by Toni Graham
Before you become a mother, no one ever tells you about what SueAnn thinks of as the panorama effect. She has talked to other mothers, and they say they have experienced the same thing. When you look at your child, or even think about your child, you never see him only the way he is now. Your child’s present self is only a fragment of your vision of him. Before digital imagery and PhotoShop and all the other technology with which SueAnn is not terribly familiar, people used to take panoramic shots of a setting from side to side; then after the prints came back from a photo lab, they would lay the photos out next to one another and tape them together to reproduce an entire landscape. She can remember her granddaddy showing her such shots he took along the coast of Japan when he was in the Merchant Marine.
During the entire fifteen years that she mothered an alive son, rather than seeing Kyle as he had been in the here-and-now of any given moment, she had seen shadow Kyles right along with him: baby Kyle in his little blue bonnet—she had been astonished when he actually said “goo goo,” just like a cartoon baby—and toddler Kyle lurching in a baggy diaper and a small white T-shirt; Kyle singing a duet of “Nearer, my God, to Thee” in the choir at church with Libby Payne’s little daughter; and Kyle as he had actually been at the end: a sweet, pimply-faced, irritable, touchingly vulnerable fifteen-year-old. Each Kyle stretched out in her line of vision like an accordion. Being with one’s child was like being in a hall of mirrors.
She moves over to Kyle’s desk and logs on to the ‘net. After a few minutes she finds that Clay’s family does not yet have a bereavement website. But something else has been on her mind, even though she might prefer otherwise. When she had a private session with Dr. Jane a few weeks ago, they had talked about what Jane called “your sexual dysfunction.” After a bit of embarrassing talk, Dr. Jane had torn a sheet of paper from a notebook and written something on it and handed the paper to SueAnn. “GoodVibrations.com” was written there in Jane’s bold handwriting. “There’s nothing wrong with what we used to call ‘marital aids,’” Jane said. “They call them ‘toys’ now, but for me, that always conjures a weird image of Tinker Toys and yo-yos in bed.” She laughed while she said this, but SueAnn blushed and wished they could talk about something else. Still, she is curious.
She gets up and goes to the doorway to determine whether Gilbert is still parked in front of the TV, then returns to the Mac and logs on to GoodVibrations.com. Oh, goodness me, she thinks, this is almost as shocking as before we had the Spam filter. She has seen things like this on late night TV, too, when she had insomnia and stayed up after Gilbert fell asleep: two women in an infomercial sitting in front of a table and handling myriad “toys,” some of which looked like medieval instruments of torture, and others that looked like—well, very, very large and colorful male members. There is no way on God’s green earth that Gilbert would find such a device acceptable in any way. He might possibly have a stroke. Even worse, he could call Pastor Russ and suggest an exorcism. She suspects that what Dr. Jane really has in mind is for SueAnn to use the toy on herself, furtively, to relieve the stress that being without sexual intimacy for months has caused. She is too embarrassed to tell Jane that she sometimes has orgasms in her sleep, reminding her of poor Kyle when he entered puberty and she used to find stains on his bedsheets.
A vibrator on the website catches her eye. It’s not as big and ugly as the dildos and some of the other vibrating wands. This one is petal pink with flecks of glitter, and the size looks nonthreatening. Plain brown wrappers are promised the buyer, and in any case she always gets to the mailbox before Gilbert comes home. But how would she pay for the thing without Gilbert noticing the charge on the credit card bill? She sits there for a moment, trying to think of an explanation. The site is called Good Vibrations, so she can claim she downloaded a song from a Beach Boys website; he would not think to question such an excuse. She scrolls past the truncheon-like vibrators with horrible protruding nubs on them; past the ones with extensions or attachments or clitoral stimulators or G-spot probes; past the Iron Maiden and the Power Thruster; past the electric devices that create images in her mind of being shocked to death while using the thing and being found in a grotesque position with the hair on her head standing up like Don King’s; past the glass devices that she fears would shatter inside her and slice her female parts to shreds. She clicks on the Fairy Dust model in Tinkerbelle Pink and then clicks on Proceed to Checkout. Close your eyes, Kyle. Her very first erotic purchase, done deal.
SueAnn’s new life begins in a week. Holly has agreed to give her a job in the bookstore, so she will soon live the life of a woman surrounded with books rather than with dollar trash in a bargain store. But the Good Vibrations toy will not be a part of that life. On the afternoon the package arrived in the mail, SueAnn went downstairs to the laundry room and opened the plain brown box. After she inserted the batteries, she turned on the vibrator, only to hear a loud grinding sort of buzz, like an electric razor or even a small power tool. The thing was loud enough for the next-door neighbors to hear and joggled her hand like a seizure. She shut off the device immediately. Her first reaction was to put the thing back in its box and discard it in the trash can. But Gilbert might find it. Worse yet, it might fall out when the garbage collectors came and roll out into the street or land on the top of the pile in the scavengers’ truck. SueAnn has never forgotten the time a neighborhood dog ripped into one of the plastic refuse bags she had left at the curb, found a used Kotex, unwrapped the toilet paper twisted around the napkin, torn at the bloody pad, and left the shredded remains in the driveway for anyone to see. If she took the vibrator to a Dumpster somewhere to get rid of it, she might be written up or arrested for trespassing. She does not need any trouble, especially not now that the bookstore is about to furnish a new beginning to her life. Burying the toy in the woods is the best plan. She has already trashed the box; the Fairy Dust wand is now in a plastic bag inside an old pillowcase, locked in the Silverado’s toolbox, next to a shovel in the back of the truck.
Driving westward on Highway 51, SueAnn watches closely for the Lake Carl Blackwell turnout. She knows she is behaving foolishly, that getting rid of the vibrator in the woods is not necessary, but every time she remembers that horrible buzzing noise and the sight of the big dome-topped vibrator, she feels a sense of panic.
