She put her heart in a box every Tuesday and took it to the market.
It was a small box, because it was a small heart.
It sat on a bookcase in the corner of her living room for many years, and by the time it began it's weekly trip outside, it was not much larger than a tangerine.
She had tried keeping it in the freezer because she had read this would keep the heart fresh and when she was ready to use it, it would be good as new, but the heart got a bad case of freezer-burn. She had to cut away a great deal of it and afterward, she decided that she should be careful with the piece she had left.
The heart now lived in the closet under a pile of band t-shirts that belonged to people who had borrowed it to write songs about. These people would always forget to return it and she would have to retrieve it from tables covered with dirty ashtrays or the bunks of tour buses where it was tossed back and forth, like a football, between shows.
Her doctor had suggested bringing her heart out every week, as an exercise, and though this made her very nervous, she agreed to try. This doctor was very expensive and required the taking of three buses to get to his office, so she did not want to have made such effort for nothing. She chose Tuesdays and said she would let him know if she needed another appointment.
That was when she got the box.
It was a wooden rectangle, lined with turquoise silk. She liked how pretty the red looked against the bright blue cloth.
The first time she took it to the market she did not know where to put it. Other people had fancy tables to display their hearts, but she had only brought her backpack. She set the box on a patch of ground that looked mostly clean, leaned against the railing of the staircase that led down to Steiner's Seafood Grotto, and waited.
The box was very quickly picked up by a boy with curly brown hair who liked the shape of it. He took it home and tried to play video games with the heart and get it to make snacks for him but that is not what hearts are for.
When it couldn't do what he wanted he threw it against the wall and shouted "this heart is stupid. I hate it!" He crammed it into a plastic grocery bag and brought it back to her. She took it to her room and put it back in the closet until the bruises had healed. A few months later she decided it was ready to be taken out again.
The next time at the market, she made potential owners fill out a questionnaire. Which television shows they watched. The kind of charcuterie they got at the little deli around the corner. One man had very good answers, ones that made her laugh, so she agreed to let him take the box back over the bridge to the big city he lived in. He really liked the heart but he had only wanted one to look at every few days and perhaps remember what it was like to have one in the house. The heart got lonely and decided it would rather sit under a pile of shirts that were worn-in and comfortable than be pulled out and polished until it just started to sparkle, and then be shoved right back into a cabinet for another week.
She had just about given up on her doctor's advice when she heard about a man who had a shop in the basement of the market. For a small price he would cast her heart in glass so it would stay the same forever. No more ache or pain. Always red, young and beautifully detached.
She took the box and her Virgin de Guadalupe piggy bank to the shop and asked the lady outside smoking a cigar if she was in the right place.
"Have it belong just to you, right? No one messing with it anymore? Sure, Sugar" the woman said, "We get gals like you in here ALL the time. Usually they're a bunch fatter or have a mess of tattoos or Botox by now. Congratulations. Sixty-five dollars. Cash or Discover card."
She felt like this was a very good price to make sure her heart was fossilized and no further harm could come to it so she handed the lady three twenty-dollar bills and one five and opened the tinted glass door.
She was surprised to find herself in a room with a large square furnace burning in the center of it. She had thought it would be like dropping off something to get framed or gift-wrapped and she wasn't sure what to expect.
There was a large man with a beard and Mickey Mouse ears standing at the door of the fire. He looked like a bear dressed like a clown dressed like Santa and she liked him immediately.
"Hey, Ladybug" he growled at her, but in a nice way. "You lost? You don't look like you have a problem with your parts"
She didn't know how to answer. He was right. There were no problems with her parts. She just wanted to protect them.
She held out the box and said 'I wanted my heart to grow, but it didn't, so now I want you to save the part that is left'.
He took it from her and looked inside.
"That is a very nicely formed heart" he said to her. "Even the part that is missing is well-healed and seems to be working just fine"
"But every time I give it to someone they hurt it and it makes me sad. I just want you to put it in a glass and it won't feel that way anymore"
The man had seen girls like this before. And it made him glad that he had chosen a profession that really, truly helped people.
"Leave it with me, Kitten. It should be ready by 5"
She handed him the box and went to eat pizza and look in the windows of the antique stores that lined the bottom floor of the market.
