Sharon L. Dean ~ Rich Ives

Deux Contes Deux

 

 

Sharon L. Dean

Lilies

 

            Hurricane Lily pummels the Maine coast, its wind penetrating through the drawn curtains into the musty air of Blenda's parlor. She sits alone in the dim light, her large figure framed by a Victorian chair. An easel beside her holds a blank canvas, a set of brushes, and tubes of paint. She is talking to a woman who could be her if she were standing.  The woman is Swedish with reddish hair drawn severely back. A white bow matches her size but is too youthful for her mature face. It looks like the wings of a bird. A high neck dress cascades over the woman's large breasts, pauses at the cinched waist, then balloons to the shoes that peek beneath it. She looks as hard as the Victorian chair.

            "It's worse than eighty years ago. Hurricane of '38," says Blenda, her voice as musty as the air. "You remember that one. We lost the pine tree. Lost more than that."

            The woman stays silent, immobile. A narrow mahogany table curves upward to her waist. It holds a vase filled with lilies. Next to Blenda on an identical mahogany table lilies rescued before the hurricane hit are coated with salt.

            "You sent me to bed. I counted every crash of the waves, too terrified to call you."

            The ribbon of light coming from the lamp next to Blenda flickers and goes out. She stands to open the curtains of the side window. It would be daylight if the storm were not hitting directly onto the rocky coast. She watches white foam rise and fall, rise and fall as each wave crashes and recedes. She smells the salt mixing with torrents of rain pounding the grass where the pine tree once stood. The perennials she helped to plant after the '38 hurricane are crushed.

            She turns to speak again to the woman who still hangs against the wall. "Flowers will revive. They'll be stronger than ever. Fertilized well."

            Blenda picks up an artist's brush and a tube of paint and pauses in front of the woman. She hears the woman say, "We'll all be stronger," before she goes into the kitchen to wash her hands. The faucet sputters out the last water she'll get until the electricity comes back on. A woman sits  at a table, framed by a twelve-paned window. She has the same reddish hair as the woman in the parlor, the same oversized bow. Her dress flows over her ample breasts and disappears behind the table that is covered with a linen cloth. The window behind her is curtained with the same white linen. A bird's nest rests on a branch on the window sill. It's been there ever since Blenda was a child. Only a tree relieves the stark white. It's a maple tree, fully leafed. Outside Blenda hears the wind bending branches, the rain gushing through a drain pipe to find its way to the rocky cliffs and into the sea. 

            She uses a match to light the gas burner. The stove is as old as Blenda. She talks to it. "Still working as good as you did in '38. Gas keeps the ghosts away when the power's down." She scoops tea into a china pot and speaks to the woman while she waits for the water to boil. "It's worse than the hurricane of '38. You remember that one. We lost the pine tree. Lost more than that."

            The woman doesn't move. Blenda sits across from her and reaches toward her hand. The woman's hand is large, gnarled from years of battle with Maine winters, with summer vegetables that refuse to grow in the rocky soil, with lilies that flourish in the ocean fog only to get trampled by thunderstorms or hurricanes. The kettle whistles on the stove. Blenda pours the boiling water into the teapot that she covers with a cozy knitted in the shape of a yellow canary. It's so old the canary looks strangled. She lays the pot and a chipped teacup on the table then sits in a ladder back chair that is a twin to the one the woman is sitting on. The chairs have been painted a blue worn into the slate color of the ocean fog.

            Blenda speaks again to the woman, who refuses to answer. "Worse than '38 when we lost that pine tree. Flowers we planted are all trampled down now. They'll come back. Life's a cycle. Ashes to ashes."

            The woman sits staring at Blenda. Her eyes, blue and unmoving, defy the violence of the hurricane. Blenda lapses into silence, listening to the wind and the rain until her tea is cold. She stands, nods to the woman who hasn't spoken, and lays her cup in the sink. She remembers not to turn on the faucet to get the few drops of water that remain in it until the electricity comes back on. She finds her brush and tube of paint, stands in front of the sitting woman, then walks toward the door to the front stairway. Behind her she hears the woman speak, "Tea cozy looks like a strangled canary."

            She climbs the stairs. At the top, the woman from the parlor is standing next to a man even sterner than she. If they were thinner, dressed in farmer's clothes, they'd look like American Gothic. One side of the woman's bow aims its wing toward the man's head. Her reddish hair glows against the faded wallpaper whose flower pattern is not perennial.