Just as she spots the turnout, she notices there seems to be something falling from the sky, drifting like pear blossoms in the bright and blue sky in front of the windshield. She slows the truck and pushes her sunglasses up on her head so she can examine the blooms that continue to fall upon the truck as she drives along. She sees now that the falling things are not blossoms at all, but more like ashes. What sense does that make, ashes dropping from above? Certainly there are no volcanoes to be found in Oklahoma. She rounds a turn in the road and sees up ahead of her a large truck with a load in the back, and she realizes the falling debris is being shed from the dump truck’s cargo, peeling off from the pile and floating briefly aloft before gravitating ethereally to the ground. She speeds up in order to examine the truck’s ash heap and finally sees that the vehicle is hauling mushrooms, mushrooms that when airborne look like ashes.
There is something in the book of Exodus; Pastor Russ mentioned the story in one of his homilies a few weeks ago. Moses and Aaron took handfuls of ashes from a kiln and threw them toward Heaven. In the sky, the ashes transformed to fine dust that floated to the ground. When the dust landed, it caused boils and sores to break out on man and beast alike. Ash to ash, dust to dust, but the dust burned torment into the flesh of everyone it touched.
Last summer when Pastor Russ went away on a mission, the congregation had a series of guest pastors. One of them, Pastor Virgil, often talked about odd ideas: about mysticism and about scientific theories. SueAnn always looked forward to his sermons, but most of the congregation was put off by him. He talked on and on about the space-time continuum and time’s arrow, which many parishioners found blasphemous. He said, too, that ther
e really is nothing new under the sun, and he made a pun about “under the son.” Virgil claimed that anything in the world that you could think about or imagine had already happened somewhere, maybe was happening somewhere else at exactly the same instant.
Maybe on the very day the bomb fell on Hiroshima, ashes might have fallen on a small town in Japan, far from the epicenter. Perhaps a Japanese woman who had also lost her only son was driving along a country road in a prewar coupé, and maybe she had even secreted in the trunk one of those Ben Wa eggs SueAnn heard about on Oprah. It might even be true that on the time-and-space continuum, these things are happening right now to the Japanese lady. The woman might be planning to get rid of the egg before her husband finds it. She could be seeing what she first thinks are cherry blossoms falling from the sky and fluttering past the car’s windscreen, then thinks are mushrooms, but comes to realize are ashes, though she is not aware they are atomic ashes. She cannot know that, like the ashes Moses and Aaron tossed toward Heaven, the falling dust will sear and scorch everything it touches.
THE FLANNERY O’CONNOR AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION
David Walton, Evening Out
Leigh Allison Wilson, From the Bottom Up
Sandra Thompson, Close-Ups
Susan Neville, The Invention of Flight
Mary Hood, How Far She Went
François Camoin, Why Men Are Afraid of Women
Molly Giles, Rough Translations
Daniel Curley, Living with Snakes
Peter Meinke, The Piano Tuner
Tony Ardizzone, The Evening News
Salvatore La Puma, The Boys of Bensonhurst
Melissa Pritchard, Spirit Seizures
Philip F. Deaver, Silent Retreats
Gail Galloway Adams, The Purchase of Order
Carole L. Glickfeld, Useful Gifts
Antonya Nelson, The Expendables
Nancy Zafris, The People I Know
Debra Monroe, The Source of Trouble
Robert H. Abel, Ghost Traps
T. M. McNally, Low Flying Aircraft
Alfred DePew, The Melancholy of Departure
Dennis Hathaway, The Consequences of Desire
Rita Ciresi, Mother Rocket
Dianne Nelson, A Brief History of Male Nudes in America
Christopher McIlroy, All My Relations
Alyce Miller, The Nature of Longing
Carol Lee Lorenzo, Nervous Dancer
C. M. Mayo, Sky over El Nido
Wendy Brenner, Large Animals in Everyday Life
Paul Rawlins, No Lie Like Love
Harvey Grossinger, The Quarry
Ha Jin, Under the Red Flag
Andy Plattner, Winter Money
Frank Soos, Unified Field Theory
Mary Clyde, Survival Rates
Hester Kaplan, The Edge of Marriage
Darrell Spencer, CAUTION Men in Trees
Robert Anderson, Ice Age
Bill Roorbach, Big Bend
Dana Johnson, Break Any Woman Down
Gina Ochsner, The Necessary Grace to Fall
Kellie Wells, Compression Scars
Eric Shade, Eyesores
Catherine Brady, Curled in the Bed of Love
Ed Allen, Ate It Anyway
Gary Fincke, Sorry I Worried You
Barbara Sutton, The Send-Away Girl
David Crouse, Copy Cats
Randy F. Nelson, The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men
Greg Downs, Spit Baths
Peter LaSalle, Tell Borges If You See Him:
Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism
Anne Panning, Super America
Margot Singer, The Pale of Settlement
Andrew Porter, The Theory of Light and Matter
Peter Selgin, Drowning Lessons
Geoffrey Becker, Black Elvis
Lori Ostlund, The Bigness of the World
Linda LeGarde Grover, The Dance Boots
Jessica Treadway, Please Come Back To Me
Amina Gautier, At-Risk
Melinda Moustakis, Bear Down, Bear North
E. J. Levy, Love, in Theory
Hugh Sheehy, The Invisibles
Jacquelin Gorman, The Viewing Room
Tom Kealey, Thieves I’ve Known
Karin Lin-Greenberg, Faulty Predictions
Monica McFawn, Bright Shards of Someplace Else
Siamak Vossoughi, Better Than War
Toni Graham, The Suicide Club
