Tag: women’s fiction

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“The Story’s Told,” from the novel “Pushing the River”

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The story’s told that Billie Rae was the quiet one in the family, the youngest, and a good girl. She didn’t give her mama and pap any trouble whatsoever, while her older sister was raising hell with one boy after another, and her big brother was puffing cigarettes and chugging beers and playing rock and roll music in every dim lit, smoke choked, sticky floored, ear splitting feedback wailing, hole of a place that pretended to be some sort of a Big Deal in the way-too-far-away from the city sorts of joints that littered the flat Midwestern landscape like May fly carcasses around the middle of June.

Billie looked at them like any big-eyed, solemn youngster looks up to the sister that braided her hair and played schoolteacher and cleaned off her bloody knees and wiped her tears when their mama wasn’t around, and the big brother who’d pretend he didn’t know that she was tagging along behind him and act all mad when he caught her, and he’d put them wriggly worms on her fishing hook while she wrinkled up her nose, and would tease her and tease her that she was too scared to touch the fish except with one poked-out finger on its slimy scaly belly, and she would holler like she done been stabbed, and he would laugh and laugh but then give her a big squeeze.

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So a course she looked up to them like they was the be all and end all. Why they pretty much raised her up, her pap mostly gone and keeping company elsewhere, her mama spending long days shut up in her room and shuffling around her own house like a ghost when she came out a’tall. Billie Rae was still too little to understand all the hollering and fist-pounding that happened now and again. Once in a while, she’d hear the clatter of something being thrown, or the terrible sound of a glass or plate breaking. She would pull the covers up around her ears and she would whisper into the darkness, “Angel of God, my Guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here, ever this night be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.”

She didn’t understand why all of a sudden, after a whole bout of hollering and stomping feet and loud wailing cries, her pap was saying that her big sister had to move away, had to go live with some aunt up Wisconsin way that Billie Rae had never even heard tell of. Billie stood around with her blue eyes wider than ever while her sister threw her suitcase onto the bed and pitched articles of clothing into it like each and every single one of them had done her unspeakable harm. Her sister took a pause now and again to wipe a steady stream of tears from her own face and from Billie’s as well; then with a hug so hard she thought it would crush her bones and a general slamming of doors, her big sister was gone.

She waited til the next time her mama came out of her room, and Billie asked her when her big sister would be back. Her mama said, “Don’t you never mention her name to me again, Billie Rae. Do you understand me?”

Still, Billie came home from school every day and looked out the window so she could be sure she’d be the first one to catch a glimpse when her big sister returned one day.

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Painting by Frank Weston Benson

 

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“Marie Falls into” except from “Pushing the River,” a novel-in-progress

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“I have so much I need to get done today.” Marie squeezed herself into a small corner of the sofa that was closest to the door, as if the proximity to an exit and the sheer discomfort of her position would magically propel her. She cradled the cup of untouched coffee between her two hands and blew across the steaming surface.

Marie alternated between two mood states that Madeline thought of as more or less “off” and “on.” In the “off” times, Marie walked with her eyes cast on the floor. She moved with such stealth that it was nearly impossible to know where she may be in the house, or if she was even there at all. She shrugged in response to any communication directed at her. In other words, she gave the ardent impression of wishing to be invisible, or perhaps to disappear entirely. During the “on” times, she could be shockingly talkative. The shifts came as a bit of a jolt to Madeline, when the same young woman who had slunk around in the deep shadows for a time suddenly plopped down on the sofa and became downright chatty, mustering an astonishing string of words, sentences, paragraphs, ideas that were not only exceptionally articulate, but were also delivered so blindingly goddamn fast that Madeline had to concentrate especially hard on the content lest she get carried away by the breathtaking delivery itself.

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She had an assortment of expression that she peppered frequently through any and every subject she happened to be addressing, a trait Madeline found so utterly charming she waited for each new occurrence and was brought very nearly to tears by them. These included:

At all whatsoever
Nonsense
I mean, I feel like
Incomparable boob
I mean, are you fucking kidding me?
Ninnyhammer

and Madeline’s personal favorite:
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“Did you hear my big fight with John last night?” Marie asked.

“What!? No!” Madeline responded.

