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

Les Godasses Émile

 

My short-story “Les Godasses Émile” has been published in Lowestoft Chronicle, issue #61.  This is a nostalgic look at Paris, as you will see, and indeed a nostalgic look back on my part, remembering how sore my feet were after walking endlessly to see the famous sights, museums, bookstores, and cafés there, and once, in addition, all of the hoopla (tout ce tapage) attending the Bicentennial of the French Revolution and the crowds of le 14 juillet.

 

This is the third story of mine to have appeared in the delightful Lowestoft Chronicle, which celebrates both travel and humor; the others were "Octopus" and "Show Me the Bust of Marcus Agrippa."  Here's what some happy readers say about this quarterly online literary magazine—

 

“Reading Lowestoft Chronicle is like jostling through a sprawling bazaar in Tashkent or Ulaanbaatar, with eyes wide open and wits on high alert.  Invigorating, too.”

— Victor Robert Lee, author of Performance Anomalies

 

“What a delightful refuge the Lowestoft Chronicle provides, artful and clean, featuring sparkling writing in multiple voices—all of it strong, provocative, wry, funny, and wise.  I’m so proud to be part of it.  Add this marvelous site to your reading matter, travelers and armchair travelers alike: your world, and mind and heart, will get larger.”

— Joan Frank, author of All the News I Need and Because You Have To:  A Writing Life

 

 

 

image:  depositphotos, Vintage Paris

Slowness, Speed (again)

 

I feel immensely honored to have had my story “Slowness, Speed” included in Pinyon’s impressive 30th Anniversary Commemorative Edition (Fall 2024), just out.  The story was originally published in Pinyon in June, 2022 (Edition 31).  This is a lovely publication, and the cover is of handsomely textured paper, with an elegantly high-spirited font.  The inside is full of great full-color art and written content.  The editor’s introduction to this celebration of continuing creation ends “What we’ve gained, or lost, in this world hasn’t changed who we are, and for that I believe we all should be not only grateful, but joyous.”  And so I am.

 

This should inspire me to get back to work on the novel I’ve conceived which includes this story and its sequel—a story which has morphed three times and now again, last time I checked still called “Ojos de Dios,” though I think that too has changed to something like “The Weight of Butterflies.”  It might well be a grateful, joyous, worthwhile thing, if I give it the attention and care it needs.

 

Thank you, Pinyon.

Hymn to Pan

 

Appropriate, perhaps, to have this story published now—dealing as it does with a seemingly dreadful man, a famous breakcore musician, a torturously disruptive neighbor, who the heroine must write up for the upscale music review she works for.

 

Carly has been ordered to make her article positive (“Capital P”), and can’t imagine how she’ll manage that, the way she feels about the man and his excruciating entourage next door.

 

“Maybe Antonio Zugasti thought himself some kind of warlock or vodouisant.  He wore his warpaint often, hung around his scraggly neck some kind of charm pendant with snakes worn on a length of nylon climbing rope.  He kept those witchy Cayuga ducks, shimmery emerald green, on a black-hearted water pond beside his neo-Soviet Brutalist house.  My daughter was intrigued by the green waterfowl, but I couldn't let her go anywhere near.”

 

One idea she explores is classical—

“Maybe metaphor, or myth?  I pulled my laptop toward me, balancing it on my knees, following a desperate train of thought.  I found the words to the Homeric hymn to Pan my classicist mother once read to me: 

         "Muse, tell me about Pan, the dear son of Hermes, with his goat's feet 

            and two horns—a lover of merry noise. Through wooded glades he 

            wanders with dancing nymphs who foot it on some sheer cliff's edge, 

            calling upon Pan, the shepherd-god, long-haired, unkempt." 

Could I expand on that?  Pan, the god of music, was Antonio Zugasti's sort.  Maybe somehow I could worm out lots of jocund Pan-like details without having to actually interview the man.  I liked that, smiled.  Humor or my sense of the absurd might after all save me.”

 

Her journey to a workable answer, acceptable to everyone, can be read in the “Second Look” themed issue of Constellations, Vol. 14, Fall 2024 (print only).  And of course the half-goat Pan has his own constellation—Capricorn.

 

 

image:  Pan, mythologysource.com

True North

 

Just published by Toasted Cheese Literary Magazine, Issue 24:3, this short story tells of a mother and her young daughter having to relocate from Arizona to the San Juan Islands—the two facing the involuntary move with very different expectations and first impressions.  Melda dreading the idea of north, and all that water, motion, instability; Luna excited by everything new she meets with open arms and heart.

