Stoddard Shorts

Yuppers

2010-01-14T12:09:00.001-08:00

This website is currently on hiatus while I build The World of Christine Stoddard, the new ChristineStoddard.com. The multimedia website will feature a variety of my writings, visual art, and performances. Once it goes up, all of my other blogs will re-direct to it.

The Puppeteer

2009-12-19T19:09:00.001-08:00

The garage, dank and dim that December afternoon, opened to a small yard. Pigeon brown hedges and wilted flowers peeked out from the fence encircling the gray garden. Slabs of plywood flattened the grass, hiding the fact that Peter had unintentionally sprayed most of the vegetation blue. Blue footprint-shaped stains graced the garage's doorstep and floor, leading to a skinny man and his cluttered workbench. The man hunched over a smattering of wood, paint bottles, and tools. His elbows wagged up and down as he tinkered with a screw. Peter wiggled the screwdriver until the screw plummeted on the table with a tiny clink. Peter sniffed in deeply, as if his nose sought the stench of drying paint.

"Smelling paints kills neurons, you know," Peter's mother always said. "That's why you shouldn't spend so much time in the art room after school. Besides, you always come home dirty. Get here as soon as you can. Or go to George's house. But I'm tired of trying to get paint out of your clothes."

Nodding submissively, Peter flung his blue (or red or yellow or green) hands behind his back. "Okay, Mom," he said.

"You know your father's trying to get a promotion at work. And with the boss living next door, Peter, and him seeing you everyday, well...what will he think of your father if you're always running around like a little painted savage?"

Peter stared his mother blankly.

His mother sighed. "Oh, Peter. I just mean...please try to act more like the other kids, okay?" She leaned in toward her son and tapped the tip of his nose. "Remember, artists always have hard lives. I don't want you ending up poor." The nervous woman shifted in her armchair and smiled at Peter. Her left eye twitched.

When she picked up her crossword puzzle again, Peter scurried back to his room. He closed the door silently behind his boyish frame. Then he whipped around. Before he could stop himself, his fingers danced over the drawers and the few shelves he could actually reach. The search for crayons, felt, yarn, markers, and clean paper had commenced. Within minutes, stickers, glue sticks, googly eyes, pom-poms, and envelopes littered the floor. Anything from cut-out animals to colorful dioramas to mini comic books somehow came out of the random shreds and strings he pulled together. When he finished, Peter shoved the creations under his bed, in his closet, under the floorboards, in the attic--anywhere his mother would not immediately find them.

Then, exhausted, Peter slumped down and contemplated his toy chest before pulling out a dinosaur or tiger. He'd make up stories for the animals, growling and roaring when necessary. When Peter's mother checked in on him, she beamed at her son behaving like a normal little boy. She beamed even more brightly when Peter asked for "cookies made from scratch."

"Of course, darling," she said, "I'll put them in the oven now. You'll have time to come up with at least one other of your stories, I'm sure. See how much more fun this is than painting? Cleaner, too."

Over the years, his mother's diction did not change. It was as she had thumbed through a dictionary for all the right words--concise, stern words. Then she wrote them all down, practiced her speech before the mirror, and spat it all out as soon as Peter arrived home from the art room. Smudged and dejected, Peter simply gulped and said yes. He had promised never to do it again at least a thousand times before.

"It's unhealthy to spend all of your time in the art room, Peter. It doesn't matter if Miss Breig stays after school everyday. That doesn't mean you have to. She's not married, doesn't have any kids. It's not like she has anything else to do, anyway. But you! You should go spend time with the other children. Don't you like the new playground at St. Agnes? You're a healthy boy, after all. Don't you like running around and throwing balls?"

By the time Peter's mother asked him questions, however, something else had already seized his mind. Perhaps a red ant scrambled across the counter. Or the faint scent of sesame oil lurked in the air. Or the television was on, with Quickdraw Mcgraw or Yogi. Distracted, Peter did not answer until his mother squeezed his chin between her lacquered nails.

"Peter," she said, "Please answer the question like an intelligent child." She waited a beat and repeated herself.

Peter sighed, promising to play soccer or baseball or tennis. The few rules of these games he actually knew had become so jumbled in his brain that, had he played, Peter probably would've held a racquet like a bat and tried hitting a soccer ball into a basketball hoop.

"You know that all boys who play sports grow up to be big, strong men, don't you? And big, strong men always get the neatest jobs when they grow up, right?"

Peter's gaze landed on his mother's mole. A teeny hair had recently begun to sprout out from it.

"You want to become big and strong, huh, Peter? Peter? C'mon." She jiggled Peter's chin. His hair fell into his eyes like bangs. "Right, Peter? You don't want to become all scrawny and pale like that sculptor down the street, right? The one who lives all alone and owns that mangy dog, right? Peter!"

Peter shuffled in place, annoyed by the nail marks his mother had left in his face. "Yes...um, no, Mom."

She patted his bony back. "Good. Now go outside."

At this time, Peter habitually hiccuped and returned to his room.

As Peter aged, his mother obviously aged, too. But she seemed better preserved, like a well-kept antique toy who would never forget its one trick. From the second that Peter reached puberty, his mother did not change. When Peter trudged through the front door with his backpack slung on one shoulder and a paint-splattered smock on the other, she repeated the same words everyday:

"You're never going to get a girlfriend this way, Peter."

He altered his response everyday, just for variety. One day, for example, he muttered, "Maybe I don't want one, Mom." He stroked the pencil in his pocket with his hitchhiker's thumb. It squeaked softly beneath his nail.

"Trust me, you do. One day you'll find someone incredible and marry her and have children with her and--oh! Just..trust me, Peter. A paintbrush cannot compare to a girlfriend."

"You're right," Peter hissed, "The paintbrush's more interesting."

"Peter!" She stamped her foot against the floor. "You'll regret this later when you're the only one who doesn't go to your senior prom, or when you live your whole life alone!"

Peter shrugged his shoulders and headed upstairs to his room. Canvases and naked wooden sculptures awaited his arrival.

Fifty finished paintings, one wall mural, and countless illustrations later, Peter grinned at the thought of high school graduation. He had just returned with an appointment with his school counselor, who informed him that his GPA had just barely qualified him for a diploma in June.

"That's all I need to hear, Ms. Parks!" Peter exclaimed.

"But Peter--what about college? You can't qualify for an academic scholarship, but a fine arts scholarship might--"

"Thanks, Ms. Parks, but I don't need any more schooling. School is the one thing preventing me from creating as much as I know I can."

"But college will--"

"Don't try to convince me. I'm graduating--I'm getting out! That's all that matters. Then I can spend the rest of my life--"

"Flipping burgers, Peter. You need a degree to apply for artist grants and fellowships. How else will you support yourself as an artist?"

Peter scoffed and rolled his eyes, suddenly in a joking mood. "I don't know. Maybe I'll own a taco cart and sell my work from there. I could even work as a living statue or a caricature artist. Heck, I might become a puppeteer and tour the world!"

Ms. Parks tightened her fist. "Peter--"

"Thanks for your concern, Ms. Parks, but I have to go give my parents the good news." Then he hopped up from his chair, grabbed his backpack, and dashed home.

When he arrived, Peter went to the kitchen. His mother was bent over the sink, fishing spinach leaves out of the strainer.

"Mom!"

Ms. Parks grunted without turning to face her son.

"I'm graduating!"

"That's nice, dear," Ms. Parks muttered, "But what's the next step?"

Peter froze. "What do you mean? Isn't it enough that--"

"Peter, you're eighteen years old. If you go to the community college, earn good grades, transfer to a four-year school, and graduate with good grades, you'll get a good job. With a good job, you'll live sixty, maybe seventy more years. But if you don't do this, you'll live maybe twenty more before you end up so miserable and impoverished that--"

"Mom," Peter blurted, "You don't get it. That's not going to happen."

"Don't talk to me that way, Peter," his mother said. Her voice wavered. Her eyes gleamed with mixed sadness and anger. "I know exactly what's going to happen. You are going to enroll in the community college this summer."

"School just doesn't work for me, Mom. And if I ever want to be a working artist, I have to start now. I already have my portfolio. I just have to around and--"

"What? Show them your pretty pictures so they can criticize them? So they can ignore all the time and effort you put into them, Peter? So they can humiliate you?"

"Nobody. Will. Ever. Humiliate. Me."

Peter's mother swallowed and rubbed a mushy strip of spinach between her fingers. "You say that now, Peter. But you're still young."

"I may be young, but I know what I want." Peter opened up the fridge and picked up a jug of milk. Then he poured himself a glass, dumped in some chocolate powder, and stirred. His stirred slowly, pensively. Once the milk had achieved a rich, muddy shade of brown-purple, Peter stepped out onto the porch and sat on the swinging bench. The wooden planks quickly grew warm beneath him. The rest of the afternoon dissolved into memories.

***

Peter, thirty-eight-years old, pictured his Rubenesque mother, sipping her trademark cup of Early Grey in between lectures. Her cat-eye glasses sat at the very tip of her nose. Her rubbery lips flapped whenever she opened her mouth. All of her sweaters were some shade of green. When the image of a dark-haired Long Island housewife disappeared from Peter's head, he looked at the workbench before him. His latest creation laid bent over backwards, dangling from the workbench. It squinted at him through thick glasses.

"You're done now, you know," Peter said. "You're about to make your debut. Just--" Peter glanced up at the black wall clock ticking a few seconds behind. "One hour from now."

Peter snatched up the puppet and tossed it into his trunk with the rest of his big-headed creation. Their wooden bodies rattled like the sound of bones in a coffin. Peter skipped to his car, swinging his trunk back and forth along the way. He threw the trunk down in the backseat and then shoved his puppet booth beside it. Whistling, he strolled to the front seat, speeding off almost without thinking about where he was going. The prospect of another performance, another display of his beautiful puppets, seemed to momentarily snatch the address from his mind.

When he parked, the rusty red Jeep lurched forward so that Peter bounced against the steering wheel. He burped, tasted some guacamole in his throat, and patted his chest. Kicking open the door, Peter jumped out into the university lot. He looked around, wondering if his car looked amiss among the clean Sedans and Jaguars. But the question quickly dissolved from his mind when he yanked out his booth. Suddenly he could only focus on voices, plots, and puppet blocking.

Twenty minutes later, Peter had set up his whole world on the carpet of an elementary education classroom. Half a dozen curious children sat on the floor before him, whispering like snakes in the grass. They poked each other with stubby fingers and nabbed each other's toys. A row of college students, most looking excruciatingly bored, occupied chairs behind the children. A sixty-year-old woman wearing a serene expression stood at the front of the room with Peter. She pushed up her glasses before introducing Peter to the group. The college students muttered, 'Good afternoon.' The children, in contrast, clapped their hands and shrieked with joy.

"Hi, everybody," Peter said, "I'm happy to be here. I, um, have three stories for you today, all of them I wrote myself. One of them is new, so you're, er, really the first audience to see it. I hope you guys like it." Peter rolled his weight from one foot to another and scratched his neck for a moment. "Anyway, I'm going to stay afterwards, too, so you kids can ask me anything you want about the puppets. Then, like Ms. Hirsch said, you're going to the library. And, for the grown-ups, I'll stay here so you can ask me questions, too. So, um, let's get started."

Peter darted behind the booth and fumbled with the puppet that resembled his mother. He smoothed down its hair and skirt. The puppet stared back at him.

"Stop that," Peter mumbled.

Then he thrust the puppet through the red curtains on his little black booth.

"This, children," Peter exclaimed in a falsetto voice, "is the 'Tale of the Caged Bird,' a new story that takes place in a city much like this one. Once upon a time--"

Suddenly the classroom door burst open, banging against a laughing whale poster on the wall.

"Once upon a time, there lived a contrary boy named Peter Henderson who threw away his future!" The puppeteer's mother boomed, "He turned down the chance to go to college, even when his parents agreed to pay his tuition in full. He swore to make a living as an artist and that nobody--no one on earth--would ever humiliate him."

Peter squeezed shut his eyes and gripped the puppet tightly in his fist. His knuckles whitened.

"He might fool you," Peter's mother continued, "But I know the truth. He lives in someone else's garage in Southside. He dumpster-dives for pizza every day of the week because he earns less than most fifteen-year-olds do working at burger joints. He's never been married--never even had a girlfriend. What does he do all day? Paint. He spends all day painting puppets to put on childish little shows in no-name venues for audiences that forget all about it two seconds later. This man could've been a lawyer, a doctor, an account. Instead, he's a failure, a loser, a--"

At that, Peter dropped the puppet.

"I am not a loser!" he bellowed.

The puppet hit the booth at the center of its neck, lopping off its round head. The decapitated puppet slammed against the floor and shattered into several pieces. The pieces eventually landed, lying there pitifully. The fall rendered twenty hours of Peter's life meaningless. The puppeteer bit his lip, suppressing an anguished scream, and held his face. Tears welled up in his eyes.

Not a second later, the room broke out into gasps and shouts from everyone but Peter, whose gaze remained on the broken puppet. Children pointed and excitedly asked, "What?" and "How?" One, a blond boy who was small for his age, began to cry in terror. One of the college girls yelped and fainted. Two of the other students squatted, fanning her with their hands and calling her name over and over. Panic overtook every molecule in the air.

One of the college students sprung up and called, "Somebody get help!"

"I'll do it," another student replied. A plaid-wearing young man started dialing 911.

Finally, Peter looked up. He knew nobody in the room could feel as distraught as he. That's when he realized his mother had stopped speaking. Peter eyed the doorway, where his mother no longer stood. Instead, her body had broken into dozens of shards and landed in a giant heap on the multi-colored carpet. Her spectacles had jetted off a few feet away from her remains, staying completely in tact.

Peter chuckled softly to himself. He drew his fingers up to his wrist and pinched himself until the tiny flab of skin purpled. Despite the soundtrack for chaos playing throughout the room, Peter unlocked his trunk and pulled out another puppet. He chose a wooden cut-out of a dove. Feathers and white sequins decorated its luminous surface. Grasping the dove by the tips of its feathery wings, Peter made it dance across the miniature stage. He cooed sweetly, the way his mother had cooed to Peter before he first picked up a crayon.

Promiscuous Ocean

2009-12-09T18:34:00.001-08:00

An octopus lies in your womb. Each tentacle gropes for a different father. But the sea of possibilities spreads off, vast and glumly blue.

You met Clarence at a coffee shop. He was hunched over a laptop, tickling the keys with strange zeal for what he later told you was a business magazine article. Right as he was describing the featured company's C.E.O., you slipped him a scrap sheet of paper. You stepped out the door a fraction of a second later. In your finest cursive, you had written your first name, phone number, and dimensions. Instead of dotting each letter 'i,' you drew a balloon heart, complete with the cartoon reflection. He called you within two minutes. His voice cracked on the phone.

George used to deliver your mail before he started working at the grocery store down the street. You needed cinnamon flavored baked beans, but the store didn't seem to have any. When you asked George, he slunk into the back of the store and brought you the last can left. Then he pushed your overflowing cart to the register for you. He popped behind the counter and began scanning your loaf of bread, celery, apples, butter, vanilla ice cream, parmesan cheese, olive oil, macaroni, cake mix, milk, doughnuts, pre-mixed salad, spaghetti, eggs, bacon bits, frozen pizza, American cheese, pears, pork chops, cream cheese, icing, frozen lasagna, tomato sauce, muffins, and cilantro. But he gave you the baked beans free. You smiled when you noticed. George smiled back, eyes lingering on your face until he finally asked what you were doing that night.

Frank, inebriated and dressed in plaid, approached you at a bar. You asked him if he always resembled a lumberjack. He asked you if you always resembled a goddess. You grinned. He offered to buy you a drink, but you said Hollywood-imposed gender roles bored you. So, you bought him a drink instead. Two martinis and two hours later, you walked through the door of his apartment. His covers were plaid, too.

When you first shook hands with Ben at the neighborhood block party, you knew. His firm grip made you quiver, though, with your winter coat, nobody else noticed. He quickly grabbed his wife's hand after shaking yours, but refused to remove his gaze. Ben seemed fascinated with your hair. You were fascinated that you managed to discuss local property values and construction for so long. When you began complaining about the eye-sore the Cabells added to the back of your house, Ben's wife spotted her friend Sarah. She scampered off in her rodent-like fashion to chat about Tupperware. You and Ben disappeared to a more private location.

Cameron volunteered at the county library while studying English and History at the nearby university. He wore Coke bottle glasses, read six novels a week, and owned five shirts. When day, while he re-shelved Georgia O'Keefe books at the back of the building, you scooted up to him, pretending you wanted to look at them. Then, in a whisper, you asked him if he ever had a girlfriend. He blushed and said no. You asked if he had ever been kissed, to which he also replied no. A silence hovered between the two of you before you pecked him on the lips. A moment later, you began unbuttoning his pants.

Norman has cut your brother's hair since you were in grade school. You used to tease him for always giving Jerry bowl-cuts. The one time your salon was closed because the owner was ill, your mother took you to Norman's. You screamed. Norman spared you from a bowl-cut, but you never forgave him from cutting your bangs too short. Twenty years later, you sat in that exact same chair and demanded that he try again. The barbershop was officially closed, but he sat you down and tied a bib around your neck. When he finished, you grinned at your reflection in the mirror. Then you jumped up and threw your arms around him...tight.

Mark served you a Hawaiian-themed hamburger with grilled vegetables and steak fries on the side. Then he refilled your glass of cranberry juice--no extra charge. He brought you extra napkins and every condiment in the house. When you took your last bite, he plopped down in the chair across from you and questioned "why a pretty lady like you is all alone on a Friday night." You made up a story about having just moved into the area and not knowing anybody. He said he could change that. You took another sip of your juice and beamed. You said that would be nice.

Richard sat next to your in your graduate Paranormal Psychology class. You were auditing the class mainly to meet men, having already earned your B.A. in English and Film and your M.F.A. in Theatre Pedagogy. You never understood the people who bothered to earn two Master's degrees in anything. By the third session, you and Richard had already started passing notes with little words like "sweetie" and "pumpkin." Sometimes you doodled Teddy bears. He doodled squirrels. You couldn't draw squirrels. He forgave you and invited you to a movie by the sixth class session.

All this was last within the last month. And the pregnancy stick reads positive.

Grits and a Rocking Horse

2009-12-08T06:24:00.001-08:00

[A short children's story.]

Winter sunlight slipped between the blinds and onto the little girl's fat pillow. Carla woke up that shimmering morning to discover a bowl of grits on the edge of her nightstand. A grin quickly won over her face. She clapped her hands, seized a spoon, and starting shoving steaming heaps into her mouth.

"Mommy put extra butter, too--just how I like it!" Carla exclaimed in between bites. The slightest bulge popped out from her neck each time she swallowed.

After she had nearly finished the bowl, Carla leapt out of bed and pulled on her navy blue jumper. She rolled up her gray socks, combed her hair, and smiled at her reflection in the mirror. Her hazel eyes shone back at her.

"Carla! Wake up!" Her mother's voice echoed up the staircase.

"I'm already up, Mommy," Carla shouted.

"Good. Did you eat your breakfast?"

"Yeah."

"Don't forget to brush your teeth."

Carla promised to brush them. She heard no more of her mother's voice as she puffed out the sleeves of her school uniform. They smelled of starch. Carla continued primping herself, adjusting stray strands of hair and rubbing on her favorite berry lip balm. Finally satisfied with her appearance, she turned away from her dresser and beamed. The bathroom lied only a few steps outside her bedroom, but she felt rushed nonetheless. Before leaving, though, Carla blew a kiss at the rocking horse teetering in the shadow cast by her bookshelf.

The rocking horse, black with a white mane, blew a kiss back.

Carla jumped, skirt waving. "Did you just--"

"I did, Carla," the rocking horse replied. "I blew a kiss at you."

"No!"

"Yes. That's the first bit of love you've shone me in a while, after all. I had to respond. I got excited."

"What do you mean? I brushed your tail last week, Horse."

"That's only because your mommy complained that it was tangled."

"No," Carla said, stamping her foot, "I noticed it was tangled before she did."

"But think--why did it get tangled in the first place?"

The little girl blushed so hard a faint rosy glow tinted her white blouse. "Because I kicked you over while playing tea party with cousin Austin. He called you stupid and I didn't want him to make fun of me so I called you stupid, too."

The horse nodded. "Exactly. And you just left me there, didn't you? I just stayed in that dusty corner for a month before you finally noticed. I bet you didn't miss me once."

Carla's gaze dropped down to the floor. She gulped. "I missed you once, Horse. When I saw another rocking horse at the toy store on Main Street. It was pink and baby blue, but I didn't like it as much as I like you. Honest. I thought that one looked too much like a piece of candy."

"Hmph," the horse said, "That's because it did. I'm a much more sensible color. After all, everything matches black."

"You're right," Carla whispered, "You are a sensible color."

She crouched down and began stroking the horse's face very gently. The horse felt warm, not at all like dead wood, beneath her chubby hand. Its eyes even seemed to squint a bit, as if it enjoyed her soft touches. The little girl's mind wandered to memories of the horse, memories of days when she was even younger and played with the horse everyday. In those times, she had pretended to be everything from a princess to a Southern belle to a pioneer to a farmer to a cowgirl to a soldier. Sometimes she even pretended that the horse was a instead car, and mimicked engine sounds by blowing air rapidly through her lips.

"I remember those times, too," the horse murmured.

Carla immediately stopped stroking the horse. "How did you know what I was thinking?"

"You leave a small part of yourself every time you get into the saddle, Carla."

Carla's smooth forehead crumpled into the faintest of wrinkles. She withdrew her hand from the horse and examined the toy for a moment. Pennies filled in for its eyes. Tiny silk roses stuck out from its knotted mane, as if peeping out from a pile of snow. A red velveteen saddle clung to its back and a ruby ribbon decorated its sweeping tail. Burgundy hearts splashed its legs.

"Feed me some grits," the horse suddenly commanded.

Carla laughed. "I don't have much left."

"Then you shouldn't mind feeding me the last bit."

"No," Carla giggled, "Not at all. I'm full, anyway."

The little girl walked over to her nightstand and grabbed the bowl of grits with both hands. Delicately, she placed the spoon in the horse's mouth. The horse pulled the grits onto its tongue, then opened his mouth for another bite. Carla gazed at the horse's expectant expression for a second before serving it more grits. Somehow its face reminded her of her mother's.

No longer keeping track of how many helpings she had fed the horse, Carla imagined herself sitting on its plush saddle. Wind rustled her flowing gown and loosely braided hair. A garland of white flowers adorned the crown of her head. Glass slippers topped her fleshy feet. The scents of daisies and daffodils surrounded her. Passionately, the horse galloped toward the sun as it descended behind dark purple mountains. Carla felt breathless, as if what lurked in those mountains thrilled her more than anything she had ever known.

Without warning, the girl's bedroom door suddenly flung open.

"Carla."

Carla dropped the spoon with a clank and looked up. A couple grits splattered on the floor. It was Carla's mother, tense and stern.

"I've been calling you."

"I'm sorry. I thought..."

"You have to be at school in fifteen minutes, honey. What happened? You're usually so good about--"

"I just got distracted."

"Well," her mother said, brushing curls from her cheeks, "Don't. Grab your coat and let's go. You only get three tardies the whole school year, remember."

Carla picked up the spoon and carried the empty bowl toward the kitchen, trailing behind her mother. But just before she closed her bedroom door, Carla glanced back at the horse. It rocked back and forth in place, tail swinging to a melody none but Carla could hear.

Like an Eggshell

2009-11-26T07:16:00.001-08:00

The refrigerator hummed its mundane kitchen appliance song. Nestled inside its bright white suit of armor lied stacks of pita, American cheese, tortillas, honey-cured ham, baguettes, salami, and various other breads, cheeses, and deli meats. Every item in the 'fridge brandished fuzzy, blue-gray splotches. The presence of mold within the big box gave the collection of comestibles the look of decaying organs. The knight, stinking of death, lied limp on the battlefield.

Suddenly someone dove milky fists into his body.

Her name was Lanetta. From ashy lashes to dusty eyes to colorless skin, she stood as translucently as a ghost. Lips shaped like a tombstone and fingers knotted into brambles, every bit of her whispered solemnity.

Lanetta surveyed the contents of the 'fridge, from sliced turkey to chunky cornbread, and sighed.

"Spoiled again."

She seized a hunk of bread and tossed it into the garbage bag that sat at her feet. Then she threw away a package of roast beef, a stick of pepperoni, and a bunch of aimless rolls.

"Ugh. So disgusting." A bag of mini-pitas plopped onto the growing pile of discarded food. The pitas then issued a nebulous cloud. The cloud resembled thousands of mushroom spores exploding into the air after a chickadee tapped their mother's cap with its hungry beak. Lanetta coughed.

The noises of the woman's rummaging echoed throughout the kitchen. She touched a piece of foil and it crunched. Upon grabbing a paper bag, it folded into a yielding crumpling sound.

As Lanetta scraped through the refrigerator, brown gunk seeped into the tiny crevices beneath her fingernails. It stung, as if full of legions and legions of ice crystals. Glossy photographs of shining, new refrigerators hovered in Lanetta's mind. Commercials drummed in her head. Instantly, Lanetta's soiled hand slid into her pocket, where a Sear's coupon slept, waiting for its owner to awaken her at the cash register.

Soon Lanetta began dumping everything in sight out of the 'fridge until it was completely empty. She threw her whole body into the act, thrusting her arms forward and her hips back as she dug deeper and deeper. She raked everything to the front of the 'fridge until boxes, cans, bottles, and packets alike plummeted from the cracked shelves. The food crashed to the floor, with about 2/3 of it actually landing in the garbage bag. The rest found its niche on the amber tiles.

"God," Lanetta groaned, "Always the same mess." Her chin dropped down on her bony chest. She stared gloomily at the mountain of rotten food and then moved her gaze toward the ceiling. Everything from steam engines to palm trees to grizzly bears seemed to emerge from the cracks and flakes of peeling paint.

Then the steam engine sped away, the grizzly charged toward a tumbling woodchuck, and the palm tree dropped its coconuts until it wilted completely into dust. Lanetta half-smiled and shuffled toward the kitchen sink. She turned on the faucet and watched the spurts of water hit the dirty dishes. When the water started to come out harder, she shoved her hands beneath the stream, and scrubbed vigorously. Her skin began to chaff into burning bits.

A window as wide as Lanetta was tall presided over the sink and part of the kitchen counter. Thick, ivory curtains blocked much of its glimpse to the outside world, however. Only a gap about five or six inches wide between where the two parts of the curtain should have met allowed a view of the house next door.

The glimpse allowed for a sliver of the neighbor's living room window. But looking through the neighbor's window glass was like looking through a muddy puddle. In fact, the glass was so frosted that not even the silhouette of the neighbor's sofa was visible. Lanetta only knew it was the living room because she once had the chance to visit. It had been an awkward affair. She knocked on the front door and tapped her foot for a full two minutes before anyone opened. Lanetta only decided to stay because she heard muttering, rustling, and the shattering of something fragile like ceramic. After the ceramic broke with a single crash, silence imbued the house. Then the sound of footsteps on old hardwood floors grew steadily louder as the feet's owner approached the door. A moment later, Lanetta stood face to face with a silver-haired, sagging woman with faint acne scars.

