Bearing Witness--The Wall

Today they started building The Wall. When I woke this morning and went down to the kitchen, Mum and Dad weren’t there. I followed the low murmur of the television and found them in the living room. Dad had his arm around Mum, and from the way her back shook I knew she was crying.

I watched the Docums for a few minutes. Picture after picture of our Chairman, hardhat on his balding head, shovel in hand, surrounded by smiling workers. All men, all white. I wondered if Heidi’s dad was there, or Rachel’s. Mum and Dad didn’t know I was there. A weird heaviness filled me, like I’d swallowed an anchor or a flat of bricks. But then it became part of me, I’d absorbed the weight of it all, and I returned to the kitchen, but I wasn’t hungry for breakfast. I shouldered my backpack and, even though it was still dark, made my way to the corner to wait for the bus.

At the bus stop, I sat on the curb, sheltered by the ancient maple better than any umbrella, and pulled out my DocBook. I wanted to write—I needed to write—but my emotions tangled together and the words stuck together like glue. Above me, the sky spit hard drops of rain that spattered on the leaves. Down the street the dim yellow of headbeams lit the way for the bus. I powered down my DocBook and as I stood, I remembered: Mum’s family lived in Guadalajara, she was born there, and now The Wall would keep her away from her family forever.  

***

Two months ago I started BEARING WITNESS, a new novel, one that will push me as I am writing speculative young adult, but one which I hope has an Atwood sensibility. The story grew from an ancient flash, never published, I'd written in response to a prompt about walls. This is the beginning of chapter 3 which I've been wondering how to start. I have to thank the current administration for it's announcement today that they are proceeding with blocking our borders for shaking out my block. Peace...   

Wassup?

In  between the time of my last blog post and this one, I could've birthed a baby. A preemie, mind you, but a healthy one. So wassup with me? Where have I been?

Lot's is up, and I've been lots of places. Mostly, my attention's focused on family: my kids, my husband, the animals (one deaf cat, bunny, three mice, and two betta fish). My son is in private school in Utah, which is mighty far from Baltimore. He's doing well; it seems a good dose of maturity kicked in on his 16th birthday. Ditto with my daughter, three years younger. Dear husband will get his extra dose of maturity later this week, when he turns a year older.

This year, I've pushed envelopes: I've zip lined down mountains, surfed in a man-made wave machine, sewn two handbags, and even ridden a horse. I have hugged the huge pine that Georgia O'Keefe once rested under, her face to the sky. I've hiked into wind caves and swum in icy mountain lakes. On the emotional and spiritual sides, even more envelopes pushed. All have served to make me more whole and more grounded.

And I have learned to say no.

Travel? Mostly due to family and work--and my writing. For work, I've traveled locally, to Washington DC and the Chesapeake Bay. For family, I've visited Mom in North Carolina and Mom-in-Law in Massachusetts. As a family, we've traveled to Utah twice, and I'm heading out again for a third trip. I spent a long weekend in a hobbit cabin with my daughter and her friend in deep Creek, Maryland, where we wrote, swam, and ate. And I spent a week writing in Taos, one of my spiritual homes, with a dear friend.

But the best journeying I've done in my head and with my hand, helping my characters continue to fumble through their lives. I am writing again, and revising; I've suffered not from writer's block but more a paralysis of the soul. For I have written, but in my personal journal, stuff I'll never share (though it make permute into my stories and poems eventually) because it is too raw.

I'm back on facebook. Back on twitter. Find me. there or here. Tell me what's new with you. I have missed you.

Peace...

THE PHONE (The Runaway--XIX)

JOSH GENTLY RESTED NIKKO’S HEAD ON THE CUSHION. A phone. He remembered the phone hanging on the kitchen wall. Josh’s feet made wet smacking sounds against the floor, but now he wanted someone to hear him, so he yelled “help” as he ran down the hall.  

But no one yelled back. He turned on lights as he flew by the switches. Bright construction paper cut-outs of cheery Christmas trees and green wreathes and silver chalices covered endless white walls.