 

“When the ferry took off, into the wind, Luna shifted from foot to foot at the deck rail—lost in wonder, feeling the spray caress her skin, and all the while chattering a mile a minute at her newfound friend as the big boat plowed up the Sound and then the Salish Sea, the open water between Seattle and Vancouver Island.  Melda, meanwhile, leaned against the comfortless support of the hull or bulkhead or whatever they called it.  She didn’t even know the names of things here, or their purposes.  She drew as far back as she could into herself, her still center, though it felt assaulted and anything but still.  She stared blankly at her phone, trying to summon the spirits from home, a million miles away, to help her through this awful journey into the unknown.  She’d saved and brought along the words which she and Shanti had collected for a little ceremony last summer before Shanti’s graduation from Arizona State.  All four of the directions were there, in this prayer, but now she had to focus on the North.

         Great Spirit of Love,
         come to us with the power of the North
         make us courageous when the cold winds 

            of life fall upon us.
         Give us strength and endurance
         for everything that is harsh,
         everything that hurts,
         everything that makes us squint.
         Let us move through life ready to take 

            what comes from the North.” 

 

Images:  Rafael Quaty, Pexels

thefullonmonet, Pexels

No Rest for the Wicked

 

A story which was fun to write (inspired by another prompt from The First Line, namely “Mrs. Morrison was too busy to die”), and has been given really fun personalized illustrations by Iuniki Dkhar on the Half and One website, posted September 9, 2024.

 

One of the illustrations (above) is of this ineffective séance which Margaret Morrison asks her friend Sally to conduct, in hopes of contacting her dead husband Ellis:

“They lit candles and held hands at the little mango wood table with its mandala design Sally had snatched up at a car boot sale somewhere, but though one of the candles flickered madly at one point, and her cat Tinkerbell gave them an awful fright springing up out of nowhere into Margaret’s unguarded lap, claws out, the spirit world contributed nothing.  Sally (transformed into ‘Salamandra the Seer’ with dusky purple velvet drapery at village fêtes) cajoled and even threatened for a good half an hour, but could get nothing out of Ellis’s intractable spirit.

“You know he never did like me; he says his lips are sealed.”

So they gave up and spent the rest of the evening contemplatively eating ice-cream with an Amaretto float (brought home by Sally at Easter from Mantua after seeing the Chamber of the Giants and the Relic of the Holy Blood).”

 

 

 

image:  Iuniki Dkhar

The Great Thieves

 

My words have traveled far—all of the way to Australia, where a story of mine, “The Great Thieves,” was published at the end of August in StylusLit, Issue 16, September 2024.  The story’s set in Boston, so it’s well-traveled altogether.

 

This is a fictional account which draws on the real-life (bigger than life) occurrences of March 1990, when thirteen major works of art were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston's Fens—a lovely museum I’ve visited often, standing each time looking sadly at the empty frames waiting forlornly for their missing contents to return.  This account of “the single largest property theft in the world,” still unsolved over thirty years later, is purely fictional but in broad terms based fairly closely on what actually happened.

 

One of the characters in the story dwells on the subtleties of theft:  “Life is essentially all about theft, I’ve concluded.  What we steal from others; what we make of that.  Mireille stole this space, to improve it, transform it.  What my mother steals is to obliterate, lay waste to—like salting the earth behind a retreating army.  The theft of your paintings, who knows?  Only the thieves know what they’ve done with them, and why.  Diogenes, who I studied at Tufts, compares the little thief (Mireille, if you like, and each of us to some degree) to the great thieves—my mother, taking life and possibility away.  Whoever stole the art.  The ‘treasurers of the temple’—the crooks in charge, who have the power to ruin great segments of the population daily, just because they can.”

 

 

 

image:  Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

 

Papier-Mâché

 

I have been accepted again as a member of the Heartland Society of Women Writers, presumably because my heart is in the right place.  They have published my short story “Papier-Mâché” in their [w]hole Anthology, which came out in August.  (Previously, online, they published “A Lilac Year.”)

 

“Papier-Mâché” is part of my “suite” of mask pieces, started in 2020, of which four have previously been published:  “The Persian Warrior,” “L’inconnue de la Seine,” “Kachinas,” and “Day of the Dead.”  There are two remaining, and I hope to see them all together some day, as a single work.  If only I had the letterpress I once dreamed of!

