Oh -- flash fiction

"Do you hate her that much?” Sherry asked, touching my arm. The gentle touch was meant as much to restrain me as to get my attention. She was wise not to clutch at me.

I’ve thought about this question so often lately. How much do I hate her? I weighed the gun in my left hand. Then in my right. I did my research. Glock Women said I had every right to defend myself.

That woman, Ms. Berenger, has been after me since the first class. Belittling me. Verbally attacking me. Because I don’t agree with her politics. A poli-sci class that doesn’t allow for dissenting views. Does that make any sense?

The Glock 42 is perfect. Less than six inches long. Weighs less than a pound unloaded. Just over a pound loaded. My purse hangs differently with it, but no one can tell by looking. No matter. It’s in my pocket. I don’t have a permit to carry. Don’t have a permit to shoot her either. It’ll serve her right. She’s such a loud defender of the Second Amendment.

I’m not the only one the old bat picks on. Why does a professor need to make a little freshman cry? The woman doesn’t deserve to be alive.

She’s graded me down on every paper I’ve handed in. Every paper. I know I’ve done good work. I’m literate. I’m conscientious. I do good research. I guess I should be glad I’m not sleeping with her husband. My B’s would, no doubt, be downgraded to F’s.

No, she should be glad I don’t want to sleep with her husband. He’ll probably be relieved to be a widower.

“You’re smiling,” Sherry says. “Good. You’re feeling better. You’re not going to do this thing.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Jen, think about this. They’ll put you in prison for the rest of your life.”

“You’re right. But she’ll be dead.” I go around to the driver’s side of the car. “Besides, Orange is the new black.”

“That’s not funny,” she says as she gets into the car.

I suppose she’s right. But can’t she see the humor here? The irony?  Ms. I-got-mine, right wing, righteous bitch gets hers. Why do I not think those words will show up in the local headlines?

I’ve worked hard to get here. Nobody handed me anything. I don’t take student loans. I’ve raised my son by myself. Never taken anything from the government. She takes one look at me and my shaggy gray hair. She hears me say I think the government should help people who need it and decides I’m a dope smoking, Act Up, Hillary supporting, welfare mom.

She hates poor people. Why, in hell, does she think I’m in school at this age? Because I’m not poor anymore, but I’m tired of working this hard to make ends meet. I’m here for a degree and a better job. 

She’s here to keep me and people like me from getting ours.

The traffic is horrendous. We’ve waited through this light three times.

“Jen, what about David?”

“What about David? He’s a grown man. He’s got a career. A wife. A family.”

“But this’ll come back on him.”

“Why? Nobody has to know I’m his mom. He’s got his father’s name.”

“You think he’ll stay away from the trial?”

I touch the gun through the fabric. I know what it looks like. It’s small and black. And mechanical. A little engine for change. A palm-sized instrument of justice and revolution.

“Move, damn it,” I will the traffic. I’ve got three minutes. She leaves the Admin building at 10:45 every Tuesday.

“Jen, please don’t do this.” Sherry’s face is buried in her hands and she’s sobbing.

I’m in time. She’s crossing the street toward me. There is no one behind her. No one else in the line of fire.

I raise the gun. Sherry is looking at Berenger so hard, her concentration is palpable.

Berenger does not seem to recognize me or the gun. She looks the other way down the street and steps from the curb.

I raise the muzzle into the air and fire. Berenger flinches and looks around.

Sherry screams. “You’ve missed.”

“Oh,” I say and drive on.

Names, What's in 'em?

“That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

Would Romeo have been the young man he was, had he been born to the Smiths instead of the Montegues? Maybe had he been a Hatfield and she a McCoy, it would have been the same. The Clintons and the Huckabees?

Was Juliet right? Names don’t matter?

Of course they do. Even among roses. Which smells sweeter? The Peace Rose or the Cabbage Rose? And the hybrid tea Black Magic which has no discernible scent? But roses, they all are.

Which sounds more regal? Hereford bull or whiteface bull? Lexus or Hyundai? Caviar or free range eggs?

How often have you been introduced to someone and you can’t remember their name because they don’t look like a Robert or a Jennifer or a Rose? Or smell like one either.

How many of us wanted to be called something other than our name. Especially during our teens. I was sure I didn’t fit my name. Claudia was, at least in English-speaking communities when I was a teen, unusual and easily shortened to Claud or Claudie. I didn’t meet another Claudia until I was in high school and then only one. A pretty girl, she was petite with a huge mane of very curly, flaming red hair.

Perhaps she should have been named Rose.

Love, Marriage, and Taxes -- Creative Nonfiction

           

He used to do our taxes. Every year. You know how some people get really aggressive when they’re behind the wheel in city traffic? That’s the way he did taxes.

Back in those days a booklet would come in the mail along with the basic filing forms. The booklet, printed on roughish, beigish-grayish paper gave you current tax rules, listed the forms you needed and gave you the postal address of the nearest Internal Revenue Service Office processing tax returns. Ours had to be mailed to Austin, Texas. We had IRS offices in Oklahoma, but they never got the pleasure of processing annual tax returns. I’ve never been to Austin, but my tax returns have.

Some of the forms needed would be included in the booklet. Some not. You had to collect up all the forms necessary for your particular situation not included in the booklet. The post office and the public library kept them on hand “Free to the Public.”

He approached tax season as though preparing for battle. Not the assaulting side, you understand, but the side being assaulted. He would make a list of forms and send me to retrieve them. Any little hiccup in our daily life during that time was not only a personal affront but a shot across the bow.