“Nonsense. I can’t believe you didn’t hear it. I was seriously screaming at him. Because
he was being a complete ninnyhammer, I mean, I feel like he started it because he was actually screaming into the phone at me, I don’t even remember a time when he’s yelled at me like that, ever, before, when he was that mad and yelling so loud I actually had to hold the receiver away from my ear a couple of times, I mean, are you fucking kidding me? Seriously, Madeline, it’s a little hard to believe you when you say that you didn’t hear any of this.”

“I seriously didn’t. Are you OK? Is everything OK?”

“It’s fine, it’s fine. We talked again this morning. For a long time. That’s why I’m running so late and I can’t do this, I can’t do this right now. I can’t sit down on this spot on this couch and next thing I know some sort of thing has taken possession of me, hours of our lives have passed, and I realize that once again I have fallen into the conversational vortex that exists in this room! I do not have time for this today at all whatsoever.” She paused. She shifted just slightly from her previous position of being bashed against the arm of the sofa.

“Possibly, it’s already too late,” Madeline said.

“Nonsense,” said Marie.

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Paintings by Milton Avery

 

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“Coffee” part 2

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No one could ever figure out whether it was one specific thing, or a compounding of smaller things that tipped the scales for the old coffee pot. Every so often, the scoundrel would simply refuse to allow the brewed coffee to flow smoothly into the carafe below, but would erupt like a volcano, spewing a scalding muck of boiling water and coffee grounds across the entire kitchen counter, sending rivulets down the cabinet doors and dark streams across the floor.

It had happened to everyone in the family at one time or another, and each of the family members had their own unique response: it happened to Madeline only once. When it happened to the Little One, she practiced putting the various parts and pieces together over and over and over, until she was certain that she had mastered it. But once satisfied that mastery had been achieved, she promptly forgot every step of the procedure and needed a refresher course each time she started anew. The Boy managed to be someplace else, nearly always, when a pot of coffee needed to be made — he so relished the cared-for feeling that came from someone placing a freshly-made, wonderfully warm, aromatic cup in his hand. On the other hand, if elected, he held no rancor nor possessed any fear about the crusty old pot; he approached it with an even, calm attitude, expecting that everything would turn out just fine. And it did.

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Marie gave it a very wide berth. She snarled at it, scowled in its direction when she went about the business of her cooking. Truth be told, she preferred to not even pour herself a cup from a fully-finished batch, so convinced was she that the diabolical device could not be trusted under any circumstances whatsoever and was, in fact, capable of genuine Evil.

Marie’s distaste of the wicked pot was so great that she did not budge from her treetop, arty nest until she heard Madeline’s feet hit the floor of her bedroom below at approximately 6:58. Even then, Marie did not move a muscle until a safe period of time had passed, and she could descend the stairs with certainty that the morning’s fresh pot of coffee awaited. Which she generally did not drink, although she usually agreed to have Madeline pour her a cup, noting the obvious pleasure it gave her mother-in-law; but Madeline would later find the stone-cold, untouched mug squirreled away in a corner of the kitchen.

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After years of managing the opening shift in coffee joints, Marie had long ago lost the ability to sleep in. She awakened each day sometime between four a.m. and five, and having her life spread out before her in one large room enabled her to accomplish a great deal in the hours before Madeline opened her eyes to the new day. By the time “good morning’s” passed from each of them to the other, Marie had: read passages from a variety of books that recent events brought to mind; corresponded, both on paper and via email, with people across the world who had stirred her soul into a permanent, unmovable, ferocious loyalty; written in her journal; scanned vintage anatomical drawings; continued the eternal process of organizing her thousands and thousands of photographs taken from world travels; jotted down ideas for a new children’s book she was writing; and curled up in the corner of the room so she could manage a long, impassioned, whispered conversation with her husband in a voice so hushed that Madeline would not even have the barest murmur invade her dreams.

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Friday Short’N Sweet, excerpt from the novel “Pushing the River” #FridayReads

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Dan maintained an unflagging, feverish whirl of dance through the entire set of the band they had all come to hear. Marie and her two friends stayed at a measured distance, occasionally regarding Dan with the attitude of the stone-cold sober towards the merrily drunk – a mix of envy, pity, amusement, warmth and disdain.

