Humpty Dumpty Sat On a Wall

I don’t remember much about falling off the wall, but what I do remains vivid – first the rending crack, a shaking sigh, and the green of the grass, each blade a perfect sword. My insides oozed out and coated the ground with a pearly sheen. The stark brilliance of the sky pained my eyes. Angels sung, a low thrumming hymn, and this peace, this grace overtook me and I cried, I cried, I was so happy! But then the men came in their shiny white jackets and picked up my brittle shards. My mind slithered down the hill, a rainbow of gold and pink and black. They caught the black but the rest escaped, and they bundled us up and carted us away in a screaming car and deposited us in a room without color or light and here I stay, swaddled like a baby, me and the black.

To this day, most people think I fell off the wall. Saying so kind of smoothes over the awkwardness of that event, just like calling someone who is rip-roaring drunk indisposed. But I know the truth, and until I speak it they will keep me here. “For your safety,” they tell me. Meanwhile, they bring me teeny white cups filled with luminosity: blue triangles, orange ovals, yellow spheres. Sometimes I swallow, sometimes not. What keeps me sane is the memory of that day looping through my shell of a head, the only other color in my otherwise black-and-white world.

***

Humpty Dumpty appeared earlier this week in 52, the final quarterly (and grand finale) of the 52/250 Flash-A-Year Challenge. Editors extraordinaire Michelle Elvy, Walter Bjorkman, and John Wentworth Chapin asked several of us *chronic* flashers to retell a fairy or folk tale. I chose Humpty because I'd always wondered if his crack-up was literal or metaphorical. Several of my older stories appear in weeks #44 (ANT FARM), #48 (TAINTED LOVE), and #52 (PHANTOM SISTER). Allow yourself to linger here -- fabulous work by many names you will recognize.

Peace...

39 is HERE!

Thirty-nine, the latest quarterly by 52/250, is out -- and what a tremendous celebration of art and words! Stories by Len Kuntz, Guy Yasko, Robert Vaughn, Catherine Russell, Marcus Speh, Susan Gibb, and a host of other uber-writer-artist types, including yours truly.

Thank you editors Michelle, Walter, and John for putting on yet another super 'zine. Peace...

Phantom Sister

Marlena comes to me on the cusp of sleep and wakefulness, when the world blurs grey. She soars through yellow-tinted waves, her bald shining skull pushing through water. Although she never speaks, she makes a gurgling sound, high-pitched like the bottle-nosed dolphins at the Aquarium. I look but never see her face. When I wake up, the bottoms of my feet sting as though I scissor-kicked through 100 laps. Those mornings I call in sick and sleep in the boat’s hold. The gentle rocking hugs me.

My twin sister Maria lives halfway around the world in the Catoctin Mountains. She paints and writes poems about trees. We rarely see each other but the internet tethers us. Maria has the same dreams about Marlena -- we think of them as visitations – but she feels the ache in her chest, the left side, a sharp pain like someone has plunged in an icy hand and wrested out her heart. Afterwards she also feels an uncommon, exhausting peace. We wonder if this is how we tangled in our mother’s womb: hands to feet to heart.

I find an old photo of the two of us, a college road trip to Baltimore. Our smiling faces squeezed together, the Washington monument towers behind us. I scan the picture, push send and the image zips to Maria’s mountaintop. Seconds later, she writes back. “There’s a hole between us.” I look closer at the photograph and my soles burn.





***

My ultimate 52-250 Flash -- this IS Number 52. 250 words, every week for 52 weeks. Inspired by the theme: threesome.

Note: Writing this last flash wrought a lot of emotion, not because of the story but because of the journey. The editors of 52/250 -- Michelle Elvy, Walter Bjorkman, and John Wentworth Chapin -- put heart and soul into this endeavor and, in return, so did an amazing community of writers. So thank you.

The weekly exercise of writing concisely to a theme challenged me as a writer perhaps more than any other endeavor I've undertaken, with the possible exception of my novels. 52/250 was a glorious ride traveled with stupendous fellow journeyers, tremendous stories embodying excellent craft, and of course, the most superb guidance. I am not sure how I will spend the next 52 weeks, and I feel a bit bereft. Two novels to fine-tune, another waiting to be written, graduate school applications all wait, but I think my Fridays just got lonelier. Thank you to all who have read my little stories, commented on them, spread them through cyberspace. Peace...

