Counting down from ten never worked for Grace. If anything, it only exacerbated her temper and focused it, creating a keener point to her already sharp tongue, so that when she opened her mouth and spoke, the words that emerged were more painful, more disdainful, and more disrespectful. When she reacted without thinking, she’d usually stumble around with inadequate phrases that blunted the fierce criticism; she kept more employees this way.
Grace was not, to say the least, graceful. Besides her forge-heat temper, she was also frequently rude – not on purpose, but because the niceties of polite small talk and banter seemed like a waste of time and she hadn’t the patience for them. She was also leery of letting others do any work for her and preferred counting on herself. She despised debts of any sort and had difficulty thanking those who helped her. Those who loved her, though, accepted this in her, and learned to become deaf to her tactless observations and blind to her sometimes embarrassing behavior.
She ran a small business, which was unfortunate for it forced her to hire others and trust them with at least a certain amount of responsibility. She always had the uncomfortable feeling that she was turning into a cliche mega-boss-lady, a woman universally feared for her tight bun and neatness. At the same time, she hated the thought that people would look at her and think “Oh, she’s really all mushy inside.”
It was hard for her, being Grace. She often wondered whether there was anything she could do about it.
fiction
Thin Disguise
The old building was cold, its concrete walls never absorbing the day’s sunlight. A small heater that sat in the middle of the room, its metal bars glowing a fiery, hellish red but spreading little enough heat beyond the foot or two of air right around it. The owner of the little room sat huddled by it, shirtless, with a sweatshirt draped over his back. The warmth on his chest almost felt as if there was another body there, pressed close to his.
He knew he should be working, spewing word after word onto the blank screen, crafting some sort of pseudo-intelligent babble that his dissertation adviser would eat up. A disturbing image of turds wrapped inside scones came to his mind; it seemed oddly fitting, though nauseatingly easy to imagine. He put his fingers up to the heater and marveled, as if he were four again, at the way the light shone right through his fingers, making the nails shine with the blood moving under it. The thought of blood always made him begin to hear his pulse knocking through his ears.
Her pulse had always been discernible in her stomach, right where his hand rested when they slept, curled up, their two pairs of cold feet trying to soothe each other in vain. That had been a long time ago. There had been others in his bed since, but they either didn’t spend the night or didn’t fit into the curve of his body quite as well. Besides, they’d all wanted to be the small spoon, and he often needed to be hugged himself, comforted in sleep by the presence of someone at his back. It was one of his only child-like traits. Otherwise, he was often too grown-up, he was told. Even in college, he’d never been as free as he should have been, as easy in himself.
The balcony door blew open and a sharp wind stung him. Getting up, his sweatshirt dropped to the floor, and he felt assaulted as he stepped over the heater, into the harsh breeze. He had to fight to close the door.
Rick’s Tracks
Rick had always been short, round and bespectacled. He started wearing glasses when he was two years old; he looked like a little owl in the photos on his mother’s mantelpiece. By the time he was six, his father began worrying about his rotund qualities and tried to get him interested in sports of all kinds. Rick took every kind of class that was offered at the community center, from karate to swimming, but he always ended up crying and, somehow or other, with broken glasses. His mother grew tired of buying him new glasses and refused to sign him up for any more classes. Instead, his father tried to get him involved in the peewee teams at his elementary school, but that didn’t’ work either. Rick was always gently taken off any team he was on when he was found, elbows on knees, staring at a caterpillar rather than paying any attention at all to the game.
It was no use. Rick simply wouldn’t become the son that his parents had thought they would have. But unlike many unlucky little boys and girls, Rick had parents who loved him and learned to accept him. Rick himself was a cheerful and dreamy child and never seemed to quite realize that his parents had been disappointed in him for a time. He grew up happily, finding friends among the other quieter kids, entertaining himself with adventure books and building blocks, and pleasing his parents with his good report cards.