"Come in," the woman coughed. "I'm glad you remembered our appointmet. Water? Tea? Soda?"

"Um, what do you have already out?" Lanetta asked as she stumbled into the musty house.

"Whiskey."

"I, er, don't drink."

"Then how do you stay from getting dehydrated?" The woman slapped her thick thighs and guffawed. Another cough escaped from her mouth.

Lanetta smiled awkwardly and sat down on the yellow living room sofa after the woman pointed to it. She waved her head around, as if bobbing along to an imaginary tune. Her eyes danced from a black vase full of peonies to a table cloth with an eggplant design. When she noticed the window, Lanetta lifted herself out of the sinking cushions. Curious about what she could see of her house, she wandered toward the window, placed her fingers on the mantle, and peered out. She fluttered her eyelashes a little before realizing what stood before her.

She imagined herself bent over the sink, scrubbing dishes that had accumulated over the past week. Bits of soggy cake and crust, dissolved by gobs of green soap, peeled off of the plates.

"Some housekeeper I am," Lanetta whispered to herself.

"What?"

Lanetta turned around, where her neighbor stood holding a tray with two glasses and a pitcher of lemonade. The neighbor seemed especially stout now that she was wearing her bright pink apron. The apron cover her from the neck to very nearly her knees. Apparently the apron had been designed for a much taller person. She stank of alcohol, as if drinking in front of Lanetta made her self-conscious now that she knew she was a non-drinker, so she had to down vodka in private. The moment Lanetta had sat down on her ugly, beaten sofa, she snuck to her spirits cabinet and glugged like Dionysus.

Lanetta tugged at her own sweater sleeve. "Oh, I was just...nothing."

The neighbor stretched her face into a polite smile. Lanetta could imagine a chronic gambler dying with that same expression. A heart attack would strike during that fatal game of poker right before the player realized he was about to lose everything.

"I'm out of ice. I hope that's not a problem."

"Oh, no, not at all." Lanetta reached for the glass and put it to her lips. "Thanks."

Lanetta could not remember how the scene proceeded from there, only that it involved mundane conversation. She turned off the sink and heaved up the big bag of garbage. It had begun to spread out across the floor like rolls of fat from a lying dog. She squeezed the bag as she tightened her grip. Putrid air puffed in lightly-lined Lanetta's face.

"I can't...ugh."

Lifting the bag proved difficult for the thin, bookish woman. She fumbled with her keys as she attempted to unlock the kitchen door.

"Why don't I ever unlock this thing first?"

She rammed her hip into the door, certain of the bruise that would greet her later that evening. She tried to ignore the rawness as her teeth jumped away from where she had bitten her lip. Lanetta pushed out the door. Cool, suburban breeze rustled her hair.

"Oh, Cape Mandrake," Lanetta sighed, and then quoted the town slogan, "'where families learn and grow together within a convenient distance from the city'." She dragged herself to her garage, which rested at the very edge of her backyard. Broken beer bottles, cat dung, and gravel littered the fringes of her property.

As she wrestled open the garbage can, she muttered something about "the woes of teenage suburban boredom." That was before the stink of old eggs and rotten cheese crept into her nostrils, of course. A coughing fit overtook her as her face dimmed into shades of pink and red. Lanetta upturned the bag of garbage, shook into until all of the contents had piled into the bin, and then retreated to her house.

Lanetta's home seemed removed from an enchanted forest. It was the oldest building in Cape Mandrake, dating back to the 1600s. It had been passed down through the family, though nothing about it carried the aura associated with beautiful and invaluable heirlooms. Everything about the house seemed like it was on the verge of breaking. From its sagging roof to its narrow front door, it appeared dainty and fragile. The shutters, unlike the rest of the shutters in the neighborhood, actually functioned, but Lanetta always left them open to allow more light into the dark and dank living room. At that, all of the shutters hung crookedly. The bottom left one on the front of the house in particular dangled so wrecklessly from its hinges that it seemed to be waiting for the most perfectly theatrical moment to fall. Even the hedges surrounding the cottage appeared ancient and dusty. Spiderwebs covered them almost completely, with only the occasional small hole devoted to chipmunk tunnels.

Lanetta glanced at the kitchen sink, rubbed her hands on her jeans, scrambled to the dining room, and took a seat at the head of the table. It was time to rest, she reasoned. A thin book of Spanish poetry beckoned her. She opened to the page where she had left off and began mouthing the lines to herself. Her brow furrowed and relaxed, furrowed and relaxed. It furrowed either when she encountered an unfamiliar word or when a thought presented by the poem disturbed her. It relaxed either when a thought presented by the poem pleased her, or she felt nothing at all. Her eyes told of her pleasure or indifference.

So engrossed in the book was Lanetta that she did not initially hear a light tapping at the window. Her right pointer finger continued tracing letters and words with the timidity of a child learning to read. The tapping came again. Lanetta glanced up but immediately went back to reading. The tapping grew stronger. Lanetta closed her book over her finger and looked up. She paused for a few seconds and, sensing no danger, opened the book again. She ran her fingers through her hair as Lorca taught her about love and death. Not even a verse later, the tapping interrupted Lanetta yet again. She shut the book and stood up. Worry washed over her, but she would not let it paralyze her. She approached the kitchen with cautious steps.

As Lanetta rounded the corner from the dining room to the kitchen, she stopped and peered around the wall, as if she expected a goblin to be ransacking the oven or burying clusters of something vile beneath the stove burners. But the kitchen seemed clear. Lanetta tip-toed toward the kitchen door and had almost unlocked it to check on the backyard when--

WHACK!

Lanetta's eyes flew open, and she dropped her keys. THAP. She paused, deciding whether or not to pick up the cluster of keys. Afraid to let her guard down for even an instant, she thought against it. Her heart galloped in her chest, despite Lanetta's desire for it to slow down to a mere tremor. She slapped her right hand over her heart and studied the tiny hairs near her knuckles in an effort to soothe herself. When Lanetta's heartbeat assumed a normal pattern again, her gaze swooped up to the kitchen window.

A plump-breasted bird pecked its beak against the glass. A light breeze ruffled its shadowy feathers. Impatience shone in its black eyes.

"What are you expecting," Lanetta breathed, "A four course meal?"

She scrambled toward the window, tripping over a can of beans along the way. Lanetta cursed the beans and then faced the little beggar. The bird cocked its head, examining Lanetta's tired figure. She appeared older than ever before thanks to the harsh sunlight streaming into the kitchen. The bird seemed so carefree compared to Lanetta, who tried harder and harder everyday to ignore the purple bags that expanded under her eyes and the silver hairs that sprouted near her forehead.

Lanetta opened the window, but the bird barely budged. It only lithely stepped to one side. Lanetta reached for a loaf of old bread on the counter. Then she removed a slice from the bag and tore it up into accommodating morsels. She scattered a few pieces in front of the bird. Eagerly, the bird gulped up the bread. Each time it swallowed, Lanetta observed a pistachio-sized bulge protrude from its throat. For some reason, Lanetta imagined how only a slightly larger object would be big enough to choke it. She shuddered at the thought and continued watching the feathered creature devour its meal.

When the bird finished its starchy feast, it swiftly plucked something from under its left wing, dropped it on the windowsill, and then stared at Lanetta for a split second. Lanetta stared back, searching the bird's inky eyes. She didn't even blink once as she stared harder and harder. Suddenly, just when Lanetta thought she detected a form shimmering in the vast blackness, the animal took off. When it disappeared, the window slammed behind it, as if its pumping wings had created a mighty wind.

Lanetta's gaze remained on the window for some time after, and, then, as if smelling her kitchen's rotting fumes for the first time, she snapped out her daze.

"What an odd bird," she said.

She was about to slide on her gloves again when her gaze dropped down to the windowsill. A long, silver ring encrusted with white diamonds gleamed at her. The ring was so long, in fact, that it looked as if it would cover the first third of whosever finger it went on. The skull that occupied the ring's center seemed to wink at her. Lanetta, startled that she had only just noticed the magnificent ring, gasped. She picked it up and immediately sneezed. As she bent over, the ring flew out of her hand. It clinked on the floor and then slid off into seclusion.

"No!"

Lanetta wiped her hands on her pants and spun around, increasingly madder with each spin.

"I couldn't have lost it so soon."

She dropped on her hands and knees, spitting stray strands of hair out of her mouth. "It must be right here...I just..." Lanetta bit her lower lip and patted the floor. Each time her palm touched the hardwood, she grew more anxious. Sweat began to bead down her cheeks and drip into her fine wrinkles.

"I bet that thing could've paid all my bills for a few months, too."

Lanetta patted some more, only stopping when she felt something sharp pierce her hand. She swiftly brought her hand to her face, shaking it all the way up. A bubble of blood popped out from her skin. It jiggled slightly.

"Ack! A splinter."

She brought her hand as close as she could to her eyes without losing focus of the new, crimson mark. Lanetta pressed her tongue to her skin to loosen the splinter, but the splinter was stubborn. It remained in place despite Lanetta's flood of saliva. She shoved her fingernail against the side of the splinter, only to further drive it into her flesh. She felt it tear layers of herself she could not see. After wincing at the burning, Lanetta glanced away from the splinter to re-focus her eyes. Her contacts had wandered out of place. Her eyelids pushed them back over her pupils.

When she could see properly again, she randomly spied the ring shining in the corner of the kitchen. Loose hair, spilled salt, and lint circled it in worship. Lanetta crawled toward the ring, scuffing the knees of her pants. When she reached the ring, Lanetta studied it for a moment. It glimmered as if fairies were tapped inside its band. The ring's quality of enchantment made Lanetta suspicious for only an instant before her fears dissipated. Then she slid it onto her finger.

Suddenly, the splinter sprung out of her sore palm. It hit the floor and splashed like a teardrop. Lanetta gaped at the puddle that formed before her. Her eyes and mouth rounded into almost perfect circles. When she realized that some of the teardrop had splashed onto her pantsleg, her mouth grew even wider. Gradually the surprised melted away from her face. Lanetta sighed and massaged her whole face, applying pressure to her temples, the sides of her nose, her jaw, her chin. By the time she was finished, her face felt warm and the teardrop had dried.

Lanetta pulled herself up from the floor and walked over to her floral couch. She pressed her face deep into the red pillow sitting against one of the couch's arm until she no longer even sensed it was there. Lanetta slept there the rest of the day, curled up like a withered finger. She breathed softly, evenly. When she finally woke up, the ring was gone.

The next day, Lanetta was washing the dishes when her ears caught a tapping at the window. She almost broke the kidney bean shaped dish she was holding. The same bird from the previous day gawked at her.

"Back for more bread?" Lanetta chuckled, relieved that it was a bird, not a Peeping Tom or her neighbor, standing at the window. "You better have another ring for me because that last one just...well, I can't even explain what it did. I don't need a bird thinking I'm crazy...It was a great ring, though...from what I remember, anyway."

Lanetta opened the window to the sound of the bird's soft cooing. She laid out a handful of bread crumbs into a small mound. They fell with a soothing pitter-patter against the gray windowsill. The bird stepped forward and began pecking at the humble meal. Lanetta smiled wearily.

"I know one of those coos meant thank you," she murmured. She bent down over the sink again, humming an old-fashioned saloon song. Her hands scraped against a course, metal scrubber. Rough soap ate at her skin. Yet the pain and irritation that a poor woman normally experiences washing dishes melted away as Lanetta observed the hollow-boned animal that had asked her for sustenance once again. Someone actually depended on her. For the first time in a long time, Lanetta felt sincerely loved.

Once upon a time, Lanetta was young, beautiful, and lucky enough to choose from a long line of men at the art academy. She settled for Scott, a welding student. Only one week her senior, Scott courted her with original poetry and roses from his mother's garden. Once, he even welded a miniature horse for her coffeetable. It was like he had read ever Harlequin romance novel ever written.

Scott was tall enough that he always had to stoop a bit to kiss Lanetta, but not so tall that they could not easily gaze into each other's bright faces after a leisurely stroll through the park. Lanetta always admired his deep dimples and the single freckle beneath his left nostril. His laugh reminded her of clouds floating through the sky on a Sunday afternoon. His voice was like the breeze that moved those clouds.

Lanetta imagined herself marrying Scott, having children with Scott, even being buried next to Scott when the time came. He confessed to sharing the same thoughts about her one evening over a mug of hot chocolate. They cuddled in front of his fireplace, his arm over Lanetta as she huddled in his sweater.

"I love you, Lanetta. I want us to be like this forever. Maybe someday soon we could run off to a place where outside forces could never ruin us, where we would be free to be ourselves. Together. Always."

But, after one year, he denied everything:

"We were never going out, Lanetta," Scott breathed into the receiver, "You were never my girlfriend. You were just some girl I slept with. If you think otherwise, you're just delusional."

Then the phone clicked. The deadest silence ensued as Lanetta clutched the phone to her breast with glazed eyes. Her heart had been racing during her conversation with Scott, until the very end when it just seemed to putter out. She did not speak to anyone for the next seven days.

After Scott had stomped on Lanetta's heart, she spat in his face the next time she coincidentally saw him at the supermarket. She aimed particularly for what she then deemed his disgusting freckle. They were standing by the cake mixes, icing, and sprinkles. No matter how sweet the aisle smelled, Lanetta's tone pumped bitterness into the air.

"I don't care what the Irish say," she hissed, "Freckles aren't angels' kisses. You aren't pure enough for that kind of blessing, you no good--"

A sales associate rapidly wedged between them before Lanetta could finish her sentence out of many more to come. It had taken the associate a solid five minutes to notice the confrontation, but when he did, he knew he had to stop it before birthday candles ended up in someone's eye sockets.

"Don't s-s-spit on me," the associate stammered. He was a skinny teenage boy who could've passed for eleven or twelve anywhere. Rashes climbed the edge of his cheeks and his apron was meant for someone twice his size. He reeked of vinegar.

"Don't worry. I only want to spit on him."

"You already did," Scott mumbled, and winced upon hearing himself admit that. Then he took a step back, not realizing that a display shelf full of cheerful cake ornaments stood right behind him.

"Um, could you spit on him outside, miss...er, ma'am? And, uh, sir, you're about to run into Big Bird--"

Lanetta stomped her foot and shrieked, "Go outside? I don't have time for that. I've given him more than enough of my time."

Scott winced again and stepped back again. He nearly knocked over the whole display.

"Excuse me," Scott said. He turned around, only to face the giant stacks of Barney the Dinosaur, Snow White, Bugs Bunny, and other children's favorites. When he turned around again, the sales associate had slunk off. Scott was then almost nose to nose with Lanetta.

"I hope you rot," she slurred and spat in his face again.

Scott called her repeatedly after that, but eventually Lanetta just smashed her phone. At age forty-two, twenty years later, she remained unmarried. During the day, she worked at a pottery store. Customers milled in and out, admiring the delicate jars and pots, but rarely opening their checkbooks. At night, she read and sculpted with the fervency of a squirrel chasing after a rolling acorn. Lanetta just couldn't determine where the acorn in her own life lied...or even if it was an acorn at all.

"It's probably a cashew," Lanetta muttered to herself, "Or not a nut at all. Probably a bicycle horn." Images of a squirrel version of herself, scampering after a legged bicycle horn, generally followed. The picture had a way of clinging to her mind.

But now she funneled all of her focus on the feasting bird. Lanetta marveled at the shameless animal as it bit another piece of bread, shocked that it had not yet exploded. The bird instantly shuddered upon swallowing, as if experiencing a new, religious form of digestion. Then, as if poised to cough, it opened its beak. Lanetta returned to washing her dish, expecting the bird to vomit and not wanting to witness it. The bird did not cough, nor did it vomit, but something other than air and half-digested food emerged from its gullet.

"Oh, ew...what--?"

Lanetta screwed up her face, her lips in particular.

"That is just..."

Lanetta bent over and picked up the object the bird's body had rejected.

"A thimble? How did that...?"

The bird jerked its head at Lanetta, grabbed a piece of bread, and without eating it, flew away. Lanetta went over the dining room, where the light shone brightest in the whole house, to inspect the thimble.

The sterling silver thimble seemed small enough to fit over a mouse's snout. Engraved at its very center were doves darting in and out of rose bushes beneath a rainbow. Lanetta flipped it over to examine its inside, where she found the initials 'J.C.' She shrugged her shoulders and went to the linen closet in the hall connecting her bedroom to the bathroom. Lanetta pulled out her sewing basket and opened it to reveal a bunch of scrap cloth, colorful spools, and dull needles. She dropped the thimble into one of the wicker basket's many canvas-covered compartments. Then she wandered back to the kitchen to wash dishes.

The next morning, Lanetta decided to mend her church dress after her shower. Hair dripping, scented like honey-infused tea, she scuttled to the linen closet. She picked out a baby blue towel to wrap up her hair. Then Lanetta grabbed the linen basket and walked to the living room sofa. When she flipped open the basket, she squinted her eyes. Since she hadn't put on her contacts after the show, Lanetta reached for her glasses case on the end table. She quickly removed them from the case and jammed them on.

Instead of the spools and scraps that had dominated the basket just the day before, Lanetta met a little jacket composed of bits of every fabric previously there. Tailored to fit someone the size of Lanetta's pinkie, the jacket sported big buttons up its tiny front. An absurdly small pocket sat next to the top button on the left side of the jacket. In it, Lanetta found an even smaller, multi-colored handkerchief. Wondering where all the other cloth had went, Lanetta pawed through the basket. The jacket was too small to have required all the scraps she had hoarded. But, after searching every compartment, Lanetta discovered nothing.

The woman pouted, upset that she would have to spend the next two or three years to make up for the lost cloth.

"Well, I might as well put this little thing to use," Lanetta whispered to herself. She stood up and headed to her television set. Toys of every make and size decorated the top of the TV, as well as the table upon which it was displayed. Lanetta plucked up to a teeny Teddy bear and wiggled the jacket onto its plush form. She smiled lightly at her newly clothed friend.

"I guess you won't be cold anymore."

Lanetta placed him back on the TV and lied down on the couch. As soon as she touched the cushion, the towel on her head fell off and plopped onto the floor. Her hair puffed out into a full mane, absolutely dry. A pleasant surge of heat shot up through Lanetta, from the tips of her toes to her forehead. She grinned and plunged deep into the couch for a nap.

The following day, Lanetta was walking past the Teddy bear when the same surge of heat she had experienced the previous day filled her entire being. She felt a soft fluttering inside of her chest. Then she made her way into the kitchen to prepare a cup of tea. As she reached into the cabinet for a box of Jasmine, a tapping she almost anticipated came at the window.

"I know just who that is."

She put down the tea box and fisted a bunch of bread crumbs she had chopped up that morning. Lanetta opened the window, but instead of placing the crumbs directly on the windowsill, kept them in her palm. The bird did not hesitate in hopping toward her and eating right from her hand. It shivered, from the top of its head to the tip of its tail, as it ate.

"That's right," Lanetta said, "Enjoy it."

The bird continued gobbling up the crumbs, bobbing up and down. Lanetta detected every flinch, every twitch issued by the warm, feathered body. When it stole the last crumb, Lanetta stroked its wings so that she felt every ripple in its plumage.

"I've never held a bird before. I never imagined it being so...peaceful."

The bird suddenly jolted up and began gagging. Lanetta kept it in her hand, already marveling at what was to come. The bird shook this way and that, convulsing like a dying insect, until it spat up something. But instead of shooing the bird away in disgust, Lanetta stood there very calmly as the bird disappeared without her prompting. Her hand remained outstretched despite the wet mound piled up on her palm.

The woman swallowed and, very slowly, looked down at her hand. Quietly, she brushed away the regurgitated bread and saliva that encased whatever the bird had now presented her. As she shifted more and more, she started to feel the contours of a long, metallic object. Lanetta picked it out, not daring to guess what the object was until she washed it. She turned on the faucet and held the object under the running water for a few seconds before discovering...

"A key. An old-fashioned key."

Indeed it was an old-fashioned key, slender at the stem with an elaborate, arabesque handle. Lanetta bit her lower lip as she beamed.

"But where does it--?"

For some reason, Lanetta knew to look at the kitchen door, and, when she did, it flew open. Trance-like, she approached the door, key in hand. All of a sudden, the bird entered the doorway, cooing.

"I'm coming," Lanetta said, "I'm coming."

The bird whipped around and began flapping its way into the garden. Lanetta followed it, step by step, over flowers and tomato plants. It led her to a golden nest perched up in a sycamore.

"Is this your nest?"

The bird answered the question by landing on the side of the next. Lanetta stood up on her toes and peered inside to discover three light pink eggs. One of them contained a tarnished lock that seemed perfectly suited for Lanetta's key. When she picked it up, the bird left, but she did not bother looking where. Lanetta stuck the key inside of the lock and twisted it very carefully.

Slowly, the egg unhinged into two parts, throwing white light into Lanetta's face. That's when she noticed the words inscribed inside of the shell, in black, cursive letting.

She mouthed them to herself. "Love is like...an eggshell."

She smiled strangely and cradled the egg within her hands, heading back to the house.

The End

Scrambled

2009-11-21T19:40:00.001-08:00

Bette slumped over the stove, wearing an oversized T-shirt and lavender sweatpants. Her hair hung in a greasy mess. After staring at the burner for ten minutes straight, she finally flicked it on. Then she wandered over to the 'fridge. The moment she opened it, the stench of spoiled milk pervaded the kitchen. But without even scrunching up her freckled nose in disgust, Bette scanned the shelves from bottom to top; she always stored the oldest food in the bins below. Deciding that the salami and cheddar should rot for another day, Bette grabbed the carton of eggs teetering on the highest shelf. It had been balanced on a row of butter sticks, a tub of guacamole, and a jelly jar.

Without the slightest pause, Bette shuffled to the counter next to the stove. Dried olive oil, smeared salsa, and flecks of parmesan cheese covered various spots across the counter, giving the appearance of a decaying patchwork quilt. When Bette set down the carton of eggs, the textured bits stuck to the surface of the counter crunched like dozens of cicada shells beneath a fur-trapper's feet. Bette sighed.

Exactly two weeks and four days ago, Bette had moved to Toronto from Miami. And exactly two weeks and six days ago, she had broken up with her high school sweetheart.

"This Fulbright will make my career, Toby," Bette whispered as she looked down at the floor, "You know I've always wanted to be a playwright--"

"You can write plays right here in Coral Gables." Toby sat next to Bette on the living room sofa, squashing a pillow. He didn't bother to pull it out from under him.

"But not without finding some way to support myself before I get famous. I'd have to wait tables, or become a secretary, or something, and that would take time away from my writing--"

Toby started to heave, "You know I'd help you. I believe in you, I'll do whatever I can to support you because I love you, and--"

"Support me? How? By taking on another shift at the porno?" Bette twisted her mouth.

"It's not a porno. How many times do I need to--"

"Toby, you still have two more years until you finish your Master's. Two years more years before you can get a real job, two more years before--"

"But until then I'm doing what I can to pay the bills. There is no shame in making an honest living selling popcorn at a--"

"So what am I supposed to do until then?"

"Stay with me until I finish my degree. Write your plays here, in Miami."

Bette breathed heavily and crossed her arms, not letting Toby out of her sight for a mere blink.

"Two years. And then we'll move anywhere you want, Bette."

Bette bolted up from the sofa and stood directly in front of Toby. "Just wait for you? What about my dreams? If you really supported me, if you really loved me and believed in me, then you'd realize that this an opportunity I just can't pass up."

"I know theatre's your life, Bette. Trust me, I do. But Miami isn't exactly the boonies. You can get your work produced at--"

"Miami is not New York," Bette spat and waved her arms, "Miami is not Chicago. Miami is not London. Miami is not Paris. Miami is not Toronto! We live in a city full of beach bums, not literatis, directors, and serious actors, Toby!"

Toby could not muster a reply. Both parties hesitated. A minute passed before Toby stood up beside Bette and placed his bony hands on her chubby shoulders.

"Bette--"

"This is the perfect place for you, I get it," Bette hissed, pushing Toby's hands off of her. "If I wanted to play with dolphins all day, I'd never want to leave Miami, either. But for someone with dreams of a theatre career, this is not the right place, okay? You knew this is what I always wanted to do."

"I thought we could make it work here."

"Well, we can't. One of us will have to make a sacrifice."

"Is there a big aquarium in Toronto?"

"Does it matter? I'm not going to stay there longer than the Fulbright pays for. I don't want to do the whole ex-patriot thing. I'll either move to New York or Chicago afterwards."

Bette flopped back onto the sofa.

"So...no more Miami?" Helplessness colored Toby all over. Suddenly he appeared small and crumpled.

"No, no more Miami. How many more times do I have to--? Wasn't it enough that I came here for you in the first place?"

"What would you have done otherwise, stayed in Minnesota?"

"At least I had connections with Bedlam Theatre."

"Don't be ridiculous," Toby said, and sat beside Bette. "You got that thing with Miracle Theatre."

"That was just a lousy cold reading."

"What about--"

"Everything else was even less impressive and you know it."

"Look, Bette, what if--what if we move to New York after I get my Master's, huh? What if you just stay here until then...and, after that, I'll go anywhere you want to go. Just...please don't leave me here, not now. Of all times, not now."

"This isn't going to work, Toby. The Fulbright's my gateway...but you can't see that."

"I just..."

"You can't let go of me. You have to see me every second. You're so jealous, so overprotective, so--"

"Hey, hey!"

"I want to break up with you." The words hovered in the air for a moment, as if tempting Bette to reach up for them and take them back. She didn't.

"No, Bette, no. That's not what I--"

"We're done, Toby," Bette stated flatly. She jumped up. "I only wish I had realized that years ago." She paused before whispering, "Good-bye."

"Bette..."

"Bye, Toby."

Bette shuddered. The carton of eggs still lied before her, a dozen shells fearing their fatal smashes. Bette picked up an egg from the far left side of the carton and squeezed it softly in her hand. It felt cold and fragile, just as she expected a refrigerated egg to feel. She tapped it against the tiny glass bowl sitting on the counter until it broke in two. Bette spilled all of its contents into the bowl. Then she pulled a fork out of the drawer in front of her and stabbed the bulbous yoke. She glanced down at it, as if to inspect the damage. Bette released a small breath she had not been aware she was holding. A second later, she focused her gaze at the wall in front of her, divining where each cockroach lay in waiting behind the tiles.

Bette whirred her wrist, beating the egg quickly and nervously. Faster and faster, the yolk danced with the egg white. In unison, they galloped around the bowl until they collided. They collided again and again, mingling like over-eager boys and girls at a junior high mixer. After ramming into each other several times, they began merging into one entity until they formed a light yellow soup. Bette continued beating the egg, clanking the fork against the glass bowl, even past the point of completely mixing the egg white and yolk. She shivered at the thought of cockroaches roaming across her entire body. When she finally considered that the eggs might be done, Bette glanced down.

The egg goo, still spinning around the bowl, was not just egg goo. Bette furrowed her brow and bit her lip. Two little foamy dolphins rotated around the bowl, swimming in a sea of yellow yolk. Bette yelped, terror, grief, and confusion all competing for space on her face. She threw the bowl on the floor, sending the egg goo flying through the air. The egg goo hit her shirt, her pants, her feet. The bowl shattered.