We Interrupt this Broadcast--

to remind you -- COMMENT HERE so I can give a dollar HERE. (btw, i have investigated numerous charitable agencies -- CARE receives highest ratings from Charity Navigator and other 'watchdogs' and has presence in Japan. Typically I support Doctors Without Borders, but they are NOT collecting earmarks for this disaster).

Please.

By Friday midnight wherever you are.

WRITERS!!!!! POETS!!!!!! ARTISTS!!!!!! Please contribute your words HERE ==>New Sun Rising -- Stories for Japan


If you are looking for my #fridayflash, go HERE -- THE ANT FARM. Inspired by the 52/250 theme: the crowd.

Peace, Linda

c(u)ore

c(u)ore

transfixed i watch your hands

strong quiet efficient

shape this humble offering

of mud into something pure

lyrical a form so flawless

it seems a miracle

later when the body yields

before the glassy burn

i cradle the leathered urn

and peer into eternity

ossified hollow of earth

primordial essence of you

Inspired by the 52-250 Flash a Year theme: to the core.

Cuore is Italian for heart. What is more central, more core, than the heart, our strongest and yet most tender vessel?

Btw, I did not write this poem. No, no, no, I do not write such sappy stuff. Ben wrote it, one of several he collated into a book of handmade papers to celebrate Phoebe's birthday. Who is Ben? Phoebe?

Ah, you'll have to read my novel to find out more. Peace, Linda

17 Days

Sometimes, under the gauze and yellow salves, under the allografts patching your body like so many potato and corn fields planting God’s earth, I glimpse you, the real you, my twinned soul from before, the brother who rode me on handle-bars, who beat up the bully on the bus, who read me to sleep when we were kids, the way I read to you now, and that’s when I grip your hand, the good one, glad the explosion incinerated the poison inside even if it burned off your smile, because now you are yourself, pure, saved, clean these 17 days.





Inspired by the 52-250 Flash a Year Challenge theme: under wraps. Plus, I was wondering what happened to MARTY.

And, I'm honored to have garnered an honorable mention for SHUT-EYE in FLASH FICTION CHRONICLE's STRING-OF-TEN CONTEST, run by the superlative Gay Degani and guest-judged by Michelle Reale. Yay!


Peace...

Cheap and Convenient

Coincidence? More like serendipity. I mean, this pink paper flapping under my windshield wiper, the only car on the street? Day care services, the flyer said. Infants welcome. Manna from heaven! Do you know how hard it is to find someone to watch babies? I had to return to work -- you know how it goes when you’re single. Besides, she was cheap and convenient.

She seemed okay. Quiet. Sad brown eyes. She looked kind of familiar. But she rocked Sophie, face out, the same way I do. “Beautiful baby,” she sang. “Beautiful baby.” Later, when she said she’d had miscarriages, I should have put it all together. Because she was there in the hospital, you know. In the same room. I only remembered after.

I hated leaving Sophie with her. I wanted to stay home with my baby. That first week Sophie screamed herself purple when I dropped her off. Me? I bawled at my desk. Called every hour. “Is she all right?” I’d ask, and she’d say, “She’s just fine, Miss Dorothee.”

It got better. We found our routine. That day I was actually relaxed – it was my birthday, you know – so I treated myself to an ice cream cone on the walk home. But no lights were on. She didn’t answer the door, so I kicked in the window, black raspberry spattered all over the front steps, but she wasn’t there, no one was there… oh God, officer, please find my baby.

***

Inspired by the 52-250 Flash a Year Challenge theme: coincidence. And a tad of guilt -- two kids, and I never was fortunate enough to be a stay-at-home mom.

Peace...

