Among the Amazons

 

Another somewhat whimsical story of mine, exploring an eccentric family's stockpile of treasures and secrets, has been published in Rathala Review's Spring 2025 issue.

 

(And don't be fooled by what they say—"Christine" is really only me, Christie.)

 

A family of all women, when the story opens, which the main character, the history-loving sister, Ava, sees as a band of Amazons.

 

    We did have horses, of a kind—the little herd of faded carousel horses that lived out in the barn along with Beulah and Otis’s trunks and souvenirs and Dad’s old snare drum set and heaps of files from everyone (even our kindergarten art, and an “opera” I had begun at six for Sam, whom I adored, called “Tigger on the Tigris”). Also, from Dad, a life-size Sphinx, on wheels, a fiberglass palm tree, and a ruminative caravan of camels painted on a long canvas backdrop. A gypsy caravan, minus a wheel. An Eiffel Tower made of resin coated styrofoam. Some faux French Art Deco posters, bigger than me. Props he’d made and painted for one of the independent film studios in LA, long before computer days, which he’d brought north to Santa Clara County, the inland, midpeninsula reaches of the Santa Cruz Mountains, with his three motorbikes. One fatally twisted but not gotten rid of (why ever not?)—the one Aunt Talia had met her fate on, that inglorious September afternoon. 

         I was the keeper of the horses, like the heroines of Flika, or National Velvet, keeping them spic and span, lining them up just so, taking arty pictures of them for class projects—glass eyes, swept manes, gilded bridles, legs flying in a gallop. I wasn’t a real Amazon, I knew, only the horses and the archery kept me a kind of honorary member, rather disdained by the others, considered insignificant. 

 

When Ada, keeper of horses, becomes keeper of family secrets as well, things of significance happen.

 

 

image:  Antique Ilions Supreme Carousel Horse

Shadow-fighting

 

One of my recent stories, "Shadow-fighting," has been published by the colorful confetti magazine.  

 

A curious small tale which began with a first line prompt.  "My life is a sham."

 

And frolics on from there, thusly:

 

"My life is a sham." 

Maud was making blackberry clafoutis with vanilla and brandy, and making pronouncements as she mixed the eggs with the liquid ingredients, downing a goodish slug of the St-Rémy from the bottle before putting the cork back in.

“I’m not fooling myself any longer.”

Another glug.

“I.  Am.  Not.  Fooling.  Anyone.”

Lowery ignored Maud as usual, shaggy head down, going on studying his lines for the Stoppard (a revival of The Real Thing, at the little theater up in the redwoods) in a spill of early summer sunlight through the breakfast nook window.

 

It includes but is by no means limited to the dramatic Judith Bliss from Noël Coward's Hayfever, blackberry clafoutis, Tom Stoppard quotes, a pragmatic and bespectacled twelve-year-old, an Akita puppy never allowed in the kitchen, Edith Piaf, Cleo the Goldfish, etymology (again), a ferris wheel, Chekhov and Dr. Seuss, and a galvinizing case of long Covid.

 

It was great fun to write, and I enjoyed spending time with its family of eccentric characters.

 

 

image:  Reflex Production, Roman Kogomachenko from Pixabay

Writing Spaces: Spring Work

 

“Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.”
― John Muir

image:  Christie Cochrell, Filoli

 

Writing Spaces

 

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Liber Floridus, Leviathan

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Edward Gorey, The Interesting List

Torre del Lago

 

Another memorial sketch of mine, “Torre del Lago (A Triptych),” bits of creative nonfiction often reworked over the years, has been published in the Spring 2025 issue of Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose—a print edition which can be ordered from the publisher.

 

The triptych includes Lucca, Italy; Santa Fe, New Mexico/Nagasaki, Japan; and Hawaii's Kona and Kohala Coasts.  (Unlikely—but then so has been my life!)  All of the threads of this are tied together by Giacomo Puccini the composer, and his transportative music (especially Madama Butterfly.

 

It begins (though not where it really began)

"One late October afternoon, some twenty years after my father’s death, we take the train from Lucca to Torre del Lago.  Arriving finally at the station on the lake where Giacomo Puccini's villa stands, where he wrote the music that has been for me since childhood the touchstone of beauty and sorrow.  The villa where, I wrote some twenty years ago, they found eight phonograph records with labels in Japanese."

 

And ends (much earlier) with yellow fishes in the blue-black water of the Kona Coast—after a long, time-traveling  journey in between.

 

Images:  Villa Museo Puccini

Yellow Tang