Bette gulped and mumbled something incoherent. Then she wiggled her bare toes and scampered to the refrigerator. She opened the door and picked out a packet of pink ham. Mold grew at its purple edges.

"I'm going to be famous one day, Toby," Bette muttered to herself, "So don't get in my way."

The Drive Home

2009-11-20T18:51:00.001-08:00

The sun has just barely set, rendering the sky a charcoal gray with streaks of gold-pink. Your form, black in the darkness, slouches in your seat. Your hands--red with cold or maybe anger--grip the wheel. The entire car stinks of old cotton candy. Your stomach, despite the sickeningly saccharine stench filling the air, rumbles with hunger. Suddenly you crave the pasta bakes your grandmother used to make for those family reunions on the Rhode Island shore.

Everything you pass prompts a memory you wish you could forget. The empty warehouse on your left. The glowing supermarket on your right. The deserted playground you can just make out in the distance. Somewhere behind you, you only now realize, was a used boat lot. Awkward first kisses; shaming yourself when the whole class caught on that you never even read the novel; walking in on your parents caressing each other; spitting out stale cereal that contained live ants; discovering that your childhood friend fell in love with you in high school; spotting your soccer coach naked at the public pool locker room. These images soar into your mind throughout the drive.

A song whose lyrics you seemed to have always instinctively known floats onto the airwaves. You cannot recall the artist, or even the title of the song, but can mouth every last word. The next traffic light you hit suddenly turns red and you screech to a halt as soon as the song ends. You jolt forward, pause, and breathe again. You hate the next song that plays, so you change the station, only to encounter commercial after commercial. You already own a mattress and no longer need S.A.T. tutoring.

The light flashes green and you go, but not because you relish the prospect of coming home and making yourself comfortable in your own little hole. You go because everyone else goes, and that's what seems right. Vaguely, you feel lost.

As if flown in from Saturn, a mangy creature suddenly scampers across the road. You swerve, still frighteningly close to the beast, but far enough from it to spare its slinking tail. Forging onward, you imagine the animal dead on the road, heart and intestines on display. You shudder, thinking you, too, may be crushed one day.

The next street marks your turn. Your flick on the signal and make a left. Houses that suddenly seem new bombard you on both sides. You never noticed that quaint porch or that elaborate chimney before. Slightly agape, you continue driving. When you see your house, it too appears strange. The shadows are too steep; the hedges too tall; the yard too cramped. You pull into the uneven driveway and put the car in park. Then you sigh, shake your head, and remove your keys from the ignition. Something still feels amiss when you step out of the car and close the door. You stare at the house with a furrowed brow, but gradually your wrinkles start to soften.

This is the place where you grew up.

Dreaming in Acrylic

2009-10-25T08:15:00.001-07:00

The garage hummed with the sounds of dying light bulbs and stray crickets' songs. A fan spun crookedly in the center of the moldy ceiling, threatening to smash against the artist's workbench if not soon replaced. Selena, a short redhead, flicked her blue-tinged paintbrush in between her fingers. A fleck of paint splattered her baggy corduroy pants. She tried to scrape off the splotch with her thumbnail, only to bray in frustration a moment later.

"I can't believe I stained them already," Selena muttered. When she wiped her brow, the stench of rubber cement and old acrylic seared her nostrils.

Five long strips of film lied before Selena on the concrete floor. Two, blank. Three exploding with dots and ribbons of teal, aqua, forest green, beige, and gold. On the first strip, the word "Peacock" appeared in stylized scrawling. "Flapping through" graced the second, while "the sand" was on the third. Selena seized one strip and held it up to the light that struggled to imbue the room. Traces of glitter flickered in a faint line along the sprocket holes. When the fervent filmmaker noticed a mangled moth in the strip's last frame, her bottom lip curled down clownishly.

"Sorry, little martyr."

Selena shoved aside the boxes and cans cluttering her workbench. She placed the strip down on the musty wood and gently tried removing the moth. It writhed the moment she touched one of its torn wings. Then its legs kicked with the intensity of a young bamboo plant shooting up from the earth.

"Just..."

The girl's whole body tensed up as she prepared to touch the moth again. Using only the crescent moon on the edge of her pinkie, she nudged it. The moth flapped even more furiously than before.

"Please...be...still."

The moth did not heed Selena's words. The girl became even stiffer when she realized that she could not save the insect from its slow death. She sighed and relaxed her shoulders a second later. Leaving the strip on the workbench, Selena returned to her spot on the floor. She grabbed a toothpick, positioned it between her dirty fingers, and began scratching her initials into the third finished strip of film. The toothpick's squeaking added to the garage's ambient noise, noise that in any other neighborhood in Arlington on any other day of the week would have gone unnoticed.

The artist's evening stretched on for a few more hours. Paintbrushes flew, toothpicks snapped in half, and cicadas eventually serenaded the urban suburb.

"There," Selena whispered to herself, "For once, a vision realized." She turned to her workbench. Her eyes scanned the bench's contents, from plastic rulers to stubby pencils to orange tissue paper to plastic doll arms to scented permanent markers. Finally, her gaze landed on an aerosol can full of fixative. Selena picked it up, shook it, and then sprayed her filmstrips like her fingertip was glued to the button.

Within a minute, the fixative's vapors danced into a big cloud and enveloped Selena from the waist up. She started coughing and spitting, eyelids a flutter.

"Christ...how...did..."

Selena threw down the can and ran outside for a gulp of fresh air. A block party, just waning down after half a dozen neighbors chit-chatted about PTA meetings and garden societies over hotdogs, stood mere yards away from where Selena panted. Hands on her knees, Selena looked up. One of her neighbors, a bald man in his late twenties, waved at her. Selena swallowed, managed a weak wave, and headed back into the garage. She slammed the door behind her with a short-lived burst of strength.

"I'm dizzy, but I'm not so dizzy I can put up with them," Selena said and coughed again. She beat her chest. "Just have to hang these up and then I can go to bed."

Selena scooped up her filmstrips and approached a rickety garment rack in one corner of the garage. Lungs still burning, she quickly clipped each strip onto the line hung across the width of the rack. Then she scurried to the door closest to her house. Before leaving, she took one more glance at the suspended filmstrips and then another at the one on the workbench. She winced at the thought of the moth's death, but swiftly shifted to the thought of her finished film. Smiling, Selena stepped out the door and headed to her futon.

The remnants of the block party disappeared just as Selena had stripped herself of her T-shirt and corduroys. By the time she had slipped into her favorite velour sweatsuit, silver clouds began to billow in the sky. A barred owl cried for its supper just as Selena rested her head upon her pillow with another cough.

Selena darted out of bed the next morning, auburn curls whipping through the breeze until she halted at the garage door. She jangled the keys in the lock, wrists shaking.

"Please be dry, please be dry, please be--"

Selena pushed through the door, but stopped in her tracks at the sight she beheld.

"N-n-no..."

The rack, bereft of its filmstrips, discreetly occupied its usual corner. The clothespins were strewn across the floor. And a neatly formed mound of sand sat by the rack, shimmering with bits of mica. Randomly sticking out of every side of the mound were glorious peacock feathers. Their emerald eyes winked at Selena, who had crumpled in the garage doorway. She stared at the floor in shock until a whirring caught her attention. Selena looked up.

The moth from the previous night soared above her, carrying the weight of the filmstrip on its tail. The strip flowed as elegantly as if it was part of the moth's physiology. It glimmered in to the streams of early sunlight. Pumping harder and harder, the moth flew above Selena's head, into her backyard, high into the surrounding yew tress, and then higher still.

Selena pressed her back against the doorframe and wept.

Julia's Shovel

2009-10-12T21:32:00.000-07:00

"Julia's Shovel"

By Christine Stoddard

"Julie, ya best not be writin', girl," a thick southwestern Virginian accent punched the smoky air with accusation. "I told ya to put those burritos in the microwave half a' hour ago." The gruff man snorted and pounded on the door again. "Julie?" He waited a second, adjusting his straw cowboy hat so that it shaded his wild eyes a hair more. Then he shoved his cigarette back between his shriveled lips.

When absolute silence met his voice, Mr. Carney rammed open the little, white door. Its hinges creaked like springs in an old sofa. He revealed a room cramped not due to its actual size but due to its abundant contents. The bed bent under the weight of three heavy, Mexican blankets in magenta, orange, and yellow wool. The stench of old soda and spoiled milk pervaded the space, absorbed by the numerous books piled in and on top of the shelves that covered every inch of wall space. A steel typewriter rested in the dead center of the room. Bottles of every make were strewn across the floor. Not a breathing soul was there, however. The room was so disorderly that a passive observer could not tell whether someone currently lived there or had abandoned the closet-sized room decades ago.

Mr. Carney stomped his foot and muttered an obscenity before trudging downstairs to his favorite armchair. A dusting of cigarette ashes marked the trail of his huffy descent. Virginia Tech was up against UVA.

Meanwhile, lavender swayed eerily in the breeze as the sun's rays stretched to embrace a humble garden. Like displaced eels, the pale plants pushed up from the earth and pulsated with a mysterious energy. They bumped into clumps of roses and lilies, but somehow managed to remain untangled from their neighbors. Julia stood several yards away, observing her urban bounty. The sweet scent of her efforts swirled around the air like butterflies engaged in a fervent mating dance. A mound of grayish dirt occupied the middle of the perfect square plot of land. On top of the mound, a raven flapped its wings and shrieked at the worms and snails lurking below its ebony talons. He scratched the soil until, either tired or bored, he took off to the skies. Had he continued digging, he would have discovered an opus.

The mound was not especially sprawling, but it definitely seemed amiss in the super green park. It smelled like life's forgotten discards: pomegranate seeds, watermelon rinds, avocado peels. The texture resembled that of lint, soft and fluffy with the occasional stiff grain woven into the earthen fabric. Not that the urge to throw their hands onto the mound possessed many passers-by. Most of the park's visitors took the mound for another garden-to-be. They seemed to think that gardens only grew flowers and plants, and that only vegetation had the ability (or right) to blossom.

Underneath the mound, ideas burgeoned in their subterranean lair, pushing out their roots to imbue the dirt with an aura, with history, with purpose. Or a breed of adolescent anxiety strangely unaffected by cheerleading try-outs and Homecoming Court elections.

Just as some people plant strawberries or petunias, either for pleasure or sustenance, Julia Carney planted poems. Ever since she was the size of a half-grown sunflower, she woke up with verse stomping around her head and words spurting out of her mouth. The stuff of lullabies and nursery rhymes soon evolved into more mature musings, though the occasional Emo angst twelve-liner was inevitable. Whatever she wrote, Julia saw her obsession as a gift from Demeter, not a time-out slip from the normal realities of youth.

One particularly illustrative morning, Julia bolted out of bed and punched out sixty pages of poetry on her typewriter, not once stopping to eat or even use the bathroom. Grime from the previous day still stuck to her arms, begging to be removed by a shower head. Her throat cried for water and her stomach shuddered in recognition of its hollowness. Yet Julia continued typing, counting syllables, mumbling aloud various forms of alliteration, and occasionally snapping her fingers in frustration. Nonetheless, despite hunger, despite her father's shrill voice coming from the bottom of the stairs, despite annoyance at her momentary inability to conjure an image, she glowed. She glowed the way some girls her age would glow upon first hearing "I love you," or at the sight of themselves in the perfect prom gown in a department store mirror. Writing was her own version of a teenage fantasy--and it cost significantly less than a Lamborghini.

Three hours later, as the sun hovered above the willow tree she had watched grow from seed to mammoth, Julia typed her final words: "To Sophie." At last, the manuscript breathed. The creatures mentioned in the various poems released their spirits into the air, urging themselves upon the ears of men in need of saving. Julia finally exhaled after what seemed like a day's worth of torturing her lungs. Memories of swim meets briefly swept over her before she tightly rolled up the manuscript. Then she stuffed it in a big juice jug, and gently placed the jug atop the growing pile of bottles in the corner of her room. She smiled at the pile's ever-expanding size, thrilled at the challenge at which the pile hinted. She sighed a little.

"What have ya been doin' in there for so long, girl?" Her father asked, only because he'd noticed that his breakfast wasn't set out on the kitchen counter. "Answer me, or else I'll barge right on in, Julie."

"Nothing, Dad. I'm just dealing with my eye. It's all red."

"Better not be bringin' pink eye into this house. Be careful who ya get with, ya hear? There's a reason I wanna to meet every boy ya even thinkin' of neckin' with."

Julia coughed. "Yes, Dad. I'll be down soon. I just have to put some more drops in." She coughed again. "Ouch."

"Don't poke yar eye out, child. Ya know I ain't got health insurance no more."

Julia began her planting process by selecting the perfect bottle. Considering all of the bottles she came across during the week--from tripping over the ones strewn across the public park to spotting litter in the school cafeteria--Julia could afford to let bottle snobbery prevail. Every Monday night, the evening before the garbage collector came, Julia rummaged through her neighbors' bins. The stench of rotting banana peels and house paint seered her nostrils. Coffee grounds caked to her hands and wrists. Egg yolk crept underneath her nails. Yet she forged on, through shredded envelopes and the contents of cats' litter boxes. Julia even panted from excitement during the stinky process. The dirtier the neighbor, the more precious the bottles, she had come to learn.

"They're so busy drowning in filth that they forget how to recognize beauty," Julia reasoned as she rubbed her hands in delight. Visions of her father decaying to the sounds of referee whistles and revving engines as he chugged light beer flashed through Julia's mind. Empty milk cartons and crumpled newspapers nearly engulfed his seated figure. Julia shook her head and then dove into her treasure chest, where the visions vanished.

The majority of Julia's goods were plastic soda bottles, but occasionally she wound up with pretty glass vessels. What was most important was that she could completely erase all traces of the bottle's brand. If the label wasn't easily removable or the brand was engraved into the bottle, Julia immediately rejected it and searched for others. She cringed at the thought of a soda company whose advertisements featured bikini-clad women and drooling basketball players speaking for her work.

"That's not my version of poetry," she said.

Once Julia finished her scavenging, she had such a big sack trailing behind her that she resembled a young, female Santa Claus. The bottles clinked and clanked with her every step on the way home. When wearing sandals, clogs, or other low-cut shoes, Julia often returned with raw ankles. No matter what, the sack always banged at her heels from point to point during her journey back. When she was especially tired, Julia tripped over the smelly sack, mumbled a Shakespearean curse, checked that none of her bottles were broken, and continued walking beneath the fluttering street lamps. It didn't matter if sirens sounded or stray dogs trotted behind her. She dragged on, not abandoning her bottles for any city distraction.

Eventually, Julia returned to her room and stored her new treasures under her bed. There, the bottles slumbered with the centipedes, dust bunnies, and less loved books. Julia, in turn, slept peacefully without the anxiety of being short on bottles pounding at the back of her head. She dreamt of familiar sensations, of romance, of personal events, of foreign lands, of various types of humiliation, of distant historical periods, and of things she could only explain in poetry.

When Julia woke up the next morning, she was often too giddy to start the day with breakfast. Her eyes shone, her shoulders shuddered, and her mouth curled into a "U." Then she sprung out from under her covers and called upon the muses in a mock Soprano, waving her sheet around like a cape:

"O Calliope, O Erato, O Euterpe! Grant me the power and passion to pen my poetry!" Her arms flung out with the intensity of a Broadway actors'.

She twirled around and flicked up her bountiful hair. "I know I'm absurd," she cried, "But I can't help it." She smiled goofily until the point where her father often knocked on the wall and demanded that she "stop makin' a darn ruckus, Julie" while he still lied half-asleep in his room.

"I told ya not to wake me up 'til the game started! It's only ten now! Tell those boys to stop callin' ya or I'll stop payin' the phone bill."

Julia's giggles faded, but she continued smiling on the inside. She tied her hair back in a single sweep. Then she pulled her bottles from under her bed and raced to the bathroom. A whole box full of cleaning tools awaited her, from warped toothbrushes to shredded sponges. They felt worn and comfortable between her fingers. The soap smelled faintly of lavender. She scrubbed the bottles long and hard until they sparkled. Foam grew all over the sink, sometimes plopping onto the floor tiles, with the fervency of multiplying cells. When Mr. Carney eventually got out of bed, he usually complained about his daughter's "sinfully long showers."

"Well, the water just takes so long to warm up, Dad."

"Ya tell that to the utilities company, girl. Ya just lucky yar mama ain't alive to see that bill or she'd whip yar Yankee behind."

After breakfast (typically buttered toast with fried baloney and bug juice because nothing decent was ever lying around the kitchen), Julia whipped out her stationary and fanciest pen. The pen was black with gold engraving, something in Italian she had never bothered translating. She tended to press down too hard as she wrote, so exchanging the nib was a common occurence. On more aggressive days, Julia pounced on her typewriter instead of resorting to old-fashioned pen and paper. The texture of the letters beneath her fingers felt theraputic. Whether Julia lunged for the pen or the typewriter, she began writing her poems, everything from couplets and sonnets to haiku and tanka. If she was particularly happy, her poems were all about the beautiful things in the world, like a round stone smoothed by the sea's gentle lulling. If she was sad, she wrote about all the terrible things in the world, like homelessness, cod liver oil, incurable diseases, her father's perpetual Athlete's Foot, and the classmates who made fun of her. What is good and comely, and what is bad and ugly is all relative.

Writing, of course, was the easy part. Collecting was slighter harder. But the most difficult part about planting poems was the actual gardening. It tasked her mind and her body, straining her back in particular as she lugged around a shovel that weighed half as much as she did. Julia usually carried a sack of stuffed bottles and the shovel all at once, but, when lucky, she managed to sneak away in her father's beaten truck, the one full of more rust than forest green metal.

Mr. Carney bought his pickup the same year Julia was born. The 1978 Chevy Silverado had tan leather seats, if they could be called that anymore. The seats were so worn that whoever sat on the passenger side nearly rubbed his back pockets against the road underneath him. At least that's how Mr. Carney liked to tell the story, in order to discourage others from asking for rides. To add to the dilapidation, cigarette holes dappled the cushions like Dalmatien spots. Dust completely filled the cup-holder. Gum and other anonymous sticky substances wedged their way into various crevices throughout the truck, waiting for an unknowing hand to slip into their gluey territory. The seat belts no longer even buckled. But Julia wasn't aiming for an elegant ride. She simply needed a large bed for her bottles.

"I don't ever want to see ya drivin' my truck, Julia," her father muttered over cold beers as he ran his fat fingers through his greasy hair. It was his trademark refrain. "That's my truck. Nobody drives that truck but me. Nobody in the whole wide world. Or else."

But with a drunken man obsessed with televised truck shows and football games presenting her only barrier, Julia just had to snatch the keys and go. A jingle and a jangle later, she was out the door with as many bottles as a hobo carries to the recycling center for some spare change. Once she unloaded her arms and covered the pile of bottles with a tarp, she started the engine. It grumbled like a disturbed old man dreading a dentist's visit because he knew his toothache was real this time. The bottles bounced up and down to the truck's natural rhythm as Julia drove to her haven. Sometimes Julia didn't even turn on the radio and instead relished the bottles' plastic and glass symphony.

Where Julia went after stealing her father's truck consisted of two options: the park or anywhere else. Besides maintaining a garden in the city's largest park, Julia scattered her poems around the selected neighborhood of the week. One week she chose Church Hill; the next, it was Shockoe Bottom; afterwards, came Downtown; then Jackson Ward; then Ginter Park; and so on. Her eventual goal was to cover the whole city, but she figured the best approach was to saturate one block at a time with the beauties of verse.

"I want someone to find a whole anthology's worth in one afternoon," Julia told herself again and again. "Maybe that will prompt them to look for more after that." She had even penciled in 'Project Afternoon Anthology' on the back of her city map, signaling her brave intentions. She always carried the map in her jean pocket so she could plot her next burial location at any moment.

The city featured a smorgasborg of Victorian townhouses, beaten-up single family homes, hipster cafes, impressive skyscrapers, gas stations, big box retailers, Mom and Pop restaurants, and university buildings. Nestled between the strange mixture of late 1800s and 1970s architecture lied a network of gravel-filled allies, parks, and empty lots. These in-between spaces proved to be veritable bottle graves. So, when wary eyes and wagging tongues disappeared, Julia took her shovel and dug.

The metal shovel rang against whatever it hit and vibrated in Julia's skinny arms. She stepped on it with both feet, pressing her full weight into the stubborn tool, before it refused to budge. Even then, it might have only moved a centimeter and flicked a pebble or two away from her intended burial ground. Broken glass, tar, shredded coffee cans, and unmentionable rubbish usually harden city dirt to the innocent penetrations of a poetic girl's frivolous projects.

During one of her late-night digging excursions, Julia remembered a time when her father picked up a storybook from her at the grocery store. Her four-year-old self shot straight to the door, shouting, "Daddy, you're home!" Mr. Carney patted her head and then walked over to the kitchen to set down the grocery bags teeming with Little Debbie's cakes, white bread, beer, corn on the cob, and hamburger meat. Julia followed her father. He packed the food either in the cabinets or refrigerator, one by one, not in any hurry, and yet still not especially organized. Julia watched him inquisitively as she flicked her pigtails.

"Could I have a Nutty Bar, Daddy?"

"Not yet. I got somethin' even better, Julie." Mr. Carney paused for suspense. Then, bit by bit, he withdrew a glittery book from one of the brown paper bags.

Julia gasped, throwing her hands to her chubby cheeks. "What a pretty book!"

"I thought ya'd like it. The pony's winkin' at ya, see?" Mr. Carney danced the book around so that it jigged with as much animation as any doll.

"Read it to me, Daddy. Please!"

Mr. Carney winced. Julia grabbed the book, glanced down at the book, and then back at her father until he said, "Ask yar mamma to read it to ya."

"But Mommy doesn't get back until 6 o'clock and the little hand isn't on the--"

"I said yar mamma will read it to ya, girl. Don't defy me." He slammed a jar of peanut butter against the counter. After sighing, he pushed the jar into one of the cabinets to reside beside grape jelly and a bag of marshmallows.

"Why can't you read it to me, Daddy?"

Mr. Carney snorted. "Of course I can read it to you."

"Then, Daddy--"

"Fine. Quit your belly-achin', child, and sit down in the family room. I'll read it to ya there."

A couple minutes later, Julia's father lumbered into the family room. Julia's small frame took up about a tenth of the sofa's cushion space. Mr. Carney plopped down beside her, causing the little girl's cushion to push up and jolt her. Julia, beaming, cuddled up against her father's broad chest. Her face pushed against the plush that jiggled beneath his white T-shirt.

"As soon as I saw this book," the man began, "I knew my Julie would love it. With all the glitter and pink stuff and the pretty pony, I guess it was a good choice."

"Yes, Daddy. A very good choice." Julia nodded her head earnestly. "Please read it to me, Daddy."

"I'll get there," he said and cleared his throat. He scratched his cheek and then opened to the book's title page. Though the book was called, The Mighty, Magical Mare, Mr. Carney pronounced it "The Mighty, Magical, Ma-Ré." The butchered word hung uncertainly in the air.

"What's a ma-ré, Daddy?" Julia asked, clapping her hands. They smelled like the wax from cheap crayons.

"Your mama probably knows."

"Oh, okay. It must be one of those girl things, right, Daddy?"

"Uh-huh. Now," he cleared his throat again, "'Once upon a time,' golly gee, all the stories start out that way, don't they?" Julia smiled back at him. "Um, 'Once upon a time...there...was...a...mighty...magical...ma-ré. She...was...pink...and...very...pretty...with...a...curly...fluffy...tail...like...a..."

Julia cut off her father, "You don't read like a grown-up, Daddy."

The man glared at the little girl. "What ya mean?"

"You read real slow, like a not-grown-up person. Like me and cousin David."

Mr. Carney cleared his throat and stroked the brim of his cowboy hat. "Hasn't yar mama told ya by now?" He closed the book as soon as the question emerged from his mouth.

Julia shook her teeny head.

Mr. Carney squeezed the book so hard that his fingers reddened. Then he cleared his throat again before saying, "See, Daddy had to drop outta school to take care of Uncle Billy and Aunt Charlotte so Grandma and Grandpa could work without worryin' 'bout lil' kids runnin' 'round unattended. And then once Uncle Billy and Aunt Charlotte were ol' enough to take care of themselves, Grandpa lost his job and...Daddy had to work in the coalmines. So, Daddy never went back to school. That's how come I can't read too good." Mr. Carney poked the inside of his cheek with his tongue and rose. "So, like I said, yar mama can read it to ya--"

Julia leapt up and hugged her father's knees. Her voice implored in the way only a four-year-old's can. "Let me read it to you, Daddy. I won't know all the words, but I can try."

The father shook his daughter off. She fell to the floor, horror streaking her face. Mr. Carney had resorted to shouting, "Why ya so eager to read, girl? Ain't nothin' special in it. Readin's for them egghead types who like nothin' better than to sit 'round all day in their fancy tweed jackets, smokin' big money tobacco in their pipes. They like to talk and write all these hocus-pocus books and essay like they so smart, like they understand the whole universe. But what do they really accomplish in the end? Huh? At least at the end of the day, I can tell ya what I done. I don't just pretend I changed the world by thinkin' all these big thoughts. I'm too practical for that, Julie. And, Christ, if I teach ya anythin' in life, I hope I teach ya that: be practical. Do real work. Find a way to survive and mind yar own business, not goin' and tellin' other people how to run their lives 'cause you read some enlightened book that had all the answers so ya think ya know better than the Pope."

Julia stared at her father, eyes as empty as saucers after supper. She now sat on the sofa again, her arms no longer wrapped around her father's sharp knees. Her bottom lip trembled.

"Never mind," Mr. Carney murmured, as he took off his hat, "I'm sorry, honey. Yar not ol' enough to understand what I'm babblin' 'bout." He placed his hat back on his head, and shifted it back and forth. Then he wandered back to the kitchen to put away the rest of the groceries.

Julia remained on the sofa, kicking her petite feet to and fro. Then, convinced that her father would not pop into the room again anytime soon, Julia hid The Mighty and Magical Mare. She kissed it before tucking it under one of the pale blue cushions. It was the beginning to her constant search for crevices.

Seeking out new nooks and crannies in the city proved more and more tasking as the days and weeks and months passed. There were only so many places she had not already touched, or only so many places she could bury the bottles without arousing suspicion. Street lamps are not kind to anyone with a penchant for clandestine activities. So Julia resorted to her bountiful garden more and more. Whether sunshine pounded or snow crept, the girl fled to her verse nursery with bottles upon bottles in her arms or in the stolen truck.

"Christ, Julie," Mr. Carney often grumbled during commercial breaks on the rare occasion he intercepted his daughter, "Where ya goin' all the time? You got a secret boyfriend or somethin'?"

Julia flushed. "I'm just busy, that's all."

"Better not be gettin' too busy with that boy, girl." A sly smile always accompanied this statement. Then he turned his head back to the screen and his eyes glazed over.

Julia quickly said, "Yes, sir," and escaped before her father could prod any further into her love life.

