Author: barbaramonier

Barbara Monier has been writing since the earliest days when she composed in crayon on paper with extremely wide lines. She studied writing at Yale University and the University of Michigan. While at Michigan, she received the Avery and Jule Hopwood Prize. It was the highest prize awarded that year, and the first in Michigan's history for a piece written directly for the screen. She has four published novels: YOU, IN YOUR GREEN SHIRT and A LITTLE BIRDIE TOLD ME, and with Amika Press, PUSHING THE RIVER and THE ROCKY ORCHARD. Her fifth novel, THE READING, will release in October 2022.
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Doorbell

For those of you who are following the blogs postings of my fourth novel, The Rocky Orchard, each one is meant to be a stand-alone snippet that piques your interest.  Like the majority of my writing, the past and present intermingle freely; memory and reality can be indistinguishable; both first- and third-person narration are used to underscore these themes.  It’s not meant to be a jigsaw puzzle to figure out, but rather, an appetizer to whet your appetite for more.

 

My brother looks at the floor when he has to walk past me so he won’t have to make eye contact.  I don’t need to see his eyes to feel the fire that is there, the disappointment, the stony disapproval.  He is furious.  At me.  Doug is, too; but at least Doug will look me in the eye once in a while. I see weary pity for me.

My brother chose sides, and he didn’t choose mine.

I was born with my eyes locked onto my big brother.  I followed him around and watched everything he did and wanted to do all those things myself.  And now, it’s like I am forced to watch as he gets into a car, locks the doors, and keeps driving farther and farther away while I just stand here.

teen.alone

Of course our after-school foursome broke up.  I am home by myself today, just like I am every day while my mother picks up my brother from his after-school stuff.  The doorbell rings.  The doorbell rings at 2:30 on a weekday afternoon, and I am sure to the marrow of my bones that it’s Tim.  I’m sure because Tim always hits the doorbell button twice in a row, with no pause in between, so the bell dingdongdingdongs in a manic blur.

My heart pounds. I have a hard time swallowing the lump that’s blocking my throat.  I’m terrified  to turn my head toward our front door, to see if Tim has already seen me, if I’m directly in his line of vision as he stands at our front door, and I sit on the couch in our living room, having thought that I was safe, safe in my own house on a random afternoon.

I stare at the living room curtains, floor-length, heavy old drapes that I picture wrapping myself within, smelling their pleasant smell that enfolds all the smells of our family’s cooking, pets, fireplace, fresh laundry, dirty socks.  If only I can get to the drapes without Tim seeing me.  I can envelop myself, clutch them in my hands, breathe them so deeply into my nostrils that—

curtain

The doorbell rings again, two more times.

Tim’s face is pressed against the small glass pane of our front door.  He’s staring directly at me. He has that wry half-smile that used to stop me in my tracks and melt me into a heap. My legs shake when I stand.  I run my hands along my jeans as if I were smoothing a skirt, which is completely inane.  I clear my throat but have no confidence that I’ll be able to utter sound, form words, talk when I need to.

My hand grabs the ancient glass doorknob on the inside of the front door.  I don’t turn it right away, as if I still believe I can prevent this whole scene from going any further.  But the door is open, and Tim says, “Hey, I thought I’d hang out with your brother.”

I nod.  I feel like a complete idiot for being so scared.  But just for a split second, because I realize that Tim knows my brother isn’t home.  He knows he stays late after school.  He knows that my mother goes to pick him up because there aren’t any buses.

He knew that I would be alone.

He meant for this to happen.

teen.boy

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Prologue

The “one paragraph” from my previous blog was a big hit with readers.  I hope you enjoy this brief passage which I expect will be the Prologue of The Rocky Orchard.

older-woman-bedI’m ready, Lula thought.  She looked down at her hands, resting on top of the thick blanket.  They no longer looked like hands to her. In the craggy blue veins she saw the branches of ancient, sturdy trees lifting to the sky.  She saw their deep, formidable roots, reaching down, down into the earth.  She saw water flowing through creeks, and streams, and rivers.

