Wayfinding, revisited

 

A story I revised in response to an inspiring class on revisions at Stanford, “Wayfinding,” was originally published in The Avalon Literary Review.  (See details here.)  I am particularly fond of it not just because it’s set in Salisbury, a favorite place, but also since it set in motion these past several years of writing faithfully, fully, fantastically (salvation during the Pandemic) and publishing most of the shorter things I write.

 

Now, “Wayfinding” has been published again, this time online in Wild Roof Journal, Issue 22 – Sept. 6, 2023 (in Gallery 2, or find me by name).  I do really love their format and their art, so do browse all the galleries.

 

Here’s a sampling of my rather wistful piece:

“She felt again the rise of the great spire above them, its miraculous continuity.  Continuity:  the connective breath of families, of the universe, that the Tewas believed they kept alive.  

         Like hope, the only thing left in Pandora's box—and in Hazel's.  Brother Raymond had given her that.  This quiet cloister, the sweep of stairs at Wells, the chance to know the brave, bright Salisbury spire, triumphant over despair.  In-spire-ing, breathing into, ‘filling the heart with grace.’  Inspire came from spirare, to breathe; the breath of life continuing.

         Continuing, if in shuddery gasps, after the human storm.  Out of the box opened by Pandora, that fatally meddlesome woman formed from clay by the gods, had sprung war and pestilence, the stuff of Evan's work.  Hazel's intention, as she'd told herself over and over, was only to set free a wistful prayer, fragile as one of the Holly Blue butterflies found in old churchyards.  Palest blue wings with a small spattering of ink spots, embryonic words.  What she had loosed instead had been catastrophic.”

 

 

Image:  Photo by Cas Holmes on Unsplash

Sea Stars

 

I’m immensely grateful once again to be one of the authors published by our wonderful local journal, Catamaran Literary Reader.  My story “Sea Stars,” also set on the Monterey Bay, has just launched in the Fall 2023 issue—Volume 11, Issue 4.  It’s also featured online, here.  The artwork chosen to grace it, used on the cover too, is an amazingly perfect complement, particularly to the myth mentioned at the end of this passage.

 

“Tobias slept for hours when Lainey had gotten him into the house, into a cozy yellow room with fog outside and kindly evergreens standing sentry.

Later, well after normal suppertime, her old friend woke, uncomprehending, in the foreign yellow room, the soft yellow throw blanket over him, but when he saw Lainey he smiled tentatively at her, the way a baby or a child might.  Practicing.  Following her lead.  She brought him warm potato soup, and bread with unsalted butter, and he ate a little before sleeping again.  She followed Leonard’s directions to the linen closet, and found herself sheets and a comforter for the daybed in the front room.

Tobias still hadn’t said anything, which was entirely unlike him, and Lainey worried, despite the reassurance of the others.  She sat in a butterfly-print wing chair, and talked to him again.  She told him his aquarium was safe, the fish fed, his fellow docents missing him, his stars aligned.  [She mentioned the Greek myths, the stories of the sea creatures and constellations he so often talked about.  That had in many ways brought them together.] 

‘My favorite is that myth of Poseidon extinguishing the stars in the heavens to help the Cretan fisherman woo the woman he loved.  They fell into the sea, all of the stars . . .’ (she waited for the old marine biologist to chime in and finish, but he stayed quiet) ‘. . . and he gathered them up in his hands to offer her—a gift she couldn’t possibly refuse.’”

 

 

Image:  Andrea Kowch, “Light Keepers,” Catamaran

The Road to Hana

 

Sadly, the appearance of this story set on Maui was terribly timed—its online publication by JMWW coming on August 16, 2023, only a week after the terrible fires.  I like, though, to consider it a kind of celebration of the island and its unique spirit; a gathering of mana to wish all its denizens good health again; a healing prayer, pule ho’ouluulu.  After all, my heroine is rather lost until she summons back (or conjures back, as is her wont) the special magic that she found there once.

 

“As usual, her approach was to brush the crumbs fallen from the mess of her life under a bright magic carpet, Turkish or Flokati.  Ignoring the real problem.  She thought of Gilbert and Sullivan's Bunthorne, lofty Aesthetic poet and self-acknowledged sham, asking his beloved Patience, lowly dairymaid, ‘Tell me, girl, do you ever yearn?’  And her matter-of-fact answer, ‘I (y)earn my living.’  That was Hana's standard approach as well, deflecting all attempts at getting at her emotions, through side-stepping words, adroit language and puns.  The stage magic she used daily, to make herself seem whole and functional.

In her job as Dear Sybil, dispensing advice, she had to endlessly sift and digest the advice of others—ancient Persian poets, Motown greats, Athenian philosophers, Tibetan sages born in the year of the Wood-Pig, Bishops of Lesotho, experts on black holes and relativity, Jungian analysts, the butler Jeeves, the Farmer’s Almanac and the ancient Toltec, the rich-voiced Maya Angelou, all-seeing Mary Oliver, Pippi Longstocking, cartoonists.  Shakespeare, often.  She was a collage artist, when you came right down to it.  A pickpocket, a thief of ideas and words.  A conjurer, of sorts, pulling bright scarves out of her empty sleeve.  Out of thin air.”

