11 posts tagged “fiction”

Lamia places her palms rigidly, queenly, on the arms of the overstuffed bookstore armchair. It is sage green, nondescript. The fabric has pilled in all of the places on which a multitude of anonymous people has sat. She fidgets slightly, warmly. She has been awake for 23 hours, maybe now a full cycle of 24. Having been awake so long and for no purpose, she feels excessively American: were it not for the iced coffee stirring in her stomach, Lamia is sure she would’ve nodded off to sleep in her comfortable-enough pillowy chair.

But her back is rod-straight, as it’s been for as long as she’s been in the store: shoulders rolled back, posture erect as a model. The chair threatens to swallow the diminutive childish figure she makes swimming in a much-too-large jersey dress. Her hair is soft, unwashed, a tangled mass of bleached-white curls and diminished shine. Lamia’s dress is expensive-looking but frumpy, a design tailored for a middle-aged woman, not for a girl her age. Yet somehow it suits her, its sequins in all of the wrong places, its blasé shade of purple appearing to make her delicate skin appear even more like pearl: this statue-girl sitting stilly with eyes like glass, hearing past the dull gentle roar of the Barnes & Noble patrons huddling into their overpriced coffees and unpaid-for books.

She could call Schützen. She knows that she could and knows that she won’t: it has been too long, and it hasn’t been long enough. When they last spoke he had said, “Bee. Rely on me if you must.” He had spoken and left the room for who-knows-where—again. Schü had business to worry about, business more important than his wayward and unmanageable younger sister. He had the hotel to run. Lamia had left then: hitched a ride to the train station and ended up at Hunter’s doorstep, where she’d lived like a vagrant since.

Until last night. Now she was nowhere again.

Lamia hadn’t intended to love him. She certainly hadn’t planned it, hadn’t acknowledged her capacity for loving, even. Not since Laila had she been so comfortable with another person—and there was the entirety of the problem. She’d been careless. And now here she is: huddled in a scavenged dress she’d found forgotten in an attic storage bin, her suitcase stuffed with Vivienne Westwood plaids and thrift store T-shirts left behind at Hunter’s. Her hands were shaking when she woke spooning his still-warm body. He smelled of her lavender soap and of something sharp. Lamia had been wearing her favorite outfit—a tartan skirt over a faded Mistula T-shirt—but as her senses returned knew she’d have to burn it: she’d have to burn the red away, the red of the tartan and the red of him.

She knew she couldn’t drag her suitcase through the streets all night, much as it pained her to leave her baubles and sundries behind. Lamia didn’t have the money for a hotel room, and using her credit card would have tipped off her father to her whereabouts as soon as the transaction cleared. Out of the question. She wasn’t ready to return to that place, even if it meant returning to Schützen. So Lamia left her pretty things behind while she walked the streets—aimlessly floating like some specter of a lost dream—until the rouged hush of morning arrived hand-in-hand with the opening of a store in which she could hide.

Now Lamia sits, increasingly aware of her immense and burning stupidity. She has no tears. She was prepared for this inevitability as much as she had dreaded it, had insisted that it would never happen. She hadn’t planned to love him and therefore didn’t see her love for what it was: a tender, yawning hole that couldn’t close until it engulfed him, too. Alone again, feeling the seconds tick by unperceived by the laughing crowd surrounding her, Lamia knows that she will have to call Schützen, knows that she will always rely on him like this—that he wants her to rely on him as much as doing so repels her. As much as doing so makes her love him enough to kill.

"I believe I told you to wait for me upstairs, Bee."

Lamia sighs with that familiar mix of frustration and delight only a sister can feel for an older brother. It has been months―a year, probably, at this point―since she has last seen Schützen, and she expects that this will be the last time they will meet for perhaps another year. From her perch upon a love-seat in the lobby of the Hotel Clematis, she smiles at his appraisal of her, his supreme cool detachment. She knows that he is angry with her for disobeying his wishes (orders, really; it is not like him to "wish"), and that fills her with an absurd sense of joy. Their relationship is like this: calculated, brisk, businesslike. Secretly she revels in it, loves him terribly for it.

"I know, Schü. I wanted to see if you'd actually come down here to find me, or if you would just blow me off like last time."

