::: fiction friday: untitled :::

Part One

It's been said that the Eskimo people have hundreds of words for "snow." It sounds logical, given that they supposedly live around the frozen precipitation their whole lives, but it's not true. The Eskimo people don't even have a single language. In addition, if you look at all of the Eskimo languages--Siberian Yupik, Qawiarak, Labrador Inuttut, just to name a few--the word for snowflake is pretty much the same. You don't have to speak any of the Eskimo languages to see that.

There are words for "niece" and "nephew," but there's not a generic word for both. There are words for "cousin," but there's not a specific word for a girl cousin or a boy cousin. 

If you're a child who has lost both of your parents, you're an orphan. If you're a person who has lost their spouse, you're a widow or a widower.

But there's no word for me. There's no one single word in the English language for what I am.

The first time I met Liz, she was having a pretty intense conversation with our comparative linguistics professor about the history of the word "agrestic," and I was waiting to talk to him about why my paper on experimental phonetics hadn't earned an A. I'd seen Liz around campus, but we had never talked. She and her friends seemed silly and childish, more interested in social events and boys than their actual education. Admittedly, I found her attractive, but I'd made a serious commitment to my studies and hadn't found much need for a romantic relationship as part of that commitment.

She turned from her conversation and her eyes fell upon me. Gesturing towards me, she asked the professor, "Would you find him agrestic? I mean, doesn't it all depend on your perspective? Someone from, say, New York City or Paris certainly would, don't you agree?"

"But that's only if you're adhering to the original meaning of the word, Liz. The meaning has morphed since then. Calling him 'agrestic' would be insulting to him, really."

"Well, I don't argue that," Liz conceded, "but in this case, maybe he fits all meanings of the word. No offense...um..."

"Larry. It's Larry. And none taken."

I waited a minute longer, but the conversation didn't seem to be slowing down, so I decided to postpone my conversation and headed back to my dorm where I looked up the word "agrestic." Had I been any kind of a real comparative linguistics major, I'd definitely have been offended.

I didn't meet Liz again until the linguistics club hosted a Halloween dance party at The Pizza Loft the Autumn of our junior year. She was Isaac Newton in his younger days, with a prism in one hand and a Bible in the other, when he was more attractive and hadn't yet become a bi-polar jerk. I was Jean Francois Champollion, the French scholar who deciphered the Rosetta Stone. I dressed in Egyptian garb and carried a Styrofoam stele carved with hieroglyphics. A couple of them were real, but mostly it was scribbles that my suitemates had etched into the foam with the end of an ink pen, the ballpoint retracted.

I'm not a dancer. I'll just say that right now. It was completely against my will that I participated in the dancing aspect of the evening, but the numbers were uneven, and some young lady would have ended up without a dance partner, which, in retrospect, may have been for the best. Nevertheless, I approached the circle, reached for a ribbon from the mass of brightly colored strips and held on.  I chose the green one, the one with the frayed edge, a thread hanging from it brushing against my wrist like spider's silk. On the count of three, we all pulled back, and Liz was on the other side of the circle, her eyes rolled ceilingward, holding her own frayed end of the green ribbon.

::: fiction friday: the pen :::

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!

The first words I could get out of my mouth had nothing to do with anything. He tells me now that I spoke very clearly, articulating each syllable with comedic, exaggerated mouth movements, pushing my lips forward as I formed each “o” or “ou” sound. He says now that he laughed out loud when he heard me speak, though he immediately felt guilty, because I was clearly very serious about my message. He even feels guilty about telling me all of this, though I enjoy hearing the story and ask over and over again for him to tell it. Usually, he gives me a kind of gentle scoff, then he averts his eyes, then he shakes his head. But because of my persistent begging, and because he loves me so much, and because, of course, he’s so glad to be able to see me, touch me, actually converse with me, he usually relents. Okay, he always relents. I’d like to take the humble approach and tell you that I’m not proud of the way I strong-arm him, but I’d be lying. I’m actually quite proud of that. Very pleased.

And that matters. Doesn’t everything? The time you set on your alarm clock. The amount of gas you put in your car. The kind of shoes you put on in the morning. It all matters. Some might say that even the gentle whisper of a butterfly’s wings or the innocuous flutter of a woman’s eyelashes can change the world. I might not have believed that before.