I am ready to go.  There is one more thing I must do.  Mazie will come to visit.  She will sit next to me on this bed.  I will touch her hand.   I will tell her that I dreamed of her.  She will be frightened, but she will always remember.  She will remember the feeling, the peacefulness, the comfort. Far from here, she will meet another old woman with my same name.  She needs to trust Lula.  If Mazie is to have a life, she needs to trust her.

hands

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Just Like That

convertible.girl

The summer that we were twelve years old, my girlfriend Karen and I spent the whole afternoon at a swimming pool I’d never been to before.  We sat in the sun, and talked about boys, and laughed, and swam, and splashed each other, and waited for our favorite songs to get played over and over on the transistor radio we’d brought with us.  By the end of that afternoon, I felt a kind of deep peacefulness.  Like my insides had uncoiled and lay still in a new way. Karen’s mother had rented a convertible for a special date with Karen’s dad, and she came to pick us up from the pool in that convertible.  First time I’d ever been in one.  The three of us sat crowded into the front seat together.  Karen’s mom had gotten her hair done in a fancy French twist for the date, and she tied a chiffon scarf around it for the ride home.  Karen turned on the radio, and her mother cranked it up even louder.  My body had that cool feeling that stays deep inside of you when you’ve been in the water all day.  But your skin heats up from the warmth of the sun, and you feel the hot and the cool all at once.  When we hit the road, the wind tossed Karen’s and my long, soaking wet hair all over the place, occasionally smacking ourselves and one another in the face.  All of those feelings together, it was thrilling, like nothing I’d every felt before; but the peacefulness was still there, too.  That’s what it was like meeting Eddie.  Just exactly like that.

girl.convert

This is one of the latest sections of my novel The Rocky Orchard.  Once in a while you have a good writing day, a day where one single paragraph works exactly the way you wanted it to work when the idea appeared in your head.  That’s how we keep going. 

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Flames

Here is a new section from my novel-in-progress The Rocky Orchard.

candle.gif“Don’t fuck with me. You were definitely talking to him.”  Then, Tim held up his hand, with his palm really close to my face. In the dark of the room, I couldn’t tell what in the world I was supposed to be looking at. Then I saw it. A circle. A perfect circle, faintly reddish-brown, traced the periphery of his entire palm. “It’s from a candle. I put my hand right on the candle and held it there.”

“What?” I said, grabbing his hand to look at it more closely.

“I did it to prove my love for you,” Tim said.

“You did what?” I said.

Just then, this guy standing at the front door yells out, “Hey, is there somebody here named Mazie?”  For a second, I didn’t even move.  And the guy added: “Hey, Mazie, if you’re out there somewhere, your dad’s here. To take you home, I guess.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m Mazie,” I said, and sort of raised my hand like some sort of dork who the teacher was calling on.  I made a straight line for the front door, didn’t even say goodbye to Sam, still sitting in the same chair examining the hell out of her split ends.  I walked out that front door in a stupor of confusion.  Tim’s voice behind me called out, “Hey, Mazie, you forgot your jacket.” He handed it to me then raised his hand to my father, “Have a good evening, Dr. Mills.”  Jesus, he sounded so normal!  So utterly and completely normal, not even a hint of the woozy guy who had just shoved his burned hand into my face.

One look at my father’s face and I knew that he was pissed.  Really pissed.  He had that look of tightly-but-precariously controlled rage, like any little thing could cause him to fly apart into a million billion pieces and rain down razor spikes on anyone nearby.

angry.dad

I debated whether it would be better for me to talk first or to wait it out.  There’s no right answer to that.

The second my car door closed, he said, “You’re grounded.  For a month.”

“What!?”  I said.  I had never been grounded before.  Not once.  “Why?  What did I do?”

“We had no idea where you were.  No idea!  You never asked us if you could go out tonight.  You’re home for a month.  Period.”