He smirks: a small twitch of the lip that, were Lamia not his sister, she would not have understood. "I'd never do that to you, dear one."

"Of course not." This is her role in his game: to placate him. "Shall we go up to your office, then?"

Schützen takes a watch out of his vest pocket, checks it, and tucks it away in one deft movement. "You've wasted too much of my time already." Lamia's heart swells: she is proud of this, of making herself a nuisance, of making herself some creature of import to Schützen. They have been apart so long that takes she consolation in whatever attention he gives her. "You know that the wedding is soon."

Suddenly her smile disappears.

"No, actually, I didn't," she replies, eyes flashing as she looks past him toward the front desk. A group of schoolgirls in uniform mill about the desk, improbably amounts of luggage barricading them from the leers of suited middle-aged passers-by. They giggle as the men pass, as conscious of their power as they are afraid of it. Their laughter reminds her of the tides of the ocean: spontaneous, organic. "I don't recall ever receiving an invitation."

"I sent one to whichever address you gave me last time you moved." His voice is smooth, malicious. "Rather, Mae sent it out."

The name hangs in the silence between them: a curtain, thick damask and dark. Lamia is sure this is a test of her fidelity, her allegiance to him, and she knows that she will submit. She always has. "Give me the date and I'll be there."

"I thought you would say that." Schützen smirks again, handing her a small ivory envelope retrieved from a pocket of his crisp, pinstriped suit. "It's the 28th of this month. Here, of course, in the Grand Ballroom. I do hope you'll attend." They both know he means: Of course you'll attend.

Her heart is heavy in her chest, dead weight. Without words, she nods. It is enough to appease him. A full, rich smile plays at the corners of Schützen's lips: a knowing thing. "We'll see you there. Now you'll excuse me―I have a meeting."

As abruptly as he appeared, he is gone. Lamia watches the throng of schoolgirls, suitcases and cell phones in tow, board the elevator, before readying herself to leave. As the elevator's door shuts, the lobby becomes thick with quiet, and Lamia is alone.

When her life begins to parallel the circumstances leading to her childhood molestation, twenty-eight year-old Jacqueline Hardy's relationship with her fiance disintegrates because she can no longer distinguish the reality of the present versus her halfway-fictionalized account of the past.

In 1890, as eccentric heiress Sarah Winchester tirelessly moves to add rooms to her so-called "Winchester Mystery House," a servant and a builder feud to win their mistress' favor and come to understand what it means to love.

"There ain't no heaven and I been doin' fine, jus' fine."

I didn't believe there was a problem, not yet at any rate, because there wasn't anything akin to sorrow scratched into his face. If you looked you could maybe see the beginnings of frustration making its mark across his forehead, a few new sullen lines where the skin had once been taut, but certainly never sorrow. Perhaps I wasn't looking hard enough. I've often been accused of looking without seeing. But each night we slept facing each other, our noses barely touching, a sleep so close as to make it impossible to ignore the development of a face's landscape, its new landmarks, when one was awake to complete the study. I rarely slept when we were like this, actually, because his sleep was so peaceful that it seemed to refresh the both of us. With him I was an insomniac: watching him sleep was enough, just enough, to keep me rested through the new day that spread through the blinds every morning. Which is why I feel I can say with some authority that I didn't believe there was a problem, not yet: he gave no outward indication, no notice of the coming loss.

In the morning Alma finds her father sitting at the kitchen table, a stack of thick pancakes assembled on the counter, waiting. Harry looks apologetic in his undershirt and boxers, his lips quirked into a half-smile as she enters the room: “Hey, kid.” Yesterday’s fallen newspapers are in a bin beside the table, neatly arranged. Before sitting across from Harry at the table, Alma takes a plate from the cabinet, drizzling two pancakes with warm syrup.

“Morning, Dad.”

“Sleep well?”

“Yeah.” Deftly, she slices her pancakes into symmetric squares, the quick cuts of the knife linear, planned.