 
“Jesus, I missed you. That was the longest less-than-forty-eight hours of my life,” Dan said as they were gathering their stuff to leave the bar. Madeline smiled, expecting to see a drunken glow when she looked over at him. But Dan seemed sweaty and slightly wild-eyed. “Really. All I could think of was how much I wanted to be with you.” As the words came out of his mouth, Dan reached around the side of the bar and retrieved two sizeable, well-used shopping bags.

 
“Ha,” Madeline said, “looks like you did a little bit of shopping yourself, long as you were traipsing around with your sis.”

 
“Huh? Oh. No. That’s my stuff.”

 

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“What do you mean?”

 
“It’s my stuff.” He dropped the bags and enfolded Madeline in his arms. “I decided to stay in town longer. Til the end of the year. I can’t imagine being anywhere else but here right now. With you.”

 
Madeline realized that she was holding her breath.

 
“It’s my stuff. I moved out of my place.”

 

 

So, there you have it. That’s how the third person came to live in this here house with My Lady. And that’s how we came to pass our days as a rag-tag group of four while Sierra’s belly swole up more and more every single day. She mostly lay on the back couch chewing on her crazy blue gum and staring at her little phone with her thumbs flying. Marie spent countless hours in the kitchen at all kinds of odd times, stirring up crazy concoctions from potatoes and garlic in pretty even amounts judging by the smells. She was just hoping her baby sister would get some decent grub into her. Dan and my Lady stayed mostly upstairs when they was both about, lolling around on the bed and reading out loud to each other. Can you imagine that? Poetry, of all infernal things.
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Top: Woodcut by Steve Ashby

Middle: Roy Lichtenstein

Bottom: Vincent VanGogh

 

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Monday Short’n Sweet, from the novel “Pushing the River”

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Dan had been visiting his sister for the past two nights, time together which generally consisted of him completing a laundry list of things she had carefully compiled. This, in turn, invariably necessitated driving around to an ungodly number of retail establishments known as “Big Box Stores” so they could gather extremely heavy things which he then used to build, fix, install, assemble, connect, secure, clean, tear down, buttress, erect, and when all else was said and done, simply move from one location to another – and often back again if she decided the original arrangement was somehow superior. In other words, the exact kind of familiar encounter that led Dan to toss an uncertain number of beers down his throat as he drove the hours’ distance to meet Madeline at the bar where she sat contemplating her next move with the uber-chipper bar patron on the stool beside her.

Dan swooped in on Madeline, slumped over in creeping despair on her stool, as if he’d been lost and adrift for endless days at sea, and Madeline was an emerald isle with Stella Artois running through the cascading streams.

He swung her stool around and nuzzled his face into the crook of her neck, planting kiss after kiss. Enlacing the fingers of their two hands together, he bobbed his head, moved his hips and feet about, and performed a wild giddy drunken dance, all while ordering two beers at once, the first of which he emptied in a single gulp. He grabbed the other bottle off the bar, lifted Madeline from her seat, and kissed her forehead between head bobs, dancing all the while.

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Both paintings by Pablo Picasso

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Friday Short’n Sweet: an excerpt for everyone who’s had a rough week

George Brassaï - Girls at a Café

The sound of the woman’s voice was driving her nuts. All sing-song and la-la-la as she prattled on and on about how well things were going in every single possible aspect of her entire life with no exceptions whatsoever. Madeline tapped her fingers on the intensely varnished bar. Then she attempted to peel the label off of her beer bottle in little strips that would spell out the word “H E L P.” Marie and her two friends were deeply in the throes of some discussion that Madeline couldn’t quite hear, their heads huddled together. The woman sang on. Madeline felt dangerously close. In a few short moments, she would no longer have a choice about it. If Dan didn’t show up very, very soon, she was going to have to spin the crooning woman around on her bar stool, slap her squarely in the face, and say, “Suffer a little, bitch!”
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Photo credits:  Brassai (top),  Jacques (bottom)

 

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“Haven of Love” part 3, excerpt from the novel “Pushing the River”

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RATED R:  Pretty sure that’s what the MPAA would rate this passage, for sexual content.  Don’t read it if the content might bother you, but gosh, I sure hope that you will.