In the kitchen, in the space by the door, a fire extinguisher, cherry red. Laughter bubbled up his throat, a laughter that tasted like metal. How the hell had he confused a fire extinguisher with a phone? He scanned the room. There was no phone, no phone he could see, so he rushed back down the hall and rattled door knobs, each one locked. On the last door, a sign: Reverend Gilliam. Of course the minister’s office had a phone, so he turned the knob but the door didn’t budge.

“FUCK!”

Josh kicked. The door shuddered in its frame. The top half of the door was a plastic window, milky and yellowed. He punched with his fist. The window shattered around him, his knuckles dripped red as he reached past the jagged edges. The inside knob slipped in his hand, warm and slick from blood, and then the door popped open. In the middle of the cluttered desk, a phone. He punched 911. On the second ring, a voice picked up.

“My friend, he’s sick, really, really sick,” Josh said.

“Where are you?” the woman’s voice on the other end said. She sounded calm, content, not at all consumed the way Josh felt.

“In a church,” Josh said, and the panic rose again, he had no idea exactly where he was. “A UU church.”

“UU?” she said.

“Unitarian Universalist.”

“Never heard of that,” she said. “Street?”

“I don’t know,” Josh said. He piled through papers and pamphlets on the desk, hoping one had the address, but all he saw were drafts of what seemed to be sermons, mock-ups of brochures. “Downtown. Near a park. I have no fucking clue.”

“I’m tracing your call now,” she said. “Tell me about your friend.”

“He’s got a fever, really high, and when I shake him he doesn’t respond,” Josh said.

“Drugs?”

“Uh, not now, not tonight, he might’ve shot up this morning.”

“Heroin?”

“Probably.”

“Is he shaking?” she said. “Having tremors?”

“No. Oh Jesus, hurry.”

“Because of the storm the system is slow. Are you with your friend now?”

“No, he’s in the sanctuary. I’m in an office, it’s where the phone is.”

“Is anyone else with you?” she asked.

“No. We broke in, the weather, we’ve been on the street. Nikko, he’s been sick so long, his arm’s all red, all hot—”

“Arlington and Boylston,” she said. “I’m sending the ambulance now. Now listen to me, this is important. I want you to return to your friend. Hold his head to the side, in case he throws up. Don’t let him breathe in his vomit. Okay?”

“Okay,” Josh said, but he didn’t move, just cradled the phone in his hands.

“Go,” she said with an odd gentleness. “Help is coming. I’ll pray for you both.”

The phone clicked. Josh let the bloody phone clatter to the desk. Josh wanted to stay in the office, connected to her, connected to her voice, but he pushed himself up. His feet crunched in the plastic shards in the hall and he started to run, slow at first, blood from his hand spattering the carpet as he ran faster, until he reached the sanctuary.

Nikko curled in fetal position. Josh sat beside him, cross-legged, and cradled Nikko’s head in his hands. Nikko’s breath floated past his wrist, faint and warm.

The chalice glowed from the altar. He wondered if the people who came here believed in God, whether when they lit their candles they prayed for strangers. He hoped so.

Josh slowly rocked Nikko.

“Spirit of life,” Josh sang, a whisper. “Come unto me. Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.”

Nikko moaned. Josh wasn’t sure, but in the dim sanctuary, it looked like Nikko smiled, so he kept singing Nikko’s favorite hymn.

“Wings set me free, spirit of life, come to me.”

Josh stared at the chalice and sung until the words turned husky in his mouth, until they became a prayer of sorts. His throat grew hoarse, but still he sang. The radiator stopped clanging, the draft faded, and Josh stopped, to listen. Silence filled the vast space. Far off, he heard the faint wail of a siren.




ALMOST at the end. Whew. What a ride. And thank you for riding with me. If you're not sure where we are in the journey, read last week's installment of THE RUNAWAY.

Read hard, write harder, live hardest. Peace...