The park brimmed with children's laughter, dogs' incessant barking, and birds' little melodies. Yet, despite its noises, Julia could not imagine a more peaceful place in the whole city. After sliding into the parking lot, she found a spot, and tip-toed to the back of the truck. She took a requisite second to gaze at all of her bottles and reflect upon the poem that each one harbored. Each poem represented at least five minutes of her life; other poems, five hours. Maybe one day, someone would gather all of Julia's bottles and use them to calculate her lifespan. After experiencing such a thought, Julia heaved up the sack. If additional bottles, ones that could not fit in the sack, remained, she would simply return for them later.

Walking to her garden involved passing a ketchup red playground, a duck pond, and a soccer field. A wildflower or a charming bird might distract Julia, even leading her on a detour if it impressed her enough. She set down the sack to chase after chipmunks or talk to the children who asked her to give them a push on the swing. But Julia never forgot her purpose and heaved up her sack once again to continue her journey. An aching back or sore limbs never deterred her.

Upon arriving at her garden, Julia immediately consulted her diagram so she knew exactly where to bury her next bottles. She had drawn it on the opposite side of the city map she always carried with her. The paper, yellow with age, felt like buttery leather and smelled of rich ink. Her precise coordinates filled the page, showing just how soon Julia would need a new space to garden.

Anyone who studied the map would soon realize that Julia divided her garden into beds. Each bed contained a different type of poem, according to subject matter. A couple dozen of the beds stretched out. One was for humorous poems. One was for nature poems. One was for political poems. One was for love poems. In fact, probably seventy-five percent of all of the love poems she had ever written were entirely devoted to a girl named Sophie.The girls' first encounter--perhaps better termed 'Julia's sighting'--naturally occurred in the library.

Julia was hunched over an anthology of Russian literature, poking at the Table of Contents because she couldn't decide between Gogol and Puskin, when she casually glanced up to rest her eyes from the page. Then she pressed her finger so hard into the paper that her nail broke. Not a second had passed when she spotted a thin girl, one so pale she appeared wrought by consumption. Her mousy hair hung in stringy clumps by the sides of her face, framing flittering gray eyes. A black, baggy, knee-length garment engulfed her skeletal frame. Then the tiniest shoes Julia had ever seen anyone her age ever wear encased the girl's bony feet. A red-and-white name tag stretched across the left side of her chest. It read 'Sophie' in timid script.

Julia gulped and stood up, nursing the broken nail in her mouth. She glided over to the bookshelf where the girl perused dusty film history books. The girl picked up a large red book that seemed to weigh as much as she did. Julia pretended not to notice when she nearly toppled over. Instead, she grabbed a book on Les Enfants du Paradis. The first page it opened to Garance and Baptiste embracing each other. Julia stared at the photograph for a few seconds before blushing at the constellations lighting the actors' dark eyes. Their mutual love for each other illuminated the edges of their ever-expanding pupils. She slammed the book shut, wedged it back onto the shelves and marched back to her desk. Sophie remained where she was, barely able to hold up the red book.

Julia ripped out a sheet of notebook paper from her binder. A couple of students whipped around to glare out her, but not Sophie. Sophie continued browsing through books, braiding her legs with each hesitant step she took. Julia's hands zipped in and out of her pockets and backpack in search of pen. Finally she seized one and began scribbling with the intensity of supernova exploding. The stardust sprinkled across her page.

Julia hardly knew what she had written by the time she put her pen down and read it. In writing so fervently, she had poked periodic holes in the notebook paper, so that the sheet could've been mistaken for Braille. Her lips smacked together as she muttered the lines to herself:

“She is”

Eyes are always on the moon

ones that covet

Kings of Deception always swoon

songs that slice the heart

Melancholy maidens spend their hours at the loom

their opuses bleeding with loneliness

She is the moon

She is the king

She is the maiden

Owls only pray in the ripe of dark

where they are hidden from heretic birds

On the tree, lovers leave their mark

the sap runs with their ballad

Gabriel whispered a tender ‘Hark!’

calming the startled Virgin

She is the owl

She is the tree

She is the messenger

Julia stared at the words a little longer before turning around to glimpse Sophie once more. Sophie twitched her little nose as her eyes ate up the page before her. Julia tucked the sheet of paper into her backpack, careful not to make too much noise. Then she slunk off to skip her next class. Her wagon and shovel awaited her.

For the next four semesters, Julia spied on Sophie, but never once spoke to her. She hid behind bookshelves, sat near her in the library, and even followed her to the girls' restroom on a few occasions. Yet all interactions between the two girls transpired only in Julia's mind and, by extension, in her poetry.

One afternoon, two years later, Julia was entering the city library during one of her habitual visits. Suddenly a librarian in a turquoise sweater called her.

"Good afternoon, Julia," the librarian whispered. She was an older, red-headed woman with smile wrinkles that extended beneath her eyes, competing with her light purple bags.

Julia lit up. "Hello, Ms. Connors. I wanted to--"

"Have you seen the display window?"

Julia set her big pile of books on the circulation counter, annoyed when a couple slid to the floor. "No. Did the Friends of the Library finally get that African painter they wanted?"

"No, not yet," Ms. Connors tittered, causing her eyeglasses to slip. "Why don't you...take a peek? I think you'll be pleased by what's in there instead." She winked and pushed up her burgundy glasses so that they sat on the bridge of her nose again. Her nostrils flared in excitement.

Sensing a pleasant urgency in Ms. Connors' voice, Julia left the books there. She scampered toward the case in the main lobby but halted once she got about six feet in front of it. Julia squinted her eyes at the glass's glare, trying to discern lied behind the reflections. At first she thought she had caught herself in another daydream. She pinched herself and gasped. Someone had not only unearthed a dozen of her bottles. Not only that, but they had convinced the library to put them up for all patrons to see. The bottles were lined up at the bottom of the display case, with her printed poems pasted to the back wall. Julia's heart began to hammer in her chest. Her whole body seemed to tingle.

All of the poems talked about love or her beloved, though none explicitly mentioned Sophie. The words "dove," "eternity," "beautiful," "soul," and "passion" floated everywhere. The very poem that Julia wrote when she first saw Sophie in the school library hung up in the middle of the twelve posted there.

Julia glanced around when suddenly she spotted Sophie. She was scanning the flyers stapled to the community board. Julia grew even more nervous. Her palms squirted out more sweat than she thought possible. Her skin grew clammy all over. Julia stood there, petrified as she focused on her words: "Give me a less than tragic love." Then her eyes shifted to the phrase, "Winter was not made for love." Silently, she counted two-hundred, hoping that Sophie would be gone by the time she turned around. Just as she whipped around to dart out of the building, Julia bumped into Sophie. The bird of a girl fell over and dropped all of her books and DVDs. She issued a yelp and crumpled into a moldy Latin text with the words "Amor vincit omnia" repeating all around the border. Sophie pulled herself to a sitting position. Then, looking mildly alarmed, she blinked at Julia.

"Oh, my God, I'm--are you okay?" Julia bent over and picked up the books as speedily as if she were an octopus. But the laws of gravity and her own clumsiness defied her every effort to stack the books into a neat pile.

Sophie barely uttered, "Yeah, thanks."

"I'm so sorry. I was in a hurry. I didn't see you."

"Really, it's no big deal."

"If any of the books are damaged--"

"They're fine. Thanks."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. Now, if you'll excuse me..."

Sophie loaded the books into her arms and shuffled to the circulation desk. Julia watched Sophie chat with Ms. Connors, both of them mirroring each other's gestures. When Ms. Connors touched her chin, Sophie followed a few beats later. When Julia scratched her ear, so did Ms. Connors. It was almost an unofficial game of 'Simon Says.' Whatever they were discussing, an intimacy burned between them. Eventually Julia grew aware of how long she had been observing them. Annoyed with herself, she left.

Julia arrived home about an hour later, after indulging in some aimless wandering. When he father heard the porch door creak, he shut off the television. Without getting out of his armchair or even facing Julia, Mr. Carney greeted her.

"Hello," Julia echoed. Tension crept into her expression.

"Why so..." Mr. Carney paused to pick up the mini Word-A-Day calendar Julia had bought him off of the coffee table, "'Sullen'?"

"I...I'm not sullen."

"Hey, don't mind me. I'm just tryin' to be a good parent. Speakin' of which, I'm tired of all these darn phone calls about you missin' school. Who's the boy this time?"

"There is no boy, Dad."

"Look here, missy," Mr. Carney spat as he towered above his armchair, now locking eyes with his daughter. "I know why you sound so sullen. You can't fool me. Now I wanna know who broke my baby's heart."

Julia froze on the staircase. "Nobody broke my heart, Dad. And if someone did, it wouldn't be a 'he,' besides." With that being said, Julia made her way up the stairs and slumped into bed.

Two weeks later, Julia's English teacher, Ms. Bierschbach, held Julia after class. It was a quiet Friday afternoon, right before Julia's lunch period. All of the other students had charged out of the room, whereas Julia slowly packed her bag and started to drag herself out when Ms. Bierschbach stopped her. The last few lockers slammed shut and the custodian began mopping the hallway so that every opened room soon absorbed the sting of bleach.

Julia stood in front of Ms. Bierschbach's desk like a Persian statue. Her hair had lost its usual gloss and her skin appeared sallow. From head to toe, she was disheveled.

"Julia," she said, "I saw your poems in the library." Her fingernails rapped against the desk built from plywood.

"Oh. They've put some up in the Carver Community Center, too."

"And at two galleries on Broad Street, yes. There was an article in Style Weekly, even."

"Ah, I didn't know that," Julia said dully. She shoved her hands in the pockets of her dirty jeans and tugged at the elastic in her underwear. Snap. Snap. Snap. The action stung her thighs.

"Now, I admire this project of yours, Julia. It's a wonderful idea, but you can't let it interfere with your schoolwork."

Julia shifted from foot to foot, eager to proceed to disappear. She stopped snapping her underwear elastic when she noticed a funny look come over Ms. Bierschbach's broad, Midwestern face.

"I've been lenient in allowing you to write poems instead of essays and book reports," Ms. Bierschbach continued, "but I can't allow that anymore. You have to learn how to write seriously. Now here, take this book." Ms. Bierschbach handed her a dog-eared novel with a photograph of a mountain on its cover. "Why don't you read this and bring me a short composition by the end of next week?"

Julia cleared her throat and placed the novel back on Ms. Bierschbach's desk. It clapped against the fake wood. "I've already read this." She cleared her throat again and asked,"Now, are you saying that poetry isn't serious writing? Is it all just fluff, Ms. Bierschbach?"

Ms. Bierschbach blinked. "I--"

"Have you read Pushkin's Eugene Onegin?"

"Don't question me."

"I'm only questioning why you're discounting a whole history of writing and some of the greatest literature that exists."

The teacher began rapping her nails against the desk almost as if she were playing the piano. "I'm not. I'm saying--"

"Then why--"

Ms. Bierschbach flushed. "You will listen to me, Julia. And you will write that paper. Or you will fail my class. You are dismissed."

"I'll write that paper," Julia hissed, "And it will be in verse. Iambic pentameter even."

"That would not follow the assignment requirements." Her lips stretched into a line no thicker than a dash.

"I don't care about the requirements," Julia blurted. Her mouth stayed open a second afterwards, prepared to speak again.

Ms. Bierschbach paused before saying, "Julia, I know it might be hard to grasp at your age. You're at a passionate time now, a time full of exploration. I was young once, too. I had dreams. I wanted to--I mean, if you live long enough, you'll eventually witness the death of one of your dreams, too. But I want to ease the pain for you by warning you before...well, before that first blow comes." She wrung her hands and murmured,"You should know now that the life of a poet is unrealistic."

[Read the rest of the story by clicking here.]

Bats and Butterflies

2009-09-11T20:40:00.001-07:00

"Bats and Butterflies"

By Christine Stoddard

Eleana sits in the English garden, marveling at another Richmond moon, with its clean, clean face (pure at least compared to the jostling James.) Her wispy nightgown fans out around her hips like a period costume. A pair of crooked fairy wings hang from her shoulders, shoulders that shine bright white in the glowing night light. Her boyfriend bent the coat hanger she used to construct the wings after she muttered she was pregnant. She wore the ripped pantyhose, which she later inundated with dollar store glitter, the night of the fatal escapade.

Suddenly Eleana stretches out her arms until she can stretch them no farther. They are long and milky before her. Her nails, painted pale gold, twinkle. Eleana draws her hands to her face and breathes in deeply, her chest heaving like a birthing mare's. The scent of lavender lotion mixed with misoprostol emerges from her pores. She shivers.

A massive magnolia overwhelms the garden with the stench of its rotting flowers. The whole tree is dying. Its leaves begin to fertilize the fetus Eleana buried there just as the sun set and shadows started to descend upon the city. She shivers again and sniffs her hands until the stench becomes indiscernible. Eleana inhales the garden's natural perfumes, from waves of Virginia Dogwood to pulses of Tudor Rose.

Eventually, she exhausts her nose. Her ears catch a flicker of sound. Eleana puts her hand over her gloomy gray eyes, shielding the moonlight from her gaze, and looks to the sky. She squints and, a second later, shrieks. Flailing her arms in the midst of wild screams, Eleana finally flings herself to the ground, ignoring the pain of mulch pressing into her soft calves. She rocks back and forth like a cradle. All the while, tears stain her face and she whispers, "I don't know if they're bats or butterflies. I don't know if they're bats or butterflies. I don't know if..."

Hours later, the sun rises. The magnolia has shed its final leaf and Eleana's wings lie over her child's grave.

Quail Bell

2009-09-08T16:34:00.000-07:00

"Quail Bell"

By Christine Stoddard

Fantomina could recite the legend of the quail bell since she was nearly small enough to fit into the glorified faerie creation herself. She had learned it from her great-great-great aunt, a shriveled, toothless woman with one eye and a single mauve scarf to cover her bald head. Ever since then, Fantomina guarded the details of the story, save for bargaining purposes and special occasions. It was the most coveted yarn in all the land, one even the most talented bards failed to steal from the lucky lass.

One early morning, in the soft glows of nascent sunlight, Fantomina was bent over a water pump with her girl cousin, Autumn. The day's chores had only begun, yet Fantomina was already exhausted. Autumn, meanwhile, carelessly flounced to and fro in her pale petticoats. Fantomina wiped the sweat gushing from her brow, moved the next pail into place, and primed the pump again. As had become habitual within the last several months, Autumn begged Fantomina to tell her the story of the quail bell. She twirled her pigtails and kissed Fantomina's salty cheeks in between whines instead of holding one of the wooden pails as her cousin asked. Fantomina finally slammed down the pail she was holding, splashing a small ocean's worth of water all over the ground, Autumn, and herself. So strong was her movement that her bun even fell loose. She resembled a mad woman just recently escaped from her prison.

"Fine," Fantomina snarled, "I'll tell the tale, but only if you help me fill up the rest of these pails, feed the lambs, snap the old hen's neck, and boil the potatoes all this week."

Autumn blinked and looked at Fantomina for a moment. "It's worth it," the little one finally uttered, "It's worth it if you tell the story for real--you know, the way it's meant to be told."

Fantomina spat on the soil. She and her cousin crooked forward to watch the saliva soak into the crevices formed by cracked earth. Once the final bubble of spittle had vanished, Fantomina stared at Autumn and whispered, "I'll tell you, but you must keep it a secret for always."

"Of course."

"I'm serious, Autumn. If you tell a soul even the vaguest outlines of the story, the quail bell will haunt you for the rest of your days. Understand?"

Autumn nodded, her sweet face stretched into the gravest expression.

"I'll begin then," Fantomina muttered and wiped her hands on her skirt.

Autumn plopped down, fixing her gaze on the peasant farm girl standing before her. Fantomina coughed as she swatted at a gnat hungry for perspiration. Once Fantomina killed the gnat, squishing it between her fingers, she sat down across from Autumn and started:

"Once upon a time, there was a faerie kingdom in an abandoned ant hill. The ant hill looked just like any other ant hill, except that it hummed in the breeze and glowed green in the night. A bankrupt queen ruled over the pitiable kingdom of fewer than one-hundred faeries, tiny considering that faeries almost always live in groups of seven-hundred and seven or more. Once the kingdom had been grand, with thousands of faeries flying in its name, and a spacious palace of scallop shells and raven feathers. But the queen's vanity destroyed everything her predecessors had worked so hard to establish. She not only had to wear the most splendid of gowns and jewelry, she demanded that the entire kingdom attend a banquet every morning after her servants dressed her to admire her unique beauty. The queen fluttered in silks, rose petals, baby's breath tiaras, velvets, snail shell earrings, pearls, crushed oyster shell rings, and whatever other precious materials her tailor's minions could procure from the forest and sea. She would not be content until every single member of the kingdom told her how ravishing she looked, how she was surely the most gorgeous creature who had ever existed in all of faerie history. Only after she had basked in the last compliment would she dismiss everyone to continue their daily duties."

"What was the queen's name?" Autumn piped up.

"Dorinda, but what does that matter? She has long turned to dust."

"I thought faeries never died."

"Well, this one did."

Autumn gasped and snapped the twig she was holding. "You're lying," she hissed.

"Do you want to hear the rest of this or not?"

Autumn pouted, twig bits still in hand. "You know I want to hear it."

"Then don't interrupt me again. We have a lot to do today. I can't spend all day explaining 'Quail Bell' to you." Fantomina swept her forehead with the inside of her wrist and then wiped her nose, the stench of mud and grass roots creeping into her nostrils.

"So, anyway, one day Queen Dorinda's treasurer announced that she could no longer afford to hold her frivolous banquets. At first, the queen was in denial, but an instant later she pulled a solution out of the air. She decided to raise taxes. None of the faeries could afford to pay them, so that plan fizzled as quickly as an alchemist's rejected potion. Next, Queen Dorinda ordered that the kingdom develop new industries to compete with foreign faeries. The next day, Queen Dorinda's citizens picked up new trades and offered services to the other kingdoms, but none of the foreign faeries were interested.

Then Queen Dorinda figured the real problem was that her kingdom was too big; if she banished half of the citizens, her treasurer calculated that she could still afford her new garments and lavish feasts. So that is exactly what Queen Dorinda did. Unfortunately, she chose the wrong half to banish. She wanted only the most elegant faeries in her court and her kingdom, even if they knew nothing about herding the dragonflies or milking the mice. Consequently, Queen Dorinda cast off the faeries who once kept the kingdom running. Thus, the kingdom dove further into poverty. Even when the queen banished half of the remaining population, her treasurer warned her that the only way she could indulge in her love for fashion and still call herself queen of an actual kingdom and not just a few stray faeries, was if she re-located. That meant selling her precious palace of scallop shells and raven feathers. Queen Dorinda barely hesitated, though, when she realized the choice essentially meant choosing a life of pretty dresses or no pretty dresses.

Queen Dorinda sold the palace to a gnome colony and took her puny citizens to an abandoned ant hill. They grumbled and griped, but, not wishing to be banished, followed her command. A couple of braver faeries, ones sure that they could survive on their own, escaped not long after moving into the old ant hill, but the vast majority of them endured. Queen Dorinda did whatever she could to preserve her luxury of a new gown everyday and a banquet to brandish it--even if it meant depriving the rest of the kingdom. The kingdom became so poor that the only meal any of the faeries ate all day was at the dress banquet. Most of them had to donate their scant clothes at one time or another for the royal tailor to incorporate into one of the queen's latest gowns. Before long, not a single tablecloth or curtain existed in all the ant hill.

Other faerie kingdoms began to talk. Queen Dorinda's vanity was the easy subject of gossip and the way she treated her citizens became infamous. The queen hardly minded her self-centered reputation, however. She was much more concerned about the other subject of gossip: her kingdom's poverty. No other faerie kingdom inhabited an ant hill because no other faerie queen was so selfish.

So Queen Dorinda sought to change her kingdom's raggedy image. For months she conferred with the wisest faeries in her kingdom. They discussed what could make them appear far richer than they were in reality. Everything they imagined, though, required spending money they did not have. That is, until Queen Dorinda's brother-in-law suggested stealing from the forest.

None of the faeries knew what the man meant at first, only that such a task would demand stealth. He elaborated until all of the council gathered this: in order for the kingdom to appear wealthy in the minds of faeries far and wide, they would have to possess something that Mother Nature had never bestowed upon faeries before. Everything they listed--from deer hooves to salamander tails to owl beaks--seemed to have come into faerie possession at one point or another. They couldn't think up anything good, pure, and natural that had not. Then one of the members of the council turned to Queen Dorinda and asked her to list some of the gown decorations she desired. Knowing her fine and particular taste, he figured she was bound to name something so rare that it had yet to enter faerie hands. It was when Queen Dorinda mentioned a quail's head plumage that the council fell silent.

No faerie had ever before touched, let alone owned, a quail's head feathers.

Queen Dorinda sent off all of her best hunters to stalk a quail and bring back its distinctive plumage. Rain fell. Snow came. They scouted for a fortnight before they returned no richer than they had been before.

Furious, Queen Dorinda, sent them out again, this time with no food. She even placed a poisonous curse upon all the foods of the forest, so none of the hunters could eat there. The hunters became so desperately hungry that they thought of nothing but capturing a quail. At last, four days later, they did. They brought back the whole bird. Queen Dorinda eagerly snatched its head plumage and threw minnow bones at the hunters as a reward. But just as the hunters started gnawing on the bones, the queen's messenger soared into the court, lamenting that the neighboring faerie kingdom had also caught a quail and put its head feathers on display in their royal palace.

The council assured Queen Dorinda that the head plumage was a prize nonetheless, but she was not satisfied. She knew her kingdom was still a laughingstock and that it would take a true treasure to transform its poor reputation. The queen demanded that the kingdom distinguish the feathers in some way. Initially, they all deemed her insane. Then one citizen, a skilled blacksmith, asked if he could take the responsibility of altering the feathers. Nobody knew of his plans, but, since they lacked ideas of their own, entrusted the feathers with him.

A week later, the blacksmith emerged from his branch of the ant hill, wielding an object so bright that nobody could look upon it. Nor could they hear what he said upon presenting the object because it emitted such a stunning, high-pitched ringing. When the blacksmith waved his wand, suddenly the object dimmed and grew quiet. At first glance, the object appeared to be an ordinary bell with a few fanciful engravings. As the faeries inspected the bell, however, they realized how wrong their first assumption was.

[Read the rest of the story here.]

Gnomes

2009-09-03T16:20:00.000-07:00

"Gnomes"

By Christine Stoddard

She swayed like a cat in heat, waist and hips fluid as an arboreal stream. From behind, a trance seemed to grip her with the Sandman's grainy hands; from the front, she suffered the obvious consequences of international airplane travel. Though slightly bloated and discolored, she was as beautiful as the tittering princesses she had worshipped as a child. Perhaps five-hundred years ago, a sweet-minded squire encountered her in a dream. To begin with, her dark lashes extended at least one inch beyond her heavily powdered eyelids. Her eyes shone an irresistible shade of gray that verged on gloominess but still emanated enough liveliness to hypnotize weaker souls. Those souls might wake up if someone whispered the fact that she wore contacts, but that event remains hypothetical. (Who would be cruel enough to destroy the spell?) Despite the smudges of concealer under her eyes, the gray-purple bags of jet-lag were still visible above her cheeks. If any of the men who wanted to touch her had the chance to do so, they would have felt the stickiness of serum in her crimped, blonde hair. It had not dried properly because, shortly after applying it, she had fallen asleep on the shoulder of somebody's grandmother during the plane ride. When she woke up to the pilot's voice that morning, Kimberly was not sure if the puddle of goo on the old woman's sweater was saliva or stray hair product. She had touched her full lips to find out; not a drop of spittle jiggled on top of them. Conveniently, she deemed herself innocent.

Now as she glided across the plane's carpeted floors to the front door, velour sweatpants cupped her round buns and neon green stars graced her shiny nails. It was just another stylish day. The moment that her ballet slipper-clad foot stepped out of the plane, Kimberly popped in her earbuds to drown out the noises of an airport that mocked her native language. She glanced up from forcing the unicorn charm on her necklace to face the right way. She barely made out the letters reading "Charles de Gaulle." The words wavered back and forth like her stomach at take-off. She slipped through Customs with an enchantress' smile and then rolled toward the baggage claim in a trance. Somehow she avoided falling asleep standing up as she waited for an epiphany of some kind.

"Where am I going?" she mumbled to herself, now that her full entourage of bags encircled her. "These Frogs better--"

"Kimberly!" A fifteen-year old boy, gangly and red-faced, jumped up and down, waving a poster at the specimen of American processed beauty. It read, "Welcom to my countrie, American princesse." Running toward her on stork legs, he was teenage over-enthusiasm for the opposite sex incarnate. Just imagine the French version.

"Hey, Pierre," Kimberly muttered as she laid her carry-on luggage on the marbled linoleum by its larger comrades. It was pathetically small in comparison, rattling with a spare charm bracelet, a book on dieting techniques from across the world, three bottles of iridescent nail polish, a still-in-the-shrinkwrap pocket French/English dictionary, an owl keychain that no longer hooted when you squeezed it, a monogrammed pen with a Tudor rose design, a My Little Pony notepad, several packs of gum, old mascara, and sparkly lipgloss.

The boy put his poster down and frowned a little. "My name is Luc, not Pierre."

"Oh." Kimberly snapped her blueberry gum. "You sure?" She pulled out her My Little Pony notepad and scanned through all her scrawling. Everything from a list of planned make-over steps to the breeds of her host family's tropical fish was there.

"Oui! I mean, yes. Of course, it is...my name."

"I'm joking," Kimberly bursted, as she shut close the notepad, "I mean, I'm tired, but I wouldn't forget the name of someone who's emailed me twice a day for the past four months. Humor. Duh."

"Ah." Luc crumpled the poster a little as it swung by his knees. "I do not understand." The poster now sagged pitifully inward, mimicking Luc's fallen posture.

"Don't take yourself so seriously. You'll hate yourself in twenty years."

"No, no, I...I'm sorry."

Kimberly re-opened her notepad, pretending to read over one of the lists there. Eventually she became aware that the conversation was moving nowhere. She closed the notepad and waved it at her face like she was hot, even though she was still recovering from a slight chill she'd caught on the plane. She began to talk very fast. "So, where's the toilet? And where can I get a greasy hamburger? They tried to feed me this fried oval thing stuffed with blue cheese. It was gross." Only after describing to the oval thing did she breathe.

"Gross? I do not know this word."

"Listen, Pierre--"

"Luc, please."

"Right. Luc. Gross means disgusting. Like, really, really bad. So bad you want to vomit. What is it--vomiter?"

They paused, staring at each other. Luc continued warping the poster until he tore about an inch into it. He blushed and hid the poster behind him immediately.

"I will flag a taxi," Luc announced, grinning too widely. "Then we shall--"

"Wait, taxis are expensive. I didn't save up for a trip to Paris to blow it all on taxi rides. Why can't your parents pick us up?"

"They are preparing for a party."

"Oh, that's cool," Kimberly chirped, "A French party my first night in France. Maybe tomorrow night I'll kiss Prince Charming at the top of the Eiffel Tower and go waltzing in the middle of the Champs-Elysée."

Luc nodded. "Er, they are celebrating the wedding anniversary of their dear friends."

