Contents
Queen of the Waves
An Oofy Baby Sees Fortunato’s Side
Doctor Moreau’s Pet Shop
Interstate Nocturne
Refugees of the Meximo Invasion
Cherish the Muffin Top
Obligates
Demi-Christmas
Blue Madeline’s Version
Snow Angels sans Merci
Smooth
Fiji Mermaid
Lactophilia
X
Annabelle’s Children
Acknowledgements
Women of Consequence
Gregory Wolos
Regal House Publishing
Copyright © 2019 by Gregory Wolos. All rights reserved
Published by
Regal House Publishing, LLC
Raleigh, NC 27612
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN -13 (paperback): 978-1-947548-49-7
ISBN -13 (epub): 978-1-947548-50-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951843
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Interior, cover image and design © by Lafayette & Greene
lafayetteandgreene.com
Regal House Publishing, LLC
https://regalhousepublishing.com
The following is a work of fiction created by the author. All names, individuals, characters, places, items, brands, events, etc. were either the product of the author or were used fictitiously. Any name, place, event, person, brand, or item, current or past, is entirely coincidental.
For Stephanie
Queen of the Waves
The vehicles in the eastbound lanes on the Massachusetts Turnpike have stopped dead: dozens—no, hundreds or maybe even thousands—of cars and trucks are bunched up in front of me. Steel and glass glitter in the morning sun like the scales of a mile-long snake dozing between snow-covered hills stippled with black, bare trees. This shouldn’t be happening here, halfway between Boston and Springfield, midweek in late winter.
I’m stuck in the passing lane, and a tractor trailer on my right blocks my view of the shoulder. The guy in front of me is already out of his van, standing on his tiptoes near the median guardrail, gazing at the double line of idling vehicles that disappears around a bend far ahead. In my rearview I watch the woman directly behind me busy with her cell phone, texting, calling. I turn on my radio, search a few minutes for news, catch instead some pop, some classical, some country western.
I know why we’re stopped. Things don’t come to a total halt like this because of roadwork. There’s no traffic approaching us from the westbound lanes—whatever has stopped traffic in both directions is certainly fatal.
I settle behind my steering wheel and turn off the ignition. The woman behind me is now using multiple phones, has propped a folder open on her dashboard. The trucker next to me swings open his door and climbs out of his cab, a tiny dog in a flannel coat under his arm. He places his leashed pet on the pavement and follows it behind the car in front of him, which has a dented rear bumper and, across its back window, a college sticker I can’t make out. This car’s driver, a young woman with blonde hair tied back in a pony tail, sticks her head out of her window. She says something to the trucker, who stops and nods. His dog, eager to get to the shoulder, pulls the leash taut, and his owner follows him to the other side of the truck.
A band of sunlight warms my lap, but it’s chilly outside. If we’re stuck much longer I’ll have to start the car for some heat. Daylight Savings Time stole an hour this weekend. I’ve heard that there’s an increase in accidents on Mondays following the time shift. It’s hard to adjust. I look for the trucker and his pup, but they’re not back.
At Mom’s funeral the sun was bright like it is today, but that was January, and my teeth ached from the record cold. The crowd joining me at the cemetery was pretty thin. No relatives attended—there is no family. Mom was an orphan; I never knew my father and have no siblings. And none of Mom’s fellow patients from her psychiatric facility would have been permitted to attend—not that she had any friends there. The director showed, and the chaplain, who offered a few words intended to comfort.
Because Mom was a veteran of the Coast Guard, a uniformed representative of the military came. He draped Mom’s coffin in an American flag and thanked her for her service. Then he raised a bugle, keeping it an inch from his lips because of the cold, and flipped on a little recorder, which played a wispy “Taps.”
The one stranger in attendance turned out to be a lawyer. She nodded sympathies after Mom was lowered into the ground and stuck a business card into my gloved hand. Her high heels rang out on the cemetery road as she hurried back to her car, trailing a frozen rope of perfume. The official report was that Mom’s fall from a fifth-floor window was accidental, but there was a question of negligence on the part of the staff—Mom had been on suicide watch since she’d begun her long commitment. I never pressed the negligence issue. I wouldn’t exactly call her death a comfort, but it was good to know she had no further to fall.
Though I was only five, I remember my first day of school—Mom shook off my hand to take my new teacher’s. Mom wanted to tell her that I was special.
“My boy was born without a sense of smell,” she said. “Congenital anosmia.
Please avoid activities that might exclude him.”
She told me she first noticed I couldn’t smell when she read me Pat the Bunny, the little board book for toddlers. “At six months old you rubbed your hand on the bunny’s fur, and you felt the father’s scratchy face—it was a bit of sandpaper. You’d lift the bit of cloth to play peek-a-boo with the little boy in the book, Paul, and you waved bye-bye to him and his sister Judy. But you wouldn’t sniff the flowers—there was perfume infused in the page. I’d get so frustrated, I’d try over and over, but all you did was slap at the book so I would turn the page. When I realized that you didn’t have a sense of smell, I felt so guilty that I couldn’t sleep for weeks. ‘My poor baby,’ I thought, ‘my poor, poor baby.’”