Of course, little children grow up, even if they read Peter Pan over and over again. Rick stood by the train tracks nervously, fiddling with a ragged piece of tissue between his fingers and dabbing his nose absentmindedly every few seconds and thought back on his life. The bad things, he decided, must have begun around middle school.
Talking to a Chair
“Mommy-Mommy-Mommy-Mommy-Mommy!” The shouts got steadily louder, accompanied by what seemed like an elephant pounding along the second floor hallway and down the stairs. It was amazing that a six-year-old could make quite so much noise.
Greer took a deep breath, trying to keep her temper. The kitchen table was littered with receipts and she felt as if they were all ganging up on her, trying deliberately to bamboozle her into making another calculation mistake and needing to start all over again.
“Mommy!” Rebecca stood in the doorway, hands on her hips. “Didn’t you hear me?”
“I think they heard you in China.” Greer sighed and took off her reading glasses. They made her head ache. “What is it?”
“If you heard me, why didn’t you answer?” Becca shifted her weight to one leg and tapped the other foot. Greer fought down a laugh; it was a gesture her daughter must have picked up from her, and it looked precociously adorable. But Becca hated being laughed at and saw herself as a very grown-up little girl. Greer remembered, vaguely, that she too hadn’t liked the feeling of being just a kid and therefore unworthy of being taken seriously.
“Because I’m working on taxes and I need to concentrate. If you needed me, I knew you’d come down here and talk to me like a civilized person instead of shouting all over the house. And I was right, wasn’t I?”
Rebecca dropped the pose and took the chair opposite her mother. “I dreamed about Daddy.”
“Oh, Becca… Was it a nice dream?”
“No. But Daddy was in it. So it wasn’t only bad.”
“Was Daddy nice?”
“Yes. He hugged me.”
Greer played with a pen, needing something in her hands to stop her from reaching out to Becca, because she didn’t like being touched unless she initiated it. The therapist said that children could develop these kinds of aversions, and Greer knew she needed to respect her daughter’s boundaries, but it was so hard, sometimes, not to be able to hug her whenever she wanted and smell her usually messy hair and remember how once there had been another smell beside it that belonged to the body hugging the girl from the other side and making a Becca-sandwich.
“Can I help?” Becca asked, picking up a long, half rolled grocery receipt and pulling it tightly around her finger.
“Thanks, but no. Why don’t you bring your spelling book in here, though?”
“Okay.”
Greer didn’t believe in heaven, so she looked at the chair that he’d sat in during dinner every night and spoke to it instead of looking up. “I hope you can see her. She’s only six and she wants to help me do my taxes. I really hope you can see her right now. You’d love her more than ever.”
Passing
It was a mistake to think that going down Main Street at six o’clock in the evening would be a good idea. It was all part of getting over it, of living her life, of being the bigger person. She’d heard these phrases over and over again, coming out of her friends’ lips. She watched those odd flaps of skin move around those words, fascinated by the way they were formed out of clicks of the tongue and smacks of flesh on flesh.
It was strange, but over the last six months, all the faces Paige saw had turned into a strange arrangement of mouths and noses, eyes and ears. They stopped seeming like a cohesive unit – as they’d always seemed before – and began looking like collages, bizarre formations stuck together on a blank, flesh-colored slate. The only face that still made sense was the one that she hadn’t seen in person for twenty-six weeks.
But on the winter evening that she finally took the once-regular route home from work, Paige saw that face again, and its perfect clarity baffled her more than all the bits and pieces of faces that she’d gotten used to. He said hi, and she said hi back, and she could feel her mouth as if it, too, were its own entity and not connected to her skin any longer. The awkward pause lasted a lifetime and a nanosecond, both at once, and then he said that she looked good. Paige didn’t know what to say back, so she nodded and clutched at her bag. It was something solid and real, and the feeling of leather and fabric anchored her and reminded her that she was of this earth, not an alien who’d fallen from the sky moments ago. She remembered that she needed to get away, and fast, or something bad would happen, although she was unclear what that might be, exactly.
