XL. The Ones That Didn’t Make it

A Story About a Door Buzzer - Shaky’s silver dress hissed around her listless hips as she lit with felicity across her bucolic Bungalow. She flicked her labyrinthine tangles of her gossamer tresses from her eyes as she braced herself against the hallway wall. With a demure press of a button, Shaky spoke demurely into the speaker creases of the inter-apartment intercom.

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A Story About Shoes - Before my son and his mother return home from the hospital I will buy the biggest shoes they sell at the store. I will take the shoes out of the box and set them to the side. The box I will fill with torn pieces of photographs, scraps of various keepsakes and shreds of my journal. We he closes his eyes I will put him in this nest and let him soak up some of memories. Hopefully we can start this relationship off with an understanding. It’ll help if he knows who I was. Then maybe he’ll forgive me.

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A Story About Keys - He tucked himself into the passenger side of his mother’s car. He was glad she forgets to lock it, especially tonight with his parents gone, locked out of his house and a cold front coming in. He jams his hands into his pockets.

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A Story About Grandparents - My Dad’s mother died before I was born. And his Dad lived until I was two. There is a photograph of him holding me. I wonder what that’s like, your father holding your child.

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A Story About Theft - Stealing came easy to me. At the age of eight I had stolen enough stuff from the department store that there wasn’t any more room under my bed. So I gave most of it away. I burned the rest. By twelve I was able to steal money with out getting caught – wallets and registers and the most basic safes. Sure there was an excitement to it, but for me, this was simply the reason I had been put on the earth. This was the problem I knew how to solve.

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A Story About What, I’m Not Sure - The bowling trophy in the garden was certain that it would be knocked over. And that’s exactly what happened on this particular Tuesday. Not one human seemed to notice. Although it was although squirrels could talk about from breakfast ‘til lunch. By dinner they had moved on to seasonal acorn storage and various marital affairs.

A Story About Handmade Clothing

Margo waded in until the hem of her dress got wet. Any farther and there’d be trouble.

Come on, someone shouted. She barely knew these kids’ names when she could see their faces, but now that it was dark they were mysteries. And they were just kids, weren’t they, just barely out of college. Maybe she was only a year or two older, but there was grey in her hair and a rasp to her voice. They had tossed their nice new clothes from their nice new bodies and ran, their nakedness concealed by darkness and then water.

There was no one to tell her no anymore, but she could still feel the ghost of a grip on her arm, fingerprints telling her to go home, to go to sleep, to get up early and go to work. Margo hiked her dress up a little higher. The kid with the shaggy blond hair, Dave she thought, dunked his head all the way under and then popped up his face tingling and his ears slightly ringing. He tried to convince the others to try it. Margo was glad their attention away from her. She kept slowly dragging her dress up her body, sliding deeper and deeper. When the frigid water touched her underwear she froze. The boy with the brown hair and the girl with the pony tail had heard her slight gasp and in turn caught her eye before looking away.

Suddenly Margo felt really silly, but instead of doing what her body told her to, what she pleaded with her body to do, she found herself pulling the dress even higher, up and over her head. She tossed the garment toward a large rock and the dress spilled onto the ground. The way the half-moon lit the trees behind it, she was reminded of a dead body on the forest floor.

A Story About Floating

Gary jumped off. If it wasn’t for the wind, he thought, I think I would feel totally weightless, like floating in a pool.

Gary had never floated in a pool, but he had always wanted to try. There were lots of things he hadn’t done. But when one considers how many things there are to do, how many lives that could be lead, how many different people we could be – one realizes that even considering them all takes a considerable amount of time, and time is the only part of the equation that is not infinite, at least not for Gary.

Earlier in the day he flipped through lists on the Internet to avoid making phone calls. A week before he had called in sick to spend some time with his brother in the hospital. He had moved into a new studio one-month prior, when his roommates told him it wasn’t working out. Almost a year had past since he dropped out of business school because he didn’t get along with his teachers. And twenty-three years ago his mother forgot her birth control.

Gary’s parents wouldn’t have fell in love, if his father hadn’t needed someone to bail him out of jail. All his grandparents had survived the poverty that had taken the lives of a half dozen siblings. To continue down the tree was to embrace stories of chance encounters, war endurance, heartbreak, perseverance and blind luck.

Yet Gary thought of none of this as he stepped from the ledge. He thought of Hawaii 1982 and a fish that skirted his ankle and made him scream pre-verbally for his mother. He wanted to call for her now, but it would do no good, no good at all. So instead he though of past, but this time he inserted himself in the memory. The sun overhead, the sand in his toes, the sound of families playing where the waves greeted the shore and murmured ...hello…goodbye…hello…goodbye… He picked up the screaming child, himself at age two and spoke in a tone he did not know he was capable of. There now, it’s okay. In the glaring sun, he did not immediately recognize the woman with the sunglasses and hat.

-You have quite a way with children, his mother said.

-Thanks…I just- he was crying…

-If it’ll stop him from crying, you can kidnap him.