GONE

You pause at the subway entrance. By the blind woman. Every evening she shows up for the commuter rush, rattling her cup, hustling for coins. Tonight you press your bagged lunch, uneaten, into her hands, then pull out the crumpled twenty you found wedged in your pencil drawer. She mumbles thanks, so you stuff your hat and leather gloves and the Ray-Ban’s your ex gave you last Christmas into her waiting lap. So many riches, all at once, and for the smallest instant you wish you were her, you wish you were anyone but yourself. She leans closer, she smells of grease and raw onion and the street, and peers into the Xerox box hugged tight against the curve of your hip. When you question the veracity of her condition, she laughs, a smoke-smoothed cackle, and you think, what does it matter?

The escalator whisks you silent into the dim bowels of the station. At the bottom, the box thuds at your feet: mug, wedding photo, the 25-year pen. You think you should feel lighter, somehow unencumbered, but you don’t. The platform trembles. The cold rush of air precedes the oncoming train.


**

Inspired by the 52-250 Flash a Year Challenge theme: the money's gone. But also inspired by a very small story of mine published last year at nanoism. Can you find the story within the story?

Don't know about you, but there's a lot of folks rattling boxes at the subway station these days. Makes me grateful for the job I do have, even those days when it drives me barmy. Peace...

LOTUS

Drape me with silk

lustrous as the line of my thigh,

feed me oysters

champagne lapped, finger napped,

cream whipped

to fill my hollows.

Make cartography with your mouth,

move mountains with your fingers,

tongue highways down my belly

moan your prayers

hush in my ear you are done

with her,

hope these offerings will

unfurl my heart.

***

Inspired by the 52-250 Flash a Year Challenge theme: passwords.

Not really sure where this came from, other than I had two ideas in response to this theme and two writing deadlines fast-approaching (the other piece, a story about hobos, is still in flux). I guess I was pondering how no one can really ever own another, but how we go through life trying to unlock each other's secrets. The image of a lotus flower came to me, slowly opening. Funny, but I found this little factoid AFTER writing the poem: In Asian cultures the lotus flower signifies the values of sexual purity and non-attachment.

Peace, Linda

WHITE

I close my eyes, see the hair. Plastered in a swirl of thalo blue, too short and black to be mine, too long to fall from the brush. I remember tapping ash from my Camel, wondering who trespassed my studio. I reached for that hair and my arm went numb, the air zagged white, and out the window fog huddled grey over the sound. I crumpled on the paint-spattered floor, counting cigarettes and brushes rolled under the easel, the shadows passing.

Now the world is blank canvas – the shades open, the sun pours in, harsh titanium. The television murmurs too low to hear, too loud to think. Nurses turn me, rub my pale unfeeling feet and arms and backside, and swaddle me again in brilliant sheets.

My son comes. I smile but he cannot see it. No one can. He sits by the bed and cradles my hand, stroking the parchment that stitches me together the way the nurses do, but longer, with smaller, tighter circles. He talks to fill in the space, more than he ever talked to me before, and I blink fast. A single tear squeezes past, and I wish I could feel it slide hot and wet down my cheek. His hand reaches. “Oh Mom” he says, and peters out of words, my poet son. I close my eyes, see the hair.

***

Inspired by the 52-250 Flash a Year Challenge theme: long distance. As well as by delving into a scene from one of my novels where the prodigal son returns home to find his mother immobilized from a stroke. Peace...

Bearing Witness

In the meeting house this morning, silence. No machines thrumming, no rumble of moving earth. Six others sit in equal quiet. A blue jay caws from someplace distant. I look down to my clasped hands. The query runs through me: Where there are hatred, division, and strife, how are we instruments of reconciliation and love?

Pews creak. Blue pulses below my wrist, skin thin as hope. The jay cackles again, the same or another I cannot tell, but Franklin rises and slides the door bolt. No one speaks; it is understood our other Friends fled South through the excavated tunnels. Decades ago, the Sin Papeles built the tunnels and immigrated North. When they crossed the border, broken and naked, we sheltered and fed them in our safe houses until they ran down our schools, shot the police, and bankrupted our hospital. Their children hold the town captive.

Still, we hold Sin Papeles to the light.

To the light we hold our Friends traveling South. I hold my daughter, her husband and infant to the light. My cousin Lorraine, the kindergarteners I taught. I hold them all to the light.

A shadow in the window. A flutter of blue feathers. Footsteps rustle brittle leaves. Far off, the staccato of gunfire. I smell the smoke before I see it curl past the window. Muriel reaches for me and we grip hands.