She didn’t turn back to look at him again. She was too scared that his face would have turned away by then and she’d only get to see the back of his head.
The Greensword Tales
Most stories begin at the beginning. Some begin in the middle. But I go by the lesson my Auntie Greta drummed into me all those years when it was just her and me in that little house off the highway. We didn’t have a TV, and our electricity came from this old generator. Point is, there wasn’t much entertainment besides the books we got at the library or taking walks in the woods, but leaving the house at all – whether to pick up new books or find a new trail – was dependent on the weather, and that was a tricky, fickle thing.
So my Auntie Greta told me stories, and she taught me how to tell them too. She taught me that sometimes beginning at the end is more efficient. This story, for instance, began with the end. Auntie Greta and me – we’re the last survivors of the sprawling Greensword family, and our story begins hundreds of years ago. I know as many tales and legends about our family as Auntie Greta does, and maybe a few more since I learned to use the computers at the library and managed to find out some other stories people tell about us.
But out of the dozens of stories Auntie Greta and I told each other, there’s only one that really meant something to us. It was our story; the story of living with the knowledge that we were the last of our kind and that there would be no more. Let me tell you, that was some burden to bear. We’re still living it, Auntie Greta and I. Our story is the ending of a long epic, but it’s not over quite yet.
But Are We Friends? II
Diana woke up to the blast of a car horn. Her head ached with its usual weekend hangover. She half sat up in bed and looked out the small window. She flinched as another loud honk sounded from the orange car parked on the sidewalk next to the apartment building.
“Shut up! Some people are trying to sleep, you know!”
Diana pulled her head away from the window, worried that the old lady across the street who’d stuck her head out to yell at Jay would see her watching and associate her with the car. The neighbors were unfriendly enough; Diana didn’t need to give them another reason to shoot her distrustful looks. She pulled on a a big black sweatshirt and a pair of leggings and stuck her feet in mismatched Converse high-tops that had been worn so ragged that she used them like clogs.
“You seriously cannot do that. Ever. Got it?” Diana slammed the orange car door after her so hard that Jay looked past her nervously to see if she’d torn the handle off. She was breathing hard and leaning towards him, hair in a messy bun smack on top of her head. She looked ridiculous.
“What? Pick you up for pancakes on a Saturday morning?” Jay fluttered his unusually long eyelashes.
“Don’t play innocent.” Up came Diana’s finger and down came her voice. She was, Jay thought, the only woman in the world whose voice went low when she was angry rather than turning high-pitched and squeaky.
“I’m not – ow! Stop it!” But Diana didn’t. She kept poking his chest and stomach mercilessly while he began to laugh helplessly. He was incredibly ticklish.
“Now here’s what you can do to make it up to me.” Diana leaned back, tired. “First, change this depressing music.”
“It’s not depressing, it’s-”
“Dylan. I know. Poet, artist, musician extraordinaire, blah blah blah. I know. Put on something that doesn’t make me want to slit my wrists, will you?”
Jay rolled his eyes but took out the ancient Dylan cassette and pushed in an equally old Earth, Wind & Fire tape. He watched Diana’s stupid hair arrangement begin to fall down as she bobbed her head to the trumpets and drums. As he began to drive she let her hair down from its constraints. He kept watching the road purposefully. “What’s second?”
“Huh?”
“You said that changing the music was ‘first.’ So what’s second?”
“Oh, right. Second… second is you pay for breakfast!” Diana punched the roof of the car triumphantly.
“Can’t. No money. Spent it on gas to pick you up.”
“Oh. So I have to pay?”
“Yup.”
“Oh, fine, whatever. But you owe me.”
“Yeah, well, I owe you like a hundred dollars by now. At least.”
“No, I mean you owe me a second thing to make your rude awakening of my neighbors up to me.” There was a grin playing around the corners of Diana’s mouth that made Jay’s stomach turn. His knuckles on the steering wheel turned white. If Diana had looked over, she might have seen this and noted it, but she was busy looking out the window, giving attractiveness scores to the guys she saw passing.