A few hours later she had had three slices of sausage and mushroom, a piece of rum cake, a root beer, and purchased a brass bottle opener shaped like a monkey. She returned to the shop and knocked, since the shades were now pulled over the windows and the woman with the cigar was gone.
After several attempts, she started to worry that maybe leaving her heart in the basement with a strange bearded man was a bad idea when the door flew open and Mickey-Santa yanked her inside.
"Wait until you see it, " he howled with glee, "I've never done anything like this one!!!"
And he hadn't.
When a heart is immersed in molten silica, it incinerates. Most of his previous clients had been fine with having their organs resembling mesquite coals as long as it meant that they were never subjected to the pain that comes with having a fleshy, beating heart exposed to the world for it to kick until bloody.
This heart was different. When cast, it exploded into a crimson rainbow. The muddy brown of decay and the Crayola red of birth and intention, and it swirled into purple and blue and then red again.
It almost made him sad to give it back to her, but when he saw her face light up, he knew that he had achieved what all artists hope for, and that is pure emotion.
She was very pleased with her new heart.
It was heavy and a thousand times more fragile than it had been before and yet seemed so impenetrable and she knew she had made the right choice.
When she got home she almost put it back on the shelf in the closet but decide to put it on the windowsill instead.
Now that it couldn't be hurt anymore, it was time to let in the light.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Meadowbrook
When the nurses in the delivery ward of a hospital receive word that a
patient is incoming with a stillborn, an entirely different set of
procedures are put in place. The first thing you notice, if you've been
previously admitted for a regular birth, is the lack of urgency. AT ALL.
There are no monitors, no one scurries in to make you comfortable or
begins an endless series of tests. There is simply silence. The door
opens periodically. A nurse who just began her shift who hasn't been
told, or a chaplain who offers solace and Last Rites for the child who
never had any to begin with.
When you ask the doctor about the C-section that must be forthcoming (because who would expect a woman to deliver a dead baby, surely you must just cut it out and end the nightmare quickly) you are informed that that is a very dangerous thing to do and the best way is to just let the fetus expel itself. "Let the fetus expel itself" is not mentioned in the baby books or at BabiesRUs when you are shopping for onesies.
So you get a shot of pitocin and wait alone until the cramps come. Cramps so wrenching, you may as well be having the baby. Or dying. A gunshot doesn't feel worse than this pain.You get the shot and endure. Endure is a good word for this. Flip through the channels waiting for your husband to come back after he drops the three year-old off at Nana's. The three year-old is excited to have a baby brother or sister. You aren't sure which. You'd asked to not be told so everyone could be surprised. Life has so few real surprises anymore, you had thought. What an idiot.
He arrives right when the insides of your body have begun churning and clenching. The doctor comes in and asks if you want the epidural. Can it be administered to my heart and brain? No? Fine. Get it over with. Just get it all over with.
Instead of the birth certificate people showing up, the people from the funeral home come and volunteer to inter your child however you would like. For free, even, as long as you select the basic design, just like a checking account. You are not a plain with address-type so you pick one that looks like a beautiful Indian hand-grenade. A cremated baby takes very little space and you don't live near a family cemetery. It seems appropriate.
When it is time and the contractions aren't stopping, the doctor and nurse come in with a tray and a pink bucket. The kind they might toss a tumor into during surgery. Your baby. The one you carried and talked to and loved and had hopes and dreams for is going in a pink plastic tub like it is a piece of useless trash.
That is when you want to die and you close your eyes and talk to your 3 year-old in your brain and tell him Mommy is going to be home really soon and you're sorry he's not a big brother and you talk to God and tell him he's a fucking asshole and you hate him forever because of this and when the baby finally comes you can't even look, let alone hold it.
If either of those things happen, you will go a kind of crazy that there is no coming back from.
They take your girl away. Yes. It was a daughter. Your husband, for all his faults and inadequacies, had the balls to see her and kiss her and be with her and you don't. You failed. YOU FAILED.
You will not be able to look at or touch a baby for the next four years without having to excuse yourself to go shriek silently in an alone place or hyperventilate.
You know that there are women walking around everywhere who this has happened to and no one ever talks about it. You are not one of those women.
