“It’s time to come in out of the dark,” I said aloud to no one.
I climbed the stairs to my apartment, feeling lighter with each step. Tomorrow I would begin again. I’d get my acting career going, this time for sure.
After I ripped it off the kitchen wall, I shattered the phone on the floor. I kept kicking until all the phone’s components skittered across the linoleum in small jagged pieces. I put on clean pants, sat on the couch and listened to my heartbeat. The pounding in my temples finally began to slow. A hot tear slipped down my cheek. I was so grateful for my breath, as if I had finally surfaced after being underwater a long time.
I am still grateful. Dr. Circe Papua, wherever you are, thank you.
THE FORTUNE TELLER
Sometimes the muse strikes on demand. I came up with this story in a few minutes at a writing craft workshop with Brian Henry. I first met Brian in my days working at Harlequin when, for $50 a manuscript, I evaluated slush pile submissions. I remembered everything about him from 20 years past and he didn’t remember a thing about me. Despite that, I remain convinced he’s a nice guy…or I’m not nice enough. ~ Chazz
Paul pulled back the tent flap for Sarah and they stepped into the gloom. He couldn’t see the edges of the room, just an old woman sitting in a circle of white light at its center.
He guessed the old woman’s business must have slowed since this afternoon’s rain. The old tent, off the broadway of the more lucrative games and rides, seemed a forgotten, minor attraction from an age before television, back when carnivals were popular. He cursed himself for taking Sarah here. First dates were hard enough without increasing the level of difficulty by going to a third-rate fair.
“Not too late to go on the roller coaster one more time,” he said. “And I’d like to take another shot at winning you a bear. Those carny games are rigged but, toward the end, I was getting the hang of that rifle.”
Sarah shook her head. “My feet hurt,” she said. Let’s sit a minute and I’ll get my palm read. C’mon, it’ll be fun.” He noticed that, as she moved, her helmet of blonde hair didn’t move, as if she had stepped off a magazine cover. That magazine would be called “Unattainable.”
The fortune teller looked up at them sourly. She smiled but the gesture looked like it caused her pain, the muscles required for the job were weak and their work didn’t travel to her eyes. She was very fat, dressed in a garish muumuu no doubt intended (and failing) to conceal her colossal dimensions. She sat on a worn lawn chair that looked inadequate to its task. A paperback romance looked tiny in her lap and a large expended bag of potato chips littered the floor at her feet.
It seemed cold and unnaturally quiet in the tent and it was so dark he couldn’t see the walls. It was as if the carnival had dropped far away. The combination of sudden silence and darkness made him feel off balance. He closed his eyes. If he hadn’t known better, he could have been fooled into thinking they were underwater in an abandoned stadium.
“Sit. Sit.” The fat woman gestured for Sarah to take the chair opposite her. From the back, Paul could see it was just another old lawn chair someone had draped with a red velvet blanket.
“I’d like to get my palm read.” Sarah extended one beautifully manicured hand and gave the old crone a bright smile. Paul thought it was the kind of smile that says, “I’d be glad to accept whatever you give me. With this smile, you’ll want to give me everything.”
Her father was a dentist. “Nice caps, huh?” she had said, within a minute of their first meeting that morning.
“Huh,” was all Paul answered. He made sure he didn’t smile too much after that, not so much that his own teeth showed. Sarah’s sorority-girl good looks filled him with new need and just as much self-consciousness about his broken teeth. One ragged, snaggletooth poked out at an embarrassing angle from his bottom row of yellow teeth. He’d never had the money to fix it correctly and had gotten through the hell of high school with the cruel nickname of Fang.
The old woman eyed Sarah’s hand for a moment and waved it away. “No palm reading,” she said. “I do deep reading. Are you sure you want to know your future?”
Sarah looked taken aback and quickly withdrew her hand but stayed seated and gave a prim nod.
“Hey,” Paul said, “just do your thing and we’ll get you back to your reading.”