It’s funny, now that I think of it, how everything divides so neatly into “before” and “after.” Before, I wouldn’t have been the kind to strong-arm him. Before, I wouldn’t have believed that my choices, anyone’s choices, were all that important. Not on a global scale, anyway. Maybe not even on a regional scale. I wouldn’t say that I vehemently disbelieved it. I mean, I still voted, after all, so I must have believed that somehow my actions could make a difference. But I don’t think I put much mind to the little things.

And then, in my second life (Ben likes to refer to it as my second life because he says I’m a cat. I think it comforts him that I have seven more lives to go), I can’t stop thinking about how everything matters. There’s a penny on the ground. What will happen today if I pick it up? How will the course of the world be altered? What if I don’t pick it up? How will stopping for just that second--maybe even a millisecond--affect me and those around me?

And what happens, if, say, for example, a person comes through your line at the grocery store, and they neatly line up all of their purchases on the conveyor, and you greet them cordially, just like the manager wants you to do, and you mindlessly ring up every item, and you total up the order, and they dig through their purse for a checkbook before looking up at you and asking, very plainly, “Do you have a pen I could use?” Because, if you’re anything like me, you’d search the counter in vain for a pen before reaching into your hoodie pocket and pulling out your very own favorite pen, handing it over with total trust and assurance that they’re just going to use said pen, not stick it in their purse and walk away. If you’re anything like me, you probably wouldn’t even notice because the day is so monotonous and mundane that you’d forget to ask for the pen back, and you wouldn’t even think about it until it’s much too late.

How can it be too late to realize your pen has been heisted? You wouldn’t ask that if you’d lived my life, my other life, my first life. You’d know full well how a simple ball-point pen could change things. Everything.

For me, I realized that my favorite pen was gone when I reached into the pocket later that day, right after I’d made a fool of myself at the gas station, peering around the corner of the pump to check out the guy with the ’67 Volvo. Have you ever had your embarrassing mistake broadcast by a gas station attendant over the speaker system? “Attention pump #10. Your gas tank is overflowing.” And, sure enough, it was. The guy in the Volvo drove away, and I was left with a red face and a puddle of gas. The guy in the Rabbit stayed. Why didn’t I mention him? Because I didn’t notice him. But he noticed me, and there he stood, beside his rodent of a car, pumping his gas confidently and grinning, first at me, and then, after I shot him a look of indignation, at his shoes. And that would have been the end of it, except that I noticed the bumper sticker on the his car, the one that said, “Real Men Eat Maple Syrup”, and I knew that I just had to have one. Since he’d acknowledged my pathetic, gas-spilling presence anyway, I felt we’d already bridged that “I don’t know you” gap, so I asked.

“Where’d you get the bumper sticker?”
“Excuse me?”
“The bumper sticker. The one that says, ‘Real Men Eat Maple Syrup.’ Would you mind telling me where you got it?”
What I heard was, “Oh. Sure. I found it on blahblahblahsyrup.com.”
And I knew I’d never remember, so I reached in my pocket for the pen. You remember the one. The one I didn’t know I didn’t have. And, you guessed it, it wasn’t there.
“Can you, uh, can you write that down?”
“Sure. Do you have a pen?”
“In fact, I don’t.”
I’m not sure what it was that did it. Was it the way he said, “Sure?” Was it the way he leaned against his car waiting for the pump to stop? Or was it the bumper sticker itself that caused me to finally notice him? Not sure. But suddenly it was imperative that I get that website address on paper. With a quick, “Hold on,” and a quicker step, I darted for the gas station.

I didn’t see this next part, but I’ve been told how it went. Me, striding forward with single-minded purpose. Car, barreling through with absent-minded carelessness. At the crossroads, large metal motorized object meets small, human, female pedestrian. Not a good combination.

I don’t remember this next part, but I’ve been told how it went. After a rush to the emergency room and a long period of me not talking, moving or responding in any way, I fluttered my eyelashes, stared into the face of a man who somehow reminded me of buttermilk pancakes, and spoke, very clearly and with strong conviction.

“Indonesia has experienced a mighty transformation.”

That’s when Ben decided that he was in love.

As for me, I had to wait until the concussion wore off.

::: 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.