 

My particular papier-mâché is (typically) complicated:   “There were strips of newspapers—of crossword puzzles, book reviews, World Series pitchers, stories about rescued dogs, and comics including Calvin and Hobbes.  And for upper layers, colored strips from National Geographics of sea anemones and cheetahs, El Tajín in Veracruz (which the aide, Martina, knew from family visits and told them was named after a thunder god).  Saturn and sharks, pandas and sunken ships, mountain gorillas and strange, creepy insects.  Funny roly-poly armadillos.  Eskimo and Maya children, children from Poland, from the Sudan.

         Silly probably to make a big deal about the paper, but Ruth Sims felt there was an indefinable magic in choosing words and images that spoke from everyday and far away as the foundation of the masks, even though they'd be painted over or covered with origami paper, tissue-thin gold leaf, feathers and raffia and beads.  What was inside counted every bit as much, Ruth told Martina.”

 

What was inside is the thrust of this exploration.

 

 

image:  ApplesPC, Pixabay

Provenance

 

The Plentitudes has been one of my favorite venues, since I was first published by them.  Their format is attractive and their philosophy congenial:  “The Plentitudes is an international literary journal showcasing captivating fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from diverse voices.  We believe in the power of writing—in its plentitudes of forms, styles, and modes of exploration—to move the spirit, shift the gaze, and offer new perspectives.  Founded in New York City in 2020, we are truly global:  our editors, reading board members, and contributors (and their stories) represent an international and multicultural blend.  Our editorial team carefully curates each issue to bring our philosophy to the page and to our avid readers. We are most excited by works that approach the human condition from a mix of critical and creative approaches and we support exigent narratives and counternarratives.  We aim to amplify emerging voices and add to the growing diversity and vibrancy of the literary community.”

 

I’ve had a third story published there, this summer, one originally written with a “body politic” theme in mind.  In this case the body is one of an archaeologist suffering from arthritis, the politics those of an Italian patriarch claiming to be of the Medici family.  The two clash, naturally, when the past is unearthed and the present left substantially unsettled.

 

The archaeologist, Juliana, finds momentary solace in the music her baritone friend and lover (also uncertain) offers on a brief visit:

“As dusk came on, he stood beside her small piano (spruce from Italy’s eastern Alps) and sang Macbeth’s aria, ‘Pietà, rispetto, amore’—sad and heavy as the ancient hills, full of regret and terrible longing.  Juliana sat by the window wrapped in cotton folds and listened to Verdi’s music.  She loved that aria, loved Renzo’s voice—like salted caramel, like sage, like gilded capitals in books of hours illustrated in some sacred dim-lit space by gentle monks.  Reverent and powerful.”

 

This story is related through Juliana and its setting in Tuscany to one of the first stories I had published, back in Spring 2019 in The Wild Word, “She Who Hesitates.”  This isn’t technically a sequel, but there are some continuations and resonances.

 

 

image:  Ekaterina Astakhova, Pexels

Right at the Water's Edge

 

Another prompt from The First Line, whose resultant story they decided not to publish, has led me to another appearance in Catamaran, the Summer 2024 issue, with this even more fabulous than usual cover. 

“Right at the Water’s Edge” drew inspiration not just from the intriguing first line “Mr. Morton needed a new pair of shoes,” but also from our almost-local Irish transplant poet, David Whyte, and his wonderful poem “Finisterre.”  We here in Santa Cruz are indeed at land’s end, at water’s edge, and have to think about exactly what that means, and where we go from here, if go we do.

 

And about how and where Mr. Morton went, in his new shoes, from here.

“An altogether new way of walking, for an old stay-at-home like him.  A crazy, chancy way of walking on, that made his new experimental heartbeat quicken, syncopate like ragtime, jazz, under his homely old tweed jacket, his no-iron button-cuff dress shirt.”

 

And about how a small boat happens to come into it, and a sea journey north . . . 

 

Find Catamaran here, and Mr. Morton here.

 

 

image:  Adam Jahiel

A Golden Opportunity

 

My first publication in a wonderfully productive July was a story with an unexpected twist, “A Golden Opportunity”—written in response to the latest prompt from The First Line:  “Thank you for taking the time to meet with me today.”

 

This tangled tale goes on the talk about an unscrupulous student, a year in Rome, a pilfered Etruscan bracelet, a couple of clean starts, and a rather fine Añejo tequila.  The bracelet is indeed a wondrous golden thing:

 

“From her designer handbag, probably one of those famous Italian knock-offs, she took out a small cloth bundle, then got up from the chair and handed it to me.  I hesitated to take it from her, but then, relenting, curious, took the worn velvet as I might an injured bird with its heart fluttering, in both my palms, and held it for a long moment before unwrapping it.  Touched with wonder, I likely sighed to see the breathtaking bangle, yellow gold, with the delicate wirework, granulation, filigree that distinguished the finest Etruscan jewelry.”