The fortune teller’s eyes narrowed and she threw her book aside, into the darkness. “Ten dollars.”
Paul pulled out a ragged bill. The old woman snatched it away and tucked it into the depths of her brassiere. Watching the bill disappear made him feel queasy.
“Close your eyes, young lady,” the old woman commanded. “Let your defences fall away so I may read you properly.” As she spoke, she never took her eyes off Paul. Her sneer slowly transformed into a smile.
A moment passed.
“You have just met,” she said.
Sarah gasped. “You’re right!” She turned back to look at Paul, favoring him with another of her perfect white smiles.
“Of course. This is what I do. Now sh! You must know something very, very important. I am serious about this. I must warn you. This man is not good for you.”
“What — ?” Sarah said.
“You heard me. No good. He has little money and if you stay with him it will only lead to sorrow.”
Sarah opened her eyes and stared at the fortune teller for a moment more, as if the old woman communicated something else unspoken that Paul could not see or hear.
“He is a jealous man. If you stay with him, you and your lover will die young and violently. This man is dangerous. Too, too jealous. This man cannot stand other men looking at you, and of course, wherever you go, men look at you. Run away before it’s too late and never return a phone call from this man.”
“Sarah! Don’t listen to her. This is crazy! I know what she’s doing. It’s called a cold read. She didn’t see a ring on your finger and made some easy assumptions. I pissed her off so she’s decided to screw me over…screw us over. Please!”
Sarah stood up, her gaze shifting from the fortune teller to Paul’s face.
“What is this? What? For $20 you kick me in the nuts and for $50 bucks we get the good fortune?”
Sarah started for the door. He stepped in her way but she brushed past him and kept moving. “This is too much. Th-this is f-freaking me out. I gotta go.” She paused at the door. “I’m sorry, Paul.”
Her face was fear. In a glance, he knew he’d lost her forever.
Paul turned on the fortune teller. “You…cow!”
“I’ve heard that before,” she said.
He stood still and they were once more plunged into that eerie, cold silence. She studied him.
Paul reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out another ten dollar bill.
The fortune teller took a deep breath and let it out slow. When she spoke again her tone was even. “You will kill me someday. Soon, I think.”
“Will I get away with it?”
Her voice broke as she said, “Yes.”
CLEAN UP
This is another story I came up with while attending a Brian Henry writing workshop. At this same workshop I met a fellow writer, Mark Young, who became a friend, a valuable beta team member and the first guest on the All That Chazz podcast. I make new friends about as easily as Samoa launches rockets, so writing workshops can provide unexpected benefits. ~ Chazz
I twist and pull the orange dish towel, wringing it ragged. The fat man in the wrinkled suit sits in Dad’s chair at the kitchen table, gazing at the family album.
“I shouldn’t have gone away,” he says, over and over, but I think he’s talking to himself. Every time he turns a page he sighs again and mutters. “I’m so sorry.”
I peer at the pictures from my seat across from him. I’m upside down. When I was a baby my hair was so blond it was white. There I am, a little boy with a stick. A thin young man with an air rifle. Then a big man kneeling beside a
dead deer, cradling my rifle.
My faces are different, but the look is the same. And we had so many dogs. They either run away, pass away or go away. My hair is heading back to white now, like my father.
“Why come back now?” I ask.
His mouth gets small, the lips flat. The whites of his eyes are a map of broken blood vessels. He tells me he didn’t see my father’s obituary until a couple of days ago. “I jumped on a flight as soon as I could get away,” David says.
David. I’d never heard the man’s name even mentioned, but he’s my uncle. Well. Half-uncle.
I’d always thought my grandparents were inseparable, bound together in sepia-toned photographs with dark thumbprints along yellowed edges of old photo albums. I don’t have any pictures of one of them alone. They always sit or stand side by side, stiff and posing for the camera, frozen together under greasy streaks on thin glass.
Family and photographs: Tricks is all.