"People our age don't say 'dear friends' in English, Pierre. It sounds like old people talk." Kimberly corrected her stubborn unicorn charm's improper direction without pausing. "I dunno about France, but in America, it sucks to be old. You have to eat prunes and nobody calls you anymore." She patted her hip, realized that she didn't have a pocket and therefore could not be carrying her phone there. Her eyes landed on a clock and then back on Luc's face. Like a toadstool, his face featured a red background and scores of white dots thanks to an onset of whiteheads. "Anyway," Kimberly began again, "so what's going to be at this party? Any champagne?"

"Undoubtedly.

"Wicked." She bent her fingers into quotation marks.

Luc scrunched up his forehead and pointed toward the entrance. "Let us go."

Kimberly swayed toward the glass doors, abandoning her luggage to Luc. He sighed and fetched a cart. Then heaving and scuttling ensued.

Kimberly was outside, already enjoying a fresh stick of blueberry gum when Luc appeared, panting, with the piled-to-the-sky cart.

"Oh, thanks for doing that," Kimberly said, and then issued a fat bubble from her mouth. Luc stared at the way her tongue danced to conjure the bubble back inside her realm of teeth and gums. His admiring gaze only faltered when Kimberly spoke again. "Hey, flag that one down." Kimberly pointed at an oncoming mini-van taxi with strange red racer stripes painted on the side. It looked fit for eight passengers, not two.

Luc turned toward the taxi and waved both arms with the widest span possible. The taxi skidded to a stop before them. Luc turned to Kimberly for approval, but she was too busy twisting a tiny braid in her hair. Her fingers spun her hair as tightly as a spindle's restless wheel. The golden thread danced over and over, having no choice but to immediately accept its new form.

The taxi driver, dark-eyed, big-eared, and brown-skinned, rolled down his window. A cloud of smoke billowed out into the air. The driver snorted and then said, "Bonjour," with the malaise of an out-of-tune piano.

Kimberly was still concentrating on her braid when she barked, "Yo, Jean-Claude. Could you put this luggage in the back?"

The man looked at Kimberly blankly and said, very haltingly, "I...do...not...speak...English." His bottom lip quivered a little for a second after his confession.

Luc jumped into French to translate Kimberly's words. Then he turned to Kimberly and said, "The word for luggage in French is baggage."

"That's nice." The footman had only just begun to load her carriage, when she snarled, "Careful! That's Vera Bradley, you know!"

The taxi driver, so startled, nearly dropped the bag.

"Let us get into the taxi," Luc muttered. He opened the door for Kimberly and she stepped inside. She thanked him rather offhandedly for it.

"Phew! This place smells like wet dog and cigarettes," she exclaimed. Despite the ignoble expression on her face, Kimberly sat down rather gracefully, crossing one swan leg over the other. Then she reached for the handle on her door to hurry into rolling down the window. Swirls of smoke fled out.

Luc snuggled right next to Kimberly, disregarding all of the empty seats in the van. "Is it not true that you smoke?"

Kimberly tsked, "Why would you think that?"

"Because your fingernails are yellow."

"That's nailpolish, doofus." Luc instantly rouged. "This is more yellow-green, but, anyway, yellow's 'in' right now. I mean, in America. Maybe not here. Seems like everyone wears black here."

"I am wearing green--"

"Hey, are we going sometime today?" Kimberly poked the taxi driver on the shoulder. "We have a cool French party to get to." The driver flinched.

Luc translated again and the taxi driver responded with, "Oui, bien sûr."

"Oh, I understood that!" Kimberly squealed and clapped her hands together. The nailpolish bottles in her bag clinked together at her abrupt movement.

"That is good," Luc replied. "But you are supposed to be speaking French all the time to practice, no? That is part of the exchange program policy, according to what I read. So we should stop speaking English...maintenant. D'accord? Alors, qu'est-ce que tu voudrais--"

"Whoah. Hold it, Pierre. I don't think you get it. Regardless of what that glossy study abroad brochure said, I'm not here to apprendre français. I'm here to have fun. And lots of it. Like I said, I saved up a long time to do this. I'm graduating from high school next year and, after that, I'm going to college, where I'll actually have to take a trip like this seriously."

"Mais--"

"Hey, excusez-moi and all, but we're going to speak my language, okay?" Kimberly squinted her eyes when she said 'okay.'

"Et pourquoi?" Luc sat up straighter, tilting his nose in the air. He stopped wringing his hands, moved his eyes off of Kimberly's unicorn charm and right into her gray eyes, "Je pense que--"

"Because it's better. It's easier to understand, it doesn't have weird accent marks, and people all over the world speak it. You have a much bigger need to learn English than I do to learn French. It's that's simple."

"Vraiment?"

"Stop speaking French! It's an annoying language." She crossed her arms and pouted. "You sound like you're choking on snail shells or frog legs or whatever else you all eat around here." Suddenly Kimberly fished an emory board out of her pocket and began filing her nails. "They can say whatever they want about French being the language of love, but I don't see what's so attractive about this nasally stuff." Kimberly blew off the bitty piles of grated nails into Luc's face and grinned.

He spat out the keratin dust, not commenting upon how it tasted like old lemon candy. Then Luc pursed his lips. "You are sounding very ignorant right now, Kimberly. I do not wish for you to disrespect my culture, especially when you are staying in my family's house. It's is impolite and you are representing your country in a very unfavorable way."

"Representing my country? What? Am I a diplomat now?" Kimberly scoffed. "I mean, seriously. The only reason to become one of those is so you can do exactly what you want without going to jail," Kimberly snorted and then pulled another stick of gum out of her purse. She unwrapped the blueberry-flavored oral distraction, crumpling the foil and tossing it on the floor of the taxi. She folded the stick under her tongue, slid her tongue back and forth, and then flipped the gum on top of her tongue to commence her trademark snapping.

"Must you do that?" Luc asked.

"Oh, sorry," Kimberly yawned, "Did you want some?"

"Er, oui."

"You're not really going to go on like that all night, are you?"

"Comme quoi?" When Kimberly noticed that Luc didn't grab the stick of gum she had extended only half a second before, she dropped it back into her roomy purse.

"You know, speaking, what do they call it in old movies? Frog."

"It is my native language. I think best in it." Luc crossed his arms and sunk down into his seat. Unconsciously, he began kicking his feet at the back of the front passenger's seat. Dust exploded from the cushion and hovered around Luc and Kimberly's knees.

Kimberly gaped a second, her wad of gum fully visible. "Wait, can you do a French laugh?" She paused. "I mean, duh, you can. You're French. Okay, laugh."

Luc scratched the left corner of his bottom lip. "I am not an actor."

"Please! Just laugh. I'll tickle you if it helps." She lunged forward, fingers poised to draw out belly-deep guffaws.

"Non!"

"Yes!"

"Non!"

"Yes!"

"Non!"

"Yes!"

"Ha-ha," Luc said very flatly, "Is that how you Americans laugh?" He cocked his head a tad and stared at her.

"In comic books, I guess. But nobody actually laughs that way."

Luc ignored Kimberly for a moment. "Monsieur, pouvez-vous turner ici?"

"Bah, oui."

The van suddenly swerved to the left of a stone monument. A hundred pigeons burst into flight and soared to the top of an apartment building a few yards away from the monument. The chaotic honking of the other cars masked the birds' gentle coos. The pigeons seemed relieved to return to their nests upon the slate roof, just as the drivers were anxious to return to nests of their own.

Luc faced Kimberly, who was now diligently applying her favorite globby mascara. "Pardon? Qu'est-ce que tu as dit?" He left his lips slightly parted after the words flowed off his tongue. Kimberly seemed less caustic when primping herself. A strand of hair innocently landed by the side of her nose. Luc felt tempted to brush it away.

"Ugh! You're doing it again," she whined. She dunked her mascara wand into the tube, twisted it around, and withdrew it again. Now dark gunk completely covered the bristles, much like black tinsel on a scorched Christmas tree.

The taxi lurched forward. Kimberly flew toward the seat in front of her and then quickly snapped back. The wand of her mascara tube just barely missed poking out her eye. A dark streak of make-up was smeared across her bony cheek.

"Whoah!" The sound whooshed out of her mouth right after the event, when she finally realized what had happened.

"Whoah?"

"It means, WTF!?"

"Comment?"

"Luc, tell the taxi driver he's crazy, okay? Tell him to slow down."

Luc mumbled something at the driver just as Kimberly screwed the top back onto her mascara. Then she dropped it into her purse. It was a round leather pouch, fit for all the trucs of a magician but filled with the things of an ordinary American girl. A moment of silence passed. Luc poked a bulge in the purse.

"Seriously. I hope French drivers aren't like New Jersey drivers," Kimberly groused, "Are we almost there yet?"

"No, we are still in the far suburbs. It should take us another hour. I think."

"What do you mean--you don't know?"

"I do not know."

"You grew up here, right? You're French, you're Parisian." Kimberly waved her hands around with the fervency of mating butterflies, indicating all the 'Frenchess' around her.

"Yes, but that does not mean I know--"

"Okay, well, what do you know? Now's as good a time as any to find out. Give me the skinny on your country. I mean, I didn't bother reading the packets my teacher printed out for me," she shouted, as she folded her hands on her lap, "They were all about Napoleon or somebody."

"Well, the capital of France is Paris and--"

"Duh. Hey, non-sequitor. Don't you guys eat a lot of cheese?"

Luc shifted back and forth. "We have cheese every dinner, yes."

"Don't you have like 5,000 different kinds?"

"I see you know your cheeses," Luc grinned, "The expression is, translated, 'A cheese for everyday,' I believe, though there are many more--"

"Gawd. You guys must have gas!" She twirled her hair with her tan pointer finger.

"Er..."

"Please! I'm just kidding."

Luc grimaced.

"Alright. It's been nice chatting," Kimberly said before Luc replied, "but I have to take a nap. I'm so tired after those two flights." She stretched and yawned without a sound.

"I will wake you up when we get there."

"You better. I'm psyched about this party." Kimberly rested her head against the window and closed her eyes to grant Luc the first peace he had experienced in forty-five minutes. Sleeping Beauty would finally sleep, happily retired to her invisible chamber.

The taxi puttered along, progressing a few inches at a time in the dusk of rush-hour. Luc focused on the outside world. They passed car after car, European, American, and Asian, in every color known to the auto industry. Once they even passed a pair of ceramic holstein cows chewing their ceramic cud. When Luc opened his window to take a snapshot of the cows with his cell phone, smog poured in and he choked. Coughing, he closed it again to escape the stench of pollution only to be re-greeted by the stench of cigarettes. He sighed and asked the driver to crank up the song that was playing on the radio.

Finally, ten red Renaults and four Spanish license plates later, Luc rustled Kimberly. "We are here."

Kimberly's eyelids wavered for a second. "I hate the dentist."

"Kimberly?"

She smacked her lips and attempted to open her eyes again.

Luc prodded her. "Reveille-toi."

She opened her eyes. "I'm awake," she murmured rather unconvincingly.

"Good. We are here."

Kimberly scooted up out of her slouch and shrieked, "Escargot! There's a snail in my hair!"

"That is gum," Luc muttered and withdrew a pocket knife. "Here, let me cut it out." Mischief pulsated in his eyes and his voice grew louder. "It looks like a gross spider about to eat you."

"Cut it? No! That's my hair. You'll ruin the perfect layers." Kimberly swatted furiously at Luc, so furiously that he dropped the pocket knife. It hit his sandaled foot with a clunk.

"Ai!" Luc's hands jumped to his foot. "You are so--"

"Feisty! The word is 'feisty,' Luc. Get off of my hair before I claw your eyes out." Kimberly nearly slashed Luc's face with her acrylic talons. "You have no idea how expensive my salon back home is."

"But you cannot go to the party with gum in your hair."

Kimberly started stroking the afflicted clump of hair. "Don't you have any peanut butter at home?" She tried to massage the bits of hair around the glob of gum to release the wretched 'spider.'

"What is that?" Luc ran his fingers through his hair in befuddlement, his gaze focused on Kimberly's hideous knot.

"You know, peanut butter?" Her eyes widened for emphasis.

Everything in Luc's face expressed bewilderment. "No, I do not know."

"Buttery, creamy stuff made out of peanuts? You spread it on bread, maybe eat it with jelly? Weirdos sometimes try it with honey or banana slices."

Luc stared back, still puzzled.

"Wait. Don't tell me you don't have peanut butter in France."

Luc paused before saying, "I won't tell you then." He fumbled with his pocket knife before returning it to his pants.

"It's an expression, Luc. Gawd, I can't believe you people don't have peanut butter. What do French kids eat?"

"You want me to list? Goat cheese, apricot pudding, crayfish--"

"Eww. I would hate to grow up in France. Well, if you don't have peanut butter, how am I supposed to get this gum out of my hair?"

Luc pointed to his pocket.

"No. There is no way I'm going to cut this out. I'll figure something out when I get to your bathroom, or Water Closet. Isn't that what you people call it here?"

"Yes. W.C."

The car stopped all of a sudden. Luc and Kimberly both fell forward and shrieked. After glancing strangely at Luc's girlish scream, Kimberly put her hand to her chest in an effort to calm down her racing heart. "Really, the driving in this country," she grumbled. She twisted her unicorn charm back into place. Her fingers returned to nursing the knot.

"We are here," Luc announced. "That is why we stopped."

"Thanks for making that clear. I thought we had a flat tire."

Kimberly stepped out of the taxi and froze before the man and woman waiting there. Luc's parents stood just outside of their walled garden by a small pile of cinderblocks. The mother was somewhat tall for a woman with inquisitive brown eyes. Her hair hung down around her long, tan face, framing an aquiline nose. Her lips, painted red, were very full. When she smiled, the lips stretched much wider than one would have guessed. She wore a plain black dress and red pumps. Luc's father was somewhat short for a man with sullen, black eyes. He had no hair to frame his square jaw and shrunken lips that barely stretched when he smiled, an action he rarely took. Stubble covered the lower third of his face. He had on a blue button-down shirt with no tie and slightly crumpled khakis.

"Kimberly!" The mother screamed and pulled the American student into a hearty embrace. The father stood back, monitoring his watch. "I am Francine. This is my husband, Frederic."

There was an awkward silence as Kimberly tried to salvage what little knowledge she had of French. She stammered something but nothing coherent managed to escape her mouth. She fiddled with her unicorn.

"What is that knot in your hair?" the father asked.

Luc moved in after tipping the taxi driver, who had dumped all of Kimberly's luggage on the narrow sidewalk. "She fell asleep while chewing gum," he explained in English.

"En français maintenant!" Francine chirped. The rest of the conversation continued in French with everyone but Kimberly settling on the language shift. They began entering the garden, with Luc lugging Kimberly's belongings.

"Do you have any peanut butter I could use to get the chewing gum out of my hair, Francine?" Kimberly asked. Her fingers still clutched her unicorn charm as she walked through paths framed by rose bushes.

Francine furrowed her brow and said very slowly in her thick accent, "Peenoot booter?"

"Yeah, peanut butter. Jiffy. Skip. Peter Pan. You eat it with jelly in a sandwich."

"No, no, I do not understand. Do you understand what she is saying, Luc?" Luc shrugged his shoulders. "Here, let me give you a tour of the house. We can discuss your 'peenoot booter' later."

Luc and the father fell behind to grab more luggage as Kimberly thrust herself into the house.

She nearly gasped and covered her mouth. The row house was more charming than any cottage she could have ever imagine. Despite the house's petite size, its space was bright and airy. All the windows brandished shutters and the floors, completely devoid of rugs or carpets, were dark hardwood. The furniture was wrickety with peeling paint or somewhat tattered cushions. Everything appeared worn in an elegant, antique sort of way, rather than utterly dilapidated. At first Kimberly was delighted that Francine was willing to whisk her from room to room, but when the French woman began shuffling through her vintage spoon collection, the young American cracked.

"Could you just take me to the bathroom?" Kimberly whined. "I have to take care of my hair."

Francine smiled a tight smile and set down a spoon dating back to World War One. "Of course." Her yellow teeth seemed about ready to burst out of her mouth. Francine described the bathroom's location in her most refined French and set the spoons back into their miniature cupboard.

Kimberly darted into the bathroom and began raiding the cabinets. Her hands skimmed over various bottles, cotton balls rained on the tiled floor, and a tub of Q-tips ended up in the garbage. She brought a couple jars and bottles, ones with less obvious labels, closer to her eyes. By the time she discovered the hydrogen peroxide and pink eye drops, she was panting. "There is nothing--you have nothing--my hair--Christ, my hair." Kimberly tugged at the knot, hyperventilating. "I can't believe--my hair."

Francine darkened the bathroom door. "Perhaps you could cut it off?"

"No!" Kimberly yelled. "Never. I refuse to cut my hair. It will ruin the layers."

"But even if you rub the gum out of your hair, some of your hair will come out. In fact, a lot of your hair will come out since your hair is so fine. You might as well cut it so it is a clean cut." She wiggled her ankle to better position her foot within her high-heels.

"I guess you're right," Kimberly gulped, "Where are your scissors?"

Francine reached into the medicine cabinet and, a second later, wielded scissors large enough to qualify as garden sheers. They shined beneath the flicking lightbulb that just barely illuminated the mildewy room.

Kimberly screamed.

"Calmes-toi!"

"Get away from me!"

"Je ne vais pas te hérir."

"Don't touch me!"

Francine whipped around and called for her husband, urgency seeping in each part of his two-syllable name. David sighed and stopped in the bathroom doorway.

"You want me to hold her down?"

"Yes, now."

David pinned Francine to the wall, despite her tears. Francine jumped forward, snipped the wad of gum out of the hysterical girl's hair, and threw the knot into the garbage bin with such force that it spun and toppled over. Kimberly fell into a ball and wept for her lost locks.

Nobody spoke as the bin whirled across the floor, scratching the tile. Finally Francine washed her hands and cleared her throat. "Alright, Kimberly. You should get dressed for the party now."

Kimberly nodded again, still the picture of a wilted flower. She was now sniffing and twiddling with her unicorn charm.

"What should I wear to the party?" she coughed and wiped her face with her sleeve.

"Whatever you wish."

"I'll have to cut the rest of my hair first."

"Oh, you won't have time for that."

"I have to. I can't go out in public looking like a dumb punk princess."

"Just put on something nice."

Kimberly dashed up to her new bedroom. It was sparse but attractive, with gray wood for her bed frame and armoire. In mad haste, Kimberly unzipped her luggage and and tore through all of her clothes. Panties, socks, and T-shirts flew in the air before she pounced upon her winner. Kimberly slipped into a brown silk dress with a bulging bubble skirt that ended several inches above the knee. Then she nestled a bright red headband into her hair, pinning back the uneven chunk. Next came her elaborate make-up routine. She sorted through a three-tiered case big enough to hide an infant, getting her hands mucky with powder and mysterious goo.

"Kimberly!" Francine called.

Kimberly nearly tripped as she raced down the stairs. She ripped off the pair of false eyelashes she had just finished applying because she knew she wouldn't have time to put on the second set.

"So, what do you think?" Kimberly asked as she twirled before Francine and Co. Her unicorn dizzily twirled with her.

Luc grinned and exclaimed in English, "You look like a gift!"

Kimberly scrunched up her nose. "You wouldn't say that in English, Luc."

His eyes fell to the floor.

Francine butted in, "Like a fairy then. Now let's go to the party."

"Wait, what? I thought the party was here."

"No, it's at a friend's house. We have to drive over. It is a surprise party."

"Oh. I guess that's cool. I mean, as long as there's champagne."

"There will be, undoubtedly," Luc said, clapping his hands.

"Nobody our age uses the word 'undoubtedly' in English, Luc. If I actually cared enough, I'd tutor you."

"That is a splendid idea! I could tutor you in French and you--"

"I don't want to learn French. This is a cultural experience, not a language experience."

"Is language not a part of culture?"

Francine glanced at her watch. "We must leave now. We have to help with the hors d'oeuves."

"Ugh. I'm not touching that stuff."

David shot Kimberly a nasty glance. "I suppose in your country you eat"--he switched over to his heavily accented English--"jalepeño poppers and Buffalo wings. I know of Hooters." He nearly gagged on the name of the restaurant.

"Don't forget mozzerella sticks," Luc said, bobbing his head enthusiastically. "They are sticks of fried Italian cheese I have heard are quite delicious."

Kimberly breathed in for a moment and said, "Okay, guys, so I'm ready for my first French party. Let's go!"

They rammed into the car, Kimberly complained about the music on the radio station for the next ten minutes, and then they arrived to their destination.

A bunch of small, compact cars crowded the condominium's underground garage. After several rotations, David discovered an empty parking space and pulled in nose first. Not a second passed before Kimberly did what Kimberly did best.

"I am so dizzy!"

Luc patted her arm, while Francine tensed up her shoulders.

"Get out, Kimberly," David griped, "Get out and enjoy yourself."

The four of them took the garage elevator up to the condo's pool, where the party had apparently already started. Tables, topped with French flags for table cloths, framed the patio. They brimmed with food and drink, from bowls of grapes to fresh apricots to hunks of Camenbert to sliced ham to juicy chicken legs and more. It was an entire buffet arranged American-style but decidedly French in its options. Not a hunk of Chicago-style pizza or onion rings laid in view. The sight of deli meats, fruits, and cheeses didn't particularly excite Kimberly ("Just give me a strawberry banana smoothie, a baby spinach salad, and a plain hamburger any day, and I'll be happy for the rest of my life.") Neither did the prospect of kissing every single party guest.

Kimberly extended her hand when Francine first introduced her to the guests of honor. "Here are my dear friends, Claire and Claude. Tonight they are celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary."

Claire was a willowy woman with cropped gray hair and morosely gray eyes. A single, very pale mole hovered on her otherwise unblemished face, near her left nostril. She sported a draping blue tunic, black leggings, and gladiator sandals. Her nails were long and shined with the glossiness of black nail polish. She reminded Kimberly of the kind of woman who would appear in a cold cream advertisement. Claude reminded her of the kind of man who would appear in a dog food commercial, throwing a new-smelling frisbee to his smiling labrador retriever. He seemed about ten years younger than Claire, maybe at 45 or 50, and looked at her with placid green eyes. His high cheekbones were his most noticeable feature, despite his mossy stubble and dark sideburns.

When nobody reached for her hand, Kimberly hid it behind her back. Claire leant toward her, her lips rounded for a kiss. Kimberly quickly bent forward to peck her once and then leant back into place.

"No, no, no," Francine chided, "Like this." Francine stepped forward and gracefully puckered up. Then, in an aristocratically sweeping motion, planted a kiss on Claire's cheek before patiently moving to the other. She proceeded to give Claude the same poetic treatment.

"Did you guys practice that before I came here? 'Cause that just looked like a dance."

Luc snorted and turned to Kimberly, "That is simply how we greet people here."

"At this party?"

"No, in France. You greet someone with one kiss on each cheek."

"I thought that was only in Pepe Le Pew cartoons."

Luc raised an eyebrow. "I know not what you are referring to, Kimberly, but you must learn how to greet people in this country if you plan to stay here for three months."

"So I'm supposed to kiss everyone I meet?"

"Yes."

"Even strangers?"

"Yes."

[Read the rest of the story here.]

Whispers from the Beach

2009-08-17T06:15:00.000-07:00

"Hey, look, boys!"

"Fatty coming this way."

"More like morbidly obese."

"Morbid because you'll die looking at her?"

"If she doesn't die from a heart attack first."

"Yeah, those legs are like logs."

"She could crush all of Guam with those fists."

"Her skin must feel like cottage cheese."

"Does that turn you on, Robbie?"

"Eww, c'mon, guys. I'd rather die."

"You will if she falls on you!"

"Shh...we're getting too loud. She's gonna hear us!"

Once upon a time, you and I went to the beach. Me in my one-piece, buried under a T-shirt. You in your new bikini, the one you said would snag Prince Charming, because you were proud about losing forty pounds, but the top was still too tiny. The bottom even tinier. I wanted to pick out the wedgie for you, but refrained. So I tried to ignore it, but just then we stumbled into a volleyball game, six Adonises on either side of the net, gleaming tans and lush hair. I turned away, sensing the forbidden. You were entranced by what you thought you could now have. I didn't tell you how blind you were to your reflection because I wanted you to be right.

You began to strut. I could hear the pretty boys' nascent snickers, the ones that seemed to erupt from the sand, shoot into the air, and reach the gulls hovering in the skies with their echoing insults.

At first you deflected their words, maybe because you couldn't hear them. Maybe because you didn't want to hear them. You held your stride and showed them another version of absolute beauty. I thought you were gorgeous, as gorgeous as you'd ever been, but I knew they'd never understand a beauty outside of fashion and porn. You were alive with flesh on your bones.

[Read the rest here.]

Salt

2009-07-10T11:23:00.000-07:00

"Salt"

By Christine Stoddard

Joanne sank into her green-gray armchair and pulled the daily crossword puzzle into her lap. Surprisingly she hadn't tripped on a plastic tow-truck or a Lego leg on the way there. Joanne had just returned from another eight-hour day of talking to bank customers she secretly hated in the typical 9-to-5 worker's way. She began by removing her wool blazer and kicking off the shoes that perpetually pinched her pinkie toes as soon as she opened the door to the sound of Sesame Street blaring throughout the house. It was time to change the channel and relax, maybe catch some "Judge Judy" so she could make fun of stupid people to up the ol' self-esteem. Groping for the remote and reading clues about "church recesses" and "parakeet perhaps" at the same time, hunger suddenly hit her. She thought she had nabbed enough cheese cubes and carrot sticks at the weekly company meeting, but apparently not. Joanne set the paper down and begrudgingly pushed herself up from her chair. Then she walked barefoot to the kitchen.

The kitchen tile was colder against her feet than Joanne had hoped. In fact, it was Arctic cold. She gritted her teeth and tip-toed over to the cabinets at the far end of the room, desperately trying to make as little contact with the freezing floor as possible. Finally, she arrived to her destination. But instead of lunging for a box of sinful snacks, Joanne stopped. She did not stop out of guilt that she was violating everything Jenny Craig had ever taught her, nor did she stop because she suspected her husband was spying on her so he could chastise her later. Joanne had told Jenny Craig and her husband to go to H-E-double hockey sticks about her eating habits long ago. No, Joanne stopped, poised on her tiptoes, because she noticed several orange Cheese-It crumbs on her otherwise spotless kitchen counter. The sight so astonished the neat freak that she jumped with fright, which brought her feet completely down to the floor.

"Ooh!" she cried. Joanne hopped onto her tip-toes again and immediately opened the kitchen cabinet doors. Bank worker became P.I. as she held her breath for fear of sniffing up a stray whisker. Joanne began inspecting for other evidence of mice by lifting this and that, but grew increasingly confused--brow furrowed, lips twisted downward--when her search yield nothing, not even the tiniest nugget of dark poo.

"I guess I'm dealing with constipated mice," she muttered to herself and smiled awkwardly. Joanne shrugged her shoulders and, having lost her appetite, hobbled back to her armchair where her red pen and personal copy of The Washington Post waited for her. As soon as she looked down at the paper, Joanne frowned for having to divine a seven-letter word for 'devouring all the cupcakes at a birthday party.' Suddenly she felt like taking a nap instead, but Joanne was afraid of a mouse crawling over her and scraping out her eyes during her sleep.