             The man is hatless. He wears the formal dress of a Victorian gentleman, a cravat, a vest, a suit coat over striped pants. His shoes are black, shiny, their points barely showing beneath the trousers. He could be posing for a daguerreotype. He holds a cane like a weapon in his right hand. His left arm is wrapped around the woman. The hand cinches her waist at the edge of her belt. Behind them a bird cage hangs from the ceiling, empty.

            The man stares at Blenda with steely eyes. She squeezes the paint brush and tube of paint. She reads the color, carmine, and stares back. Saying nothing, she stands immobile for several minutes. When she moves again, she grabs the bannister that curves into the upstairs hallway. It creates a barricade against the hallway below. She hears the woman say, "It isn't what you think."

            The windows in the bedroom rattle in the wind. The muslin curtains sway from the draft. Blenda looks out the side window toward the pine tree. She covers her eyes then looks again. The tree is gone, toppled in '38. She moves to the windows in the front of the room and looks outward toward the sea. The rain pelts down, the wind howls through the leaves of the maple tree. Beyond, the waves crash onto the rocky cliffs.

            She sits on the bed, still clutching her paint and brush. Standing motionless between the front windows, a little girl is wearing a nightgown. White with a blue ribbon woven through the neckline. Her hair is reddish. It falls in ringlets to her shoulders. Blenda lies down. She remembers the man sitting on the bannister, holding a canary by the neck. She hears the rain, the wind, the waves. She hears the crash as the pine tree falls. As the man falls. The woman with the bow as wide as the wings of a bird wrings her hands and looks at her. "Go back to bed, Blenda. It isn't what you think."

            Blenda pulls the covers over her head. One hand holds the spread. The tube of paint oozes its carmine.

            The woman in the parlor hasn't moved. The bow in her hair has been painted over, its blue turned carmine. The woman in the kitchen window hasn't moved. The maple tree is still. The bird's nest sits on the window sill as it has for eighty years. The gnarl of the woman's hands is carmine. At the top of the staircase, the man no longer stares with steely eyes. They have turned an angry red. He won't raise his cane again.

            The little girl looks out the side window to the space where the pine tree once stood. The lilies beneath are drowned in the storm. They are well fertilized. They'll come back. At the hem of her nightgown a name, Lily, is painted over and replaced with Blenda. The letters scream in carmine.

 

 

Sharon L. Dean grew up in Massachusetts where she was immersed in the literature of New England. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of New Hampshire, a state she lived in until moving to Oregon. In New Hampshire, she taught writing and literature at Rivier University. After giving up writing scholarly books that required footnotes, she reinvented herself as a writer of mysteries. Her first novel, Tour de Trace, was set on Mississippi's Natchez Trace, which she once toured on her bicycle.  As a teenager, she was a Shoaler on New Hampshire's Star Island, the setting for Death of the Keynote Speaker, her second Susan Warner mystery. Her third Susan Warner mystery is scheduled for publication in Fall 2016. All three novels are published by A-Argus/W & B publishers. For more information, see sharonldean.com.

 

 

 

Rich Ives

The Wrong Movie

 

He’s like a bright balloon tied to a tree to show the way to the party. It doesn’t take much of a wind to set him loose and then the party goes with him, colorful and unexpected, more fun than it would have been if he had remembered what he was really chosen for.

 

There’s nothing particularly sensitive about this storyteller, even if his story might be considered poignant. It’s the story that’s sensitive, not the guy. But how long can the guy go on this way? Longer than you want to think about.

 

So let’s just admit it. The guy’s a thinly disguised idiot. He doesn’t even deserve our attention. But he’s going to get it anyway. That’s the best part of telling a story. The guy can do any horrible thing he wants, but he can’t hide. If we hate him and his creations enough, we might start to like hating him, and then he becomes a different kind of excitement, already conforming to our expectations.

 

Okay so now he feels like telling you what’s going to happen next in the story about his story because that would be so “inappropriate” and cool, but the truth is he doesn’t know. At least he doesn’t know in any way he can consciously explain. He doesn’t even know how long the story’s going to just sit there until something that can actually happen coincides with a desire to see something that’s happening finally get finished, but he has to admit he trusts that coincidence with his life, which means that he’s confident in a twisted way, which means it’s not really a coincidence, but he doesn’t know how long it’s going to be before that happens because he’s good at letting things ride, even though he’s impatient enough to want to discover what they are.

