A Frowning Jar (my birthday story for Miss Justin P)

A Frowning Jar

So, I met this girl a couple of years ago when I was in college.

Nice enough girl, a history major, but she never smiled.

And when I say never, I mean never. It was the strangest thing. I had never, and have not since met someone who just didn’t smile.

Even accidentally.

There are plenty of people out there workin’ an angle or tryin’ to live up to an image and those people pretend not to care or to smile or any of that, but if you get an adult beverage in them or if you get them alone they’ll open up like a crack to Hell but this girl gave you nothin’.

Not a thing.

And it was her frowning which drew me.

It was her molecular refusal to not be unhappy which made me so fascinated with her.

So, every day at noon I’d head down to the campus cafeteria to sit and eat lunch with her.

She was getting out of Economics and I was on my way to Biology and it was a chance for a few of us to get together and talk. She knew a guy I was friends with, I suppose they dated but I never had asked so maybe they just slept together occasionally.

Hard to say.

Each day I’d go to lunch and just watch her and while she’d talk, it was always the most gloomy and unhappy things that she had to offer. Not that she was into the macabre but she just chose to talk about really sad and awful things. I am usually pretty cool with whatever anyone wants to talk about, being a big fan of all night diners and coffee shops and the like you fall in love with stories, whatever they are, but her stories got to me.

She told me once, when we were both walking to our classes together, that she collected these stories and had since she was a teenager. Her uncle had been the one to interest her in these stories and who had hooked her on diners and funerals because those were the best places for the best stories.

Or perhaps the worst stories.

Her uncle would write down these stories and collect them in a frowning jar so he could keep the stories forever. Her uncle told the girl about the jar and passed it on to her for her thirteenth birthday, wanting to pass on the tradition. What was strange was that the day he gave her the old glass jelly jar he smiled for the first time and that was the last time she could remember smiling.

She stopped suddenly and her eyes grew wide.

I stopped as well and wondered if we’d found the answer to the unposed question.

She pulled a pad of paper from the back pocket of her jeans, a pen from her front pocket, and wrote a short note to herself before putting it all away again. She had already taken three more steps before I started walking again and was able to catch up to her.

‘Well?’ I asked.

Oh, I realized that I had a new story for the frowning jar.

I shook my head and asked her how many jars there were now.

‘Oh, gosh, just the one, but that one is in a big pickling jar now. I try to write the stories as tiny as I am able to so I can save room for more stories.’ She told me that and then was off to her class and I was off to mine and I had a lot of thinking to do.

This all happened on the Friday before a long weekend so I had to sit and stew about all that she’d told me for three long days but as soon as we were back at school I sought her out and asked her about her jar.

‘Can I see it?’ I asked.

She tilted her head a little and her ever-present frown deepened.

‘Gosh, I never showed anyone before. I’d like that.

Can you skip class?’

Of course I could.

The girl lived three blocks from campus in a small apartment that was paid for with grants and funds and some other money for really smart kids. Sure, she was frowny, but she was clever as could be.

She was right in downplaying the magnificence of the jar because it really wasn’t much to brag about. The jelly jar was small and cracked and rested, full of small scraps of yellowed paper, in the bottom of a big glass pickling jar.

That jar was about half way full and I had a feeling that she’d probably fill sooner than later, if she kept up the pace she was on.

She picked up the jar with a grunt and handed it to me carefully. She had the look of someone who collects fragile things but never really enjoys them for fear of breaking them.

I lifted the jar up to eye level and looked into it and saw what had to be the miseries of a thousand people, all collected like some vast world diary and just holding it I felt the corners of my mouth fall down into a frown.

The jar seemed to just give off a feeling of sadness and doom.

I looked to the girl, who was pretty but might be beautiful if she were to smile, and I thought of the jar, and her uncle, and finally of the frown that turned into a smile.

I had a feeling about something but needed to ask her, just in case - Had the jar ever been emptied?

Of course not. That ruins the magic. That releases the stories she’d worked so hard to collect.