With swift and precise movement, Madeline pushed Dan backwards on the couch, threw her leg across his lap so she fully straddled him, and gripped his head between her two hands.  “Want to know what I think you should do?”  Madeline moved in, her lips, tongue, teeth showing all of the threat, and all of the promise, of a wild and starving animal.  She threw her head back, panting hard.  “Any questions?” she asked.

Taking Dan’s hand, she led him to the staircase.  With her back to him, Madeline ascended with measured, deliberate steps, resting their entangled fingers against her ass, with every intention that he pay keen attention to it.  She took her time lighting the two candles on her bedside table, her back still to Dan, waiting for the match to burn all the way down before she blew the slightest puff of air.  Standing behind her, Dan reached one hand out to caress her buttocks, took a step forward, and cupped her breast with his other hand.  They stood for a time, motionless, listening to one another’s breathing; and that marked the last instant of anticipation, or of anything languorous.  Madeline ground her ass into Dan’s pelvis, hard, and rocked it from side to side.  His fingers dug into the crotch of her jeans.

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Clothing flew.  Hands could not explore fast enough, could not cover enough ground.  Lips, tongues, saliva were everywhere, all at once.  The air in the room thickened to a fecund hothouse from the blossoming of body parts and ooze of fluids.

Dan gripped her haunches and pulled her onto him, astride him as she had been on the couch.  Madeline ran her hand along his cock as she slid him inside her, and shut her eyes tight to block out any thought, any hint of any sensation, that was not the feeling of his cock reaching into her.   Dan seized her hand and enlaced his fingers with enough force that Madeline’s eyes snapped open.  Her first inclination was to gasp. She had never seen a look quite like the one on his face.  His impossibly blue eyes wide open, his body trembling, Dan looked right at her, right into her, with a hungry yearning that pronounced there would be no place for a single part of her to hide.  A sound arose from deep in her gut, a sound she was not even sure was her own.  And when that sound reached up through her body and spilled from her mouth, she was gone.

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Painting by Varvara Stylidou

Photos from Flickr

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“Billie,” new excerpt from the novel “Pushing the River”

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Madeline rolled Marie’s words over in her mind,  “She’s not safe.”  She flashed back to two years ago, the last time she had seen Sierra.  That summer.

“Not safe.”  Madeline heard about the events of that night after it was all over.  She awakened to then-13-year-old Sierra curled up in a ball, deep in slumber on the couch in the very room where Marie told the story of the previous night as if it were a tale of very long ago, and quite far away.  Grotesque scenes involving the screaming of sirens, spewed vitriol, handcuffs, jail, emergency protective orders, and a young girl – with a freshly stitched and gauze-wrapped gash across her forearm – now in the legal custody of Marie, with the legal residence of Madeline’s home.  Marie blew across the top of her coffee as she spoke.  She unfurled a crumple of pages — various reports from police, the hospital emergency room, child services — and smoothed them with her hands.

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“Not safe,” Marie now said, two years later, into the phone.

Madeline thought of a photo that Marie had pinned to the wall of the room that she and John lived in that summer of two years past.  An old photo of her mother Billie Rae when she was young — a grown woman, but still young.  She was seated at a kitchen table, leaning forward in her chair to nestle herself, her slight-framed body, fully against the table.  One shoulder tilted towards the camera in a way that looked both flirtatiously coy and thoroughly exhausted.  The photo was not a close up, and the distance made Billie seem even tinier, all long dishwater blonde hair and huge blue eyes.  There was something else, too – a softness.  The girl in the picture possessed a definite softness.  This is what Madeline would try to remember.  That there had been a time when Billie was soft.  Vulnerable.  Young.  There was strength in that face.  And fatigue.  And pleading.  Whatever came next, and next after that, Madeline would try to remember the girl/woman in that picture.

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Paintings, top to bottom, by:

Tiziano Vecellio Titian, Henri Lebasque, Julio Romero de Torres

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“Haven of Love” (cont.) from the novel “Pushing the River”

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“Would you like a house tour?  Want to see the rest of the Haven of Love?”