Mom conducted experiments to confirm her diagnosis: “I tried everything, hoping for a reaction,” she said. “Lemon, orange peel, cedar wood, perfume-soaked cotton, banana, coffee, dirt, vanilla, onion, mint, vinegar, moth balls, rose flowers, ginger, pencil shavings.” She nodded as she ticked off each item as if reciting a prayer. “I held each sample under your nose—but you didn’t twitch a nostril. I kept thinking about that French writer who remembered the smell of a cookie from his childhood and it inspired him to write thousands of pages about his life. ‘If my baby can’t smell,’ I thought, ‘he won’t have a past.’”
But when Mom listed the items she’d stuck under my toddler-nose, my head filled with a kaleidoscope of images—soaked cottonballs, Dixie cups, paper plates—and I could hear her voice: “Try this, now this, how about this.” I told her what my inner eye and ear were seeing and hearing, but she just squeezed my shoulder.
“It’s amazing how the brain learns to compensate,” she said. “But none of that is real.”
She bathed me twice a day. “Thank goodness you can’t smell yourself,” Mom frowned, raising her voice over the gush of steamy water filling the tub.
There were times I thought I could smell: the lilacs in the neighbor’s
yard (we had no flowers, only shrubberies); my shit; Mom’s cooking, particularly when she burned something. On what turned out to be my last day of elementary school, I excitedly told her about an experience I had when we were led back to the classroom after gym: “Before we opened the door,” I said, “I knew there was going to be popcorn—I had a feeling in my nose and a picture in my head. I think I smelled it.”
“Popcorn?” Mom’s eyes drilled into mine. She sat me down at the kitchen table. “Honey, it’s time we had an important talk. The truth is, I can’t let you call what you’re doing ‘smelling.’ We’d just be fooling ourselves. The sense of smell is a miracle you’re just not capable of experiencing. Smell has dimensions.” Her gaze dropped a moment. “I might as well try to describe color to the blind,” she muttered. She raised her eyes. “Listen—it’s like you only smell the skin of things—you’re missing the blood and bone inside. You can try and try, but you’ll never get it. Everyone else takes the miracle for granted. I’m not going to allow you to lie to yourself. You’re going to need a particular kind of education,” she said, “and I don’t think the schools are prepared to give you the attention you need.”
I jolt awake, see the double line of cars in front of me, and jab for the brake pedal with a panicked foot. But the exterior world is as still as a photograph. I remember I’m in a traffic jam. Where’s my steering wheel? And what’s this folder on my lap full of papers covered with unfamiliar charts and columns of numbers?
“I don’t know how long—” The voice of the woman beside me quivers with frustration. She’s not talking to me—she’s holding a cell phone. “So change the schedule.” She looks toward me—through me. I’m in her passenger seat. It’s the woman I’d seen behind me when traffic first came to a halt. Through her windshield I see my car—those are my plates.
“Hello,” I say, but the woman turns away. She has no idea that I’m with her. I might as well be a ghost. This has happened before: overtaxed senses sometimes invert, I’ve learned. I feel like a cramping fist, but my guess is I become like a black hole in space, where the pull of gravity is so powerful it won’t let light escape. My senses suck me into myself until I’m invisible.
Though she can’t hear me, I talk to my host. “Do you know what my mother told me about my lack of smell?” I ask. “She said, ‘You may lack the miracle, but you also avoid the misery. Depths of pain you’ll never have to worry about. Look at the faces of those around you. Everybody’s suffering.’” The woman next to me keeps texting. Is that a tiny picture of a baby I see on the screen of her phone? She twists suddenly, grasps for a briefcase wedged behind us in a child’s car seat, but can’t dislodge it. I keep talking: “Mom said, ‘You can try to pass as a “smeller.” You can learn to mimic those faces. But the little whiffs you say you get will never be anything but fool’s gold.’”
The busy woman slaps her cell phone onto her lap and lets her head fall against her window. I look past her—the westbound lanes across the median are still empty.
“I was homeschooled,” I tell my companion. “There was a lesson Mom and I kept coming back to, reusing it for history, for science. It was about a hurricane they had over a hundred years ago that destroyed most of Galveston, Texas. There was an orphanage run by nuns, right on the coast. As the winds blew and the water rose, the nuns tied themselves to the children with ropes, eight or nine kids per nun. The nuns and orphans sang a French hymn, ‘Queen of the Waves,’ right up until the orphanage gave way and sank and they all drowned. I don’t know who heard them singing, but that’s how the story goes. They drowned because they got tangled up in the ropes.” The first time Mom told me the story she gave me a look that still burns inside my skull.
“Mom said,” I tell the woman beside me, “‘Whenever you wish you had the same sense of smell that normal people have, imagine that you were part of the crew that came across those dead orphans and nuns, all twisted up in ropes the way they were, after their swollen and rotting bodies washed up on shore. Imagine the stench of death and sadness, and ask yourself if a sense of smell is worth having.’”
My overwrought host’s attention is riveted on something out her window—I hear it, too, and now I see it—a helicopter, flashing into view above the trees, startlingly black against the blue sky. Its shadow passes over us like the blink of a god.