Ah.

So I looked into the jar one last time then let go of it and let it fall onto the linoleum floor of her kitchen.

As soon as I let it go I heard her exclaim and saw her reach for it too late.

The jar hit the floor and shattered into a hundred pieces and the stories scattered across the floor.

I looked over at the girl and for a moment, all the rage of the world was in her eyes but then it changed and her face cracked open and a smile emerged like the most beautiful butterfly I had ever seen.

She fell forward gave me a kiss like I’d never had before and never since, and then hugged me.

Sure, she was sad about the jar but, with it broken, it felt as if a great weight was off of her shoulders, a great responsibility, and she was glad to have it gone.

I smiled to her.

I had an idea.

We gathered all the stories together and put them all in a paper sack and made our way down to the park. In the park we found an open barbecue and loaded the stories into it and set them ablaze and as they burned they gave off a miserable green flame that had the worst scent I had ever smelled but, when they were gone the sun seemed to shine a little brighter and the day felt better.

We fell in love there, beside the burning miseries of a thousand people and bonded by our resistance to them.

We fell in love and made a new tradition then and there.

Sure, we still collect the stories, the good, the bad, the big and small, only this time we collect them in a box and when that box is full we burn it, and release the stories to the wind.

Maybe it’s me but the days feel longer, the nights not as dark, and her smile, well, it’s still the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

…c…

Too Short in the House - loving the short story

It’s weird to say but I can’t really remember just when it was that I fell in love with short stories, or what story it was that did it. For me, the beauty and the sheer art of the short story is that  you must still tell a full story, even if it’s just the story of a moment, in only a matter of pages. With short fiction you don’t have the luxury of taking your time to build the layers of the tale, you have to measure every word carefully to make sure that it gets right to the heart of what you’re trying to say and what it is you are trying to convey.

I have always had a deep respect for novels, and always will. Hell, the one I have written was done so by accident alone and nothing more. I hadn’t intended to write a novel but found that what I wanted to say was longer than I expected. Despite having written A Shadow Over Ever (Which will hopefully see publication some day), I don’t really feel a deep need to write another novel. See, I love short stories, and it’s what I am most drawn to. As long as I have been writing (Which I can honestly say I have been doing seriously since I was about fourteen) I have loved writing short fiction. I love the immediacy of short stories and that you can do many of the same things, and create the same feelings, but in fewer words.

It’s a shame that short stories are becoming so scarce these days, the market seeming to have all but dried up over the years. The crazy thing about short stories and story collections being so rare is that, in a world where we’re all so much busier, and have so much more to occupy us, you would think that we’d want to read shorter fiction. I would think that the draw of stories that can be read in one sitting would be a draw for people, especially vacationers. It’s strange. I tend to wonder if it’s the quality of stories out there, or if it’s the selection on the shelves. Unfortunately, there just isn’t a lot of space on bookstore shelves for new or lower profile fiction so a lot of work goes unseen. Moreso even than music, indie books and writing is a pretty rare and under-appreciated animal. With music you can at least sample the stuff in some way but with fiction, you have to take a chance or happen on a friend or reviewer that draws you in. What a shame.

As much as I hope for a resurgence of short fiction, I have to admit that that’s probably not going to happen. What might happen however is that the bigger names in fiction will embrace shorter fiction and will help get people interested in it again by writing some themselves.

Time will tell, naturally but me, I’ll keep telling my tales because that’s what I love to do. It’s as simple as that.

…c…

Gates and Narrows

Of Wooden Skin

Red Hands

Red Hands

I wonder if I am the only one that sees it.

Wondering if we’ve just become accustomed to the smell of murder, sound of death, and sight of anguish, living in our blood red world. I find I can’t even look at people’s hands anymore. Not even my own. The sight of all that blood horrifies me.

Sickens me.

It’s worse at night.