I’d never thought of Grampa as a young man catting around. It never occurred to me he could have a bastard son or that Dad had a half-brother. My father never told me. I’d sat by his deathbed, hour after hour, watching. As his days shrank, he shrank, but he’d had strength left at the end. He’d gotten away, after all.
“I lived in this house for the first nine years of my life,” David says. He looks around, takes in the old pot belly stove, the faded fridge magnets shaped like roosters and chickens, the scuffed fake-brick floor tiles. He squints at a high shelf. The green paint on my John Deere model tractor is chipped.
I can’t read people’s faces, but I guess that he’s figured out there’s no inheritance to be had here.
“It’s hardly changed,” he says finally. “Somehow it all seems smaller. But I guess that’s what people always say.”
“Is it?” Things people say puzzle me — maybe it’s simply that he’s taller and fatter. He doesn’t take my question seriously. “Your grandmother was always good to me. Treated me like family. I’m sure she was disappointed in your grandfather, but she never took it out on me.”
I nod and say nothing. In David’s eyes I see my father’s eyes as he died. There are always secrets too dangerous to share. I understand that. But Dad somehow kept his half-brother from me.
That won’t do.
David squirms in Dad’s chair, burdened with my heavy stare, my silence like sandpaper. “You hear all those clichés about evil stepmothers. Your grandmother disproved that rule.”
He smiles at me the same way I smile at everyone.
I nod. I twist the dishtowel, like that solves all my problems.
David’s talking and talking, making me tired. Something about his house in Connecticut. His hands are thick and red, knuckly and scarred. He’s used to outdoor work. Even though he’s old and overweight, David could still be dangerous.
If Dad could keep family from me, it wouldn’t do to underestimate another man’s power just because he’s old. Repeating mistakes is a weak person’s luxury.
David says my grandfather’s mistress is still alive. The whore must be unreasonably old. To me, David looks gray, almost dead, though he volunteers that he’s “only seventy years young.”
The dishtowel is well made.
“I always thought I’d get back together with your dad. You know. Visit. Be friendly.” He raises his eyebrows at me.
I think I’ve missed a signal but I don’t understand body language. Why can’t people ever just say what they mean?
“I sent Christmas cards every year but never got one back,” he says.
My face must have done things.
“I’m sorry if you feel this hurts your grandfather’s reputation.” Eyes wide, he says it quick, like he’s rushing to slap cool balm on a hot water scald. “I’m not out to bring pain to your family.”
I don’t care about that. I was little when Grampa died. I was stuck in a hospital around the time Grandma died so I missed that funeral, too. I wanted to go, but Dad said I was too young to see a dead body.
“You’re not embarrassing any family anymore,” I say. “It’s just me now.”
It was the Christmas cards that got to me. That hurt like cigarette burns in hidden places. David shouldn’t have told me about the Christmas cards. His fault.
Every December, Dad had a fresh reminder, a new opportunity to tell me the truth and give me an uncle. My father probably torched each card in the wood stove after I went to bed or maybe slipped them into the chipper at the mill.
I liked Christmas: Cold air sucked through a scarf; colored lights under thick snow; the smell of the pine I chopped down myself; the escape from school. Each Christmas memory was a betrayal now. Dad got away with lying to me and there was nothing I could do about that now, short of digging him up for a stern talking to.
David finally puts the photo album on the table. He ignores the steaming cup of black coffee I’d set beside him. “So…what do you do, Billy?”
“William.”
He clears his throat.
The kitchen clock ticks off the seconds.
“What do you do, William?”
I knock the hot coffee into his lap. I stand and slip behind him. That sound must be what people call a strangled cry. I brace my knee against the back of his chair as I twist and pull.
I show him what I do.
I treat him like family.