------------------------------
The phone rang at 4:45 am, jerking the sheriff out of his dream and into the tiny den off of the kitchen that he'd been sleeping in ever since Pam died. He couldn't bring himself to sell the house. It was full of the memories of everything good that had happened in the last 20 years. He also couldn't stand the idea of laying in the bed they had shared,or getting rid of it, so every night he climbed into the tiny twin that he had bought for the nurses and home workers, and twisted the ring on his left hand around and around until he fell asleep.
His first thought at the sound of the ring was to let it go. If it was an emergency, Dwayne or Myrna would start calling on the radio and if it was anyone else, well, it was his day off.
RRRRINGG
Whoever it was had better be bleeding.
-------------------------------------
Meadowbrook was a bit of a misnomer.
There was no meadow to speak of, just a few chicken and dairy farms covering about two square miles in the corner of Hopkins County. As far as anyone could remember, there had never been anything so much as resembling a brook, although Glover Rayburn swore there was a trout pond there once that got hit by lightening in '66. "Biggest fish-fry you ever set your eyes on", he'd tell anyone who asked.
The police department had two employees, including the sheriff. The dispatcher was the deputy's wife who came in at night to bring him dinner and keep him company while they watched Golden Girls reruns on TV Land. During the day, the calls were routed through Wood County since they usually had a grand total of four cars driving around at any given time.
When Wichita Foster opened the manila folder Garland had left on his desk and took a look at the girl they had brought in the night before, he was surprised to see a pair of clear blue eyes and the pretty face of a girl who looked to be the same age as his daughter.
The surprise wasn't that she was attractive. It was her expression. There was not a hint of sadness in her face. Not a mean pull at the corners of her mouth, no squint or glare. None of the usual hardness or anger he was used to finding on the faces of these young women who turn so violent.
He wasn't sure where he stood on genetics vs. environment but he was sure this girl had come from a good
family.
He'd have been half right. Esper Parker was a drunk, but he was a friendly one who worked hard to feed those kids and keep a roof over their heads after their daddy drowned.
When you ask the doctor about the C-section that must be forthcoming (because who would expect a woman to deliver a dead baby, surely you must just cut it out and end the nightmare quickly) you are informed that that is a very dangerous thing to do and the best way is to just let the fetus expel itself. "Let the fetus expel itself" is not mentioned in the baby books or at BabiesRUs when you are shopping for onesies.
So you get a shot of pitocin and wait alone until the cramps come. Cramps so wrenching, you may as well be having the baby. Or dying. A gunshot doesn't feel worse than this pain.You get the shot and endure. Endure is a good word for this. Flip through the channels waiting for your husband to come back after he drops the three year-old off at Nana's. The three year-old is excited to have a baby brother or sister. You aren't sure which. You'd asked to not be told so everyone could be surprised. Life has so few real surprises anymore, you had thought. What an idiot.
He arrives right when the insides of your body have begun churning and clenching. The doctor comes in and asks if you want the epidural. Can it be administered to my heart and brain? No? Fine. Get it over with. Just get it all over with.
Instead of the birth certificate people showing up, the people from the funeral home come and volunteer to inter your child however you would like. For free, even, as long as you select the basic design, just like a checking account. You are not a plain with address-type so you pick one that looks like a beautiful Indian hand-grenade. A cremated baby takes very little space and you don't live near a family cemetery. It seems appropriate.
When it is time and the contractions aren't stopping, the doctor and nurse come in with a tray and a pink bucket. The kind they might toss a tumor into during surgery. Your baby. The one you carried and talked to and loved and had hopes and dreams for is going in a pink plastic tub like it is a piece of useless trash.
That is when you want to die and you close your eyes and talk to your 3 year-old in your brain and tell him Mommy is going to be home really soon and you're sorry he's not a big brother and you talk to God and tell him he's a fucking asshole and you hate him forever because of this and when the baby finally comes you can't even look, let alone hold it.
If either of those things happen, you will go a kind of crazy that there is no coming back from.
They take your girl away. Yes. It was a daughter. Your husband, for all his faults and inadequacies, had the balls to see her and kiss her and be with her and you don't. You failed. YOU FAILED.
You will not be able to look at or touch a baby for the next four years without having to excuse yourself to go shriek silently in an alone place or hyperventilate.
You know that there are women walking around everywhere who this has happened to and no one ever talks about it. You are not one of those women.