 

That’s why he’s thinking about himself as the author of his story, to consider the possibilities of the story about his story until a coincidence occurs that reveals itself not to be coincidental. So he doesn’t know what’s going to happen next because he doesn’t have the same need for it to happen that a lot of people do. Perhaps that’s why he’s interested in the story of a story that doesn’t really have anyone in it but him.

 

Skip this part if you want to because it’s not essential to the nearly nonexistent plot. It’s a moody kind of moment where the weather doesn’t seem to like the protagonist very much. The weather gives plausibility to the emotions the guy is experiencing even though in reality it might not affect all that many people in such an obvious manner.

 

Anyway, the guy feels like the sky just wants to spit on him. That’s how it feels. It’s not that big of a deal, but it does affect him. Under the skin, so to speak. It’s not something he can talk to his therapist about. It seems petty. But it really does affect him. And you can’t control the weather, right? So what’s all this bullshit about making good choices in our lives, huh? If you feel like the weather’s going to shit on your head then that means something. Even if it’s not going to do that.

 

If there’s some French-bereted idiot out there, who will someday make a documentary about the author’s story, it isn’t the protagonist’s fault. And if said beret-head thinks the story’s about some character who actually answered the phone when beret-head called, and who actually gave acceptable answers to beret-head’s interview questions, then beret-head’s got it wrong because he thinks too much about redeeming social values and that’s not the author’s fault either.

 

So here’s the story of the French guy’s documentary:

 

Guy with a floppy hat talking to actor who thinks he’s just playing the part of a loser, who’s going to win in the end. Guy with the floppy hat explaining how self-aware in its mockery the appearance of complex depth will be when the loser, who’s been leading us to expect he will die tragically, actually wins. Flash forward to different guy, in a baseball cap, the new director appointed when the documentary went way over budget finishing the movie minus floppy-hatted second-hand art pretenses, which now promises to end suddenly with a compromise that pleases no one. Still, it’s an anti-Hollywood movie.

    

Newer Than New.

    

Way Way New Age Hip.

    

So struggling actor’s therapist explains that self-awareness may not be enough by itself. You have to actually do something. Sometimes making a bad choice is better than not making any choice at all. So the actor does that. Chooses to stay in the movie and chooses to make more choices. But the story’s not about that. The actor could be the guy in the story after all because he doesn’t want to make these choices.

 

Then he explains this to the French interviewer, and he’s no longer even the real guy he used to be in the documentary, just a talking head answering questions about who the real guy was and how he couldn’t explain himself. He’s all self-assured now, and the real guy didn’t have that point of view.

    

Now the actor can’t really have that point of view either because he understands it too well. It’s a point of view that has a lot of misunderstanding in it. He can’t even be the guy who writes about the guy in the story. Because that guy doesn’t understand himself well enough to explain it but maybe just write it. Too bad they didn’t get that into the movie.

 

Then there’s this long shot of the author in what used to be the French guy’s movie that slowly moves down the narrow hallway, like in that movie Serpico, which is about the good cop that gets treated very badly. There’s something incredibly ominous at the end of that hall, and colors that change just often enough to remind you it’s really happening but never seem to match anything you’d find in real life. Like it’s supposed to be hyper-real, except that hyper-real isn’t real. The shot seems to go on forever. Maybe it does. You could get a couple of fingers shot off in the movie Taxi Driver while you’re going down that hall. You could get horribly beaten. Disfigured. You could lose a part of yourself almost immediately. You could sit there for a while in a pool of your own blood. You could do a lot of things that create even more tension, including deny tension exists, but one thing you can’t do is stop. This story isn’t a story about stopping. It’s not that kind of story. It’s not even the story of that story about stopping. You don’t get to die in this one. You don’t get to answer your questions. You only get to stop talking.

 

 

Rich Ives is a winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander and the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His books include Tunneling to the Moon, a book of days with a prose work for each day of the year (Silenced Press), Sharpen, a fiction chapbook, (Newer York Press), Light from a Small Brown Bird, a book of poems, (Bitter Oleander Press), and a story collection, The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking (What Books).