“That’s not true!” I said.  Jeez Louise, this whole evening was bizarre beyond belief to begin with, but now this?  I knew that I’d asked my parents if I could go to this party – well over a week in advance – and I also knew that they had said yes!  This is a really tricky one to know how to play.  Did they really forget that I’d asked?  Well, they drink a lot.  A real lot.  So that’s always a good possibility.  But it’s not like I can point that out, that maybe they “forgot.”  No question that would make my situation worse.  I’m pissed!  I ASKED them.  But showing that I’m pissed is also going to make my situation worse.  I take a deep breath, I gather all of the calm I can muster and I say in a really nice sweet gentle voice, “Dad, I’m really sorry that we seem to have gotten our signals crossed here.  I’m super sorry if you and Mom were worried, but…think for a minute.  I asked you about this party at the dinner table last week.  It must have been last Thursday, because we’d just been talking about my math test.  Remember?  I told you about the math test, and then right after I asked you about the party – because Tim had helped me study for that test, and it reminded me to ask you.”

exasperated

My father remained icily silent.

“Did you and Mom think that I just…disappeared tonight?  I would never do that!  Come on; I would never do that!  Tim’s friend picked me up, just like I’d told you he would.”

I halfway expected the steering wheel to break, what with the death grip my father had on it.  We were most of the way home before my father spoke.

“Did you really ask us?  Are you telling the truth? Because if you’re lying now, I can’t even imagine…” he said.

“Not lying.  Math test.  Time helped me ace it.  Reminded me to ask about the party,”

“You didn’t say good-bye when you left tonight,” he said.

“It’s possible.  I acknowledge that I may not have said good-bye when I left.  Am I grounded for a month for that?” I asked.

“Let me speak with your mother,” he said. “I make no promises until then. Not to mention how hard it was to even find out where you were tonight. Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah, I don’t actually know Samantha real well. That’s her real name, but everyone calls her Sam. Different schools.  I know a lot of people who know her, though, like Tim and a lot of his friends.  I think they all went to the same church or something.”  OK, that was a big fat lie, and I knew it, but I thought the circumstances justified my throwing it in there, seeing as how I had been falsely accused.  I’m not a liar, generally speaking.  That’s a bad way to live. I mean, I’m a teenager, and I have parents; so, of course I lie.  But I don’t usually go out of my way my make stuff up and toss it out there.  This was different.

Bullet dodged.  I did not get grounded.

Pretty soon after that, I turned fourteen.  Tim bought me this giant, apple-scented pillar candle for my birthday.  I couldn’t believe it.  A candle.

 

 

 

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The Purest Water

The Rocky Orchard, the novel that I am currently writing, has a multitude of underlying themes.  In terms of the tone, however, it is meant to have the feel of a long, rambling, wondrous walk through the woods.  I hope the following section engenders that spirit:

“The first trip Eddie and I took together, we went to Rocky Mountain National Park.  We’d only been dating a couple of months.  Eddie planned it.  He wanted to make me happy, and knew that being outside and hiking and immersed in the mountains would be perfect.  We found an adorable little inn – equal parts cute and kitsch – with a remote-control fireplace in the room and our own jacuzzi on the private outdoor deck.  We arrived at night, popped open the bottle of wine Eddie had arranged to be waiting for us in the room.  We couldn’t stop playing with the remote, turning the fireplace on and off, cracking up so much we spilled red wine all over our clothes, so we ripped them off and ran naked out to the hot tub.  That was when I learned that Eddie had a thing about water.  Hot tub, shower, ocean – whatever – something took hold of him the second he got wet.  He had an immediate and overpowering need to make love.  So we did.  In our own little hot tub on our own little deck of the room in Estes Park.

“The next morning was one of those Colorado days you remember your whole life.  The sky so vast and blue that the whole world seems to be in sharper focus.  We took this amazing hike – straight up, like pretty much all hikes in the mountains; and when we got to the topmost point, we kicked off our shoes and waded in a stream not so much bigger than this one.  I took a picture of Eddie standing in the middle of that creek, right about the time he was saying to me, ‘This may be the purest water we taste in our entire lives, baby.  Drink up before we head down.’