Strolling the myriad of rooms, Dan remained decidedly quiet.  Madeline ran her fingers along walls and gestured with giddy abandon as she dug up tidbits of historical facts about the 100-year-old house, and recounted treasured memories of her thirty years within the confines of its walls.  Dan nodded once or twice.  He knit his brow now and again.

The house tour completed, Madeline plopped down beside Dan on the sofa, their thighs pressed together.  The arc of the evening – the deep pleasure of Auggie and Bess, the astonishment of Dan actually getting it about her house, the chance to tell its stories – had left her in woozy, buoyant spirits.  She sighed aloud and rested her head against Dan’s shoulder.  He reached his arm to encircle her, kneaded her shoulder, then withdrew it.

“Are you feeling it?  Are you as totally uncomfortable as I am?”

For a split second Madeline thought he must be pulling her leg.  An attempt at a bit of ha-ha hipster ironic humor; but one quick look at his face persuaded her that this was not the case.  “What?” she said.

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“You can’t tell me you’re not feeling the same.  How completely different this is from last night.  How awkward.”

No…I…I’m so sorry that you’re feeling uncomfortable.”

“Last night just flowed.  Every minute.  Flow.”  Dan sat forward on the couch, leaning as if ready to spring.

“You look like you’re thinking pretty seriously about leaving,” Madeline said.

“I am.  Thinking about it.  This is just so…weird.  I’m not sure what I should do”

Something old, and very deep, within Madeline felt a profound shame.  She tamped down the instinct to apologize over and over, to do anything, to do everything, that might possibly make Dan feel better, like her, want to stay, want to hold her, want her.  She was also aware of a flash of rage, an intense desire to slap Dan’s flow-spouting face.  Inside, a part of her screamed, “Fuck you, you arrogant fuck!”  Alongside the shame, and the blind anger, the most profound feeling of all was a wish that something, just one thing, could be simple.  Clear.  Easy.  Known.

With swift and precise movement, Madeline pushed Dan backwards on the couch, threw her leg across his lap so she fully straddled him, and gripped his head between her two hands.  “Want to know what I think you should do?”  Madeline moved in, her lips, tongue, teeth showing all of the threat, and all of the promise, of a wild and starving animal.  She threw her head back, panting hard.  “Any questions?” she asked.

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All photos from Flickr

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“Haven of Love,” excerpt from novel-in-progress “Pushing the River”

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By the time Dan tumbleweeded through the front door and into the dining room with my Lady, Auggie and Bess had pushed their chairs back from the table in healthy respect of keeping a certain distance from the remaining rubble of pie.  Auggie and Bess looked Dan up and down while Dan looked the tumult of plates up and down, and before fifteen minutes of interesting conversational tidbits had criss-crossed the dining table, Auggie turned squarely to face his wife and said, “Well, honey, we really need to get going.”

“What?!?” Madeline said, nearly before the words were fully out of his mouth.  “Really?!?”

“Really.  Come on, babe.” And with an incredible efficiency of movement, he grabbed Bess’ hand, pulled her up from her chair, and led her towards the front door while both of them exclaimed the virtues of the food and the wine and the company, until the door shut behind them and their continued words drifted into the evening air.

On the other side of the door, the entire atmosphere inside the house shifted by the time Madeline took the twenty or so steps back to sit at the dining room table, side by side with Dan.  He gave a faint chuckle. “Nice folks.”

“The best.” Madeline said.

They sat facing the table laden with the evening’s detritus.  As if he had read the crusted plates like so many tea leaves, Dan said, “This house is so you.  You are everywhere.”

“Really?” Madeline retorted, more than a tad skeptically, as he had arrives less than a half hour before and seen only two rooms.  “How’s that?”

“It’s so clear what this house is.  It’s the place that you created, and have worked hard to protect – a haven to encircle all of the people you love.”

“Geez,” Madeline thought to herself.  “Just how much longer do I have to wait to fuck this guy?”  But what she said aloud was, “Huh.”

“There is love everywhere,” Dan said, still looking down at the plates.

“Maybe not quite yet,” she considered.  “But soon.  Very, very soon.”  The thought exhilarated her, thrilled her, yet also filled her with a quiet apprehension.  She said in a pitch that was decidedly tauter and higher than usual. “Would you like a house tour?  Want to see the rest of the Haven of Love?”

Night dance