 

Image:  Photo by Dwinanda Nurhanif Mujito on Unsplash

Green Was the Dream

 

The First Line Literary Journal has once again inspired a story bringing together far-ranging memories and ideas.  “Green Was the Dream” was subsequently selected for their Volume 25, Issue 2—Summer 2023.  It’s mostly about lawns, a poem of Federico Garcia Lorca’s I read and loved in Spanish class long, long ago, a class trip to Baja, Mario Lanza, and how the world has changed.  (Also a little bit of this and that.)

 

Here's a taste of Cody’s green dream, vastly different from her father’s—

 

“A closet Romantic (with a nostalgic cursive R), Cody despite her guilt can't stop loving that pristine patch of Kentucky bluegrass.  She lies out in it sometimes too, luxuriating, reading the García Lorca poem her class has been assigned, and dreaming herself green, desired, like the woman in the poem, on the Spanish balcony.  Green, how I want you green.  Dreaming that Nolan Ewing, who is (ever so much) in the class, will murmur that into her ear one afternoon, beside her in the sultry shade, or as evening lengthens and deepens into night.  Verde que te quiero verde . . . And then those other dreamy lines, Con la sombra en la cintura, ella sueña en su baranda . . .  With shadow at her waist, she dreams . . .  She traces the shadow of the camphor tree that lies across her skin where her shirt has rucked up, imagining Nolan sitting above her, leaning down, his sun-bleached hair brushing his cheek, and hers.

         Keeping those dreams of green alive for others and not just for her makes her feel powerful and cool, like the sorceress in the Waterhouse painting of Circe (the poster in her bedroom) with her grass green dress and deep green bowl—poison, admittedly.  Dangerous and enthralling.  Unlike the practical Cody of the pert Stoppard-like screenplays, the papers on Lorca and on the donkey, Platero, she writes in competent Spanish with no mistakes.”

 

Image:  Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Etymology for Beginners

 

The fun Pigeon Review has published a story I had fun writing, indulging one of my favorite fascinations, etymology—and right along with it, wordplay.  You can find “Etymology for Beginners” online, here.

 

And for an amuse-bouche—

 

“Florence would have liked to be named for the famous Italian city, with its Etruscans (the tower builders) and its bridge of gold.  Or, adding an F for femininity, for the Friar in Shakespeare’s play, with his knowledge of herbs and family politics, his role in that famously bad ending.  Or for the Saint, patron of poor people and school children, comedians and cooks, martyred on an iron grill in the third century.  (Another bad ending.)  Or even for Quebec’s great river, bedded in an ancient geologic depression.  That she'd been named instead for her Aunt Florence Wilson, with no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever, other than her stolid decency, had set in motion a lifetime of yearning and making do.

         Her fascination with names, for one.  (Flo—Flora—Flory, all considered and rejected as not suiting her at all.)  With words, more broadly—and what they meant, what they implied, and where they led, both backwards and forwards.  Her need to be part of the great world and its wonders, setting off a lifelong quest for connection.  For following the rivers (and their flow—so maybe after all, then, Flo would name her perfectly) from source across uncertain boundaries to outlet (River of the Algonquins, Big Water Current); the aqueducts from snowmelt in a slow descent to the Villa d’Este’s glittering fountains via Rilke’s poetry; the nightingale (also related indirectly by her name) from nurse to lovers’ near mistake.” 

 

 

Image:  Photo by Ruiqi Kong on Unsplash

 

Release

 

My short story “Release” was published online in the Spring Issue (2023) of Amarillo Bay.   Set by the Pacific Ocean in Santa Cruz the day after Thanksgiving, it involves a chance encounter and a spur-of-the-minute decision which will change the direction of Georgiana’s life—sadly stifled lately.

 

"Though unseen, the tides of the Monterey Bay were ruminative in their overheard rhythms, their profound exhalations, over and over, and Georgiana's own breath began to imitate them naturally as she traversed the night.  A bright planet hung low in the darkness off towards Monterey, and then eventually Japan, farther than far.  Venus, she guessed, wishing she could remember more from the semester of astronomy she'd taken for fun one year at Mount Holyoke.

         What a relief to be outside, walking, her thoughts her own, the possibility of other places there again.  Places with life, color, substance, quirks.  Not all high tech and ungiving unalluring white or stainless surfaces.  A few dogs, flitting or lumbering along the oceanside sidewalk.  Lighted windows to look in, passing.  She envied some with deep bookshelves and antique wooden tables set with burgundies, burnt oranges, copper, chocolate, mulberry, and dusty rose.  Always the gentle soughing of the nearby waves as they came in, went out, audibly grazed the shore.

         This was, nearly, what she'd been looking for."

. . .

"He picked up the soft-sided mesh carrier the mouse had traveled in, and a bigger canvas shoulder-bag, which he opened when they got to a couple of Adirondack chairs just off the parking lot.

         'Oh, I'd forgotten,' he said with what sounded like amusement.  'We can dine in style.'

         Out of the bag he pulled a candelabra with five flameless taper candles which flickered realistically when he set it on the slightly tilted stump between the chairs and turned it on.

         'You carry that instead of a flashlight?' Georgiana teased him, amused and curious.

         'I took it along to my boyfriend's apartment last night for our Thanksgiving revels, and hadn't gotten it home yet.'

         From Bly's more prosaic thermos cups they drank Mayan hot chocolate with ground chiles and cinnamon and ate wedges of vegetable pakora and curried eggplant roti.  Though Georgiana felt out of place and embarrassed sitting 'slumming' in it, as her mother would scold, she was grateful for her warm shin-length camel hair coat."

image:  Photo by White.Rainforest ™︎ ∙ 易雨白林. on Unsplash