I walk the streets of the city, drowning in the watchful eyes of the buildings but unable to escape them. I walk and see it everywhere, the bloody handprints of society. On the shoulders of a homeless person, pushed down to their knees in supplication. Across the bodies of the young, the lost, the damaged, as predators mark them and paint their bodies with their sick lusts. I see it on the faces of young women trained to walk with their heads down, faces hidden, the red palm prints peeking through their hair. Brilliant across their cheeks. I see the blood smeared across the mouths of men with poisoned eyes and wicked smiles. Madmen carrying bombs in their hands, knives in their hearts.

The horror of it all is staggering.

We have soaked this earth with so much blood we’ve made it a vampire. Needing it. Craving it. We feed it our bodies, our life, in sick acts of worship and damnation, giving thanks and hate to the only god we truly believe in – ourselves.

Everywhere I look I see bloody handprints, or pools where the blood has dried only to be covered with more blood and more after that. Our guilt is everywhere. Our sins our legacy.

In the evenings I’ll sit on my porch and hear the city screaming, an animal sound both pathetic and dangerous. The sound of a wounded thing in a corner. In the distance the city glows with red, as if on fire, but the awful truth is it’s almost worse here in the suburbs. The blood covering everything until this becomes a red world with red people and red horror. People wading through the blood to get to work, or to their cars. Children playing in blood like it were water. All of them oblivious to the red around them.

Are we all so blind or just accustomed?

Can we not see the red or do we choose not to?

Have we forgotten how to see pain? Even if it’s our own?

There is no place safe anymore. No places of green, or blue, or even the gray of concrete. No place safe from our bloody hands. We’ve covered it all like children marking our toys, or animals marking our territory.

There is no beautiful sleep, no great art, no lasting architecture, and no timeless message of hope.

No.

Ours is a legacy of blood, and I hold that proof here in my own red hands and stained body.

In a world where we are all guilty, where we are all damned, all red, we need not a savior but a safe place. A place of green and gold and blue and bronze. A place where hope still lives and can yet spread.

A place that may not exist anymore.

But if we don’t find hope soon, we’ll all simply drown in our legacy and leave this vampire world to wait for more victims.

On my knees I pray, to you, to me, to all of us, and hope that someone hears me, and tells me how to wash this red from me and all of us before there is no other color left.

…c…

The Bloody Tub

Doorways into Darkness

more pictures of doors, a recent photo obsession

Showers and Floors and Blood, oh my!

Happen - story

Things happen.

Not for a reason.

Not with a purpose.

They just happen.

Things…happen.

This river for example.

In 1932 there was a group that had come 100 miles for a mass baptism. They’d heard the tales of the women around here, the stories of six sisters who were powerful and old and who took water from this place. Some say these people were Christians, Baptists with people from the south. They weren’t. Neither I nor anyone else knows what or who they were, but they weren’t here to visit with Christ. They came for the power.

And the power came for them.

73 people were in this river, flooding it with flesh, if you will, when a freak lightning storm broke out. A bolt or two struck the water and killed 64 of those people in the river. The bodies floated down to and past the nearby town and were never seen again. The survivors, those in the river and the twenty on the land, disappeared too. A handful turned up in the papers, to tell their story, but within a week, the people were gone. Vanished.

What did it all mean? – people wondered.

It meant nothing.

It just was.

Same as the mother who took her three children into the woods here, hoping to find her lost husband, a man who claimed to hear voices calling him into the thick woodland. They found five pairs of shoes, all lined up neat as can be, near a clearing that no one remembered seeing before. And at the center of that clearing?

Five new trees.

What does it mean?

Hocus pocus?

Magic?

The devil?

No.

Nothing.

It means…nothing.

Just as it meant nothing when my mother left my father, or my aunt shot her husband, or like it does when it rains in Japan. Yes, there are reasons for things happening, but things just happen. There need be no grand explanation for everything.

I remember being a kid and hearing my mother and father fighting, well before they split, and I was so scared, and so upset they’d break up for good. I went to my sister and asked her what was happening, why they were arguing, and you know what she told me?

Sometimes it just happens.