------------------------------
The phone rang at 4:45 am, jerking the sheriff out of his dream and into the tiny den off of the kitchen that he'd been sleeping in ever since Pam died. He couldn't bring himself to sell the house. It was full of the memories of everything good that had happened in the last 20 years. He also couldn't stand the idea of laying in the bed they had shared,or getting rid of it, so every night he climbed into the tiny twin that he had bought for the nurses and home workers, and twisted the ring on his left hand around and around until he fell asleep.
His first thought at the sound of the ring was to let it go. If it was an emergency, Dwayne or Myrna would start calling on the radio and if it was anyone else, well, it was his day off.
RRRRINGG
Whoever it was had better be bleeding.
-------------------------------------
Meadowbrook was a bit of a misnomer.
There was no meadow to speak of, just a few chicken and dairy farms covering about two square miles in the corner of Hopkins County. As far as anyone could remember, there had never been anything so much as resembling a brook, although Glover Rayburn swore there was a trout pond there once that got hit by lightening in '66. "Biggest fish-fry you ever set your eyes on", he'd tell anyone who asked.
The police department had two employees, including the sheriff. The dispatcher was the deputy's wife who came in at night to bring him dinner and keep him company while they watched Golden Girls reruns on TV Land. During the day, the calls were routed through Wood County since they usually had a grand total of four cars driving around at any given time.
When Wichita Foster opened the manila folder Garland had left on his desk and took a look at the girl they had brought in the night before, he was surprised to see a pair of clear blue eyes and the pretty face of a girl who looked to be the same age as his daughter.
The surprise wasn't that she was attractive. It was her expression. There was not a hint of sadness in her face. Not a mean pull at the corners of her mouth, no squint or glare. None of the usual hardness or anger he was used to finding on the faces of these young women who turn so violent.
He wasn't sure where he stood on genetics vs. environment but he was sure this girl had come from a good
family.
He'd have been half right. Esper Parker was a drunk, but he was a friendly one who worked hard to feed those kids and keep a roof over their heads after their daddy drowned.
Friday, October 10, 2014
Mt. Pleasant
When a rat-fucking son-of-a-bitch like Ed Horne turns up dead there's two things for certain.
Ain't nobody going to be real surprised.
Ain't nobody gonna be real sorry, neither.
-------------------
From the Sulpher Springs Telegraph Sunday July 20, 1924:
MAN DROWNS AS WIFE LOOKS ON UNABLE TO HELP
James E. Horne, city employee, latest drowning victim.
Stepping from shallow, into water ten feet deep as he seined for minnows in the levee "bar pits"along the Trinity River a mile and a half past Grauwyler Bridge, James Edward Horne, aged 38, a foreman in the city street and bridge department, drowned late Saturday as his wife and daughter looked on, helpless to aid. John Price, negro and city employee, who lives on the Horne place, tried unavailingly to save the drowning man's life.
Horne is the eleventh person to drown in this county this year. Price asserted that Mr. Horne was able to only swim a few strokes and that his heavy shoes and clothes hampered him in his effort to regain the shore and dragged him down to his death.
"We had been in the pit just a few moments, using the little seine when Mr. Ed went under all of a sudden, " Price declared. "He came up twice and got hold of the seine, crying for me to help him. I tried to pull him in, but his hands slipped off, he went under, and I couldn't find him anymore"
Couldn't Locate Him
The negro and Waylan Macon, 5317 Ash Lane, who was attracted to the scene by Mrs. Horne's frantic screams for help, dived for close to an hour in an effort to bring him to the surface. "I saw him near the top once, but he sank from sight when I went in after him and I couldn't find him again" Macon said, " I'm pretty sure he was already dead."
Horne and his wife and their little daughter Doris had gone to the bridge on a fishing trip Saturday afternoon. After reaching the bridge, he decided to seine for minnows before beginning to fish.
Saw Him Lose Grasp
Mrs. Horne, who stood screaming on the bank, waited until she saw her husband go under a second time before running for help. She raced through more than a mile of dense underbrush before reaching Old Maple Road where she was able to use the telephone of W.W. Stor to call for help.
Deputy sheriffs found her in the pits just a hundred yards of where her husband's body was finally located, crying broken-heartedly. She drove her automobile back to their home where she fainted and was put under the care of physicians.
