Sadly, Doug never figured out what he wanted to be when he grew up. Over the last forty years, he’s been a philosopher, new-community designer, architect, project manager and educational consultant. Now, at last, as dotage draws near, he’s decided to do something really challenging and become a writer.
Free as a Bluejay
By
Madelyn Killion
She loved to drink.
Probably a little too much, but there was no one to tell her so. And she liked that. As she sat at the bar delicately stirring her bourbon with a crooked finger, she smiled to herself. She reveled in her freedom.
Taking a sip of her drink, which she counted as the fifth of the evening, she silently pitied the others in the bar, obligated to someone or something, tethered to their families and jobs. Not me, she thought as she lit a Winston, I am as free as a bluejay and just as happy. Mitzi sucked the smoke into her fibrous lungs, holding it for a long moment. She loved smoking, perhaps even more than she loved drinking. She thought that smoking made her sexy, and she imagined men’s eyes upon her as she slowly released the gray streams from her nostrils. She cast a glance around the bar, surprised that she did not catch anyone watching her. Oh, they’re good, she thought smugly. But I can be coy, too. She raised a shaky hand to her head, unconsciously checking her hairpiece. Her hand gave it a slight pat, and then traced down her neck, feeling the wrinkles that led to the sagging flesh of her chin. Well, what do you expect? You’re sixty-six today, and bound to start aging sooner or later. Never mind the little things, she consoled herself, you still have the legs of a teenager.
With that thought she polished off her drink and returned her attention to her cigarette. She had to buy more before the night was out. Through the haze she spied a man sitting at the opposite end of the bar. His hands clutched his half-empty glass, as if to shield it from the other patrons. He was hunched over the bar, head close to the precious glass, eyes blinking and vacant. Poor bastard doesn’t even know how pitiful he looks.
She heaved a congested sigh, dismissing the man and his problems, and signaled to the bartender to bring her another drink. He slowly obliged, as if he were hesitant to approach her. As he did, his nose wrinkled in distaste, her cloying perfume offending him. She narrowed her eyes upon seeing this, and pursed her flaking lips. Who the hell do you think you are? Every night I’m in this place, giving you business, and you dare to make faces? She lifted her nose in disdain and looked away as he poured the amber fire into her glass, not giving him the chance to apologize for his rudeness. From the corner of her painted eye she saw him quickly shuffle away, distancing himself from her.
Satisfied by her silent snub, and even more satisfied by her full glass, Mitzi lit another cigarette. Her mind drifted, and she recalled past birthdays, many spent like this one, all too blurry to remember the details. Well, old girl, at least you know how to have a good time, not like these sorry fools, too broken to lift their heads, too damn old to know when to go home. You’ll never be like them, ever.
She sipped her drink, trying to look demure, and allowed her eyes to wander the bar for another countless time. She noticed a young couple come in, stupidly giggling as they shook the snow off their coats. She watched as the man hung the damp articles on the coat rack by the door, watched as the woman watched the man. He turned with a smile to his companion, a smile that lit the room with its toothy gleam. He walked to her quickly, as if the brief moment apart from her were too much to bear, and enveloping her shoulder in the crook of his arm, guided her to a back booth.
I hope you know what you’re getting into, little lady, she thought charitably. I hope you realize they only want one thing. She smiled a knowing smile and shook her head at the younger woman’s naiveté. You’re lucky you don’t have one of them to rule you, to lord over your every move. No, not you, old girl. Free as a bluejay and just as happy. She stole a sidelong glance at the couple next to her, who had settled into their barstools soon after Mitzi’s arrival. They were young as well, but that was all they shared with the two who had just arrived. These two, much to Mitzi’s satisfaction, were on the brink of an argument. The young man with his hook nose and slick hair, reminded Mitzi of some of the men that she used to date in her youth, and this tangible, breathing memory sitting next to her was a reaffirmation of her sour opinion of the opposite sex. She could tell that the man was no good, and had she been the kind of person who cared about the welfare of strangers, perhaps she would have leaned over to the young woman who accompanied him and told her so. But Mitzi’s shallow well of altruism was temporarily dry, so she simply sat there, a lopsided smile smeared across her face, content with the knowledge that every woman must learn these lessons for herself.