We are instruments of peace, we whisper. We are instruments of love.

I hold us to the light.

***

A rather dystopian ditty inspired by the 52-250 Flash a Year Challenge theme: border town. I recently went to a Quaker service; it seems that hour of reflection resonated longer and deeper than I thought -- this is the second story spun from that visit.

A foot of snow in Maryland. The ground glitters in treacherous beauty. Peace, Linda

The Way It Is

The preschoolers scampered through the garden, clutching their butterfly nets and insect cages. The teacher pointed out the katydid marching up the daylily scape, the leaf cutter chomping through the Brandywines. Her long hair stuck to her neck, and her inner thighs chafed from sweat. She craved iced coffee, for the coldness, for something to shock her into feeling.

“Look Miss Nancy! Ladybugs!”

The children jostled around the sedum. Nancy moved slowly, trying not to wince. The ladybugs swarmed the waxy leaves, hundreds of them, coupling and uncoupling, falling to the ground. Paler colored beetles took flight. The males pursued, wrestling the females with their tiny legs. The pairs swirled down like maple seeds.

A small girl sobbed. “They’re fighting.”

Nancy stepped towards the child. Pain seared through her pelvis to her sitz bone, reminding her of last night, of Roger stumbling through the dark to bed, rousing her with his beery breath. He’d yanked down her panties and took her from behind, hard. When she cried, he thrust harder. She felt something in her backside crack and she rolled away. He slapped her cheek as he came all over her stomach. The welt stung almost as much as the single word he’d spat at her when he left.

Nancy stroked the crying girl’s hair, translucent in the sun, and considered whether to correct the girl. Fighting, mating. Everything seemed filmy. She touched the end of her sleeve to her eyes.


***

Inspired by the 52/250 Flash a Year Challenge theme: animal behaviors. As a writing friend commented -- animals have 4 behaviors: fighting, feeding, fleeing, and mating. I think I covered them all. Peace...

The Golden Moment

I draw the bow across the strings, the trembling G of Chopin’s Largo, and wait for the small gap of time suspended between noise and its absence, the space where the note vibratos into nothingness. I lower the bow, and the hall thunders.



Planes careen into fields and skyscrapers, a cacophony of metal and fire. After, the sky stills, an eerie instant slouching towards an infinity of sorts. I rest my cello in its velvet-lined case, and close the lid.



You enter this world amidst the clack and clatter of machinery, the urgency of voices, and the stench of laser-burnt skin. The surgeon reaches into my abdomen and your head crowns, waxed with blood. The surgical suite melts into white static and you yelp your hello.



Your science project involves water tension and other physics I do not understand. I watch you release the eyedropper, amazed at the utter perfection with which each bead breaks the awaiting meniscus. You record the seconds it takes for the water to resume its placid surface.



The hushed morning after the snowstorm, you sleep upstairs. The ground glitters with diamond dust, the only sound the tinkle of flakes falling. I pick up my cello and play to find the space in between.


***
Inspired by this week's 52-250 Flash a Year Challenge theme: silence. What is often most significant is that left unsaid: the blank page, the unbroken snow, the beat between notes.

The Watch

After the wolves killed the sheep, then Damien, I fled the backcountry. Without cricket and tree frog song, the silence grew too deep.

I packed light: food for a lifetime, clothes and boots, and all the guns. One photo of my love, sewn into the pocket over my heart. The audio of our poetry.

On the last night, I siphoned 30 gallons of ethanol to power the ATV, and sloshed the rest around the perimeter of the house, the shed, the still. The timber flared with a loud wumph. The wolves gathered, mesmerized by the flames. Their low snarls trailed me as I drove from the forest, the evening star obscured by smoke.

It took three days to reach the City. From the top of the tower, I watched the horizon. The tinny pop of guns from the last of the resistance punctuated the low whine of advancing tanks. For some reason, these noises comforted me.


***

The cusp of a new year always brings out the dystopian in me. Inspired by the 52-250 Flash a Year Challenge Theme: Urban Convert.

Coming up next week: The Twelve Days of Books. Stay tuned. And stay warm! Peace, Linda