Ambiguous Figures

 

It’s always fun to write stories for The First Line, following their four prompts a year.  The first of my attempts they published was the rather unique “Checking Out,” back in September 2020 (Vol. 22, Issue 3), beginning “The Simmons Public Library was a melting pot of the haves and have-nots, a mixture of homeless people and the wealthy older residents of the nearby neighborhood.”

 

I have just had a second story published by them, in Vol. 25, Issue 1.  This, “Ambiguous Figures,” begins with the line “I am the second Mrs. Roberts.”  And continues:

 

No one seems to know except for Perry's sister Jane; his otherwise-absorbed students and colleagues haven't noticed any change.  The neighbors to our south are half an acre and luxuriant hedges away, and to the north an impersonal major intersection cuts us off from one-on-one contact.  In this hectic, clamorous world, who pays attention to the introverts, the chronically depressed, those who would rather pass unseen?

         "Dulcie," the academics say to me, indifferently polite, over the Brie and dry baguette slices at the Art History dos—thinking they recognize me by the wavy bob, the half-glasses, the frumpy clothes.  The fading-into-the-woodwork faculty wife demeanor:  nothing to stand out.  Jane's face shows disbelief when she sees me accept their assumption, but it hasn't seemed worth the trouble explaining that I am Johanna, instead; how my own clothes burned up with house and everything I once was, in the terrible Caldor Fire last fall.

 

It includes, variously, Salvador Dalí, two older Golden Retrievers, Stanford’s Festival of Lessons and Carols, a bunch of academics, some shrimp remoulade (my mother’s recipe), an illicit kiss, and a wayward Nunuma bush buffalo colored by red ochre and black resin. 

 

image:  Salvador Dalí, The Hallucinogenic Troubador

After Julian

 

How fun!  I’ve been given my very own Valentine’s mini-issue by Poor Yorick (A Journal of Rediscovery).  It’s Santa Fe being rediscovered in this story, as well as a high school romance, and besides some mischievous exchanges between the old sweethearts (an author and an editor, no one I know), I enjoyed remembering my own Spanish class trip to Mexico City, back when—especially Chapultapec and Teotihuacan. 

 

See here, for some travel back into past places.  And even some cockatoos!

 

         “On beautiful October days with brilliant leaves and skies, she sat in her new second bedroom/office with its rustic trestle table in a pullover that had been Julian's, and skinny jeans, and as the month went on turned up her ancient writing files.  There were a few old stories that she thought weren't bad, from early classes in college, all of them exploring the insatiable aches and hungerings of female adolescence.  That fateful trip to Mexico City with her Spanish class.  The story of the pyramid she hadn't finished at the time, suddenly catapulted into her future instead.  Maybe, she thought, something worth rescuing?  A little personal—but so much time had passed, she knew it couldn't make any difference to anyone, including her.

         She fiddled with the language of the stories, changed a name or two, and sent them off to various journals she found online.  She hadn't published anything for years, since her two lesser novels, and thought she'd like to find herself writing again after too long just helping with Julian's papers and reports.  It would be one more step towards rejoining the living.  Last week she'd been persuaded by a coworker at the Library for the Blind where she'd started volunteering to buy a pair of cockatoos whose owner (the librarian's mother) had just gone into care.  The birds, Salsa and Mambo, did add some whimsical color to her days.”

 

 

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, figurine from Teotihuacan

 

 

Writing Spaces

 

Writing from my heart, today, to fill the space of gray, the in-between spaces, the spaces that words can't quite light.  Some images that warm me, in this year-end time, the not-quite-threshold time, the waiting, waning time not yet ready to wax.

 

images:  Jean Misceslas Peské, Femme à l'ouvrage; Medieval roof angels, 15th c, St Agnes, Cawston, Norfolk; Francis Killan, Bird Woman; Maurice Marinot, Intérieur; Odilon Redon, Fleurs

Winter Solstice

 

On this shortest day, this day to reflect and stay still, to revel in silence, I've turned again to my account of one of the perfect silent retreats that restored me in years past.  (And this year, sadly, the leader of those retreats has passed too.)

___

 

Back from a day’s silent retreat at the Green Gulch Zen temple and farm, I’m full of quiet wisdom.  I’ve come back not with the silence itself, which is hard come-by in our obstreperous world, but the capacity for silence (as my father wrote about never losing the capacity for happiness, however unhappy we might be).  This is the richer gift, I see.  The key to that place inside myself I can return to, over and over, at need; where I can hear birdsong, or twigs falling onto the canvas of the yurt, where I can hear my heart expressing gratitude over a simple handful of October flowers, the hard wood (Eucalyptus) and the soft wood (pine) ready for our first-morning fire should we need one, the taste of peppermint tea made with two teabags.  