 

Available only in print, this issue of The First Line—Volume 26, Issue 2—can be purchased here (see column 2).

 

image:  The British Museum, Art & Object

Vagaries (part Two)

 

I am jazzed (a word I latched onto earlier this year) to have a story in the March/April 2024 issue of The Saturday Evening Post—and to join the company of such illustrious authors as that other Christie (i.e. Agatha), William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather, to name but a few.

 

My story is “Vagaries,” which was first published in Catamaran in Winter/Spring 2019.  Somehow the Editor-in-Chief of the Post came across “Vagaries” in Catamaran, and went to a lot of trouble to contact me through my editor there, Elizabeth McKenzie, and ask if they could reprint it.  I did say yes, when he finally reached me after a string of e-mail glitches followed by some phone tag . . .

images:  The Saturday Evening Post

The Days That Must Happen to You

 

“When he died, their father had two requests.  First, that his ashes be taken to the palacio on the river the third week in September, on what would have been his 90th birthday.  And second, that the whole family be there to take part in the scattering.  Or, as he put it in the codicil, quoting his favorite poet, Walt Whitman, and underlining the words twice, ‘These are the days that must happen to you.’

         That second was the sticking point, of course—though he'd cunningly left generous funds with Daniel Kim, his dexterous executor and sandcastling buddy, to cover travel from their various boltholes across the world, and made it clear that only if they carried out that dire last commandment would there be another cent.  But even so, could they forget their rancor, their cherished pet peeves, and tolerate each other's company for three interminable days?” 

 

Thus begins another story inspired by a prompt from The First Line.  (Yes, there are many yet to come!)  This was published yesterday by Eucalyptus Lit, who had this to say:

“Today is the winter solstice: a natural pivot in the seasonal cycle, aligning with our exploration of change in this issue. Allow yourselves to be changed, inspired by the work of the community around us.  Great art is meant to be enjoyed—to be shared—so please feel free to spread the word about our issue to your friends, family, and fellow literature enthusiasts.” 

 

I told them when it was accepted, "It is especially nice to have my story published by you, since eucalyptus has graced much of my life—from the Mills College campus to the foothills around Palo Alto where I spent some thirty years, to the park here in Santa Cruz whose eucalyptus shelters long-traveling Monarch butterflies.”

 

And it was fun to spend some time in the Carmel Valley with this peevish family over three days, along with Walt Whitman, and see where all of us came out.

 

 

 

Image:  Feel Good and Travel, How to Build a Sandcastle

Signature Required

 

Here’s another of my wilder whimsies, a.k.a. "What Should We Do with the Body?", in response to a prompt by The First Line—who (in more sober frame of mind) did not accept it for publication.  It’s been picked up instead by Cerasus Magazine, appropriately situated, as is the story, in England.

 

For those who enjoy whimsy involving Punk rockers, Paladian bridges, Polish chickens, an early Renaissance stiletto, and a stray cassowary (or, indeed, as an editor I once worked with once enthused, for “anyone with an interest in anything”), a paperback copy of Issue #11 can be purchased from Amazon, or the pdf can be downloaded here.

 

I’ve imagined that an ideal film version of this story would star the following:

John Gielgud as old retainer

Ken Stott (Rebus) as Digby

young Stephen Fry or Simon Callow as Aiken

Ian McShane (Lovejoy) or David Jason (Frost) as Man with Clipboard 2

Richard Briers or John Cleese as Lord Ashenden

Bill Nighy as Parson Q

Peter Vaughan as the Major General

But that's just further whimsy, of course . . .

 

 

 

Image:  Palladian Bridge, Prior Park, England

Salve Porta

 

The wonderful online journal, The Plentitudes, has again honored me by publishing a story in their Fall issue, “The Clarity”—this, all about doors and what they signified to Emmy Salas.

 

Doorways were fraught.  Portals to the unfathomable place where absence dwells.  The loneliest, most haunted spaces in the world.  They swallowed people whole.  Emmy had lived with a phobia of doors—entamaphobia—much of her life, having watched too many of her loved ones vanish through what Rilke in one of his Sonnets to Orpheus called “the inconsolable open door.”

 

Other elements in this story, “Salve Porta,” include Mesa Verde and Aztec Ruins, Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House, Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, and a black Skye terrier, Pautiwa, named for one of the Hopi sky gods.

 

 

Images:

Aztec doorways, photographer unknown

Gates of Heaven, Bali, photographer unknown

Pisa light, Christie Cochrell

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