Mitzi lifted her glass to her mouth and took a long swallow. Glancing at her watch, she saw that she still had a few minutes before the liquor store closed. She could buy a bottle, buy more cigarettes. She could leave these miserable people behind. She tossed some crumpled bills on the bar and teetered to the door, pulling her threadbare coat tightly around her narrow frame. She paused before the door, and pulling out a cigarette, lit it for the walk. Heaving open the door, she stepped out of the dimly-lit bar and into the night.
She loved to drink. Probably a little too much, but there was no one to tell her so. And she liked that, she reveled in her freedom.
Eight years ago Madelyn Killion left her relatively safe job as an English teacher to enter the frontier of motherhood. Currently she lives with her two children and husband in Pennsylvania, where on any given day you can find her laughing with her family, jogging with her friends, or napping with her dog.
4;30
By
Bob Walton
My father is a very simple man. He served in the navy during WWII. I popped into the world around the same time. The day he left for duty, he planted me in my mother’s little garden. I was two-years-old when he finally made it home for good.
Dad had to clean up after battles by gathering the dead from the beaches and the water. Wherever there were dead soldiers, he’d be there afterwards. The war kept him busy. By the time his outfit reached Iwo Jima, he felt like retiring.
Dad smoked like a nervous hooker. “We all did,” he would tell me. Whenever I asked why he smoked so much, “we all did” was his standard reply. He smoked for forty-seven years and finally the people who make Camel cigarettes made good on their promise.
Two days before he died my father had me sit down with him and he told me something he said he’d carried inside him for all those forty some years. He didn’t breathe very well at this point but he managed to get out this confession.
He called the vessel he served on a mortuary ship. It would follow the fleet around, he told me, and clean up the marines and sailors who wouldn’t be making the trip home.
He said, “We had just taken the beaches of Iwo Jima; the marines were all over the place, on the beaches, inland, and on ships. And bodies were just mangled to pieces. The soldiers kept busy organizing their operations and trying to stay alive. The Japs had mines planted everywhere, including the water, and every so often you’d hear an explosion and you’d know there’d be another guy not goin` home.
“You expect people to get shot or blown up in war, and these guys had been through Hell. But I seen somethin` that day in the lagoon that made me sick to my stomach, and it’s still here,” he said pointing to his stomach, “in my head.”
“This new troop carrier had just anchored in the bay waiting to unload its cargo of fresh marines. These guys hadn’t even seen action yet.” He paused. His face turned red, he looked like he was holding his breath. I asked him if he was all right. He nodded and put his fist to his chest like he had heartburn or something. I figured it had to be his heart, but said nothing. I just waited and looked at him. We both knew he wouldn’t last long. Besides, what could I do for him? He looked at me hoping I wouldn’t notice, like I had no idea he was sick.
“Finally,” he said, “the carrie
r was floating near the entrance to the lagoon, when suddenly a mine hit it. When I got there, bodies were all over the place, just floating face down. There were no signs of these guys being shot, burned, or blown to smithereens. We got busy pulling them up outta the water. Some guys were down there in troop carriers scooping them up. We were droppin` nets,” he stopped to catch his breath. For a couple of minutes he lay there panting. Then he continued, “...and grappling hooks, anything to get them the hell outta the water as fast as we could.
“The medics checked them. They moved from body to body quickly. One doc finally stood up and took off his helmet and scratched his head. He walked over to the Ensign in charge and said, ‘But they all have broken necks.’ ”
Slowly my father continued, “When they were told to abandon ship, many of them were still wearing their helmets, and jumped overboard.
“Shit, son. That’s at least a 40-foot drop. Do you know what their heads did when their helmets hit the water from that height?”
I didn’t know if this question was hypothetical or not, but I said,
“‘Uh, no.”