“You’ve been quiet these past couple of days. Something wrong?” Harry’s voice is low, filled with unasked questions Alma knows he’s thinking: Something wrong? Lose your sight? Can’t feel a thing? Passing out? She chews on a perfect square, thinking about the unhappy reality of misunderstandings, of contrivances. I’ve been frightening myself. Last night too was an anomaly. Yet she can’t shake the sense that she’s fooling herself into a false calm, a calm which she herself does not—cannot—really believe. Again she thinks of the previous day’s injection, of the nurse’s noncommittal demeanor, her own disconnect from her body. The ache in her thighs, the absurd burden of nothingness. Alma sees her future and it is blank.

She says, “Everything’s fine.”

The night is quiet but for the scraping of the tree against Alma’s window. She is wide-awake and lying on top of the soft teeming mass of blankets padding her bed, her legs straight like branches, breathing softly through her mouth. Her evening had passed uneventfully enough, a fried chicken T.V. dinner eaten and a few chapters of Catch-22 read while sprawling on the sofa, Harry snoring in his battered blue easy chair as a baseball game droned busily in the background, dividing the room in lonely halves. Abruptly, during a commercial break only a quarter of the way into the game, she rose for bed, abandoning Heller to the Red Sox and her father to his dreams. In her room she turned on the light and lay down, resigned. Now she studies the ceiling, an unmarked sterile white thing, the colorless domestic sky sprawling needlessly above her before reaching down to meet the trim ivory walls. She’s struck that the ceiling is finite. In the ceiling she observes a defined beginning and ending, a tenuous mortality clinging to the crisp whiteness of the paint, and she feels small. She thinks, The night is young, and feels smaller.

Absentmindedly she runs her hands over her tender thighs, feeling for something of which she’s not conscious, some secret only her fingertips can trace. She is wearing her nightclothes, an oversized nightshirt and clean panties. The pressure of her fingers on her bare legs is enough: Alma remembers the day she first encountered death. Already long-limbed at seven, she was stretching her arms as far as she could toward the clouds when her mother came downstairs, red-eyed and bleary. She continued looking upwards during Rita’s explanation of her grandfather’s death: “It was a heart attack, honey. But he must be happy, wherever he is, because he was an old man and he was loved.” For years afterward Alma thought a heart attack was an eruption of emotion, that sharp overflow of turbulent joy when one’s heart seizes and one’s brain realizes, This is the moment, this is the endless moment, the endless final moment, praise be. That day she saw angels in the clouds and felt at peace. Lying in her bed now, Alma is a nihilist, the ceiling above the arbiter of futility. She hurts. Harry is downstairs snoring, and she is upstairs, hurting. When she went blind she had an excuse to feel unhappy, and yet she was unaffected, unafraid. Now it’s just the bruising, the prick of the needle each week against her already blue-red skin, the machinations of scheduling her life around a barely-apparent disease. Today’s gruff indifference. Her solitary burden. The loneliness. Her father, unaware. Alma is ashamed of herself, of her weakness. He’s always here for you, Alma. It’s just an off-day, an anomaly. But she fears that this will become routine, that she’ll be struggling against her impalpable future alone, her mother gone south to who-knows-where and her friends still blissfully ignorant, her father big and tired from too-much worry, she forgetting to breathe as the plunger descends inside her again and again, the never-ending reality of illness, the perpetual motion-machine of medication, of abandonment, clotting within her chest. She closes her eyes and massages the bruises.

Are these my entire life, now?

Soon she is dreaming that humanity rides in an airplane she herself flies, entire populations filing into the passenger seats while she double-checks the instruments in the cockpit, lighting the Fasten Seatbelts sign as foreign dignitaries demonstrate safety procedures, then landing safely in some alter-universe, some new green star, one tinged with the bright everlasting promise of escape.

Again the tree scratches the window and moans.

It’s 4:27 P.M. when Alma returns home. Her car, a miniature black two-door Saab with a dent in the passenger-side door from when she ran into a mailbox, grunted and groaned, a dyspeptic sound, the entire ride back to 171 Washington. Alma is currently unemployed and can’t afford to fix whatever has given her car indigestion. She parks the car across the street from her house, the sterile white ranch clothed by poplars in which she’s lived her entire life, and leaves both doors unlocked, hoping an unassuming carjacker will happen to take it away. Inside she sits on the fading green family room sofa and broods.