FEVER (The Runaway--XVIV)

JOSH WALKED TOWARD THE FRONT OF THE SANCTUARY to the door which he knew led to offices and bathrooms and the kitchen; all churches had the same layout.  His boots squeaked against waxed linoleum, so he slowed down, afraid someone might hear him. Josh passed through the fellowship hall. A long table, set already for coffee hour with two silver coffee urns and white porcelain cups balanced on matching saucers, lined the far wall.

Another door led to the kitchen. A streetlight shone through the only window over the sink, muted by swirling snow. Josh cracked the door of the refrigerator. A loaf of bread and an opened bag of individually-wrapped Colby cheese sticks. Josh dropped the cheese and bread into a plastic grocery bag. A percolator and a can of Italian roast stood on the counter by the stove. What he would give for a cup of hot coffee! Later. After he fed Nikko, got him settled.

 

Back in the sanctuary, Nikko slept on the floor, right arm thrown over his head as if hoping for a pop fly. His coat sleeve had fallen to his elbow. Angry purple welts trailed down his inner arm. Josh touched Nikko’s forehead. The heat scared him. Josh’s mind scattered, to the snow, to the desolate underpass, to Nikko not getting up off the cold, granite step, to the guitar shining in the storefront window and the coffee, the organ, the eddying white, and the night, the day, the whole last month melted into a white blur.

“Wake up.” Josh shook him by the shoulder. He pushed away the damp hair fallen in Nikko’s face. His friend’s eyes looked sunken. Dried blood caked his lower lip. “You need to get up.”

But Nikko lay there, unmoving. Josh picked up his arm and it flopped to the floor with a thud.

“Jesus, Nikko. Get the fuck up.” Josh wrapped his arms under Nikko’s chest and heaved him forward. But Nikko went limp, a dead weight, and slowly slid back to the floor. 

Josh stood. A strong urge to kick Nikko, anything to get him to move, overwhelmed him, and as he battled the urge, it came to him Nikko was dying, he was dying now, and if he didn’t do anything, Nikko would die there, on the floor in a church in a city four hundred miles from home, and it would be all his fault and how would he, Josh, ever live with himself if his best friend died in his care?




Getting closer to the end. I've decided to shorten each installment (last week's was a bruiser to get through), so maybe 3 or 4 smaller posts. Thank you for reading, Josh and Nikko and I appreciate it! Peace...

7 or 8 Things I Know About Him

The Father's Guns
It turned out his father owned two guns, a rifle and a pistol. The rifle was for putting food on the table, and the pistol for keeping humans and other varmints off the nine-hundred acres sowed with wheat and soybean and later, when the market tumbled, less than cattle-grade corn. The father showed all three sons how to shoot the rifle, but of the three, only the youngest, Jeremiah, took to hunting. Michael, the eldest, was a gangly, quiet kid who preferred to ride his horse through the fields. Martin, the middle son, cringed when a turkey or deer came into view, and became a vegetarian and a minister. When he was six, Jeremiah, shot his father's hunting rifle and thought it the biggest gun in South Dakota; years later, he would find it insufficient for elk, terrorists, and other big game.

All three sons forgot about the pistol, although they knew it was kept in a box with a combination lock for safe-keeping. The mother did not forget about the pistol.

The Bird
When he was 17, Jeremiah packed his crossbow and arrows and took Sheila up to the foothills that curved down to the edge of the farm. They made camp in an old deer blind, padding the ground with his sleeping bag and the woven wool blanket her mother had made, and brought enough food and drink to keep them comfortable for a day or so.

They waited for the turkey to strut through their campsite—they had seen the fine bird pass through twice before—but by late morning they knew they would not see the Tom until dusk, if they were lucky. He kissed Sheila, and then unbuttoned her jeans and stroked her lower stomach before burying himself between her thighs. When the thin wail of sirens from across the fields found them, they paused. Clouds of yellow dust billowed from the winter wheat field where Michael had been harvesting. Sheila whispered, maybe we should go back, and he looked at the dust, then at her lips red as just-plucked cherries, and pulled her back down into their nest, laughing.