A GIFT FOR CURSES
This story is partially true. It was inspired by my first, and last, foray in Yorkdale Mall in Toronto on a very busy Boxing Day. I tell these stories because it’s an outlet for a lovely little revenge fantasy. If I didn’t have this outlet, I’m afraid of what I might do. ~ Chazz
I met Jack and Diane for 15 to 20 seconds on December 26, 1987. Jack and Diane grew up in Toronto in a tough area of low-rent housing off what’s called the Jane-Finch Corridor. Both kids had working-class parents who didn’t do much wrong beyond inattentive parenting, but they should have cared more about the practice of good manners with dangerous strangers.
Diane started out as a sweet girl who went boy-crazy when puberty struck. She “blossomed too young” her teachers said — the females said this with chagrin while the males said so with a shy smile which betrayed their titillation. “Blossoming young” really meant that she grew a startling pair of knockers the summer she turned thirteen. A smarter girl might have seen this early development as a curse. Thus fortified, by her mid-teens the sweet child had turned demanding and vain.
Jack was always just ahead of being put in a Special Ed. class, which meant that he spent all his time either tolerated or ignored at the bottom of regular classes. He got into fights defending his little sister from bullies. To defend himself from older kids, he was soon hanging out with the biggest and dumbest kids around his age. Jack was nine when he had his first serious talk with a police officer after he was caught shoplifting a bag of chips from the convenience store next to his apartment building. The owner banned him from the store forever. Jack had to walk six blocks to the next convenience store, so he was determined to steal more than one bag of chips to make the trip worthwhile.
After school one day, Jack and two buddies beat a little terrier till it couldn’t walk because it nipped at Jack’s leg. Jack and his friends were trying unsuccessfully to break into the dog’s owner’s home at the time. The criminals-in-training were caught by a neighbor. The judge let them off with a warning. I don’t give warnings.
Since their cars sat unguarded and vulnerable just outside in the parking lot, Jack’s teachers were nervous about disciplining him in class. Diane was the girl in the rear of the class who never raised her hand. She was bored and put a lot of energy into looking bored at all times. A year or two after graduation her teachers could recall her face, but none could remember her name.
Jack and Diane shared some classes in junior high off and on and had teased each other in a clumsy dance of flirtation, pulling and pushing without touching, weak magnetic poles working
against eventuality. They got together as a couple in their last year of high school. It was October, the first dance of the year. He wore his older brother’s blue suit. It fit like a garbage bag. She wore a pink dress that was no defence against cold winds seething early.
They didn’t know how many possibilities were still open to them. Every day, with every single, tiny choice, possibilities narrow until we reach the end of our lives when there are no choices left. We measure our time by the arbitrary divisions of sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour. We should measure our time by how many choices we have left. Jack and Diane thought they had time and the world was their buffet. They were sure everything would work out for them. It is a mystery to me why people think that.
Jack asked Diane to dance. She ignored his bad teeth. They danced to a Pet Shop Boys tune and broke apart awkwardly, not having anything to say to each other. They were about to drift back to their different groups of friends when the next song came on. It was Jack and Diane by John Cougar Mellencamp.
The song was from the summer of 1982. It was now 1986. Funny how roads turn. If that song hadn't played just then, they would not have been together as a couple when they met me. Fate moved a hand and the song played. They laughed about the coincidence and danced to it slowly. She sang the lyrics to him, her eyes suddenly bright. He held her tighter so she sang the rest of the song with her head on his shoulder, her warm breath in his ear. The biological imperative asserted itself and various hormones poured into their bloodstreams. Pheromones emanated and they saw each other in a new way. Chemistry pushed and they fell into each other. The next song was slow and by the end of that, they were an item. Choices had narrowed again. Events funnelled them toward me.
Diane was Jack's second girlfriend. He was still in love with another girl named Cassie, but Cassie had moved away with her family at the end of the summer and Diane was here. Diane was willing to pass the lunch hours kissing, groping, and wrestling with clothes behind the stage in the school’s gym. Jack was Diane's fifth boyfriend in three years, though all her boyfriends were pretty much interchangeable. Three of them were named Mike.
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