 

The capacity for brilliant yellow, too—the walls of the old wooden laundry room, open at both ends.  Inside humming with clean clothes tumbling in a row of dryers, outside colored the most intense and radiant yellow, from (I’m guessing) lichens or pollens collecting on the wood over the years.  Accumulating yellow:  a good way to live.  (And like my favorite painter, Pierre Bonnard, who used to go back and add yellow to his finished paintings, sometimes years later.)

 

In the silence I learned I need to listen to my heart, foremost.  I walked out to the ocean with the others, because my bad knee didn’t let me walk that far the last time I was there, so my mind told me I needed to make up for that.  It told me I like the walk, and the ocean.  All of that true, but what I really wanted, above all, was to sit the whole while in the garden, which I don’t just like, but love.  The beach was terribly crowded, with people happily engaged in their noisy business, and though that taught me an important lesson once before—that I don’t need to be a part of that, that I can maintain my silence and just observe (something I do naturally anyway)—it wasn’t what my heart needed.  Not then.  So I walked quickly back to the garden, and spent a precious ten minutes just being there, with end-of-summer roses, lichen-ey old wooden trellises, my favorite apple tree in all the world, a couple and dog on the grass, the play of sunlight and late-afternoon early-October shadow just perfect by then, the silence absolute—except for my heart’s exclaiming its utter delight.

 

Another of the members of our group had said at introduction time that he had recently decided to quit work, to work on opening his heart.  Meaning that going on working was led by mind, and trying something else important for heart.  I know I need to do that too—live that yellow!—and maybe some day soon will find the courage to do so.  To know that following my heart is the right thing to do.  Not willful or unwise (as I’ve been gravely taught over the years), but essential.  The wise course born of silence.

 

(October 2014)

 

 

image:  Pierre Bonnard, Bouquet de mimosas

Kachinas: A Christmas Story

 

I'm pleased that my short story "Kachinas" has been published in the December issue of Grande Dame Literary Journal—an appropriately seasonal tale, making me terribly nostalgic for New Mexico and its incomparable way of being.

 

 "Lil didn't know the meaning of the intricate rhythms and steps, since no outsiders were allowed to know, but she felt it somewhere deep within, encouraged by the drums. The story being told and prayer offered. The waiting clouds they danced into being, and quickened into hope. Nimbus, nimbostratus, the fertile, undulating clouds Xavier painted with abandon, with enormous swooping strokes of not just fingers, wrist, but his whole body—in a way becoming cloud himself, just as the dancers in their masks became the spirit-beings they embodied. Kachinas." 

 

This story is part of a thread also including "The Persian Warrior," "Day of the Dead," and "L'inconnue de la Seine."

 

And I, henceforth, would love the honorific "Grand Dame."

 

 

image:  Kachinas, photographer unknown

Writing Spaces

 

"The Moving Finger writes; 

and, having writ, Moves on . . . "

(Omar Khayyám)

image:  photographer unknown

Ghost Light

 

"a kind of glow—humanity, noblesse, beatitude—lingered in the great spaces that like Space itself held stars already dead but luminous, inherently present, the residue of suns long since burned out.  Ghost light, Aash thought of it."

 

Just published in Livina Press Literary Magazine, Issue 2, Fall 2022 (print only)—my short story "Ghost Light," set in the ruins of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, a museum which was originally a collaboration between the places and peoples of its collections and between the collections and the viewers who engaged with them.  And then between me, the author, who's collected them again, and the characters I have sent into the ruins to collect what they can of what's left after the world's culture has been destroyed and most animals and plant-life gone extinct.

 

This work is a collaboration too with the author of a book one of the characters once read—Russell Hoban, who offered his amazing The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz to the world.  The book is integral to my main character's identity, and has remained for many years in my own consciousness, now informing my writing.  In it are extinct lions, which are regenerated in the haunted spaces of the museum, later joined by other extinct animals gathered between the covers of a salvaged bestiary.

 

And finally, or really first, the work is a collaboration between me and a writer friend's grandson, Westley, who offered us the first line as a gift.

 

At its heart this story is about the essential shared responsibility of carrying the memories of things past, things gone, as we all do—together saving what we can in these destructive times.  It no longer takes a village.  It takes a world.  A museum, with all its salvaged, plundered ghosts.

         

 

image:  photographer unknown