"Like Hitchcock's The Birds--but with mice," she murmured and shuddered. Her pen fell; she picked it up then picked up a dictionary to look up how to spell "Loquacious." Her left eye twitched as she flipped the pages toward her destination.

The rest of the evening continued in peace, despite Joanne's burgeoning paranoia. Joanne's husband came home, having picked up their six-year old son from his play group. He placed a lukewarm pepperoni pizza on the table and, still holding Thomas in his arms, and gave Joanne a dry kiss. Thomas blew a spit bubble that popped and splattered on his face. Neither parent noticed. Joanne had abandoned her puzzle and stared straight ahead at the wall, wondering how many dirty rodents lurked there. Fred distracted Joanne by asking how her way went and then described his, in the customary way of remotely engaged married men. He licked his lip right after posing the question. Joanne explained how she had filled out about six billion deposit slips and handed cheap lollipops to noisy children who otherwise wouldn't shut up. Fred had to wait on two customers who, within minutes of ordering a four-layer chocolate cake to celebrate their 20th anniversary, started arguing about getting a divorce when he came to re-fill their beer mugs.

Gradually, Fred realized how nervous Joanne was growing with every second. She kept looking around her with the fervency of a crack addict, rubbing her hands back and forth on her pants, and playing with her hand. Joanne never touched her hair unless she had to wash it. She considered fingering ringlets and smoothing back bangs some of the most unsanitary things around. Fred started massaging her feet and asked what the problem was. He avoided touching her red pinkies for fear that she would squawk. When Joanne asked Fred if he had seen any mice around, he said no. His wife sighed, "Good." Then Fred told Joanne more stories from the restaurant. Eventually the evening faded and Fred, Joanne, and Thomas went to sleep.

There isn't much to summarize; the color of the walls, or the type of dishes they owned could not shed further insight on the evolving predicament. Linking a tablecloth brand to their circumstance would be too easy, too "correlation indicates causation."

The next several weeks followed a similar pattern with one major change. Joanne came home from work at the bank's cranky and ready to rest--this was nothing unusual. But now, instead of retiring to her faithful armchair, Joanne set out to destroy the enemy. After discovering the open boxes that one fateful afternoon, Joanne purchased about fifty mousetraps. The very next day, she then positioned them throughout the house as soon as her husband and child came home.

Joanne concentrated mostly on the kitchen. There she formed a circle of traps in the middle of the tile floor and nestled a bit of feta cheese into each wooden contraption. She stepped back, placing her hands on her hips, to admire her store-bought brilliance.

"Good," Joanne muttered, "By this time tomorrow, I should have a ring of rodents." She wasn't even sure what that meant, how having a ring of them would be better than a line of them, but she clapped her hands and shuffled back to her chair to guess at a synonym for 'lint,' anyway. The clumps of dust, like mice, issued a sharp shiver through her nervous body. She sneezed just thinking about it.

Joanne sank into her armchair and twirled around her pen lazily as she pondered clue after clue. As she read, guessed, read, and guessed some more, the sounds of Fred and Thomas playing "Park Ranger," a game of Thomas' imagination, buzzed in the background. Thomas always bawled when Fred pretended to be a poacher. Yet no matter how many times Joanne told him to remove that part from the game, Fred built it in, with the excuse that, "He might as well learn about the real world now."

"Hey, quiet, boys!" Joanne yelped. She hadn't meant to whine, but she was so invested in her puzzle that the most minor sounds irritated her. Fred growled like a grizzly bear in response. "C'mon! I'm reading through my clues!" Finally one hit her--the capital of Kansas--and she rushed to write it in the blank boxes.

She whispered, "T-O-P-E-K-A," and grinned at her miniscule accomplishment. Seventy more clues remained unanswered.

Suddenly a chorus of twenty consecutive clatters caught Joanne's attention. She tossed down her pen and ran to the kitchen, one slipper one and one slipper off, chipped nails visible to the mysterious mice.

Joanne expected blood. Joanne expected guts. She anticipated all the grime and none of the poetry of death. But when she entered the kitchen, Joanne observed nothing more than the same ring of traps she had set up an hour earlier, minus the feta.

"Genius mice, apparently," she sighed. "Fred!" When her husband didn't answer, Joanne trudged to her son's room with the sorrow of defeat.

As she stood in the doorway, Fred smiled at her and asked, "What's the matter, sweetie?"

"I--where's Thomas?"

"Oh, the poacher got him." When his wife glared at him, Fred blurted the more apt, "He went to the bathroom."

"Ah. Anyway, I just checked up on those mousetraps and all the cheese is gone. Those mice managed to steal it all."

"You didn't even catch a tail?"

"Nope. That's expensive cheese, too."

"What kind did you use?"

"Feta."

"You put feta cheese in mousetraps, Joanne? I didn't know we were millionaires." He rolled his amber eyes.

"Well, I'll check the other ones tonight. Don't worry about it, babe. We'll catch some. If not, we need a pet around here, anyway."

"Oh, Fred. I don't want a cat. It'll--"

Fred widened his eyes and meowed.

"Stop being cute," Joanne said and stuck out her tongue, as if she and her husband were two ten-year olds too embarrassed to admit they had crushes on each other.

"I can't help it."

Joanne shot him a fake disapproving look. A moment of silence passed before she wondered aloud, "What's taking Thomas so long?"

"He's probably still crying about the poacher, using up all the Kleenex your mother brought over."

"You didn't! I told you to stop talking about--"

"No, not this time. He cried too much last time. Don't give me that incredulous look. I promise."

"I hope so. I better go check on him. As far as I know, he's swishing paper around the toilet bowl again. If I ever see another plumber's bill like that again..."

Joanne meandered toward the bathroom, knocked on the door, waited for a reply, and opened to the sight of her son with his blue jeans down and his skinny legs dangling. As usual, though, his red hair outshone everything else about him.

"Hi, Thomas."

Her son burped in response.

"Well, excuse you. C'mon. Are you almost done? Daddy wants to read you that new book on elk in Yellowstone National Park."

"Yes, Mommy," Thomas mumbled. He hopped off of the toilet and onto his tiny stool to wash his hands. Then he waddled back to his room, where his father had already begun thumbing through the latest nature book.

Joanne kept buying mousetraps and kept failing. Joanne eventually realized that the mice wouldn't fall for her traps, so, despite her promise that she would never own a pet, she adopted a calico cat.

The cat hissed and cowered away from Thomas the moment Joanne placed the animal in the backyard. Thomas continued chewing a frosty clump of grass, as if nothing had happened. When Joanne ran into the house to pull a peach pie out of the oven, the cat squeezed under the yard's chain link fence as quickly as a fish in water and was never seen again.

"Of all the luck!" Joanne griped as she stood in the yard, holding a peach pie in her oven-mitt clad hands. No matter how many times she called the cat, it did not respond. It had slipped off into a world of countless birds and no pesky owners.

"Come inside, Thomas."

Thomas wouldn't budge.

"Don't do this to Mommy, Thomas. You see I'm losing this battle with the mice, don't you?" Joanne stormed into the house and told her husband to grab Thomas.

"Come on," Fred said, "It's time for your bath, buddy." He scooped up the boy and went inside, where the house was significantly warmer. Fred climbed the stairs to the second floor bathroom and sat Thomas on the toilet seat. The little boy kicked his feet back and forth restlessly. "Do you want to play with Ducky or the boat?"

"Ducky."

Fred squeaked the rubber duck in Thomas' face. The boy laughed and took the duck to hug in his pudgy arms. Fred turned around, turned on the water, and let it run as he peered out the window. Snow had begun to carpet the yard. Fred pointed it out to his son, who began to sing, "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer had a very shiny nose!"

"A bit off-key there, Thomas. Let me show you how it's done." Fred seized the rubber ducky from Thomas' hands and belted out his even more off-key rendition of the song. Thomas giggled and scrunched his upturned nose.

"Okay, Thomas," Fred said, after dunking his finger in the bathtub, "Let's start taking all those winter layers off, huh? Imagine, pretty soon you'll be taking showers and you'll have to take your clothes off all by yourself." The father unzipped the boy's coat, pulled his sweater up over his head, took off his T-shirt, and jolted back. "What are these?"

White spots, like thick strokes of paint on a pale pink canvas, covered Thomas from his shoulders to his waist. The spots were about an inch in diameter and not especially round or concentrated, but they were definitely noticeable. "Joanne!"

"What?" She called from the kitchen.

"Get in here."

"God, Fred, I thought we agreed you'd give him a bath tonight!"

"No, come look!"

"If this is a joke," she said, her voice growing louder with the sound of her approaching footsteps, "I'm going to be pretty upset. I just put another pie in the oven."

"No, it's not a--" Fred didn't even finish his sentence. His wife rounded the corner and froze in the doorway.

"Christ, what is that?"

"Some kind of rash?"

"Yeah, but from what? I've never..."

Thomas turned his head from Fred to Joanne and from Joanne to Fred.

"I'll call the doctor in the morning," Joanne muttered. "Maybe it's some kind of allergic reaction. Put some Vaseline on it after you dry him. I don't know what else to do." She pulled Thomas into her chest and whispered a word or two into his velvety ear.

The next morning, Joanne called the doctor's office and had to endure Muzak, the exact same tune they played at least twice daily at the bank where she worked, when they put her on hold.

"Hello?" The secretary's voice was deep and tinged with annoyance.

"Finally," Joanne murmured half to herself. "Hello."

"How may I help you?"

"I'd like to make an appointment for my son. He seems--"

"The doctor's all full for the day."

"Could he come in tom--"

"Is this an emergency?"

"Well, no. Er, maybe. I'm not--"

"If it's not urgent, you'll have to wait until January 8 when his office re-opens from the holiday season."

"That's a month from now!"

"I'm sorry, ma'am"--she sounded less than compassionate--"but Dr. Herbert is a very busy man. Everybody wants to see him. Parents want to bring in their kids for the slightest cough. I mean, do you think he has time for that? No. You'll have to wait. Please understand. It's--"

Joanne slammed down the phone and closed her eyes. She leaned against the wall and crossed her arms. When she opened her eyes again, she shivered at the sight of more crumbs scattered across the kitchen table. Joanne started to sink down until she sat on the floor. Suddenly she jumped up and picked up the phone. She flipped through the Yellowbook perched beside her and dialed the number for the exterminator.

"If I can't fix one thing, I'll try and fix another."

The exterminator was available that very afternoon. Forty-five minutes after entering the house, the dark-haired and sallow man stared at his clipboard and asked Joanne to sit down. Joanne complied, praying that the annoyances that had grown into torment would end. His eyes flickered for a moment before he began with, "Look, Mrs. Stallings, given all the loose food you've said you've seen in your house recently, you probably won't believe me, but..." He placed the clipboard on his large lap. "I can't find any evidence of mice in the whole house. I've inspected every single corner. As owner of this business, I am first and foremost a salesman--I will admit to that. But I do have a conscience and I can't honestly say that you need me to treat this house for mice. There just aren't any around, not in the attic, the basement, anywhere."

"You're absolutely sure?"

"Yes, Mrs. Stallings. There's not a single squeak or rustle coming from your walls or even underneath your fridge," he said and chuckled, "I mean, unless they all skipped town when they heard I was coming..."

[Read the rest of the story here.]

Vacation Notice

2009-06-29T07:35:00.001-07:00

I will be in France from June 29 to August 1. During this time, I will not have the chance to regularly update my blogs or submit to other publications as usual. However, I do encourage you to check out my French travel blog as I document my voyage! Please visit http://blog.vcu.edu/stoddardcs2/ for my writing and photos.

The Turtle that Turned into a Little Girl

2009-06-24T20:57:00.000-07:00

"The Turtle That Turned into A Little Girl"

By Christine Stoddard

The fact that the Egyptians worshipped them is irrelevant: Buddhists insist that cats do not go to Heaven, let alone rule over it as gods. Or perhaps I am confusing my religions, philosophies, ways of life, "however you want to describe each culture's hodgepodge of myths and rhymes contorted to fit reason," as my college Theology professor once blathered. Buddhists do not envision Heaven in the Christian sense, they prefer--why is that cat sniffing that log? I pause, afraid that it's discovered a dead thing. At first, I do not understand why the cat is lurking around in the garden at all. I thought I read in one of those magazine "Did you know?" lists that they were sacrilegious. What it is doing? Is it hunting? Buddhist cats should be vegetarian cats, especially if they live off of the generosity of Japanese monks. I step closer to the short-haired feline, but that one step proves fatal. The cat immediately darts off into a nearby hedge, concealed from my Western eyes. Now I can inspect its finding. I close my Nicole Miller umbrella, shake it only to wonder what difference it will make whether it is wet or not as I use its tip to poke and prod. The umbrella flips over a palm frond and I sigh. An empty turtle shells lies in the stinky mud, the inhabitant long gone.

I squat like I'd seen nimble Asian women do by the roadside as they sift through sweet grass for fallen acorns to grind into flour. Flecks of gold and deep brown mark the shell, the first I have ever seen outside of a nature center. It tells a thousand stories, none I comprehend. A couple of seconds later, I grow restless with my sighting and stand up. My lavender skirt suit is crumpled in all of the wrong places, not that it should be crumpled at all. My mother, the grand-daughter of a seamstress, would be so disappointed. I purse my lips for a second but ignore my annoyance. I can have the suit pressed again tomorrow. I continue walking through the lotus scented garden. The scent is not quite as pure as I had imagined. I suspect that the blaring train has distracted my nose. Somehow a single train in the lonely countryside sounds louder than all the construction work and road congestion roaring in the city. If cats don't belong in a Buddhist monastery, steam engines certainly don't either. Thanks to Andrew Carnegie, few icons better represent the greed of capitalism. Immediately after I think that, I laugh nervously to myself. No matter how much I wish to convince myself otherwise, I still hold an M.B.A. and not an M.A. in Literary Theory. I bend down to waft the lotus stench into my expectant nostrils, but it doesn't help me smell the flower any better. Mostly I smell my Tender Poison. Obviously Dior was not intended for a summer's day amongst holy plants and ceramic Gautamas.

At least I don't have to smell the water in order to enjoy it. I walk over to a bright orange overlook and sit down on a similarly painted bench to admire the pond overflowing with lily pads. It stretches out into a broad ellipse where clusters of algae blooms float over koi kingdoms. Every now and then I catch glimpse of a scaled tail slithering beneath the ripples caused by dancing dragonflies. When I see a turtle pop up onto a thick log, my mind flashes back to what the cat found. Wouldn't it be strange if the turtle had reincarnated into the very cat that discovered its shell? If I'm going to entertain metaphysical thoughts, then--

I hear someone behind me. I whip around, startled. It's a monk, a white man dressed in burnt orange robes and Teevas. He wears smart glasses that frame his blue eyes. The man sits down, his robe nearly blending into the wooden bench underneath him so that his head almost seems to float. His furry hands clasp a clear bag but before I can determine the bag's contents, two Japanese girls suddenly run up to him, giggling. He clasps their tiny hands, so sallow against his ruddy red skin. Words I cannot decipher spill out of the children's purplish lips. The man nods for a moment, pensively absorbed. The girls tug on his robes until he finally says what I assume is "No." The children lose their smiles and droop like the odd wilted lotuses in the garden. They sit next to the man, one on either side of his much larger body. Their waists are about the same size as his thighs. The man mutters something and the girls outstretch their hands. Then he digs his paw into the clear bag and drops several Cheerios into girls' palms. Cheerful again, the girls toss the Cheerios into the water and laugh. My gaze follows their stubby, pointing fingers. Blue gills, sunfish, koi, and turtles have all emerged to swallow the bland cereal. As the children throw out more, the number of hungry, aquatic creatures multiplies. Fish lips form a perfect "O" as they suck individual Cheerios into their piscine mouths. I glance up from the newly formed islands of turtle shells and notice that the monk's previously stony face has broken into a kind smile. Wrinkles line his skin the way the carps' scales structure their coats of iridescent chips in ivory and apricot patterns.

But I am not as discreet as I thought. The monk turns to me and asks, in the heaviest South Dakotan accent I've heard since Fargo, whether I'd like to feed the fish. When he pronounce the word "fish," I cringe, not because of his accent, but because the word suddenly seems brusque for such beautiful animals. Even in their frenzy to fill their stomachs, the koi remind me of graceful birds trapped beneath the green water. Their fins are wings and their scales are the feathers of ancient folklore, where birds are plated in real gold and silver because the gods willed it.

I thank the man as I simply take the bag. Then I scoop out some Cheerios and pelt the pond's glass surface with them. A turtle the size of my first thrusts from the black depths of the water and viciously seizes two Cheerios simultaneously. I blink and the turtle has already disappeared to his duckweed lair. Most of the other Cheerios I threw are gone, too. It's like Black Friday at the mall.

"How did you find out they liked Cheerios?" I finally ask the monk. By that point, I have already tossed four heaping handfuls of cereal into the water.

The monk grins and replies, "I used to bring stale bread, whatever the other monks and I hadn't finished that week. I figured at least the birds would eat it, but the fish always liked it better. One week, though, we had finished all of the bread. All we had left was, well, a box of old Cheerios in the back of some cabinet. So I grabbed the box and came here. As soon as I threw some out, the fish and turtles gobbled it up. Turns out they like Cheerios better than bread, but that kind of information would put pet stores out of business."

'Out of business' is a phrase that makes me shudder. I murmur a polite, "Oh," and roll the bag up to return it to the monk. He takes it, then strokes one of the little girls' glossy hair. Both of the children wear plain bowl cuts and matching pink sandals with lace-trimmed socks. If it were not for the extraordinary light shining in their faces, I might have mistaken them for dolls. They are too lovely and serve as a reminder of the daughters I could still have.

A balmy breeze sweeps by and rustles the monk's robes. The orange cloth seems to engulf the girls in epic flames as they fly back and forth. The breeze's delicacy amplifies the monk's hugeness and roughness as he sits so still. Not a single hair on his head moves, as if each strand is made of steel. I suffer this striking creative impulse. I just have to take a photograph of them but the only camera I have is on my cell phone. I might as well feel the urge to write a novel and type out a text message to tame the desire. The monk's hand drops from the girl's head and rests in his large lap.

"Do you come here often?" He asks, shattering the silence that managed to grow beneath the breeze. The man's question sounds like a bad pick-up line, but I snap the connection in half. He's a monk, I tell myself.

"No, not really, only every now and then. It's too far from the city."

"You live there then?"

"No, but in an immediate suburb."

"Alexandria?"

"No, Arlington."

"Where the cemetery is."

I suddenly shiver at the reference. I had never identified my home county that way before. Yet now an image of 300, 000 graves flashes in mind over and over like a crude Eisenstein scene. Leave it to a monk to reflect upon death. After letting too long of a pause linger, I say, "Yes. My apartment is less than a five minute drive from there."

The girls, who I only just noticed appear to be identical twins save for a height difference of about four inches, pat the Cheerios bag impatiently. The man releases it from his clutches and then sighs, "My wife lived there for a year during high school as a foreign exchange student."

I perk up. A certain word piqued my interest. "You have a wife?"

"I had a wife," he murmurs after clearing his throat, "A beautiful wife."

I picture him embracing a lithe geisha with azaleas in her pinned up hair. Powder shrouds her, even the tops of her pixieish fingers. She resembles one of the dolls nestled amongst ferns in the garden. In a fairytale-like venture, the monk rescued her from the whorehouse, they wedded in the Japanese mountains, they--

"She died twenty-one years ago. Cancer."

"I'm sorry." I'm not sure if I really mean it and then, amiss, I whisper, "I didn't know monks could marry."

The girls place the Cheerios bag on the orange floorboards before scurrying off into the garden. This time the monk does not stop them. In the background, I hear them shrieking the way happy children do.

"Certain monks can, depending on the type of Buddhist, which country. Japanese monks may marry. It's one of Buddhism's lesser-known facts. Well, lesser-known to outsiders I suppose." He crushes a Cheerio between his fingers. "Are you Buddhist?"

[Read the rest of the story here.]

Ugali

2009-06-03T17:37:00.000-07:00

"Just 'cause you're a Creative Writing minor doesn't mean you can write," Randall sneered. "Can you even spell 'recidivist'?" He crumpled his lip and threw down his pencil. Randall and I had attended the same school since pre-kindergarten and he was just as whiny then as he was now. I still believed he suffered from colic and possibly wore diapers that his mother changed right before his 9 p.m. bedtime. Talk about living in Eden's nursery garden.

Calm down, Casey, I told myself. Deliver your blows with composure. "Just because you're a Literary Criticism minor doesn't mean you can recognize quality writing. Oh, and to prove a point, R-E-C-I-D-I-V-I-S-T."

Randall always pouted instead of making come-backs, as if those azure eyes could salvage anything he said. He sniffed and started marking up my poem on Freud and biscotti. I narrowed my eyes at his trademark red pen, but quickly diverted my attention. Maybe I could write a poem about that brown splotch on the window. Randall would hate that more than a generic brand suit. He had written about the limousine his parents had recently scrapped. It ended with the less-than-sentimental "Good riddance."

"Really, Casey," Randal began again, now that he had recovered from his magenta blush, "You shouldn't have ended that sentence in a preposition." He pen stabbed the line.

"'Was' is not a preposition. It's a conjugation of the word 'to be.'"

He scoffed. "Please, you don't have to explain such base grammatical points to a former English major. I--"

"I thought you might have forgotten some of what you learned from your pre-Accounting major days, Randall." I snatched his pen away.

"Hey! That's a personalized executive pen, ya know! Sterling silver!"

I slipped the pen down my blouse, confident that Randall would never reach there. That guy didn't want me any more than I wanted him, which was about as much as I wanted an STD. Randall gritted his teeth, squeaking, "I was referring to that sentence." He pointed to the sentence above the one I thought he meant.

"Oh." Curses, I had ended the sentence with a preposition without any nerdy-sounding, literary B.S. justification. How would I save myself this time? "You see, I selected that specific sentence construction because--"

The answer arrived much too conveniently.

"Okay, everyone," Professor Oxley announced. "Peer editing's over. I want to quickly collect Week Eight's assignments. Make sure you have your name, the date, and course number written on your portfolio or commonplace book. Then put them in the basket right here next to my desk."

Randall shot up his hand to ask one of his typical goody-goody questions. That freed up my paper. I snatched it away, picked up my tote bag, and headed out the door. I had turned in my portfolio a week ago. Just as I reached the doorway, Randall began basking in Professor Oxley's attention and spewing out word for word what the man had said during his lecture, sort of like a Born Again prostitute beaming before a preacher. Performing proverbial lap-dancing, folks, is how you earn an A.

I knew the library would be open, so I wandered in that general direction. I needed to revise "Dolce Cioccolati," my now-slaughtered poem. Since nobody occupied a cubby in the far back corner, I plopped down my bag there. An industrial sized fan blared like a mutant insect. The library's excuse was that they were in the process of fixing the 1970s air-conditioning, which meant they could not run it. Lacking both headphones and earplugs, I had to endure the sound of a thousand flapping cicadas. Somehow it still wasn't as obnoxious as the sound of Randall's voice.

As I exchanged one word for another, revised syntax here and there, I thought about Randall, as much as I tried to avoid it. Whenever I wrote or read, I had to think about Randall. We taken writing and literature classes together since the days when the sky was green and the grass was blue. He wasn't a bad person and certainly not an evil one, even if he taunted random strangers with his keen spelling knowledge. Randall was simply annoying and unintentionally so. If I were the average American 19-year-old, I might blame his parents for creating an entitled snob of a young man, but I've always had more of a European streak. C'est la vie--et pas la culpibilité de ses parents. Randall could have resisted his parents coddling, he could have been as ornery as I was. Yet he smiled and dribbled and kicked his chubby Winnie the Pooh clad legs as he suffocated beneath the weight of his mother's breast. She would never wean him.

[Read the rest of the story here.]

Just Wandering

2009-05-26T18:44:00.000-07:00

“Just Wandering”
By Christine Stoddard

“You and I, Kelly, we think more than most people.”