The Bread
It was only a slice of bread, but after ten days of field rations and the thin unleavened nan-e bread the Afghans ate, it tasted the way Jeremiah imagined manna might taste. He sat on the edge of rocky outcropping the hour before patrol began, the slice cupped in his palms. The smell of it brought him back to the fields, the grain rippling silver in what little breeze the summer could muster. To Sheila patting small wheat tortillas and frying them in the pan, to his brother's warm house smelling of yeast and rye and cardamom. He thought of Maryam then, of the way she chewed the wooden end of the brush when contemplating the next strokes of a painting, and his brother Martin sitting in his armchair watching him teach Josh power chords on the guitar, and for the first time since he arrived in Afghanistan, Jeremiah felt the space in his chest swell.

He tore off a small piece of the still-warm bread and let it dissolve in his mouth. The sun hovered two inches above the mountain ridge. Soon, he thought, I will hunt in the dark. He ate half the slice like that, tiny pieces of white dropped on his tongue, then wrapped the other half in a piece of plastic to eat the next morning.

First Criticism
Two weeks after birth, lying in the bassinet. “He disturbs me,” the father said to the mother. “His eyes follow every little thing that moves, even me. Why can't he just sleep like our other two boys did?”

Listening In
“There is nothing we could do,” the man in white said. “Nothing anyone could do. It is the way of God and nature--those unprepared to live must make way for the strong.” But the doctor let her hold the gray infant swaddled in pink flannel, and her sobs filled the hospital.

Self-Criticism
After Sheila left. “The only thing I'm good at is hunting.”

Fantasies
For years, when he dreamt of sex, he dreamt it was Maryam who lay beside him. In his dreams she came to him, arms open, supplicant and soft, her pink robe slipping from her left shoulder. She was like falling into a nest of eider down. Often in his sleep, while dreaming this dream or even thinking about Maryam, he would turn to Sheila and she would curve into him, unknowing, and they would make sleepy love.

In the morning when he awoke, he felt cleansed and confident, but as the day wore on and he remembered the way he held Maryam, the way she held him, he felt dirty for coveting his brother's wife.

Reprise
When he heard the click beneath him, so quiet and unassuming, he was not sure, so he froze. But then through his night vision goggles he saw the ridges, the faint outline of the IED. You goddamn idiot, he thought.

He tried not to tremble from the cold, the odd sensation growing hard in his gut. The WinMag grew heavy on his shoulder, digging a groove, and he thought for a moment whether to turn it around, place the muzzle in his mouth, and pull, for that was a better, cleaner alternative.

But there was hope, always hope. When he did not return by daylight, base camp would search for him. Six hours he could stand stock still. Six hours he could wait.

The sky tilted, carrying the stars with it. His breath danced around him like a tired ghost in the frigid night air. When he thought he could not stand still another instant, the edge of the sky melted crimson into the mountain ridge. He closed his eyes, let the sun warm his face, and thought of Sheila working the clay, of Maryam standing by the window, the crunch of gravel as the car brought him closer, the sheer curtain hiding her face. He thought of the bread in his pocket, the way the soft crumbs dissolved in his mouth.


***

I love my Creative Writing Class at Hopkins. Every week we have a prompt to respond to, focusing on some facet of writing: plot, narrative, point-of-view. This story focuses on characterization. And the prompt? A huge nod to Michael Ondaatje, whose prose poem 7 or 8 Things I Know About Her (A Stolen Biography) served as an armature to dig deeper into the character of Jeremiah Anselm--in love with his brother's wife, lover to a Lakota potter, American Army sniper, and a player in THE MINISTER'S WIFE, my novel-in-progress. Peace...

Poetry in Place

This week's story is a poem, actually, and part of the LANGUAGE>PLACE Blog Carnival. This month's edition is hosted by Walter Bjorkman, a fellow Marylander, at his digs QUIK-BAKE SYNTHETICS. Peruse the mighty-fine holdings of writers you will recognize. My small contribution is HERE.

Enjoy, and peace...