A Story About the Woods

The girls had been lost in the woods for two hours and we were beginning to worry. My husband stirred up some hot chocolate on the stove in the hopes that the smell might draw them home. The sun crested a nearby bank of trees and the backyard lit with an angelic glow. They had never been gone so long. I hoisted on my mud-stompers and donned my wool field jacket and matching cap. I pocketed my father’s compass and a folding knife the girls had got me for my birthday. My husband entered the hall as I opened the door. I opened my mouth to reject his protests, but he had no plans to stop me. “Here,” he said, “in case you get hungry.” He handed me a carefully packaged sandwich and a pouch of granola. “Or they get hungry.” I kissed him on the cheek and headed out. The look on his face made my heart ache, so I tucked that image away and stepped into the endless woods.

When I say that the girls were lost, I mean they were lost to us. Certainly they had each other, but I could not say if they felt like they were missing. Or if they would miss us at all. At this point I couldn’t be sure of anything and there was a possibility that they were intentionally gone. The girls had been spending most of their free time outside this time of year, which seemed only normal after being locked away in our cabin during the snowy season. Usually they didn’t stray out of earshot. Certainly they didn’t miss the dinner bell. The would surely endure my husband wiping clean their dirt colored cheeks for a plateful of stew. They ate like wolves. We forgave our children their ill manors in this one instance because their wild abandon radiated our small home with such joy that we would all give over to laughter.

Before bedtime they had been asking questions I felt I should not answer. Even more disconcerting, their teacher had remarked how our girls had become particularly clannish, keeping to themselves at recess and during snacks. The truth is, hearing this made me proud. We encouraged our children to bond deeply, to see people as they are and to be part of the world. Everything they wished to know would be revealed to them in time. So when their father and I failed to answer their questions, they stopped asking. Instead they took up their indoor time by telling us the adventures they had during the day. They practiced elaborate games of imagination. The girls spun tales of hunting made-up beasts and traipsing across unknown terrains. I worried that these stories they told themselves lived to close to the act of lying, but my husband insisted that the girls were merely acting out the skills I had taught them and I could not argue with that. Secretly I worried that the girls had too much of my people in them.

In the dying light I could see the detritus of their pretend time. Make-shift weapons and the remains of forts were nestled into the crooks of trees, and I wondered if their preparedness was more thorough than I would have initially imagined. I maintained a steady but observant pace. If they were hiding anywhere nearby they could surely make it back to the cabin after they finished their fun of scaring their parents, and their father would have warm blankets to go along with any admonishment. No, I tasked myself with going into the deeper woods, where the roots of trees tangled together and it became difficult to both traverse and navigate.

I tried to picture the story of how my girls might have left. Even I, their mother, had started to think of them solely as a group, but in truth there were five individuals and knowing their weaknesses was essential. They would certainly know how to protect the group. Emily, the smallest, was quick and alert. The biggest was Hannah who, while commanding in presence, often cast sly glances to Jane. Most likely it would have been clever Jane who suggested this journey. Margret and Victoria held the middle, but while Margaret maintained the heart of the group, Victoria was the hardest to read. Her flighty nature masked thoughts that were not available to her parents. For the moment I focused on Jane, trying to see her path unfold before me.

A Story About Metamorphosis

As Gurtie awoke from uneasy dreams, she found herself transformed into a rather large rabbit. Uncomfortably positioned on her curved spine she parted her eyelids. The sight of paws startled her. Immediately she twisted and kicked, kicked and twisted, winding herself under the now undersized duvet and hiding her soft white belly from view. With her head covered, Gurtie felt much better. Despite her nose twitching and her heart pumping like a motor, the experience was not wholly unpleasant.

Well look at this, she thought, This is something new. Gurtie had been wanting a change for a sometime, and while she might have only been thinking of getting a few new blouses, this change might work as well. Won’t everyone be surprised when she showed up to work like this. She wondered if there might be more difficulty in filing or answering the phones or typing at a computer, but she was certain they would have to make accommodations. There was a new girl in a wheelchair who had been quite a modern set up. Even Janet received an adjustable desk, when her doctor said she shouldn’t be sitting for so many hours at a time.

Perhaps it would be acceptable to poke her head from out of the covers. It wouldn’t be quite right to say that Gurtie felt confident in a way that she hadn’t since her first year of college, but more like she felt at home. Peeking out into her room she saw the clock read a few minutes past seven. She had forgotten to set her alarm again, but had luckily awoken with enough time to get to work. Maybe she would even walk today.

Her nose and whiskers itched and Gurtie found the back of her paw a satisfying remedy. The way her tucked arms rubbed over her face, felt right in an evolutionary way. She found that if she licked her paw she could clean her long furry ear. Catching sight of herself in the full length mirror on the back of her door, she let out an audible sigh of cuteness – Awww. Just then she heard a small knock on the door and ducked back under the duvet. A familiar voice said, “I’m going to hop in the shower if that’s okay.” Her roommate Wendy was always so considerate. Gurtie was surprised by her voice saying Surrre. That one word purred with the beat of her heart. Wendy’s footsteps went down the hall and Gurtie realized all the things she could hear.