You can ascribe weird reasons for any and every damned thing that exists. You can create a god, a devil, a demon, an angel, an alien for anything.

The truth is what you choose to believe it to be.

Absolute truth stands in the shadows where few of us are willing to look.

But I will look.

And in those shadows I see happenstance. I see chance. I see that there is no great deity at all but a butterfly beating its wings on Day One and today we are still feeling its effects.

Once upon a time a man and woman came here to birth their baby in this river. They believed the stories about the river being a place of power and healing. They believed the story of the man, a tramp with no home, who had slept by this very river in 1923 and had awakened twenty years younger and with an idea that became changed how we manufacture a certain thing in this country.

The world shook.

The heavens fell.

Life was changed.

So they say.

So this couple, poor and living in a rented trailer just outside of town, in the borderlands where the refuse, human and otherwise, was relegated, came to this place to change their future. To give a future to their baby.

They came to this place, the place where three tribes had tried to settle but where all three had vanished. A place where two women, lovers, came to commit suicide, yet left these woods strangers, never speaking again for as long as they lived, the only hint of their affair being a forgotten note that had been left pinned to a tree.

They came here, and they had their child.

They had me.

And what am I?

I am a man.

I had a job, I had a girlfriend, I had a kid, and once upon a time we shared a small apartment.

I am neither great nor infamous.

I just am.

I have known love, loss, pain, and joy.

I was told the story of my birth, and of how the woods became still as the water ran red and my mother had me, never once screaming, the cold river serving as a sort of anesthesia. Told me of how there was the sound of something moving in the deep parts of the woods, something large and slow that never drew near but circled near them. They told me of how dad went into the woods after I was born. Walking as if in a trance, and leaving my mother there, holding me close, the cord still linking us, and he was gone for two hours, and the woods were still. When he returned he didn’t remember where he’d been or why he’d left. He just remembered six trees.

The next day he got a job at the local mill and was foreman in two months. My mother opened a beauty salon in town by the end of the year and a year to the day I was born my sister was born, though she was born in a hospital.

And now, and now, and now.

Now I am old.

My skin is soft, my hands untouched by hard labor, and my back is straight.

I am a child of modern medicine and have outlived even my own love and child.

I am an old man, Noah with no ark.

Methuselah with no savior.

So I come here, day after day after day to these woods and this river, a place with so many stories and so much lore that it’s become almost as storied as the woods that surround its waters. Just last week they found the body of a boy who’d gone missing in Kansas but wound up here, dead in this river.  No one knows how he got here, or why.

Things just happen.

They happen and I hate it.

I hate the dark shadows of truth that lead me to this place, like Lucifer with his lies. I believed, for as long as I lived, almost I think to defy my father, that there was no magic in a world long past dead. A planet and its people waiting to die.

I was wrong.

I was wrong and I know that now.

Know that as I see my face in the waters and see a man of thirty who is dancing into seventy-five.

I know this as I hear the voices now, louder than they were at ten, at twenty, at thirty, louder than they have ever been and calling me. Calling me here, to this place. Now even I hear the sounds of the things in the woods, and the singing of the sisters. And I wonder what terrible price my father paid with my birth. My mother bearing myself and my sister after being told she could bear my seed to fruition, and my father a man with no healthy seed to give.

Yet…

Yet here they came to create me, one moonlit night I found out on the deathbed of my father, as he screamed that the woods were coming closer, and now I wonder if we didn’t live amidst them all along.

My daughter and lover dead, killed in a car crash among these trees. My sister disappeared when she was twenty-one. Depressed and mad and gone one night that was like the night I was conceived. My life better than it should have been, my parents turning from paupers to lords of this small town in a matter of a year. The world changed with my birth, and I don’t quite know why. But I am a man born with a borrowed future and a bloody past and no understanding of my here.

And now, and now I happen to be here.

And I don’t believe anymore in happenstance.

All I hope, is that, if I walk a little way into this river, if these rocks in my pockets keep me low, and I can stay down and dream for a bit, then maybe this curse will die with me.

The trees tell me different though.