After Mom withdrew me from school, she began her attack on my remaining senses. Color first, then sound.
“Find the number,” she said. I was staring at a swarm of colored bubbles on the top card of a stack Mom held on her lap. “You’re supposed to see a number in the bubbles. I do. Everyone does. If you can’t see the numbers hidden among the bubbles, then you’re colorblind.”
There were forty cards, and I failed every one. I didn’t see a single number, even when Mom traced the digits with her finger. “I can see that there are blues and yellows and reds and greens,” I said. “Purples, too. Just not any numbers.”
“Well, it’s obvious that whatever you think you’re seeing is different than what the rest of the world is looking at. You’re missing virtually everything.” Her eyes gnawed at my face. “It’s not going to be safe for you to drive a car, you know—how will you tell the color of traffic lights? And that’s the least of it.” She gathered the cards into a neat stack. “This is as bad as smell, you know. Your world is even smaller than I thought.”
I cringed, suddenly claustrophobic—it was as if I could hear the walls of our house scraping against the floor as they closed in on me. What an incredible place the world I was missing must be.
I’m talking now to the trucker driver—I’m sitting beside him in the cab of his truck, and, like the busy woman I visited earlier, he doesn’t seem to know I’m here. He’s fiddling with his radio. But his little dog stands between my feet and stares up at me with Raisinet eyes.
“Mom told me winter would be my easiest season,” I explain. “Snow and slush, black trees, gray skies. ‘Spring and summer people will have moods you won’t understand—because they’ll be absorbing the smells and colors of flowers and lawns,’ she said. ‘And in autumn—those red, yellow and orange leaves, like the trees have burst into flame. Don’t worry—all the leaves will crumble into dust when it gets cold. The snow will cover everything. I should move us to Alaska, that’s what I should do.’ She stripped color from every room of the house, explaining why as she hung black and white photographs on the walls, deleted the “color” setting from our desk-top computer and cut color pictures and charts from my homeschooling textbooks: ‘I’m creating a safe environment for you,’ she said as I watched her replace bedroom curtains I knew were blue with gray ones. ‘At least at home you won’t have to worry about what you’re missing. You won’t be straining yourself to feel something you’re incapable of feeling.’”
“Music came next,” I tell the trucker. “When I couldn’t name all the instruments in a CD of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, she concluded I was tone deaf. She outlawed singing.”
The trucker finds a country western station. Guitars twang. The singer laments his losses. As a child, I rarely thought of my father. The idea of him was like another sense I didn’t have. The trucker closes his eyes and tilts his head back. A tattoo of a dragon runs up his neck and disappears into his beard. Covering his thick forearm there’s another tattoo that looks like a maze. At its center is a name I can’t read. And just above the middle knuckles of his hand are tattooed musical notes, one note per finger. I wonder if they’re part of a melody or a chord. What would hitting someone with his fist sound like? From his cab we’ve got a bird’s-eye view of the stalled traffic. I can see that the sticker on the rear window of the car in front of us reads “Framingham State University.”
“I taught myself to whistle,” I tell him. “Like colors and smells, whistling was something that I read about in books and wasn’t sure I understood. But I practiced at night, and I figured out how to make a sound. Mom he
ard me, of course, and came to my bedroom door frowning. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked. ‘You can’t possibly know how horrible that sounds. Thin and weak. An insult to music. Don’t.’”
The tattoo I’d like would cover my chest—instead of an inked outline, it’s a movie, an old newsreel clip Mom made me watch on the computer. The brief clip shows a crew of twenty men trying to anchor a huge blimp. They hang onto ropes, but the blimp drags them down the airstrip. One by one, the crew members let go, and the blimp soars into the sky—but two men hold on, and the camera follows them as they’re pulled into the air. A few hundred yards up, one of them loses his grip and, kicking and flapping, drops out of the picture. The other manages to wrap his arms and legs around the ropes. The blimp keeps ascending, and he’s still rising with it when the clip ends.
“He hung on for hours,” Mom said. “The blimp’s crew pulled him in as they floated along, so high up he must have been just a speck to those on the ground. It took hours.” She shut off the computer. Her eyes were shiny. She patted my chest. “Whatever you’re feeling this very second, that’s probably as close as you’ll ever get to what real senses are like.”
It’s impossible to describe how much the crazy sky-dance of the guy who gave up means to me.
I’m in the backseat of the young woman’s car now, the one with the Framingham State University sticker. If she sat up straight, I’d see her reflection in her rearview mirror. But she’s leaning on the door, so I’m staring at the back of her head and her blonde ponytail. All I see in the rearview is the college sticker.
“I don’t know why Mom brought me books,” I say, “since she assumed my failed senses kept me from understanding most of what I read. Was she encouraging me to create some kind of shabby half-world so I could limp through the real world everyone else enjoyed? I was nearly a teenager; I had powerful longings I couldn’t identify. And I fell in something like love—with myself—with my own touch. Morning and afternoons I peeked from behind my gray bedroom curtains at the kids my age on their way to school. At night I remembered the girls. And then one evening, as I forked through my plate of sauce-less pasta, I asked my mother if I could go to public school.”
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