Both the emergency ambulance and automobiles from the sheriffs office carrying Deputy Sheriffs Bob Jones, Earl Sypert and John Heffington answered the call. The use of grappling hooks by members of the sheriffs office failed to locate the dead man, and diving was resorted to. "I found him face down in about nine feet of water," Adolphus Lee Whatley said. "He, apparently, had been dead about an hour." After the body was taken from the water it was placed in the emergency ambulance. Later on it was transferred to the ambulance of the Smith Undertaking company, which also had responded to the call. Mr. Horne is survived by his wife and two daughters, Nettie Lou, 14 years old and Doris Lee, 12 years old.
------------------------------------------------------
After Ed's funeral, there were a few callers to the farm, offering to turn the field and cut and cord the wood for winter. Alta was amused. She appreciated the extra sets of hands but she had no interest in the rest of their parts.
It had taken her 16 years to be rid of that man and his mess and she had no intention of being subject to someone's ill temper or dirty coveralls again. Still, Esper kept coming around.
His wife Millie had gotten sick just before Christmas and was dead from lung cancer by Easter. When he came to see if he could change the chain on the plough, she had felt sorry for him and invited him in for coffee and some biscuits.
Five years of baked good and home repairs later, they admitted that there was more than just neighborly reciprocation happening and he asked her to marry him one Sunday morning after church. Ed hadn't even asked. Just took her down to the courthouse, put the paper in front of her and told her he'd buy her a used Ford and a new washer if she'd sign it.
When she thought back to that day, she realized she should have flipped the two. She'd have had an excuse to not do the laundry and a car that could have driven her as far away from that damned farmhouse as she could go.
Maybe to California to see Marie, who was writing home to tell about the high life she was living with that mobster she kept calling a businessman.Why would a grown man with a perfectly good name like Benjamin want to be called Bugsy?
---------------------------
They keep telling me they're going to find out how I did it.
"You left something, somewhere.It's just a matter of time" Sheriff Foster said when he unlocked the holding cell and let me leave with AJ
I don't think I meant to kill him but maybe I did
Maybe I was tired of being called a dumb cunt every time I forgot something at the grocery or didn't finish folding the laundry.
I hated cleaning up after him.
The way he left his clothes right next to the hamper.
The toenails I found flung all over the house.
He told me once that I should take pride in getting the skidmarks off his Fruit of the Loom's because 'That's what a good wife does, Marsh'.
I guess I'm not that good.
-----------------------------
"The RV is a success, Myrna, because it allows women to pee every 20 minutes without ever having to find a rest stop"
Dwayne and Myrna were having Cokes and talking about whether to sink their retirement into a time share down in Port Aransas where Dwayne could net shrimp while Myrna learned to watercolor sea fowl. And they could take nice long walks on the beach and grill the delicious shrimp that Dwayne had caught just hours earlier.
This was what Myrna's picture of happily ever after looked like. The other 50 weeks of the year could be spent visiting her sister over in Tyler and growing those roses that Dwayne swore were costing him at least half the retirement they were discussing.
Dwayne had a different movie playing in his theater. One that had quite a bit of golf in places that ended in 'a' and catching fish in rivers that didn't have rattlesnakes swimming in them. He had just pulled up a picture of the new Coachmen Concord and was about to start showing her the kitchen and bathroom features as methods of persuasion when there was a buzzing at the intercom.
It was early. Too early, even for Jimmy Foster, who sometimes dropped off the paper and came inside for a few minutes to hear who was breaking the law and how in Hopkins County.
There was no one there when he opened the back door, but an envelope fell and he bent down to pick it up.
It wasn't sealed or addressed. He pulled out contents and when he unfolded the note inside there was a picture of a farmhouse. The back of the picture was marked 'Winnsboro' and on the paper were just two words
'Horne Witches'.
Dwayne and Myrna were having Cokes and talking about whether to sink their retirement into a time share down in Port Aransas where Dwayne could net shrimp while Myrna learned to watercolor sea fowl. And they could take nice long walks on the beach and grill the delicious shrimp that Dwayne had caught just hours earlier.
This was what Myrna's picture of happily ever after looked like. The other 50 weeks of the year could be spent visiting her sister over in Tyler and growing those roses that Dwayne swore were costing him at least half the retirement they were discussing.