“Stop being such a snob,” I muttered and coughed. He was smoking again, the asshole. He knew how much I hated it, how much it filled up my shriveled little lungs. Wasn’t I sick enough already? Surely Dale wanted to ignore the symptoms of heartache. Either that or he was convinced that I was a hypochondriac like everyone else in this wanna-be tie-wearing, Jaguar-driving world.
“All I’m saying…” His voice trailed off. It was a habit of his, like pathological smoking. He should have turned into a cigarette by now.
“I know what you’re saying. You don’t have to explain. I'm tired of listening to your raspy, know-it-all voice.”
“Moody, eh?” He took a long drag from his cigarette and stared at the moon, like a young Humphrey Bogart.
I jumped up and brushed the mulch off of my skirt. “You don’t look nearly as glamorous as you think you do.”
“Who said I was trying to look glamorous? If that’s what I wanted, I’d be sitting here in some faggotty sequined dress and lipstick, made up better than you in that ugly paisley dress.”
“Whatever.” I snatched the cigarette out of his mouth. “You’re trying to look cool and it’s pissing me off, Dale. Can't you stop smoking once and for all?”
He bolted up a few seconds later. In fact, his reaction was so delayed I could have sworn he was already dying of undiagnosed cancer. “Does every night have to end in a sermon?”
“This isn’t a sermon! This is your girlfriend--”
“Yes—“
“You’re the one lecturing me right now!” I shrieked. I tossed his hot cigarette to the ground and stomped on it like some rabid gopher. Besides, I didn’t like his comment on my paisley skirt. Not dress, skirt. Why did boys always confuse the two? They probably only grouped girl’s clothes in terms of difficult and easy access. In that case, skirts and dresses are the same.
“That was my last one, you bitch!” Dale’s eyes looked incredibly mean just then. Meaner than a rabid gopher’s.
“Well,” I spat, “You’d have more if you hadn’t smoked the rest of the carton—“
“I’ll smoke whatever the hell I want, whenever I want and you have no right to say anything about it.” It made me mad how handsome he looked in the starlight. It gave his eyes a corny gleam, like something out of a Cary Grant film. Wow, I wanted to kiss him and tear out his innards at the same time.
I paused and fingered my paisley skirt. It was bright purple short, cut with spaghetti straps. I didn’t usually wear short things but I did that night because I thought he would enjoy seeing my legs. Now I felt like I had cheated myself. I should have gone with the usual paint-splattered jeans, even if he hated them. At least then I wouldn’t be cold.
“Hey, you’re right. But I’m not going to stick around if you keep on smoking like this.”
“So what? I’m tired of you, anyway. You’re worse than Janie.”
“Don’t talk about that little slut in my presence.”
“Pretty judgmental tonight.”
“I just don’t want you talking about her.”
“She’s no slut.”
“Hell, of course she is.”
“You’ve gone further than her.”
“So what? Only with one person. She’s probably been felt up by eighty-seven dweebs already.” I shuddered but tried to control it so Dale wouldn’t notice. I didn’t want to appear overly dramatic. Those kind of people irk me.
“Thirty-six, if you go by her last tally. Now, do you mind fetching me another box of cigarettes from the car?”
“No.”
Dale picked the blade of grass that balanced on his knee as he sat cross-legged. “No, what?”
“I’m not fetching it for you.” I made sure to curl my fingers into little bunny ears around the word ‘fetching.’ It was one of those cutesy gestures that irked him as much as it irked me.
“Look, Kelly,” Dale started, “I just want a smoke.”
“That’s not all you want.”
He gulped. “Why won’t you—“
“’Cause I said no.”
“Virginity’s for the birds. You've said it yourself.”
“What, is this 1959? Quick talking like some cool cat beatnik.”
“I am a cool cat beatnik.” He furrowed his brow, as if he was entertaining a profound thought. It annoyed me how often he did that, as if everything Dale Clyde, Junior considered was wider and deeper than the universe himself. Already I knew he was destined for a fancy liberal arts school.
“See? I told you that you were trying to act cool.”
“Uh-huh.” He crumpled the blade of grass between his pointer finger and thumb. If it had been daylight, I probably would have seen green smears all over his skin. But it was nighttime and we were on another crummy date because he was too miserly to take me anywhere that cost more than $1 admission. Dale would rather shell out his spare change on his affectionately called ‘smokes.’ Bastard. For once I wish he would revere the right character in all those black-and-white movies we watched.
“No,” Dale went on in his irritating drawl, “You said I was trying to look glamorous.”
“Cool. Glamorous. What difference does it make?”
“Pick up a dictionary.”
“I don’t feel like it.” I didn’t like reference books, truthfully. They made me feel like a push-over for consulting them. Like their ink and pages gave them an authority I myself could never have. Sorry I’m made out of flesh, not paper.
“You’re such a drip, Kelly.”
“I’m not the one always wiping my nose with the back of my sleeve.”
“Oooh! Nice come-back! Christ, you’re being immature.” It wasn’t the first time someone had described me that way. My mother insisted that I was still a little girl; my father refused to believe that I would ever grow up.
And why were all of these thoughts colliding in my head? Why couldn't I just focus on our conversation? Why did I have to observe every detail and make every comparison? “I’m mature enough.”
“To what? Ride a two-wheel bike?” I knew he was picturing me in one of my billowing sundresses, hair flying through the sky, as I pedaled nervously on a wooden doll bicycle.
“I’m breaking up with you,” I blurted, just like that. Although the statement surprised me, I didn’t even gasp afterwards. We both knew it was coming. I had written enough angst poetry about that.
“S’okay. At least I won’t have to see your ugly dresses anymore.”
“And I won’t have to see your ugly jeans. How old are those things again?”
“Not as old as our love.”
“Ooh! Burn! Newsflash: I was never in love with you.”
“Congratulations for finally becoming introspective.”
“I hate you.”
“The feeling, my dear, is mutual.”
I gritted my teeth and tore my necklace off. It was a gold, heart-shaped one he gave me for our six-month anniversary. Then I chucked it right in his face, the face whose every freckle and wrinkle I knew.
He scoffed as the necklace slid down his chest and crumpled in his lap. Squeezing the necklace in one hand, Dale flicked open his lighter with the other. Then he united the necklace and lighter, burning the chain.
I clenched my fists and pressed my foot hard against the ground. He wanted me to react. He wanted me to yell for him to stop. He wanted to know that our relationship still meant something to me.
But I did not respond. The chain began to melt, dripping into metallic beads that splattered into the ground. I should've known it was nothing but cheap nickel, anyway.
“Bye, Dale.” I said it flatly, as if the words themselves contained no meaning. I wasn’t bidding a long-time boyfriend farewell. I was issuing syllables to the summer breeze. This is the age of immateriality, after all.
He dropped the necklace, along with his jaw. The hurt in eyes almost made me want to apologize, but I didn’t. I whipped around and kept walking without ever once looking back. The spookiest mummy could have emerged from behind me and gripped my ankles like in some B-list horror movie, but I still wouldn’t have looked back. This time Dale and I were breaking up for real, no exceptions. I had drawn too many asterisks next to my conditions before.

[Read the rest of the story here.]

Ending Freshman Year

2009-05-11T06:43:00.000-07:00

“Ending Freshman Year”

By Christine Stoddard

The cathedral overlooks a hobo park, where art students paint and fly kites on humdrum Sunday afternoons. Sometimes lovers set out old-fashioned picnics there, with a wicker basket and red tablecloth. But tonight it is empty, devoid of all the usual associations. I stare at the moon as my sister pushes an archaic microwave into the trailer our parents towed down from home. The moon cackles at the grunting girl with Tweety bird eyes. It always takes my side.

“Need help?” I mumble. I don’t really mean it. I’m standing in front of Sacred Heart, wondering how I can stuff the silver night clouds into the trailer. I, the greedy, nostalgic girl that I am, want to take everything.

My sister growls, not even bothering to face me, and hauls a beige television set from the moving cart she wheeled from her dorm to the street. The TV reminds me of one of the Jurassic computers on which I first practiced typing “Ariel Heart Love” back in kindergarten. I would print out ten sheets at a time and scribble pink crayon hearts all over.

My sister drops the giant box on the trailer floor and then fishes out a navy and white plaid bedspread from the moving cart.

I immediately stand up straight and ask, “Hey, where’d you get that?”

“Huh?” She flashes me her trademark ‘I’m studying Film at the best public art school in America and therefore holier than thou’ look.

I asked again, “Where’d you get that?”

“This bedspread?” She picks it up again from where she’s dropped it. “The trash. I was just going to wash it and use it. It looks almost new.”

“Almost.” I bend over and finger the majestic blue paint stain shaped like a castle. That’s where we were supposed to live one day. I trace over the tiny torrents I had overblown in my mind.

“Oh, I didn’t notice that stain,” my sister murmurs. “Whatever.” She scrunches up the bedspread and pushes it into the trailer. Then she reaches into the moving cart again, this time for a box brimming with glittery, ceramic fairies. They carry Celtic crosses and crystal balls, the sacrilegious sprites. I try to ignore the fact that they smell like wet rubber cement because of what rubber cement triggers in my head.

“Are you sure you still want it?”

“The bedspread?” My sister stares at me, those fairies still in her cut-up hands. “Yeah, I mean…look at it.” She points at it with her pixie chin. “It’s fine. What difference does one little stain make?”

It makes a royal difference. “No, you’re right. No difference at all.” I pause. “You’re not going to sleep with it, are you?”

“It’s a bedspread. What else would I do with it?”

I gulp through all the B.S. sloshing around my skull. A good answer has to exist in there somewhere. “Use it as a drape in one of your films. Or lie out your equipment on it instead of on the ground.”

“I hadn’t thought about that, but, no, I’m going to sleep with it.”

“How about that torn-up corner?”

I immediately seize the bedspread, pressing it close into my body, remembering how it felt the first time my skin touched it. It still feels soft and welcoming. I almost draw it up to my nose, but stop when my sister starts talking.

“What tear? Is it serious?” She steps closer to me.

My hands skims over the mass of cloth until they stumble upon what my heart hoped I would meet again. “Here. See?”

“That’s weird. It looks intentional.”

Forgetting my censorship, I blurt, “That’s because it is.” My mind jumps to those sturdy wrists trembling with the opening and closing of kitchen shears. He had needed the scrap of cloth for another one of his flamboyant collages. It was supposed to fill in a gap of his stormy sky.

“How do you know?” She scrunches up her round face and licks her upper-lip. It’s a habit of hers. I picture his lips and the way a fleck of gesso always managed to cling to his moustache back when I still knew him.

“I…I mean,” I say, stumbling for a valid response, “It looks so intentional, like you were saying. It couldn’t have been accident.”

My sister shrugs her shoulders. “Yeah.” Then she grabs a bouquet of wilted purple flowers from the bottom of the moving cart. “I can’t believe how much crap I had in my dorm. I should just throw it all away.”

I cringe when she says that, as if memories were so disposable. When I went up to help clean my sister’s dorm, I was so upset to see the discarded bits and pieces of student’s lives crumpled up in the hallway trashcans. Perhaps I am too sentimental. Evan was the opposite, always focusing on what was to come instead of what was before. My watering eyes jump to the ground and then back to his bedspread, still pinched by my sister’s grip.

“Mixed media’s the art of the future,” Evan explained the day my back first lied on that navy and white bedspread. He was hunched over a massive board of foam core, slicing out the contours of a silver knight. The knight, tall and brawny, held a shield that barely concealed his big body. On the shield was a neon green peace sign, just like the one painted on the city book mobile where Evan and I first met seven months before college began. I couldn’t tell if Evan was alluding to our first encounter or not.

I sat on his dirty floor, trimming strands of gold wire Evan would twist to form briar bushes to frame his noble knight. The television hummed with the voices of Biblical scholars as a punk song played from his computer, but everything was turned down too low for me to make out the words. I couldn’t tell Amorite from anarchy. I glanced up at the beads of sweat growing on Evan’s bare back. My gaze returned to the coils of wire before bouncing to the damp blue paint smeared on Evan’s jeans.

“What about multimedia?” I asked him, a couple minutes delayed. I always did that, treating conversations like I lived underwater where everything was stretched out for too long and words arrived too slowly for landlubbers’ tastes. In the end, that’s why Evan broke up with me. I was too distracted for his quest-oriented lifestyle.

“Mixed media, multimedia—same thing.” He paused and then set down the X-acto knife. “Ah, done!” Evan flashed at the knight at me and smiled. “It looks better than I thought.”

I grinned. “It looks great. Why—”

Just then Evan started to sit down on the bed. I tried to stop him but he had already brushed against the spread when I cried, “Stop!”

“What?”

“Look.” I pointed to the blue stain he left on the cloth.

“Ha, it looks like a castle.”

I smiled. “Yeah, but won’t your mom get mad?”

Evan suddenly clasped my face and pulled me toward his puckered lips. First I tasted the saltiness of his tongue and then I tasted the gum I hadn’t realized he’d been chewing. He ruffled my hair and told me he loved me. I cooed in his ear. We continued that way until he climbed on top of me for my first time. His first time. Our first time.

My sister snaps her fingers in my face, snatching me from my reveries. I hop a little and catch my breath in a way I haven’t done since that night with Evan. “Yeah?”

“How many times do I have to repeat myself? I know it’s a full moon, but, really…you’re acting dreamier than usual.”

“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t hear you.”

“Ugh.” My sister rolls her eyes and places her hand on her hip. “Could you watch my stuff while I go back to the dorm for the aquarium? It’s the least you could do.”

I nod, only then aware that I’m petting a small, white splotch on the bedspread. Somehow the bedspread found its way back into my grasp.

My sister wrinkles her nose, squints at the splotch and covers her mouth. “Eww! Is that what I think that is?”

“I…” I know it is but that confession will remain unspoken. I lock it up in a chest and feed the key to one of the ink dragons lurking around my brain. I love and hate how his illustrations still linger.

“That’s seriously disgusting. No wonder they threw it away. Some poor girl would rather toss it out than wash her ex-boyfriend’s…yuck.” She shuddered. “You know, you’re right. I’m putting this back in the trash where it belongs.”

My sister yanks the blanket away from me, but holds it far from her body as she walks back to her dorm. For some reason I can’t move. I feel like she is throwing away one of my memories, just dumping it into the trash with all of the other freshman castaways. I stand by the moving cart, wishing I had insisted on keeping it. Wishing Evan had never discarded it, even if the blue paint stain would have angered his mother.

I close my eyes and let the breeze caress my lips and tousle my hair, imagining the sight of Evan’s empty dorm room. The only trace of him is a tiny tinge of blue paint on the corner of his desk. And maybe a thread from his bedspread floating through the air, moments from falling to the floor.

A Strawberry Slurpee Day

2009-04-26T21:09:00.000-07:00

Grace pulled into the convenience store lot and turned off the ignition. It was only May, but the mercury practically burst out of the thermometer. The burgeoning art historian dreaded August already. She, nostalgic for J.M.W. paintings and Victorian impressionism, was not fond of the future. Southern summers were brutal enough without threats of global warming. The only solution for her desperate ennui: buy a slurpee.

With a $1.89 beverage on her mind, Grace hopped out of the car carrying a Tinkerbell shaped coin purse.

“Hey,” a hobo lingering outside of the store muttered. The girl’s hand had just touched the door.

Grace smiled politely and said, “Morning. Can I get you a soda, maybe a sandwich?”

“Naw, honey. I need money. Money only.”

Grace nodded and, protective of her coins, walked into the store. Five or six teenagers hovered over the neon-colored ice cream bin, rummaging through over-priced frozen treats. A gray-haired man in a wheelchair perused the fruit juices. The cashier, afflicted with the sniffles, thumbed through a special edition tabloid.

“Can I help you?” the cashier asked, without looking up from grainy photos of Brittany Spears and Jennifer Aniston. It was only then that Grace realized she had paused long enough at the front of the store to catch attention.

Grace broke out of her stare and shook her head. “No, thanks. I know exactly what I want.”

The cashier didn’t reply. Instead, he flipped the page and gaped.

A few seconds later, Grace was at the back of the store, pulling a clean cup off of the stack next to the slurpee machine. She pushed the machine’s button for strawberry, but nothing came out.

“Hey!” A gruff voice croaked from above like some angry angel in the heavens. Grace, frowning thanks to her empty cup, looked up.

A lump of a man, covered in black grease and icy slurpee clumps, was perched on top of the machine next to a blue tool bag. He wore a big patch of the dyed ice over his left eye.

“Oh, sorry!” Grace gasped, realizing that pressing the button must have splattered slurpee gunk all over the man. “I didn’t see you. How—what—”

“I’m trying to fix the machine here.”

“It was an accident.”

The man threw a wrench down on the machine as he scoffed, “God, how many times have I heard that before?”

“Really, it—”

“How many other accidents have you made? How many other accidents do you plan to make?”

Grace gulped, responding only with silence. Maybe it hadn’t been a strawberry slurpee day, after all.

“How old are you, girl?”

“I just turned twenty.”

“Twenty.” The repairman mulled over the word. He tossed a screwdriver up into the air and caught it before demanding, “What are you doing with your life?”

“I…I’m studying art history at—”

“An art student, eh? Huh, I was an art student, too.”

Grace loosened up her shoulders. “Really? Here? I mean down at—”

“Yep. And look at me—fixing slurpee machines at 7-Eleven in the same town where I grew up. Lived in New York for five years after I graduated but then I came right back.”

“It’s a creative endeavor, I guess. Fixing the machine, that is.”

“Not really. All I ever have to do is connect the red wire to the blue wire. See, it’s just hard to get a hold of the blue wire. Somehow it always manages to drown in excess slurpee down in the machine. You should take a look at all the rainbow slush pools up here sometime.” The man licked some of the ice off of his fingers and then wiped his hands on his janitorial pants. “Who’s your favorite artist?”

[Read the rest of the story here.]

Pound Cake

2009-04-23T18:50:00.000-07:00

“Pound Cake”
By Christine Stoddard

It is Monday and the watch-worshipping doctor has left the premises. He flicked his wrist to check the hour, cursed hypochondriacs, and marched straight out. He never even left a bill. Perhaps the stench of rice and beans offended him. Adria does not pretend to know. The moment the doctor walked out the door, Adria threw her thermometer out the window. It landed in her mother’s pepper garden but Adria is too happy to care.

Curled up beneath a Mexican blanket on her pullout bed, Adria flips through an old fashion magazine. She relishes the fact that all of the photos feature embarrassingly tacky outfits. The little invalid dreams of strutting through now-dead towns in polyester blouses and garters. She turns pages to the beat of songs by El Columpio Asesino. The volume’s up all the way. Most of the time, Adria can only decipher a third of the lyrics, thanks to her faulty Spanish and perpetually noisy household. The screams of “pendejo” this and “puta” that. As Adria reads, she wraps the blanket tighter and tighter around her skinny body, the body her mother so desperately tried to fatten up with chalupas and sopapillas before resorting to gringo food.

Adria plucks at a slab of pound cake that her mother made sure found its way into her daughter’s mausoleum. The cake represents the only item in the room lighter than a strip of fried steak. Beside the cake, Adria’s skin appears even grayer than usual. The faded sepia tone photos in the archaic fashion magazine are more golden than she is.

After reading some other fashion magazine her cousin brought from the outside world, Adria painted the walls of her room black. That was seven months ago and Adria had not left her bed since.

“There are so many chemicals in that paint,” her mother had said the day Adria collapsed. “To think that you never even opened the windows.”

“I was afraid a bird would fly in and never fly out,” Adria responded through coughs. Her mother had buried her under an avalanche of shawls and given her spicy hot chocolate. “Remember how that happened in our other barrio? And I found the bird dead on the floor?”

“But that was back in Mexico, hija, where the birds are beautiful. What sort of birds fly in this Chicago? Ugly, brown ones, like ratones pequeños. Who cares if they get trapped?” Her mother paused and pursed her lips. “Drink.”

“You put chili powder in it.”

“Better than that Swiss Miss they give you at the school cafeteria.” Adria’s mother pronounced the brand like ‘Sweese Meese.’ “I’ve tasted it, so I know. Now drink and get better. I can’t wait on you always.”

Adria’s eyes fell on the mug of chocolate and then moved to her mother before falling on the mug again. Adria shrugged her shoulders and chugged the chocolate for a couple seconds. Then she gagged.

“It’s too hot, Mami.”

“Tsk! Siempre estás quejándote. I’ll get you some gringo bread to mop it up.”

“Thank you, Mami.”

Adria’s mother scuttled into the kitchen. Adria, still sitting in bed, stared at a poster of Audrey Hepburn she had taped to the wall.

“Her bony shoulders remind me of wings,” Adria’s mother said when she first noticed the poster. “These American women never eat. Just peck, like birds.”

Adria whispered, “I think she’s beautiful.” This occurred only about an hour after Adria had fallen. Adria rested in her mother’s bedroom, away from the paint fumes. Somehow Adria had managed to chuck the carton of cigarettes she had pocketed before her mother even picked up her daughter’s thin frame from the floor.

“You would. Is that why you starve yourself?”

[Read the rest of the story here.]

The Pigeon Predator

2009-04-21T05:45:00.000-07:00

The pond is still, placid on the balmy spring day. Willows sway gently in the warm breeze as dragonflies dart in and out of reeds. The sun hovers dreamily high above. It is a beautiful afternoon, hardly one that seems sinister.

In the painterly clouds, a stark white pigeons pumps its wings. Suddenly it swoops down toward the pond for a drink. The pigeon swiftly lands and takes a few sips before nestling in the grass for a rest. It thinks of bird things, like the best way to build a nest and incubate eggs.

Meanwhile, the surface of the pond just barely trembles. Something—a hungry something that eyes the pale pigeon—lurks beneath the algae infested waters. The pigeon continues grooming itself, not sensing even the slightest danger. Its mind is on the gastronomical differences between sunflower and poppy seeds.

The predator, however, does not care for seeds. It craves meat, specifically plump, juicy pigeon meat. It slowly approaches the pigeon, careful not to disturb the waters enough to stir suspicion within the bird’s little brain. As starved as it is for new flesh, the predator knows the value of patience.

A swarm of gnats zooms toward the pigeon and floats around the bird’s head. The pigeon bobs up and down, but the gnats remain. Then it beats around wildly, taking several steps away from the pond. The predator holds its breath, praying that the pigeon won’t fly away. The pigeon doesn’t but it is now farther from the predator than it was before. The pigeon sits down again, happy that the gnats did not follow it to its new patch of grass. The predator curses the gnats for making the pigeon scurry away from its convenient location but keeps faith. Dinnertime is so near.

A soft gust of wind ruffles the feathers on the top of the pigeon’s head. The bird stares out at the pond and blinks. Cackling below the waters, the predator the predator ignores the sound of its roaring stomach and surges onward. Its stomach growls again, but there’s no reason to stop now, not when the prey is so close.

[Read the rest of the story here.]

Happy Easter, Isabelle

2009-04-11T11:18:00.001-07:00

Isabelle woke up light-headed. The ceiling wavered as she tried to determine what the splotch on it was. All Isabelle knew was that the splotch resembled a gray eye peering down at her in her white cotton nightgown. The art student rolled over and gently tapped her radio alarm clock until it ceased playing. Isabelle never laughed when characters axed their alarm clocks in classic cartoons. She liked the sound of Claude Debussy in the morning.

The girl pulled her gown off and wandered to the sink. She gazed at the lavender bags above her cheeks, wishing they formed thanks to a long night of studying art history textbooks. She sighed, seized the strand of dental floss hanging from the edge of the sink, and dropped the string into the trashcan. Her boyfriend never remembered to clean up after himself. After letting the faucet run for a couple of seconds, Isabelle splashed some water into her mouth. She swished it around and then spat it out, ignoring the blood that swirled down the drain.

A moment later, Isabelle stood before her closet. She fingered an old, lace blouse and wondered when its threads would finally break. It should have become a moth’s tender feast by now. Once she slipped on the blouse, Isabelle grabbed a pair of faded jeans and danced into her sandals. Then she slid her sketchbook into the purse hanging on the front doorknob and left. She did not lock the door behind her.

The elevator usually took several minutes to reach the thirteenth floor where Isabelle lived. She smiled when she thought of how some places did not label their thirteenth floors, instead calling them ‘the fourteenth.’

“How primitive,” Isabelle whispered to herself and let out a small breath of air she wasn’t aware she had been holding.
The elevator chimed and Isabelle stepped inside. Out of habit, she immediately pressed the button, even though no one approached the doors. Isabelle scrunched up her nose and wiped her fingers on her pants. Someone had smeared a sticky substance across the button.

Once the elevator doors opened, Isabelle stepped out. As usual, she failed to acknowledge the half-asleep security guards as she passed the front desk. She pushed through the exit and sprinted to the bus stop.

The bus was just pulling up when Isabelle arrived. She flashed her student I.D. without smiling at the driver and plopped down. On this Easter eve morning, Isabelle was the only passenger on the bus. She crossed her legs tight and then turned around to observe everything the bus lapsed. Seven bicyclists, three dogs, and four flower patches later, Isabelle pulled the cord and jumped off the bus. The driver started to say something to her, but Isabelle fled much too quickly to hear the sentence completed.

Despite her heels, she whizzed by the library, the campus art building just barely in sight. Fluorescent lights shone through its windows.

“Please be open, please be open,” she muttered. When sweat started to grow on her skin, Isabelle finally came to a halt and caught her breath. Then she fished out her phone to check the time. It was barely eleven o’clock. Isabelle rested her hand on the birch tree beside her and bit her lip. “Why did I think it was so much later?”

Suddenly a storm of children rushed in Isabelle’s direction. She darted behind the birch, before realizing the children were trying to talk to her.

“If you died today, would you go to Heaven or Hell?” the oldest of the dozen, no more than about seven years old, challenged her.

Isabelle blinked but when she opened her eyes, the children hadn’t vanished. She took the pamphlet one of the children gave her and flipped through it before responding. It was an evangelical publication printed by one of the city churches. “I’m not sure anyone knows. That’s a very big question.”

The children remained, all cocking their heads at her, as if they had rehearsed their reaction. To sunder the awkward silence, Isabelle cleared her throat and asked the children what their church was doing for Easter.

“We got an Easter egg hunt today,” a tiny boy with a backwards baseball cap answered. “Wanna come?”

Isabelle smiled politely. “What’s your church doing tomorrow for Easter?” she repeated, this time turning to one of the older children.

[Read the rest of the story here.]

A Destitute Reflection

2009-04-04T18:27:00.000-07:00

Connor scuttled through the crowds of people waiting in line for the film festival as the sun beat too hard overhead. The phony film buffs wore red laminated passes swinging from cheap lanyards. Connor hated that blinding color but, even more so, he hated all the smiling men and women standing outside the cinema. They seemed too happy for people about to cram themselves into a dark room for twelve hours straight with nothing to eat but over-priced, over-salted, over-buttered popcorn.

“Idiots,” Connor muttered, “Most of them have on glasses just to look educated. Even people with 20/20 vision have them on.” He spat on the sidewalk, hoping one of the ladies in tacky heels would step in his glob of mucus. Connor relished the thought of ruining someone’s ugly shoes—especially the ugly shoes of someone lifeless enough to enjoy sitting before a screen for a half a day. Maybe then the lady would remove her shoes and curl up barefoot on the theatre seat, getting her sole sweat all over the cushion. The next person who sat there would never, ever suspect that his professorial tweed pants were about to meet layers of toe jam. This ignorance pleased Connor.

Connor eventually squeezed out of the crowd, like a single louse dropping from a recently treated head of hair. He dragged his feet along the sidewalk, mostly staring at his sneakers and the gum smeared across the concrete. The gum came in all colors but lung pink and crap brown dominated. Several yards after Connor had escaped the “insipid twits,” he bent down to pick up a greasy penny. He rubbed it between his fingers and sighed at its filth. Couldn’t even the smallest thing shine anymore?
Connor dropped the penny into one of his sagging pockets and continued walking. The clanking of cars and whirring of voices grew fainter the longer he trudged forward. But as the noises outside of his ears faded, the noises inside of them amplified. Something within his ears seemed to flutter, like a trapped moth. Connor swatted at his left ear and then his right, almost as if he were throwing punches at whatever insect had invaded them.

“Stop it!” he grumbled. “Stop it! Go away!”

But the fluttering persisted.

“What’s the matter, boy?” a scraggly voice came from behind Connor. Connor whipped around and stared at a lump of a man displaying rags like a sad Christmas tree. The man’s beard rested on top of his potbelly the same way a cat snuggles up against its owner sitting before the fireplace. But this cat was gray with dirt and coarse from age. It would not meow a “Happy Holidays!” as chestnuts roasted over dancing flames. It would remain there, lethargy brought on by grime.

“I…” Connor started but his voice did not know where to go.

“What’s the matter?” the hobo repeated.

“Something’s in my ear.”

“No problem. I can get it out for you.”

Connor stared at the man, convinced that he did not want the filthy hobo to touch him. “No, I’ll—thanks, but…I’ll take care of it myself.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

The two men stared at each other for the length of several flutters. Then the hobo extended a soda cup and asked, “Could you spend some spare change, boy?”

Connor sighed. He fished the mucky penny from his pocket and threw it into the cup.

“Thank you, boy, thank you very much.” The hobo then pulled one of the hanging rags from his arm and pitched it toward Connor.

Connor whispered, “Yeah, whatever,” and seized the rag as it soared through the air. Then he pivoted away from the hobo and headed to the seediest, loneliest part of city that came to mind. Crowds of tourists would be the last things he’d see there.

[Read the rest of the story here.]