“In a heartbeat, that blue sky darkened to a menacing, steely gray.  The temperature dropped probably twenty degrees, and hail the size of marbles slammed us with such force it seemed like it must be trying to hurt us.  We started running as fast as we could, and since it was a steep downhill, it felt like we must be flying.  Flying and freezing and getting pelted.  And laughing.  Laughing so hard.

“Right about the time we could spot our car in the parking lot at the trail head, the hail stopped and the skies cleared.  Poof.  The same stunningly beautiful, warm day as before.  Like the universe just wanted to play a funny little trick on us.  Know what else, Lula?  That ‘purest water we ever taste in our entire lives?’  I got a parasite from drinking it.  Was sick as a dog for months.  That is, I believe, an outstanding example of the concept of irony.  Eddie was fine, by the way.”

Mazie couched down at the creek’s edge and submerged both her hands in the cool water.  She spread her fingers wide, letting the creek’s slow current flow over and around and between them.  She turned her hands palm-side-up, raised them out of the creek, and let the water run between her fingers.

With a great effort, Lula knelt beside Mazie.

Neither woman said a word for quite a while.

“Is Eddie fine now, Lula?” Mazie asked.  “Is he all right?”

painting: Megan Gibbons

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Lives Darkly in my Body

In previous blog entries, I have touched on the ephemeral, ethereal phenomenon that we refer to as “inspiration,” which the Oxford dictionary defines as “The process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.”

We know that inspiration can point its magic wand at the most unexpected times; still, I was taken by surprise when the recovery from my first total hip replacement last November transported me to a “place” that became the basis for the novel I am currently writing, entitled A Rocky Orchard.  Currently recovering from my second hip replacement, I have a solid start on the novel, and am thrilled to be back at work on it.

 

You lean your head towards mine.  You are going to kiss me.  How many times have you kissed me, and my stomach still does a little leap.  Your head jerks. “What was that?” you say. “What was what,” I say. I didn’t hear anything. “I definitely heard something,” you say. “You didn’t hear that?  Sounds like someone is throwing something — balls or something like that —  one after another. Listen, you say.  I hear it. Sounds like it’s getting closer, you say.  Sounds like it’s coming from the orchard.  You hear it, right? You ask me.  Yes, I hear it.

Stay here.  I’ll check it out, you say.  Probably some kid having a little fun, you say.

Don’t be silly.  I’ll come, too, I say.

The short step down from the porch, my bare foot on the hot summer grass, I am hit by a wall of humidity.  The full, fertile feel of the air that marks a Pennsylvania mountain summer. Thick, wet, ripe with a steaming, green life. “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.” That poem, the Pablo Neruda poem that you recited.  The humidity reminds me. Down on one knee in an old-fashioned gesture I never would have guessed.  Holding my hand and you said, “I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers.” The wall of humidity pushes against me.  Your arm reaches out and you tell me to stay back.  Please, you say.  Please stay back.  “Thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.”

I see him, you say.

Then I see him, too. 

I wonder what in the world he is doing here. 

Without thinking I start to call out to him.  I want to laugh.  I want to wave and ask him what in the world he is doing here.

Then I see his face.  “Lives darkly in his body.”

And I know what he is doing here.  I know.

 

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new writing, new newsletter

swing

Let’s start out with a new tidbit from my novel-in-progress, The Rocky Orchard:

Swing

I am barefoot.  My absolute favorite thing.  I reach down with one toe, just my big toe, to give us the barest little push to keep the swing going.  I feel tiny grains of dirt on the porch floor as my toe kisses against them.  The extra length of the swing’s chain clanks against the section of chain that’s holding the swing from the porch ceiling.  How long has this swing been here?  We have never once had to fix it, or adjust it, or anything. Not like the old wooden swing outside, with its absurdly long ropes hanging from the giant pine.  We have had to fix that swing a million times, it seems; but the porch one, never.  I toss my head back and look up at the ceiling bolt that holds the porch swing in place, ancient and rusty and painted over so many times. The thought of its strength, its endurance, amaze me. And makes me tired, exhausted. The strain of years upon years of holding up the weight of human beings. I twirl the extra chain through my fingers, I clunk it against the taut chain that is doing the work of holding us up.  I look over at you. My Eddie. 