And I happen to believe them.

 

…c…

Old Folks - story

The air chills quickly as the sun slowly makes its way from its throne up high in the heavens toward the darkness far below and then a fleeting sleep. An old man groans and stretches himself as the sun slides away – his legs lifting up and moving out from under his rocker and over the porch’s steps, slippers loose on his feet and dangling in mid-air a moment. He raises his arms high and his shoulders pop as his fingers claw at the flaking paint of the porch’s ceiling and they too crackle. He pulls his arms and legs back in, scratches absently at his crotch, and smiles to himself.

  “You look just like a pussy-cat there Trev. Just like a big kitty. Like that old cat them folks down the street used to have but lost a few years back. ‘Member that old kitty Trev?”

  “Yup. Ain’t that that old tom that was always sniffin’ ‘round here after yer little Fluffy while she was still around right? Yup, I remember it. Used to pee in the garden didn’t it? Yup… Got its little tom-self killed didn’t it? Yup…”

   “Yes, poor dear… Such a pretty kitty; had that big fluffy orange tail. Looked like a little tiger it did. Just like a little old tiger. You warm enough there hon?”

  “Yup, don’t need no blanket yet. Not yet… Gonna need it soon though. Yup… Old sun’s goin’ down the mountain again. Goin’ back to sleep for a turn. Gonna get real cold tonight, real cold, I can feel it in my knees… Frost everything up real good. Old Fall’s comin’ ‘round again - can feel it in the air, smell it in the wind, see it in the stars. Gonna be a cold one this winter, ya can feel it comin’. Yup. Gonna be a cold one. Remember back in, when was it, sixty-eight? Had that old winter storm that kept us in the house for a week straight?”

  “Remember? How could I forget? Spent most of the week in the bedroom trying to make us a baby we did…good times those were. Good times…”

  “Yup. I’m…I’m still real sorry ‘bout that…”

  “Sorry? For what? Oh, oh sweetie I know it wasn’t your fault. Some people just ain’t meant to have little ones is all hon. It’s God’s Will, and ya just can’t question God’s Will. Besides, we have each other…and our little visitors, we don’t need nothin’ else.”

  “Yeah, we gots them visitors, I know, but a man should be able to give his woman his seed so they can make them a baby. It’s the way it was meant to be. Ain’t fair is all. Couldn’t give ya no child and then…and then that goddamn disease took…took my sight from me. Left me all but a goddamn cripple and it, it just ain’t right. I can’t give you no child, and now ya gotta take care’a me like I was some goddamn infant. Ain’t no way for a man to live. I mean, without no sight, and no way to give his woman a baby what is there for a man?”

  “Sugar, oh, oh no hon, don’t say that, I hate to hear you be so down on yourself. God works in mysterious ways. You know you were always more than enough man for me. Here, take my hand, what do you feel? Remember these? Hmmmm, I bet you do. I bet you do…We may not be able to have children, my husband, but we can still try for the fun of it…”

  “Ha, dammit woman yer still the vixen ain’t ya? Still wantin’ this man meat, heh. I never could resist these soft lovelies, or you. Not even after all these years. I’m still under yer spell. Tell me, sun gone down yet? I can’t feel it on my face no more so it has to be close to gone. I hate this, god do I hate this…the darkness in my head.”

  “Mr. Sun is just puttin’ his head down for a nap dad. Do, do you miss it much old pop? The sun?”

  “I miss all of it mother, I miss all of it. What I miss the most is seeing your face in the morning. I can still remember the first time I got to see that. You were lyin’ next to me on the floor of your mama’s place, naked, asleep, this beautiful, silly grin on your face and both of us still out of breath from the night before. God, I loved you as soon as I saw that grin, and I knew you were the one.”

