::: fiction friday :::

To balance my efforts in writing non-fiction on Tuesdays, I'll be exercising (exorcising?) the fictional side of my writing with Fiction Fridays. Each will be a short story, vignette or snippet. 


Enjoy!

Marge had been beautiful once, back when she’d been Margaret. When she’d been Margaret, her cigarette had dangled seductively from her puffy lips and the black eyeliner had run smooth across the edge of her lids. But then she’d become Margie, funny and good-looking for her age, and then she’d become what she was now, just Marge, and it was almost impossible to see either Margie or Margaret through the wrinkles, and the nicotine teeth, and the black eyeliner that skipped across her lids in a jagged, broken line, and on those cracked, brittle nails the color of epoxy that hadn’t set quite right, and the spots the sun, that same sun that had once loved her so, had left behind in brown, lumpy patterns on the back of her thin, veined hand. Yes, the sun had loved her once. Everyone had loved her once, back when she’d been Margaret.

Marge stuck out the edge of her bottom lip and forced the smoke out into the chill of the December air. It wasn’t sexy now. As a matter of fact, and even she was aware of this, it hadn’t really been sexy then. It had been ugly. It had been gross and smelly and deadly. But she’d been told it was sexy, so it made her feel sexy, and that had boosted her confidence, which had made her seem sexy. Wouldn’t it have been nice, Marge thought, if we could have found that confidence without the Capris?

Before she had been Marge, or Margie, or even Margaret, she had been Maggie, a sweet little blonde darling with corkscrew curls and big brown eyes, sitting on the arm of her daddy’s easy chair watching Tom and Jerry cartoons.

“Don’t get fat,” her daddy would say. “Don’t get big and fat like Aunt Rita. God, that woman could eat a man out of house and home. I don’t know how Uncle Bob manages to work enough to feed that woman. She must go through two packs o’ hot dogs a day, that woman.”

Maggie liked Aunt Rita. She made cinnamon rolls from scratch and called her “baby.” Her house smelled like heating coal and rising bread, and when she went to visit, Aunt Rita would always take her to church where they sang “This Little Light of Mine” and “Amazing Grace” and the preacher would ask if anyone had a sin to confess, and that now was the time to make things right with God. “Ya never know,” he would say, shaking his finger straight up in the air, “if you’ll get home tonight alive. Who knows but that you’ll get into yer car and BAM! get smashed into by a big ‘ol Mack truck until there ain’t nothin’ left of ya but yer shoes on the highway, and then yer soul will go up yonder to meet yer maker, and will it be ready? Or will the Lord shake his head ever-so-sadly and say, ‘Child, I never knew ye?’” Maggie had made things right with God every Sunday and Wednesday night that she’d gone to church with Aunt Rita, but she never did feel like her soul was ready to meet her maker, so she kept her eyes open for Mack trucks every time she climbed into Aunt Rita’s green Gremlin.

“Have you made things right with God?” Maggie had asked her daddy one Wednesday night after Aunt Rita had dropped her back home.

“God knows about me,” Daddy had answered, keeping his eyes on the t.v set. “Me and God, we got ourselves an understandin’. I leave God alone and he leaves me alone. We ain’t got no problems with each other thatta way.”
“Should me and God have an understandin’ too?” Maggie had asked, picking at the nail polish that was chipping off of her thumbnail. “I don’t wanna have no problems with God neither.”

“You’re too pretty for God to have a problem with you, little girl. Just stay pretty an’ you’ll do alright with God and with everybody else. Got that?”

And, for the most part, he’d been right. When Maggie had wanted her way, all she’d had to do was stick that lower lip out in a pout, and people would just melt. “Take a look at that face,” they’d say. “How could a person ever say no to that sad little face?” And they’d hand over the candy, and the circus tickets, and the pretty dresses.

But not Aunt Rita. Aunt Rita would say, “You stick that lip back where it belongs before I lop it off,” and she’d hold up her butcher’s knife in her pudgy fist and scowl until Maggie’s eyes widened and her pout disappeared. “That’s more like it,” Aunt Rita would purr, and hand her a cloverleaf roll, warm and smothered with half-melted sweet cream butter.

“Look at that tan!” Maggie’s daddy would say. “Look how brown you get! You’re like a little colored girl, all browned up! ‘Cept you’re so pretty and blonde.” The words thrilled and embarrassed her, but she couldn’t put her tiny finger on why.

“You do what you can to keep that little figure,” her daddy would say, puffing on his Camel. “That’s the only thing a woman’s really got is her looks. Ain’t nobody gonna hire ya or marry ya or give ya any mind unless you got the good looks. Look atcher mother and Aunt Rita. Your mother was pretty oncet. Wouldn’t know it to look at her now, but she had herself a figure. Aunt Rita, though. She’s always been a fatty. She’s always done looked like somebody beat her with the ugly stick.”

When her mama and daddy would go out for the night, Aunt Rita would keep her, would tuck her into bed, put a hand on her forehead, close her eyes tight and pray to God for Maggie’s safety. Maggie would lay there, open-eyed, and watch Aunt Rita, would see how her face shone from a scrubbing and how she smelled of Noxzema and Listerine. Aunt Rita would always tell God how much she loved him, how thankful she was for every little thing he gave to her, how she knew that she was worth more than that little sparrow at the feeder and how God wouldn’t let her fall without his knowing about it. And then she’d kiss Maggie goodnight, tuck the sheets tight around her body, and leave her in the dark guest bedroom wondering if God was still there or if he had left the room with Aunt Rita.

Marge tossed the cigarette, only half-spent, onto the ground, crushed it with the black toe of her pointed shoe and stepped away from her daddy’s grave. It would be a long walk back to Aunt Rita’s house in the December cold.