalks of unknown plants had taken over the clean corners.

She was reminded of her grandmother and this made her more depressed.

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