Dwayne had a different movie playing in his theater. One that had quite a bit of golf in places that ended in 'a' and catching fish in rivers that didn't have rattlesnakes swimming in them. He had just pulled up a picture of the new Coachmen Concord and was about to start showing her the kitchen and bathroom features as methods of persuasion when there was a buzzing at the intercom.
It was early. Too early, even for Jimmy Foster, who sometimes dropped off the paper and came inside for a few minutes to hear who was breaking the law and how in Hopkins County.
There was no one there when he opened the back door, but an envelope fell and he bent down to pick it up.
It wasn't sealed or addressed. He pulled out contents and when he unfolded the note inside there was a picture of a farmhouse. The back of the picture was marked 'Winnsboro' and on the paper were just two words
'Horne Witches'.
Witches
Well, now.
That could mean a couple things.
Could be someone was a bit too Christian to use the B-word. Could mean they were hag-like in temperament and stature.
Or
It could mean "one that is credited with usually malignant supernatural powers; especially: a woman practicing usually black witchcraft often with the aid of a devil or familiar"*
Dwayne was familiar with the first two kinds seeing as Myrna's mother was a pageant winner in both, but the third? That was crap. No such thing. There were some people in town who claimed that the woods out at the edge of the county were spooked and that there were meetings out there where people wore hoods and robes that weren't white like normal, but black and red. Meetings that were more like rituals. Sacrifices, baby goats, baby pigs, baby babies, who knew what.
The people who spread these stories tended to be folk like the Twisselmans and George Rose's jar of nuts. Crazy meth-heads who lived out past Horseshoe Road, in trailers with 10 cars in the front on blocks and lawn mower parts everywhere.
If they said there were babies being killed out in the woods it was probably because they were getting mixed up with one of those awful movies Myrna liked to watch on Netflix. He couldn't stand them, all those bright red and pink bits of fake flesh and intestine smashed all over the screen while girls ran around in panties acting surprised.
All them people watched that kind of filth. Every time he had to answer a call out there one of them would have a TV on with something godawful on the screen, or they'd have a bunch of posters haphazardly taped up. Naked women with chainsaws coming out of their lady parts, or clowns, razor-teeth bared, blood smeared all over their grinning, demonic faces. Dwayne couldn't imagine what kind of dreams the kids who lived in these houses must have.
That's who believed in witches, He thought. Looney-tunes on drugs. Not regular people and certainly not the deputy sheriff of the Meadowood Police Department..
*thank you Webster's online
-----------------------------------
Well, now.
That could mean a couple things.
Could be someone was a bit too Christian to use the B-word. Could mean they were hag-like in temperament and stature.
Or
It could mean "one that is credited with usually malignant supernatural powers; especially: a woman practicing usually black witchcraft often with the aid of a devil or familiar"*
Dwayne was familiar with the first two kinds seeing as Myrna's mother was a pageant winner in both, but the third? That was crap. No such thing. There were some people in town who claimed that the woods out at the edge of the county were spooked and that there were meetings out there where people wore hoods and robes that weren't white like normal, but black and red. Meetings that were more like rituals. Sacrifices, baby goats, baby pigs, baby babies, who knew what.
The people who spread these stories tended to be folk like the Twisselmans and George Rose's jar of nuts. Crazy meth-heads who lived out past Horseshoe Road, in trailers with 10 cars in the front on blocks and lawn mower parts everywhere.
If they said there were babies being killed out in the woods it was probably because they were getting mixed up with one of those awful movies Myrna liked to watch on Netflix. He couldn't stand them, all those bright red and pink bits of fake flesh and intestine smashed all over the screen while girls ran around in panties acting surprised.
All them people watched that kind of filth. Every time he had to answer a call out there one of them would have a TV on with something godawful on the screen, or they'd have a bunch of posters haphazardly taped up. Naked women with chainsaws coming out of their lady parts, or clowns, razor-teeth bared, blood smeared all over their grinning, demonic faces. Dwayne couldn't imagine what kind of dreams the kids who lived in these houses must have.
That's who believed in witches, He thought. Looney-tunes on drugs. Not regular people and certainly not the deputy sheriff of the Meadowood Police Department..
*thank you Webster's online
-----------------------------------
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