  “Oh, oh hon, you still remember that? Why we was still kids then. I remember that night too. My ma came home from her boyfriend’s and found us lyin’ there on her rug, our clothes all in heaps around the house and my lord was she furious. She beat the livin’ daylights outta you with that old broom of hers, you remember that? Chased you outta the place still naked if I recall. She never did like you…that I wanted you…”

  “Eh, old witch that she was, heh. She was just jealous you was getting’ some action when she couldn’t even get a man to look at her unless she had her dress over her head and was sittin’ in the middle of the road.”

  Silence.

  “Hello? Hey… Sara? Sara you still there? Where you go woman?”

  “Yeah, I’m still here, just, just thinkin’…”

  “’Bout what woman?”

  “My ma. You. Us. Kids…”

  “I’m sorry. Sorry about my shootin’ blanks, sorry that some goddamn disease took my sight…Sorry about a lot of things I s’pose. But I’m sorriest that I could never give you a child. You woulda been a great mama…”

  “Oh love, all I ever needed or wanted was you. You know that don’t you? I never needed no baby to make me happy. I just… I always wonder if things woulda been different if we’d have had us some kids. Maybe God is punishing us. I dunno. But it ain’t you though sugar, it ain’t nothin’ you coulda done. Here, gimme yer hands, can you feel this, this smile, these lips, these cheeks, this throat, these breasts, this heart? It’s all for you. Because of you. I exist for you…”

  “And I for you…”

            She leans over to him and places her head on his thin chest. He runs a hand through her hair and puts his other arm around her shoulders. The sun falls further and the sound of crickets rises from around the small house like a siege. She smiles and her hand slips from his chest down to his belly, still smooth as it was when he was seventeen, and then lower and then he too smiles. He kisses her on her head softly and imagines her as she looked at seventeen. A life still ahead of her. A heart full of dreams, eyes full of wonder, and hands full of magic. And now, now it was all passed them both. All passed.

Suddenly there is a piercing shriek that comes from the back of the house, breaking his memories and bringing him back. And then there is another scream. And another. One that of a girl, the other that of a boy. Both very far from home and very scared.

  “Fuck.”

  “Now, now, don’t get yer dander up hon, I’ll see to ‘em. You just stay there and keep yer soldier at attention…”

  “No, I’ll do this. Yer just gonna have to help me. There’re some things I can still do though and this is one of ‘em. Here, help me up…”

            She stands slowly, her hips popping, joints grinding, and her wrinkled face closing in on itself as she grabs his arm and struggles to help him out of his rocker. He stands and stretches himself out, his arms rising high, and he shivers as the cold of the coming Fall bites at his bare ankles. Another scream cuts through the chill of the night but quickly gives way to crying and then to wheezing and coughs. He stands still a moment, the old rage building and building as the coughs finally give to the familiar mewls and whines.

  “What them children need is some discipline, and I can do that father. Let me do it hon, set yerself down and I’ll be back in a jif, ‘kay? I can get myself back there and take care of this and will be back so I can finish what I started.”

  “What them bastards need is to learn to behave, mother. These parents today are too damn easy on their kids. Treat their kids like they’re made of glass. They need to learn suffering. Children need to learn about suffering and what it means to respect your elders. God brought these children to our door for a reason, and that reason was to learn them what He showed us Himself. They ours now, they our children, just like the thirteen before them, and if these fail to learn then we show them the well, like the others, and we wait for God to grant us His wisdom. Now gimme my cane…good…now gimme the knife.”

  “No, hon, let me…”

  “Woman, gimme the knife, I’m gonna show them what suffering is…”

  “Then I’m goin’ with ya father ‘cause this was a duty the Lord and Jesus gave us both, so let’s go.”

            The woman grabs a long and rusty butcher knife from the windowsill and handed it to the man, the furry orange tail tied to the end of the knife sliding across his wrist. He runs the blade across the palm of one hand and feels a warm sensation run down the length of it and smiles as it drips to the porch. He was going to have to teach them a lesson. Like the others before them and the others that would come after them. Teach them manners. Suffering. Like he knew. Like they both did.

  “Time to do the Lord’s work.”

            She takes his arm and guides him to the door, through it, and towards the back of the house and the cellar where their students were waiting.

…c…