JUST BREATHE (Miriam's Story)

Arms by my side, I lie on the floor in the dark floating on a raft of breaths. I try to relax – that is why I am here, after all – learning to relax, but the towel bunches under my lower back and I want to yank it out, pull hard, like a Christmas cracker, for the pop, the small prize, the fortune, but of course, no such luck. My stomach gurgles thinking of the almond wafer melting in my mouth, which in turn makes me think of communion, though why I don’t know, I am the wife of a Unitarian Universalist minister, we have potlucks, and Catholic churches give me the willies.

The instructor’s voice wafts disembodied over my head: Remember to breathe.

My yoga teacher says the same thing every Thursday night. How ridiculous - breathing is an autonomic function, buried deep in the brain stem, as instinctual as apple pie and motherhood. Or perhaps not absurd, since motherhood eludes me and is the reason I am prostate in corpse pose on a carpet trod by hundreds of filthy shoes with a dozen other women all trying to envision the same thing: a tiny sperm swimming up the fallopian canal, making it’s touchdown with the egg, the fertilized embryo dropping like a feather to settle in the womb. Maybe I should heed the warning to breathe. Maybe these three years we’ve focused on the wrong body part – maybe it is my lungs that need fixing, not my baby making organs.

I want to return to the meadow, the one the instructor walked us through minutes ago, the one carpeted with sunshine and daisies and tall, waving grasses. In my imaginings, I wear a white dress and run in slow motion towards my first lover, a tall man, a philosopher with long wavy hair who proved, in the end, rather abusive. But how I loved that hair! Running my fingers through those auburn strands, braiding them into baby dreadlocks after screwing all afternoon on the narrow dorm mattress we threw on the floor. Bring me his head, I think, that will help me relax. I giggle in the quiet.

The instructor stands over me.

--Anything wrong, she whispers. I shake my head, mortified to be singled out. Then just breathe, she says.

Just breathe. Just relax. Right. As if relaxing will fix my faulty womb. The hormones haven’t, nor the nightly progesterone shots in my gluteus maximi, or the countless surgeries transplanting our beautiful, delicate embryos in their beds of nourishing tissue. Not the second mortgage making all this joy possible. Just breathe. As if the reason for my miscarriages is due to not breathing, not relaxing. I don’t have time to relax. I should be grocery shopping, the only milk in the refrigerator smells like sour cream. I should be making a casserole to eat later this week, or paying bills, or scrubbing toilets, anything other than lying here staring at the back of my eyelids.

--Inhale deep, she tells us all. From below your belly button. Breathe from your uterus. Bathe your growing baby in positive energy. Breathe in that golden sunshine from the meadow.

I concentrate on the three 4-week embryos cleaving to my uterine wall, sucking up nutrients, dividing from one cell to two, four, eight, sixteen, growing into a blob the size of a peanut, a golf ball, limbs emerge, a head, a spinal cord glints in the ultrasound. Hello, I say to my future child. I love you. Tiny fingers wave in amniotic fluid and for an instant everything goes white, goes warm, and I float with my daughter in the calm swells of my body.

--Breathe deeper. The floor shudders as the instructor walks past.

I breathe in, to bathe my babies in that golden sunshine, my blood pulsing around them, protecting them, but halfway through the inhale my throat clenches -- it is all so impossible, the embryos are too tiny, too fragile, mere cells surrounded by disaster.

Air wooshes out. I breathe in again, one, two, and on three my throat constricts again. I cannot I hold enough air with one breath, so I breathe and breathe, faster and faster, my chest heaves, my pulse thrums in my ears, and my baby disappears in a jagged flash of light. The meadow peels back, the flowers, the golden waving grass, my white dress, gone, all gone, and somewhere in the room someone gasps, someone cries, and the instructor kneels beside me, her hand on my back , and she holds me, she rocks me, and I want the floor to split open and swallow me, a useless woman who cannot make babies, who cannot even breathe.


***

Meet Miriam, the Minister's Wife. She's younger here, though not by much, a decade or so, but this is how I envision her story opening. At least today. Peace...