            A line of sweat is just beginning to break out in the crease of your neck. I want to capture the expression on your face and put it in a jar.  I want to carry the jar around with me like precious fireflies from a summer night.  I have never seen you so relaxed, so contented. As if you know what I’m thinking, you reach for my hand and you kiss it.  I am staring at you and you know that I am staring at you, and I tear up, and you laugh.  You kiss my hand again.  You have that shy-but-formidable look, the one you had on our first date, our real first date.  The look that makes you one dimple sing out.  The look that made me think that maybe, just maybe, we might end up right here someday, swinging on this swing.

            Your hand in mine is sweaty.  The cool moistness of your palm against mine sends a ripple through my body, a shudder of feeling. I reach across your body to trace the line of sweat on your neck with the index finger of my other hand.  I taste it.  The salt of you.  I cannot get enough of you. 

couple.legs

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Architects and Gardeners

hayden

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is… But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.”  — George R.R. Martin

Me, too. I have often wondered if I took my college writing teacher (the wonderful poet Robert Hayden) too seriously when he strongly suggested that I stop trying to be an architect and answer my true calling as a gardener.

After I completely re-wrote my first novel, You, in your Green Shirt, a soul-killing third time –we’re not talking about major editing, we’re talking about a complete re-write – I swore that I would architecturally plan my next novel.  I didn’t.  When I hit a dead end with A Little Birdie Told Me that stretched out for well over a year, I once again swore that I would never plant a seed again and wait to see what grew.

Though my third novel Pushing the River “showed up” somewhat more intact, as it was inspired by real events, it was, in every way, the result of long years tilling the soil and caring for the seeds.  Although I sometimes dream of note cards, and plot outlines, and lengthy character profiles with extensive back stories, I have come to terms with the reality that I am, and will always be, destined to plant seeds, tend them, watch for signs, and let them grow.

Here is the latest snippet from my fourth novel The Rocky Orchard.

figure-blueberryMazie waited at the porch door, standing on her tiptoes and watching for Lula to come through the orchard at her usual time. When Lula was close enough to hear, Mazie called out, “Lula, do you know what I just realized?  It’s blueberry time!  It should be just about peak blueberry-picking.  Right now! You probably haven’t even seen them.  They grow along the bank on the far side of the road – the stretch of road that runs right along the length of the orchard!  See what I mean?  If you’re walking through the orchard itself, you’d never even know the bushes were there!”

Lula turned her body around. “Ah, right as rain, Mazie.  Sure enough, I’ve never seen a single bush.”

“That’s because the road at the far end of the orchard – where you come in over yonder —  it’s deep in the shade of the woods.  The orchard opens everything up.  A little patch of sun hits the bank, and Voila!  Wild blueberries!”  Mazie regarded Lula, noted how heavily Lula leaned on her walking stick.  “Are you tired, Lula?  Do you want to rest up with a tall glass of water?  I was thinking I might go and pick some.  Was thinking that I would whip up some blueberry pancakes for us.  Have us a true hearty breakfast, if you’re game.”

“My word, that does sound lovely,” Lula said.

“You can wait here, if you want.  I’m happy to go and pick them.  If you want to sit a spell.”

“Oh, heavens no.  Not so tired that I can’t pick a blueberry off a bush.  Not to mention, can’t trust a weekender to tell a truly good ripe berry from a bad one,” Lula said.

“Oh, ouch,” Mazie said. “I was wondering how long it would take you to bring up the ‘weekender’ thing, me being an interloper and not true country and all that.”

