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.