Alma lives alone with her father, a round-faced man with deep-set eyes and red cheeks. In his youth Harry was a hockey star. Since graduation he’s worked as a court reporter, marking the days with long stretches of furious keystrokes. His mother-in-law, a doubtful woman with a sharp widow’s peak and a dotted line of grey hairs across each eyebrow, used to say that “only gays and sissies work as secretaries,” a statement her daughter never refuted despite the reality that her husband was a rough, curt man more given to watching football than loving. Unlike Alma, Harry wasn’t surprised when Rita left, citing irreconcilable differences and an aching for her boss’ fresh blood; he knew himself to be hard, unmanageable, probably an unfit husband and an even more unfit father. Even so he loved her, and Alma can see the regret in his eyes even in the present. Since that day, he has been reluctant to trust his daughter, half-believing in the myth that all girls grow up to become their mothers given enough time and distance. Alma isn’t certain this won’t be the case.

Still, she wonders where her father is. Usually, Harry is back from the courthouse on Fridays with enough time to watch her stumble in from the clinic, ensuring that the week’s injection has gone well. Soon after Alma was diagnosed and put on drug therapy, Harry gruffly offered to administer the shots himself so that she wouldn’t have to make the inconvenient trek downtown each week. As a diabetic, he has no issues with impaling himself twice per day to regulate his blood sugar; as a father, he balked at the length of the needle the training nurse expected him to plunge into Alma’s thigh. At the training session, his hand wavered over her leg, holding the needle gingerly, fearfully, as if it were a spindle of glass threatening to cut them both, and after a few moments, he laid it down, unable to bring himself to puncture her then-flawless skin. Harry doesn’t trust his daughter, but he doesn’t want to hurt her, either, so grudgingly he handed the responsibility of his daughter’s health over to Pathways Medical. Alma takes his presence on Fridays for granted in a way she doesn’t during the rest of the week, and today, she feels his absence acutely, piercingly. She remembers being 14-years-old and hearing her father’s wan shallow sobs from behind his bedroom door following Rita’s leaving, the fragile choking sound pathetically keen in her ears, pathetically erupting from a man prone to icy silence. Never will I need another person like that, she thought. Never will I rely on another. Her high-school years were spent in constant avoidance of the responsibility of close friendships, of relationships deeper than finger-fuckings on the backseats of beat-up cars. She was never without friends, but never with confidants. And yet she finds herself craving the simple comfort of her father puttering around in the cramped yellow kitchen when she comes home from the doctor’s office, spreading peanut butter on saltine crackers as he mechanically asks how her day went, the words well-worn and familiar, if artificial.

Soon the front door opens a crack and Harry pushes through hip-first, a stout brown grocery bag full of newspapers in tow. “Goddamn garbage-men didn’t pick up the newspapers again.” He’s indignant. Alma shrugs, has nothing to say. Walking toward the hallway, he unceremoniously drops the bag on the floor, spilling newsprint across the drab carpet. When she moves to pick up the papers he stops mid-step and looks at her. “Don’t. I’ll get that in a minute. I need a shower.”

Alma nods, still quiet, and he leaves the room. After a moment’s silence she stands, wincing at the ache in her thighs, and follows him to the bathroom, leaning against the wall to speak with him through the firm white door. “Where were you?”

Harry’s voice is muted through the painted wood. “Uncle Joey’s. He needed me to bring Ma to the chiropractor. Couldn’t get off work to bring her himself.” Alma smirks, imagining her father as the scowling family chauffeur, ugly black hat and all: Uncle Joey never gets off work to drive her anywhere. She hears him flush the toilet and turn on the faucet. “How did it go?”

From behind the door, Harry seems distant, misplaced. She’s uncomfortable answering him. “Alright. Well, almost. I came close to fainting again.”

The faucet turns off. Alma hears him knock over some bottles of shampoo, cursing faintly. “Goddamn house is too small.”

“We can buy another one.”

“Get a job and maybe we’ll talk about it.” There is more cursing as Harry knocks into the bathtub, turning on the shower. Alma waits by the door, expecting another inquiry into her day, but Harry has moved into the shower and is now singing some song whose name she can’t place. After another minute she leaves, her thighs fighting against her pants-legs like two matadors.