“Well, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.  Just meant to say that of course I want to come along,” Lula said. “Assuming you have a proper berry-picking bucket, that is.”

pail

Mazie sighed playfully and did an exaggerated eye roll. “Gosh, let me go look.  You stay here and rest; don’t strain yourself trying to think up any more witty-but-caustic things to say.”

“Do you have any idea why some blueberries have that white coating-like stuff on them and others don’t?  Should I stay away from the whitish ones?” Mazie asked Lula.

“I do know!” Lula said.  That white coating is called the ‘bloom.’  It’s a slightly waxy substance that the berry produces; the bloom protects it from pests and bacteria that might harm the berry.  Isn’t that amazing?” Lula’s delight radiated from her.  “It’s also a sign of freshness.  It’s the other blueberries that we should stay away from.  The berries start out with the bloom when they’re beautifully ripe, but it fades as they sit on the bush past their prime.”

berry.picking

“Do you know everything, Lula?  Cause it’s really starting to seem like you know everything,” Mazie said.

“Heavens no, dear,” Lula said.  “But like I told you, I know a lot about things from around here. I’ve always been here, like I said!”

“What’s the tenth decimal place of pi?” Mazie asked.

“Five,” Lula said.

Both women stopped picking and looked at one another. “Well, I’ve studied a few other things along the way, I suppose,” Lula said. She spread her arms and shrugged her shoulders. “My bucket is getting pretty full, Mazie.  How about yours?”

How-to-pick-wild-blueberries-4

 

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Outhouse

 

out3

old-outhouse-in-baw-jeff-swan

Here’s a new snippet from my novel-in-progress: The Rocky Orchard

Mazie rubbed her hands along the back of her chair, then along the table top.  “I guess I should deal another hand?” she asked. “I’m not really sure what to do.”

“Mazie, gin rummy is a grand old game, indeed.  Nonetheless, I suggest we get off of this damn porch and give you a chance to feel the sun on your face, even if all we do is take a lap or two around the house.”  Lula hooked her arm through Mazie’s and tugged her gently toward the porch door.

Lula stepped off the porch.  The steep path that led to the road straight lay ahead of them. The short distance to the orchard sloped to their right. Lula bore left.  She and Mazie walked, arm in arm, across the flagstones that ran along the front of the house.  Passing under the canopy of towering pines, the two women paused at the edge of what Mazie’s family had always called “the lawn.” The swath of coarse, broad-leaf pasture grass that took up a good quarter-acre on one side of the house has always been referred to as “the lawn.”  Her parents kept the assemblage of mostly-green, low-growing plants trimmed very short, so from a distance, it presented a vast visual field of verdant green.  From a closer vantage point, the lawn looked exactly like what it was: dry, cocoa-powder-colored dirt covered sporadically by weeds, clovers and various invasive plants that had been chopped off close to the ground.

“We seem to be headed directly for the outhouse,” Mazie said.  Was that your intention?  To get me off the porch and into the fresh air and then explore the old outhouse?”

Lula laughed and squeezed Mazie’s arm.

Toward the far end of the lawn — quite far from the house but in the dead center of the grassy field — a small, wooden structure that could only have been an outhouse perched.  “Speaking of things that completely terrified me,” Mazie said.

“Really?” Lula asked.  “The outhouse?”

out4

outhouse-sept-2015

“Oh my gosh, are you kidding me?” Mazie said.  “Every single thing about it scared me.  Including – and this is my lot in life, Lula; this is my lot in life that I am this particular sort of a person – I am the sort of person who worried about the people who lived at this farm before my family bought it!  Before there was a working toilet in the basement, and they would have had to actually use the outhouse for all of those outhouse-y-type things.  It’s so far from the house!  I worried: what if someone were really sick, or just waited a little too long, or there were little kids who were just learning to use the bathroom?!  Or, what if it was the middle of the night?  Although my parents told me that people used chamber pots in the middle of the night, which is just a different kind of gross and scary and gruesome.  Anyway, the basement sump pump — which, by the way, I was also terrified of – well, it would go out of whack on a fairly regular basis.  And when it did, we couldn’t use the toilet. We’d have to muster our Early Settler, pioneer spirit and do our toileting right out there in that outhouse.