“Their heads snapped back the second they hit the water, and broke their necks.” He stopped talking and coughed, his eyes were moist from the coughing, I thought. Maybe it’s the memory of those Marines “Those dumb-ass mother-fuckers never even got shot at and they died before any of ‘em could shit their pants.” My dad chuckled a bit. “I took off my helmet right then and there and never wore it again.”
Then he coughed. He coughed good and hard. He coughed until he spat blood, and turned a couple shades of purple. Finally he settled down. My mother came in and gave him a shot of morphine the doctor had given her. We waited until he fell asleep, and left the room. That was the last thing he said. He died a couple days later in the early morning before anybody got up. My mother later told me that she thought she had heard a noise. Thinking she heard somebody downstairs she got up and went to look. She found my father at the window slouched over in the chair. His cane had knocked over the lamp.
He had been upstairs for weeks unable to even go to the bathroom. How he got downstairs beats the hell out of me. My mother still laments over that. When she saw him, she screamed bloody murder. It was 4:30 AM. I have to say he looked a lot better lying there than he had the last few weeks. It’s as if all the worries left him the minute he stopped living. I don’t think this could be said of the bodies he recovered in the war.
For weeks afterwards, my mother would get up at 4:30 every day like an alarm went off, go downstairs and clean the living room. But she never touched that chair again.
Robert Walton is a graduate of Penn State University, with a degree in Archeology. He has a wife, a daughter, a house, and a dog and owns his own bagel shop in suburban Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Fatal Snow is his first completed novel and he is currently trying to sell that novel while writing a sequel called Fatal Spring (the mask of Minos).
Fade to Black
By
Kathryn Grace
I'm not a confrontational person. Perhaps a little hard to believe an attorney could have such a quality. But I researched my way through law school and clerkship to land my dream job writing policy and position papers about obscure points in constitutional law. No person-to-person battle ever arose. Until the day I sued my sister.
It was six years ago, but the memory of the moment that changed everything remains stark. How the sudden jangling of the phone startled me awake. My chest heavy, my heartbeat pounding in my ears, I looked at the clock: one a.m. on a Saturday.
Phone calls that wake you up are never good news. It was my brother-in-law, telling me that my nephew had been in a terrible accident and flown by helicopter to the trauma center about thirty miles from my house.
"Could you come? Janice really needs you." His voice was hoarse and broken.
"Oh my God, Don. What happened? How is he?" I scurried around my room like a frightened animal, trying to find a shirt, any shirt, hopping to pull on the the first pair of pants I touched while keeping the cell to my ear so as not to miss a word.
The voice was almost a whimper. "It's bad. He was thrown from the car. Head injury. He was having seizures at the scene. They're in with him now. We don't know anymore. Please come." He started to cry. "It was only a mile from our house. He was almost home. Please come. Oh my God, he's our only kid."
"I'm on my way," was all I could manage. I started crying; I started bargaining. "I'll believe, I'll join a church, I'll build houses for the poor, I'll never talk about anybody again, just please let him be ok."
My sister's family was my only family. Jason was an only child, the basket with all the eggs.
Somehow I got to the hospital, and to an elevator, and down a hallway and to the ICU. The floors were shiny and my shoes made clicking sounds as I followed someone in scrubs with a name tag to Room 7. The fresh smell of sanitizer and plastic, mixed with the pungent odor of vomit and urine, made my stomach turn. I stood in the doorway of Room 7, and at the far end of the room, on a bed with sheets so white his bruises stood out with even more anger, lay my nephew.
Stumbling toward him, blinking my eyes to clear the tears that gathered there to see him, the nurse pulled me back.
"He's heavily sedated. We don't want him upset. It's important for him to remain quiet."
She led me from the room to the family area, which was appropriately clean, comfortable and not too cheerful. False hopes served no purpose. Janice and Don sat there, heads down, staring at that shiny floor as if an answer to this might be written there, if only they could find it. Several other people sat there. They were all looking for that answer.
Janice looked up and then melted into my outstretched arms. I closed my eyes and felt her grief as something so physical, everything about her was heavier.