Yellow Horse

2009-03-23T20:09:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, there lived a horse brighter than sunshine. His shimmering yellow coat rivaled dandelions and daffodils. The horse towered so high above the rest of the farm animals that his combined height and yellowness made him the most magnificent creature in all the land. The details of his appearance further amplified his sheer splendor. His flowing mane grazed his front legs and his tail trailed behind him like a bride’s graceful train. The yellow horse charmed all who merely glimpsed at him. Over the course of his lifetime, hundreds had begged the horse’s owner to ride him but the farmer never relented. He permitted only brief contact, from a few strokes to a single hug. Many chose the latter. All who pressed their heads against the yellow horse’s soft neck and sniffed him claimed that he smelled of nascent dew.
In an effort to maintain the creature’s glorious coat and enchanting scent, the horse’s suspicious owner fed him bales of buttercups and forbade him from drinking anything but fresh buttermilk. The farmer deemed any other diet bad luck. The farmer’s daughter also brushed the horse three times daily and cleaned out his stall just as often.
“Your coat is your treasure,” the farmer regularly said, articulating every syllable, as he patted the horse, “Your coat is your purpose.”
The horse, who took religious pride in his yellow hair and hooves, did not slog like the other farm animals. Instead of putting the yellow horse to work in the fields, the farmer put him to work in shows and fairs. The yellow horse won every pageant in the region. More of the horse’s blue ribbons and trophies lined the shelves in the farmer’s house than books. No other animal drew more spectators in all the land. Visitors paid a shilling just to visit the horse in his stall outside of pageant season. With that money, the farmer was able to buy new bulbs, seeds, agricultural supplies, and anything he and his family could not produce on their land. The horse shared the farmer’s fear that labor would dull his brilliant color.
“You,” the farmer told the horse again and again, “Must remain in your stall. Only I am allowed to free you. There’s no need for you to go out into the fields like the ox or the mule. They are ugly and meant for work.”
The yellow horse nodded, understanding every word. While the ox and the mule toiled beneath the skies darkening with rain or in the unmerciful summer air, the yellow horse stayed in his stall. He munched on buttercups or lazily followed butterflies with his expressive eyes. With each day, the yellow horse became even more beautiful.
“You’re lovely,” the farmer’s daughter told the yellow horse every morning. The girl woke up early with the rest of the family to begin the day’s work, but she was always the first to the barn, eager to stroke the yellow horse. The early morning was the only time during the whole day the girl could admire the horse by herself. Too often, visitors pushed the girl out of the barn, demanding that she serve them cookies and lemonade. But at the birth of cockcrow, as the girl bolted out of bed and pulled on her gingham dress, she did not have to worry about any visitors.
The yellow horse basked in the girl’s ritualistic praises. Each one of her caresses made him feel prouder and prouder of his unusually hued coat. Meanwhile, the mule’s hooves tore through mud, smearing worms across the soil, and the ox’s back sagged just a little bit more than the day before. Nobody, not even the farmer’s daughter, ever bothered to visit the mule or ox. Never once did anyone remark on the color of their coats, except to call the animals common. The mule and ox did not feast upon buttercups or drink sweet buttermilk. They ate the food of beasts meant to work.
One day, the farmer sent his daughter to the buttercup patch to gather more of the yellow horse’s food.
“See how little there’s left in his trough,” the farmer said, “How can he ever survive on such meager portions?”
The daughter immediately set forth, swinging her wicker basket and humming a fairy’s tune. Undoubtedly, the girl wanted to provide the best for her yellow horse. She left the barn and climbed over a steep hill not far from her house. When she reached the top, the girl lied down on the damp grass and rolled to the opposite side of the hill.
“Yellow, yellow, yellow!” she shrieked all the way down. Farm life rarely let her enjoy such frivolity. Upon reaching the opposite side of the hill, the girl scampered to the buttercup patch. She did, after all, have many chores ahead of her. But instead of finding flowers, the farmer’s daughter stumbled across a flock of birds.
“Shoo!” the girl yelled. She ran around frantically, waving her arms in an attempt to scare the birds to the skies. They all ignored her. Figuring herself outnumbered, the little girl started up the hill again. The climb up was much harder than the climb down. She already feared her father’s reaction.
“What do you mean there are no buttercups left?” the farmer asked, “What will the yellow horse eat?”
The girl stared at the ground, counting the pebbles beside her feet. “Twenty-two,” she muttered.
“What?”
The girl looked directly at her father and said, “We could feed him wheat.”
“Wheat? You mean hay? It might be good enough for a mere mule but not my precious yellow horse! What would happen to his coat if we fed him wheat? How many awards would he win for being a blonde horse? Everyone has seen a blonde horse! But a sunshine yellow one? Think!”
“What if we give him the freshest, most golden wheat?”
“No,” the farmer spat, “Do not disgrace me with such stupid talk. I want you to go into the forest and search for buttercups.”
“But there are wolves in the forest!”
“They sleep during the day. You will be safe. It’s early yet. Why, the sun has only just risen.”
The farmer’s daughter gulped.
“Come on,” the farmer said, “You don’t want the yellow horse to starve, do you? What would happen to our family then? Without the yellow horse, we starve, too.”

[Read the rest of the story here.]

Chandra's Case

2009-03-17T06:35:00.000-07:00

Chandra sprinted through the woods behind her house with the swiftness of all the sprites she had read about in her storybooks. The tiny spines of blonde hair on her legs shone in the early spring sunlight. She felt enchanted. By what, she knew not, nor did she care. Chandra only knew that the day was beautiful and that somehow she had to capture a sliver of it to remember forever.
The little girl, the one of fairytale long hair and large, serene eyes, normally struck the adults in her life as strangely ambitious. Her heart wanted to conquer all.
Over tea one afternoon, Chandra’s mother chatted with her sisters and neighbors about how much her daughter wanted to visit the moon. Scores of sugar cookies sat on platters set on the table.
“Doesn’t every kid?” the sisters and neighbors said, shrugging their shoulders and sipping their tea. One or two of them nibbled on their cookies, sending flakes of sugar flying to the floor.
“But Chandra wants to kiss it. She wants to hug it—no! Embrace it. Love it.”
“Oh, you know what they say about the moon. Maybe she just likes cheese,” one sister teased, “C’mon, stop being so poetic.”
But Chandra’s mother was no poet. A pragmatic woman who arranged the contents of her kitchen cupboard alphabetically and never once tried a new recipe, she sighed at Chandra’s odd behavior. She did not understand the girl who aspired to draw crayon portraits of everyone in the many countries and kingdoms she promised herself she would one day see. She did not understand why anyone would ever want to leave the comforts of the routine they knew in their homes.
Chandra’s father, too, lacked the sentiments of a poet. He kept only one photograph in his house and that was the picture taken on his wedding day. (Of course, the picture’s true purpose in the home was questionable, as the frame covered up an unfortunate stain on the wall.) Chandra’s father denounced religion, ate only five different meals, and, since the age of twenty, always appeared about ten years older than he actually was. He rarely smiled.
With such bland parents, no one could determine the source of Chandra’s overwhelming curiosity and vivacity. At every moment, she seemed thrilled just to breathe, as if even the common air contained some kind of sparkling magic.
“Chandra does not walk,” her kindergarten teacher once mused, “She dances with the angels.”
And that day, that beautiful day in early spring as she ran through the woods, Chandra again danced with the angels. She twirled in and out of the trees, beaming. The sounds of songbirds filled her ears and, despite how close her home lied to a bog, she saw more butterflies than mosquitoes regardless of the reality.
The girl hopped from toadstool to toadstool, careful not to stomp upon them. She had barely grazed one with her tiny toe before she proceeded to the next. After jumping from one to another in a row of toadstools, Chandra softly landed on a patch of dewy moss that moistened her doll feet.
Chandra paraded a few steps forward, admiring the aroma of daffodils and crocuses. Their colors wove in and out of her field of vision as they competed with the colors of honeysuckle and tulips several yards in front of her. But the child’s peaceful stroll was soon interrupted. She stumbled and fell face down, her small nose sliding into the soil.
She gasped. Right before her rested a bone. Chandra sat up and seized the bone to inspect it. The bone was dark ivory with flecks of gray, like the surface of the moon. It was part of a pony’s jaw. Chandra shook the jaw and the teeth nestled in it shook to make a morbid kind of music. They clicked and clacked against each other. Even after the music ended, the teeth moved a bit. Chandra wanted a tooth.

[Read the rest here.]

Bertha's Books

2009-03-12T07:18:00.000-07:00

The electric doors squeaked open as slowly as the disoriented drivers moved their cars in the parking lot. A draft whistled through the lobby, but, when the doors parted, winter winds overwhelmed the weak indoor breeze. It was cold outside, with bites of sleet sailing through the air. Not

a single green plant prevailed. Tan and faded chocolate dappled the dreary landscape. Even the more modern townhouses and offices in the neighborhood seemed to sag. Nothing escaped the wintry bleakness. Yet Bertha had another reason for seeking shelter in the library.

As the large woman rolled her suitcase into the building, more than one person pretended not to stare at her. Bertha said nothing and only ran a fleshy hand through her off-white hair as she looked around the lobby. No matter what, Bertha's chipped nails were all different lengths. They often snagged the coarse mane that coiled into woolly bunches and framed the strangely small face. Piggishly upturned, the nose almost touched the perpetually pursed lips. The dark eyes nearly bumped into each other. Everything appeared too close, crowded. Only the cheeks were ample. They hung loosely in flabs that formed the doughy body. The complexion was as hazy as the fog hovering outside.

Those details, however, only revealed themselves to keen spectators. To everyone else, Bertha mostly seemed big. Her clothes were too bulky for casual observers to make out the Rubenesque curves of her figure. Her trademark rose-colored ski jacket puffed out to disguise her true weight; her navy blue sweatpants billowed with her every step. The woman's clunky shoes, those scuffed-up messes of cheap leather from Salvation Army, made even her naturally tiny feet seem gargantuan.

[Read the rest of the story here.]

Nude Death

2009-03-06T20:45:00.000-08:00

Claire trudges up the stairs, dragging a stretched canvas with her. She is naked, except for the small knapsack covering a patch of her back. At forty years of age, the color in eyes has started to fade from mountaintop azure to a softer, sea level mist. Wrinkles frame the sides of her mouth. Her fingers are knobbier than they had been. But age alone cannot account for Claire’s melting beauty. Her sister blames Claire’s chain-smoking but that isn’t it, either. It’s the disappointment swelling in her chest.
Claire is a classically trained artist but for the past year, she has not sold a single painting. When the first month without a check passed, Claire shrugged her shoulders and continued painting. She figured it was a sign to focus on a new series of hers, one concentrating solely on dogwood trees. She holed herself up in her apartment and drank inhuman amounts of coffee. After the first week, Claire had already become a recluse and an insomniac. Her only desire was to paint and occasionally sneak in a mouthful of chocolate or a bite of a bagel.
But as the months droned on and her savings ran dry, Claire soon had no money for her rent or even food. After starving herself for three days, she realized she needed to find a steady job to survive. So, going against every will in her body, Claire applied to teach day classes at the local community center and night classes at the nearest community college. It was the beginning of Claire’s journey to the depths of her depression.
Every minute Claire spent in class meant another minute away from her work. Every minute she spent critiquing a student’s piece meant one minute fewer for her to reflect upon her own paintings and how to improve them. It meant less time submitting her paintings to competitions and galleries. Claire hated her students for robbing her time and forcing her to stare at their inferior interpretations of countryside homes and flower gardens. Claire loathed the students’ poor forms, their crooked contours, their off-colors, and their shoddily stretched canvases. Everything about their work sickened her. And since she spent so many hours teaching to pay her bills, she found herself feeling sick more often than not. Teaching makes her stomach literally churn.
For the last few months, she has been suffering a serious malady. In order to end it, she has to die. She neither sees nor cares for any other solution.
This evening, Claire has just returned from teaching a lesson on watercolors. The red wisps and smears of paint one of her students used to depict the sunset startled her. They were the same shades she expected an innocent bystander to see on the sidewalk only a few hours from then. The same shades you expect to see when you first notice her fall.
But you are a stranger and know nothing of Claire yet. You are still at home, preparing for your evening stroll. You can’t find your sneakers and suspect maybe your dog buried them in the yard again.
The garage is nearly empty. At most, ten cars are parked in the lot designed for 100. It is so hot that Claire wonders if the cars felt like sweating. She puts the canvas down on the ground for a moment and wipes her brow. Anyone looking on who knew Claire planned to commit suicide within the next few minutes may have assumed she is rethinking her choice. But she does not. Claire just doesn’t want her wet skin to make her any less aerodynamic as she glides through the air.
You spot your sneakers peering out from under the kitchen fridge. Apparently your dog discovered a new hiding place for them. You pull out the shoes and slip them on, finally ready to get your exercise of the day.
Claire stands against the garage wall and peers down at the street. All the people are gummy bears and the people, gumdrops. She whips out her brush and jars of acrylic and paints her last view of the earth.
At least you thought you were ready for your walk. Now your dog’s leash has disappeared and you have to look for that, lest a policeman write you a ticket for letting your dog run loose. You search the whole house.
Claire’s strokes come out in dashes. She works speedily. The painting is impressionistic. Soon all the people and cars emerge from the dashes. Claire wants to finish the painting fast.
The leash is right where you left it, hanging on a hook in the coat closet. Your eyes had jumped right over it. For some reason, you’re distracted, nervous. You sigh, call the dog, leash him up, and head out the door. The humidity hits you immediately so you roll up the sleeves of your T-shirt. Your shoulders are bare.
The painting’s done. Claire scans it and hastily signs it. Then she tosses it over the edge of the garage and watches it flutter down to the sidewalk, which it touches with almost no sound.
You’re downtown with your dog, feet and paws beating the pavement. Up ahead, you catch sight of something rectangular resting on the sidewalk, right at the start of a hill. You ask yourself what the object is. As you come closer, you realize that it’s a painting and you wonder where it came from. Naturally, you look up.
Claire dangles a leg over the garage wall. She starts humming a tune she made up herself but wavers. She pulls her other leg up and dangles it over the wall, too. Claire just sits there and hums like Humpty-Dumpty.
You first note that the woman is nude. That observation stuns you so much that you almost forget to question why she’s teetering so precariously from the top of the building. Then it dawns on you. Images of splashing blood haunt you, even though they’re only in your mind.

[Read the rest of the story here.]

One Glove

2009-03-01T10:24:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, two little girls lived in a small, muddy town. From their foggy eyes to their soft curls and round fingers, they were identical. Even in action, Maurya and Macayla mirrored each other. Because their mother dressed them in the same white lace dresses, nobody would have been able to tell them apart if it had not been for the fact that their mother braided Maurya’s hair and pulled Macayla’s back into a loose ribbon. The twins played, breathed, and lived together. Like the most passionate of lovers, their hearts assumed the same rhythm.

And that is why what happened during their trip to town on that steaming May Day proved so tragic.

Maurya and Macayla, in a flourish of seven-year old rebellion, chose to play hooky that day. They had agreed to skip school the previous night, as they lied in their shoddy bed together exchanging gossip. So the next morning, as their parents toiled away on the farm, the twins relished the sunshine and butterflies. Anyone five years older than they would have looked upon the early scene with fond remembrance of simpler times.

The day started when the two girls kissed their parents farewell and pretended to head off to their lessons. But instead of making the trek to the schoolhouse, they stopped at a stonewall at the edge of their farm. Then they sat down and kicked their bare feet through the wildflowers that grew there. An hour or two of idle conversation passed before the children felt hungry and pawed through their lunch pails.

Maurya bit into her warm cheese sandwich and Macayla bit into hers. The cheese had been fresh that morning when they packed their lunches but now it was on the verge of spoiling beneath the late spring sun.

Maurya spat out the bite she had taken and scrunched up her face.

"Oh, it's not that bad," Macayla muttered, in a rare instance of divergence from her sister.

"You say that," Maurya shot back, "But you were the one who got sick last weekend at the picnic, not me."

"The food didn't make me sick. Mum said the ham was fine. It was the water, she said. The water in that part of town is bad."

Maurya shook her head. "No, it was the ham. It tasted funny, I remember. Now let's throw these away and get something else to eat."

"There's nothing else left in the icebox except for the ice cream."

"Why can't we have that?"

"'Cause Mum said to wait. You know that. We're bringing it to Lucy's birthday party tomorrow."

Maurya sighed and remained quiet for a moment. Then she squeezed a daisy head in between her toes. She plucked the head off and laughed. Macayla copied her but did not laugh.

"Macayla, I have an idea."

"Okay, but we're not eating the ice cream."

"I know. But I'm still hungry. Let's go into town. We still have our allowance."

Maurya shrugged her shoulders and jumped off the wall with her sister. They pressed their pink feet to the gravel path before them, holding hands and chatting as the crows above them cawed. They walked beneath a series of towering trees until they reached the nearest town.

The streets were empty while everyone slaved away at work or school. Nobody expected the twins to be wandering around from business to business. Nobody expected anyone to be wandering around at all. In fact, most of the shops were closed and would not open until later in the afternoon. It was the town’s unusual way.

After wandering more than they would have liked, Maurya and Macayla saw that the butcher shop was open. Its door hung out into the street. Figuring that they could buy a couple slices of ham, the girls pulled out their coins and stepped into the shop.

A whirring sound, like that of a machine pressed to bone, inundated the small space in which they stood. But they could not see the butcher at work. He was in the backroom.

“We could come back later,” Maurya mouthed.

Macayla refused. “I’m hungry now. Besides, I bet he’s almost done.”

The twins remained at the very entrance of the store yet quickly grew impatient. Maurya began poking Macayla and Macayla poked her back. Soon enough, they were darting back and forth, chasing each other within a four or five foot radius.

It was Macayla who dared escape the girls’ imaginary circle. She jumped so far out of it that her back pressed against the glass meat case. Maurya, meanwhile, stood still, too timid to get so close to the source of that unnerving sound.

“Come on,” Macayla impishly beckoned, “He’s in the back with that dumb machine. He’s not right here. You’re not scared of a meat case, are you?”

Maurya shook her head no and trudged over to her sister. And then her pretty eyes widened.

“Macayla,” she whispered and pointed to area behind her sister.

[Read the rest of the story here.]

The Cheese Master

2009-02-27T20:33:00.000-08:00

When Sirlia did not dance, she worked in her parents' cheese shop, located between a bike repair shop and a large, commercial bookstore. At least that was the alleged reason the girl spent so many hours alone in her parents' business. In all honesty, she had nothing else to do besides

bore herself at school. More often than not, Sirlia played opera records on an old phonograph as she drew outlines of strange figures in the cheese meant for finicky customers.

Sirlia began by slicing the cheese into thin flaps, sometimes as fine as paper if she felt particularly diligent. Then she took a toothpick or pin and conjured zebras, penguins, dragons, llamas, and any other beast that enchanted her imagination that hour. If she made any mistakes, she simply smoothed them out with the warmth of her fingers. Once Sirlia finished drawing the creature, she pressed down the toothpick against the completed contours, and carved the animal out of its cheese cage. Only she had the power, or desire, to set the miniature beast free. Anyone else would have laughed at the sight of an animal in his slice of cheese and then shoved it into a sandwich with some salami or bologna. The sounds of Salome announced the cheese creature's newfound liberty.

"One day," Sirlia whispered to every beast she made, "You shall return to your mother. I promise." The girl sat by the cheese shop's window, stretching her arm out to hold the silhouette of the beast against the lemon moon hovering in the sky. The creatures never responded, no matter how much as Sirlia thought they did.

Sirlia's parents disregarded the girl's unusual pastimes, asking only that she be happy. With her defect, they worried she would never have friends or a husband. They were sad to see that she did not have success even at school. So, taking pity on her, if, from the backroom of the shop, they heard a customer impatiently ringing the bell and Sirlia failing to attend to the sir or madam, Mother or Father would rush up to the main counter. They committed such a rescue almost daily.

"How may I help you?" either Mother or Father would inquire the customer who tapped his foot or furrowed her brow.

Meanwhile, Sirlia continued talking to her cheese beasts, from finger-sized men to owls.

"I need a pound of provolone, please."

Pavarotti blared in the background.

"Provolone? Of course. Would you be interested in any of our other—"

"No, thank you. Just provolone."

"Alright." The parent would then turn and call to the distant daughter. "I need more wax paper, Sirlia."

[Read the rest of the story here.]

ROYGBIV

2009-02-21T06:25:00.000-08:00

“What about the blue one, Eddie?” the red-faced man asked, removing an indigo bear from a pile of his polyester companions.
“Naw,” Eddie said and clutched his newfound white friend.

His father tightened his thin lips and flared his nostrils impatiently. After a ten second pause, he muttered, “But the white one has a pink bow.”

Little Eddie glanced down at his dollar store treasure and tugged its tiny bow. “I like pink, Daddy.”

Eddie’s father blushed and snatched the white bear away from Eddie. Two elderly women stared at him strangely, but immediately returned to comparing plastic fashion dolls when they realized Eddie’s father caught them looking. Eddie’s father cleared his throat and took a deep breath of cheap Chinese clay and rubber bouncy balls.

“You know,” he began, kneeling down so that he was eye-level with his son, “Blue is Daddy’s favorite color, so it would make Daddy really happy if you chose the blue bear.”

Eddie sighed, put the white bear back in the basket, and took the blue one from his father. A silence ensued between father and son, interrupted only by the sound of a young girl testing rubber duckies in the next aisle over. Eddie diverted his eyes from his father’s steady gaze and focused on a piece of lint nestled between the bear’s ears.

[Read the rest of the story here.]

The Ghost of Smith Hall

2009-02-16T06:01:00.000-08:00

The hall stood black and silent. All of the other girls and boys had retreated to the warmth of their beds for their soothing beauty sleep. They breathed calmly, in and out like normal, with dreams to spice up their young heads. Only one remained awake but only because she could never sleep.

Her name was Belle Weingarten. This night, she lied crumpled on the floor in her great mass of a white nightgown. The diaphanous cloth consumed her. From a distance, one would not have guessed that a girl sat there at all. She appeared like a single heap of unwashed sheets with her face buried into her cool thighs. But this pile of sheets wept fiercely.

Belle had been crying so hard and so long that her hair had matted itself to the tears smeared across her cheeks and chin. Her eyes, only partially visible through her dark tresses, shone bright red. Her little lips chapped and bled from the salt hitting them. Belle’s skin, so clear and pale, appeared translucent. She was not like the other girls of Smith Hall.

In fact, earlier in the evening when another student left her room to use the bathroom, she did not stumble over Belle; she walked right through the girl of the fairy glow. Belle, undisturbed, continued crying.

After a while, however, her eyes could cry no more, so she rested her head in her lap. A spindly tree branch tapped the window at the end of the corridor. It seemed right in rhythm with the girl’s sighs and sniffs. Eventually Belle lifted her head and gazed out the window, at the lightning brewing in the star-speckled sky. She shuddered at the sight of each bolt that illuminated the heavens. Slowly, Belle pushed herself off of the floor and wandered to the window to stare at the storm. She fervently pressed herself to the glass.

The pelting rain and swirls of wind brought back a memory Belle knew she’d never forget. It was the reason, after all, why she haunted this hall. She closed her eyes and stepped into that fateful day exactly one quarter of a century ago.
She and her sweetheart, Daschle, were quarreling in his room. She perched herself on the edge of his bed and studied the hardwood floor while he studied the cracks in the ceiling after a passionate argument. Both remained tensely quiet until Belle dared to talk again.

“Really, I just wanted to--”

“Please, Belle.”

“We never even--”

“Don’t say anything anymore. Please just leave. I’m done.”

Belle gathered the belongings strewn across the bed, got up, and left without a word. She slammed the door behind her to leave Daschle in peace and went to find some peace of her own.

A few minutes later, Belle reached her own dorm and quickly bolted the door. She did not want anyone to disturb her. She threw her coat, sketchbook, and purse on her own bed and huddled up into a corner of the room. If she sat there for an hour or two, the anger would dissipate, Belle told herself. She began by diverting her thoughts but somehow her mind always returned to her spat with Daschle. She couldn’t stand to seem him so upset, so defeated looking.

So Belle pulled out the shoeboxes from under her bed, the ones containing photos of her with Daschle, and flipped through them. They were all Polaroids. Some had already begun to fade. At first Belle thought the little sunlight she allowed into the room may have eaten colors but then she noticed that only Daschle had faded. She appeared in full color, just like the day the photos were taken. Belle shoved the photos back into the boxes and decided she had sulked enough.

[Read the rest here.]

Corinne

2009-02-12T05:49:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, there was a young girl, just an average girl in every way, who fell in love. Her name was Corinne. But don't let the musicality of her name fool you. Despite her pretty name, Corinne was rather plain. Not ugly, but certainly unremarkable. You could pass her on any city street, or even small town street, and not notice her. In contrast, the boy, whose name does not matter, was rather handsome---classically, conventionally, and cluelessly. Anyone from Tempe to Timbuktu would have agreed. He was tall, strong, and smiling. And every blink of his soft eyes brought alive something in Corinne's aching heart.

Corinne dreamt and dreamt about every word she and the boy exchanged and dreamt even more about the words they had yet to speak to each other. She was completely devoted to the running script that played in her head. Corinne constantly edited it, rewound it, and watched it over and over again. But the boy she so adored never guessed at Corinne's feelings. He held her as a friend, a sister. They had gone to school together since kindergarten. Their mothers belonged to the same book club. Much to Corinne's anguish, the boy loved another girl, although she never knew this other girl's name. Tried as she might to discern the girl's identity, the boy never revealed who she was.

The secrecy of it all sent Corinne madly guessing. Corinne imagined her beautiful, far more ravishing than she. She pictured someone pleasantly statuesque with flaxen hair, glossy lips, and the obligatory hourglass figure. This girl wasn't Barbie, she was Venus incarnate. Whoever this girl was, Corinne figured she must look like everything she was not. Corinne's own reflection disappointed her, from her too-skinny legs to her dull, shaggy hair to her inky eyes.

As far as Corinne was concerned, she was too short and too bony. She hated to look in the mirror and yet spent hours in front of the object, brushing her hair or practicing various ways to talk and smile. Every glance made her cringe but Corinne hoped that her appearance would improve somehow. She wanted her beauty to far surpass this other girl's. Perhaps then the boy would covet her instead. It was her most fervent wish to grow gorgeous.

Corinne's attractiveness, however, remained the same. She painted her lips, piled on layers of necklaces, plucked her brows---none of her strategies placed her upon any pedestal and certainly not the one that mattered most to her. Despite all of her passionate efforts, Corinne still looked like an average girl. She had her admirable qualities of course, but Corinne ignored all of those. She decided that if the boy had not noticed her for her personality, then the only way to win him was with her face and figure. She knew that Prince Charming always chose the fairest in the land, not the one with the best sense of humor or best ability to crochet colorful scarves.

[Read the rest of the story here.]

Welcome!

2009-02-11T22:23:00.001-08:00

Hello; my name is Christine Stoddard and I am a writer from Arlington, VA (just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. in case you failed history class.) I write in a wide variety of forms and genres. Mostly, however, I write short stories, poetry, fashion articles, and creative non-fiction. I have dabbled with literary analysis and criticism, novels, novellas, plays, and other forms of journalistic writing, too. Here at Stoddard Shorts, though, I will only post short pieces of fiction. I hesitate to say "short stories" because I would argue that not everything I will post is a story; some of the pieces will fall more into the category of stream of consciousness or slice of life because they will lack a fully fleshed out plot (you know the bit: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution.) If you want to debate my definition of a short story or simply ask me to clarify and elaborate, I am more than happy to do so. Otherwise, read my stories and comment on those instead.

If you would like to learn more about me and all of my glorious creative projects (mostly writing), then please visit my official website at www.christinestoddard.com.

Thanks and try not to have too scary of a day. I know it's a frightening world out there.