Conversion
“Convince me.”
The whispered challenge echoed in the otherwise silent, empty space. The words didn’t seem to disperse and the lips that had uttered them were still curled aggressively around them. A skittering noise in the wall broke the spell of rage, announcing that the place wasn’t quite as empty as it seemed; there were mice in the walls, at the very least.
A statue loomed at one end of the hall. It was a tragic figure, mouth turned down, eyelids drooping sadly, shoulders drawn up in a helpless gesture. If it was expected to respond, it stayed disappointingly still.
“Convince me!”
No whisper this time; a harsh, ragged voice flew around the high ceiling and traveled up and down the walls. The mice stopped their scratching, fearful of the stranger invading their nocturnal freedom. Sharp whistles came from the speaker’s chest as air wheezed in and out of it. Illness was in the air. The statue’s frown almost seemed to deepen, perhaps in mourning.
“CONVINCE ME!”
The shout dispersed the quickest. Two thumps followed; the mice fled, thinking it was the cat jumping down from some high object. What followed was the most profound lack of sound, more of an absence of anything substantial rather than true silence.
Typer
The blender whirred and buzzed loudly. Laura turned her head and torso away from it, even as her finger stayed firmly on the button that made it work. It was an old machine, one of those that had been built to last rather than to break, and she’d gotten it when she and her sister moved their mother to the nursing home and divided the stuff in their childhood home between them. Laura had also taken the old rug that had kept the parlor permanently dusty and the painting her father had produced in his youth before giving up on art and becoming a pawnbroker.
She took her finger off the button and felt her headache subside a little with the end of the horrible noise. Lifting the lid, she looked in at the gooey, sticky mess and sniffed deeply. Chocolate, brown sugar, peanut butter and half a gallon of soy milk. Her friends said it tasted awful, but the invented drink was Laura’s favorite. Sometimes she added vodka and made it as her own personal cocktail when she had friends over for dinner and drinks.
Laura poured herself some of the thick drink and put the glass container with the rest of it into the fridge to cool. She dunked one of the thick crazy-straws that she collected into it and sipped – it was a struggle, which was part of the fun – as she took it into her writing room.
She sat down at her typewriter. She had a laptop beside it, but she used it only to copy the typewritten pages, editing them along the way. Her first drafts she wrote exclusively on the clunky old machine. She had a thing for the antique and outdated. Anything that seemed to reflect the past drew her attention immediately. In college, she’d considered becoming an archaeologist for a while before inevitably declaring an English major.
Taking another long sip, Laura began to type.
The Goof
It was going to be a stinky day. Mark could feel it as he walked through the halls. Some days just stank, and this was one of them. He kicked an empty can in front of him and concentrated on the rattling, metallic noise it made. It was better to listen to that than to hear the conversations going on around him in which he wasn’t a part.
“Hey.” The Goof was waiting by his locker again. Mark knew his real name, but he never thought of him as anything other than The Goof. The Goof had big ears that stuck out of his head, big eyes, a big mouth and an oddly small nose. It was as if someone had looked at pictures of boys in a magazine and cut out different bits of their faces and assembled them together. The result was The Goof. Mark didn’t answer him as he opened his locker, hiding the combination with his hand. Thirty-two… Seventeen… Twenty. Open. It was like magic, a little piece of magic, this locker-opening business. All you did was twist a knob around, but you had to do it carefully, you had to concentrate or you’d have to start the whole thing over again.
“Hey.” The Goof wasn’t going away. Mark grunted his approximation of a greeting. The Goof, now secure that he had Mark’s attention, launched into a long speech about the recent discoveries or, as he pointed out, un-discoveries, about the shadowy mystery of the God Particle. Mark didn’t know what he was talking about. He tuned The Goof out, as he usually did, and grabbed his algebra textbook and his lunch from the locker before banging it shut and walking away, The Goof trotting along at his heels like a persistent terrier.
Slightly Ignorant 