"He'll be okay," I whispered to her hair. "He's a fighter like you." For a split second, I was in a different embrace with her. The embrace after our mother died, the embrace after Janice heard. Then it was gone.
"There's a lot of bleeding in his brain," Doctor Trauma Surgeon said. "It will be several days until we get a better idea of the extent of his injuries, and even longer before we can comment on the permanence of any disabilities. His condition is critical. Right now we're keeping him on a ventilator and chemically paralyzed. The less stimuli he has right now, the less his brain will have to work We want the swelling in his brain to go down before we go any further. Any questions?”
"Is he going to die?"
"I can't answer that."
No more questions.
Janice and Don went in with him for a few minutes every few hours, to stand by his bed, to touch him when allowed, to watch their shared piece of life lay still and quiet except for the work of the ventilator. After five days of worsening CT scans and quiet EEG's, the traumatologist, the neurosurgeon, the pediatric neurologist all raised the possibility of stopping life support. Janice reacted as if someone had reached in with a brutal hand, right into that place in the heart where your soul lies and yanked as hard as they could. She bent slightly at the waist and circled her arms around herself as if to hold herself together. Her eyes were closed as she slowly shook her head and murmured the word 'no,' a wounded cry almost drowned out by the sound of Don falling heavily into a chair behind her.
No one challenged her. The doctors respected her decision and gave her timetables for more testing. They would talk again soon. I didn't know what to say. I looked at them both, Don with his head so low it almost touched his knees, Janice caught in her own embrace. They never touched, but waited there in those positions until the nurse came and took them back to Jason's room.
I was in awe of them both, teary-eyed in the waiting room, but up-beat at his bedside, reading to him, telling him the news, telling him jokes, trying desperately to get him to respond. I tried to be there as much as I could, taking time from my work schedule and my limited personal obligations. I tried to ease my sister's burden, although she would nev
er let me. And so Jason stayed on life support, and they continued telling jokes. After more weeks than I can remember, they did remove the tubes. Slowly, one by careful one, because there was some brain activity. Then came the rehab hospital, where his damaged brain would try and make his body follow some basic commands. Like blink. And smile. And maybe swallow. Janice quit her job. She gave Jason everything she had, every day. But like her son, she was changed forever. And like her son, I wasn't sure what her future held.
They were together in the early stages naturally. Hospitals in particular tend to bring people closer, however artificially. As the weeks turned into months turned into a year, Jason came home. Don worked as much as possible to keep Janice and Jason there. Until the day he decided to not go back there himself. It was just too hard. Jason was so difficult to understand, and he didn't really walk without the assistance of someone and some appliances. On the rare nights when he wasn't working and he let Janice take a break, Don wheeled Jason in front of the T.V. and there he sat until Janice got back. Father and son had not been particularly close before the accident; Jason's disabilities only made it harder to connect. Janice and Don never had a very tight marital knot, and the incessant pull of lost expectations was enough to make their relationship unwind. When the marriage ended, everyone, including Janice, was disappointed.
No one, including Janice, was surprised. So Don left and moved to Canada with his travel-agent girlfriend, sending some support money and an occasional greeting card.
"It's not that much different without him," Janice would joke in the early days. "At least now I don't have to cook as much." And she kept up her spirits, and the seasons changed, and Jason got better a grain of sand at a time.
I never realized how much trouble I was in until it was too late. It was a cool April night, just after Jason's twenty-first birthday. Time and therapy had given him the ability to transfer from bed to wheelchair and from wheelchair to potty seat. With the assistance of one strong person, he could walk short distances, although it was certainly not graceful. He could feed himself slowly and sloppily if the food were cut. His speech stayed slow and monotone, very hard to understand unless you were accustomed to it. Which was a shame, because Jason was very funny. Funnier than before the accident. What he gained in humor, he lost in self-pity. His mental capacities were diminished, he would never be an engineer, but he would graduate from high school. He would make some kind of life for himself, by himself.
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