I was scared just reaching for the door, waiting for the sound of the noisy spring that whined and complained when you pulled the door open, then snapped the door back lightning-quick, with a ferocious thud.  I was immediately convinced that I was trapped, that the outhouse held me prisoner and laughed at the silly, naïve trust I’d shown by having entered.  I was a goner.  But just in case I was wrong, and that my brother might try to mess with me while I was in there – which he often did –I locked the rusty old hook-and-eye latch, being convinced that it would rust in place, but not before giving me a fatal case of tetanus.”

“What an imagination you had, dear. It takes my breath away.”

“I’ve hardly begun, Lula.  Do you know that there is always a breeze that blows through an outhouse, blows right across your…bottom.   I guess I don’t know about all outhouses, really, but there was a hefty breeze blowing right across my ass in this one!  Now, how could that be?  No breeze blowing across the lawn, no breeze blowing through the little outhouse room, but a good, stiff breeze blowing across my ass. I used to get in all kinds of crazy positions, looking up and down and here and there at the way the little house was built, even looking right down into the unspeakable depths where all that bodily waste fell, trying to figure out how there could be an eternal breeze.  Only thing I could figure: had to be haunted.  Another reason to be terrified.”

“And please notice that I’ve gotten this far without mentioning the smell. Holy cow, how could you not be scared out of your mind, as a little kid I mean, by a smell so strong and so awful that it surely must spring from something Evil, something way beyond just…shit.  I rest my case.”

“Well, if that’s your way of saying that you’d rather not explore the outhouse…” Lula said.  “I thought it might be an interesting diversion.”

“There’s that sense of humor of yours, Lula.  Such a card,” Mazie said.

outhouse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Aftermath of a Dream

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Here is the latest snippet from my novel-in-progress, THE ROCKY ORCHARD.

“Lula,” Mazie said.   Lula held her hands on Mazie’s upper arms and squeezed.  A shudder ran through Mazie’s body and left her trembling.  Her lip quivered and she said “Lula” again, as if testing the sound of her own voice.  “What just happened?  What in the world just happened to me?”

“You were telling me about your dream.  It must have been very powerful, especially for such a young child,” Lula said.

“But I was really there.  I felt the same exact things that I felt at the time.  When I had that dream in the first place,” Mazie’s breathing became uneven again.

Lula ran a gentle hand down the length of Mazie’s hair and brushed Mazie’s cheek with her fingers.  Mazie felt the tension drain from her body, and she inhaled a great breath, feeling the mountain air rush into her lungs.  “Your memories are quite vivid, dear.  And that particular dream was so frightening. You must have been so scared, so confused.”  Lula squeezed Mazie’s hand and asked, “Did you ever tell anyone about it?”

Mazie let out a small chuckle and said, “No.  No way.”  She thought for a moment and added, “I might have gone into my parents’ room.  I used to do that when I was still little.  If I was really scared about something, I would get up and wander into their bedroom and crawl under the covers beside my mother.  They would never wake up or anything, but I would lie there for a while.  I used to watch the little patterns and swirls that your eyeballs see sometimes when it’s dark and still.  They were strangely comforting; in fact, I would crawl into their bed and wait for the patterns to show up.  After a while my mother would stir and say, ‘OK, Mazie, that’s long enough.  Go back to your own room now.’  But that was OK, really. My parents’ bed always smelled really strongly of the two of them, all intermingled, and between the smell and their heavy breathing and the little floating dots, I felt OK again.”

Lula smiled but said nothing.

“You must think I was the strangest little kid, Lula.  Well, I told you I was.  Now you can see for yourself.”

“Not so far, dear.  Not so far.”

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