Once the dryer quit working. We both worked full-time and had a toddler. Considering our income, he should have considered us lucky that he could fix it. Right then in the middle of tax season.

And there was the time I locked the keys in the car at the post office. The post office was thirty minutes away from home. He was a model of restraint and kindness, or at least silence, when he arrived with the spare key and took away the forms.

Each year there was a nontax-related disaster for him to overcome. And each year I would take the children away from the house while he prepared our tax returns. It was best that they not learn any new words that would get them in trouble at school.

Somewhere along the line I volunteered to take over tax duty. Somewhere along the line, tax preparation companies started making software available at a reasonable cost. Each year I am so grateful to them.

And each year I put it off to the last minute. Today is the deadline. I finished them yesterday. I’m always afraid it’s going to be too hard. I won’t be able to find all the information I’ll need. Somebody’s going to get sick and I’ll be too busy with them in the hospital. If I’m lucky, it’ll be me.

My computer will conk out. The internet will go down. There’ll be so many of us at the last minute that the IRS’s website will crash.

We’ll have to pay.

We won’t have enough money to pay and I’ll be arrested. I’m sensitive to tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and eggplant. What kind of food do they serve in jail. It will be Federal Prison who knows where. There are Federal Prisons all over the country. I could end up in Kansas. I won’t know anyone there. Will they let me watch Downton Abbey?

After the appropriate number of sleepless nights, I did our taxes yesterday. He stayed away while I did them. In fact, he kept a low profile all last weekend, knowing that the end was near.

It wasn’t as difficult as I expected. The software has simple, easy to follow instructions and walked me through the process, step by step. It never has been as difficult as I imagined, but this could have been the year. And, HOORAY! We don’t have to pay. I won’t be going to prison anywhere. At least not this year.

He came home all smiles. He didn’t comment on the last-minute-ness of my tax work. He didn’t make any suggestions about how I could do it differently next year. He just brought me a present. A bottle of Riunite Lambrusco.

He remembered my favorite wine.

“I had trouble finding it.” he said. “I looked all over the store. It was on the bottom shelf. Guess that’s where they keep the cheap stuff.”

This I promise myself. I won’t wait until the last minute next year. I’ll put important documents and receipts away promptly – somewhere it makes sense so I will be able to find them. I’ll consider investing in one of those bookkeeping software programs. Next year I'll start as soon as I get my husband’s W2. Next year.

This year, I had a nice glass of  red wine with grilled chicken. It’s nice being married to someone who loves me and buys me cheap wine because I like it and won’t mention that you’re supposed to drink white wine with chicken.

Kingsolver – A Review (Rumination)

I thought to call this piece a review, but I have a daughter. And as any mother of a daughter knows, what we think doesn’t matter. She graciously pointed out to me that I’ve never written a “review.” Not a proper review. She likes what I write but, they’re not reviews.

Okay. I’ll call this a rumination – as I will all my reviews henceforward.

That same daughter introduced me to Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, a marvelous novel written in first person. First person from five points of view. As a writer, I understand the difficulty of portraying a character’s unique point of view, then maintaining that identifiable point of view through the length of a novel. Kingsolver did it with five characters, a mother and her four daughters, the children ranging in age from five to fifteen at the beginning. She wrote each as an identifiable individual with particular peculiarities of thought and language. Five significant and singular points of view.

So when I was looking for a book of creative nonfiction Kingsolver’s name in the credits of Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, along with Amy Tan and David Sedaris, I was sold.

Creative nonfiction is new to me. At least the term. Having enjoyed David Sedaris and Bailey White and Baxter Black for years on NPR, Creative nonfiction in the short form is not new to me at all. Come to think of it, Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” would be considered creative nonfiction.

“But that’s not what I come here to talk about.”

I came here to talk about Barbara Kingsolver, the woman I met in her work “High Tide in Tucson,” a wonderful true story that begins with a displaced hermit crab and moves into her life.

Kingsolver doesn’t define herself as a high school English teacher would, giving us her date of birth and where she went to school and when she married and how many children she has and how many awards and commendations she’s received. Or, as too commonly with autobiographies and memoirs of people successful in their field, what celebrities she’s met and slept with and/or disapproved of.

She offers us her view of living. Not in florid and overblown language, but concretely as a true word smith should.

“It’s not such a wide gulf to cross,” she writes “from survival to poetry. We hold fast to the old passions of endurance that buckle and creak beneath us, dovetailed, tight as a good wooden boat to carry us onward. And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore.” 

I've been there and am doing that. I bet you have and are, too.

J is for Jason -- flash fiction, a re-post.

Today is the day I HAVE to do our taxes and I can't think of anything else so I'm re-posting my favorite bit of flash fiction about a woman's favorite son, Jason. It was originally posted October 25, 2014. Hope you enjoy it.

image from people.com

“Dammit Jason.”

“Honest Mom. I didn’t mean to kill her. She’d a killed me if I hadn’t done it.”

“Eighteen years old and you can’t handle your granny’s pig?”

“But she was gonna bite me. More’n bite me. She’d a killed me.”

“Dammit Jason. She’s a pig. Granny’s the one you’re gonna have to run from when she finds out you killed her pig.”

“That’s why I called you. I knew you’d know what to do.”

“You just be sure that blanket’s coverin’ up the floorboard. I swear the only danger my car’s ever been in has been you. You and your friends. Just two beers, my sweet Aunt Sassy. Smelled to high heaven for three weeks and now there’ll be blood all over.”

“But she ain’t bleedin’.”

“She ‘isn’t’ bleedin’.”

“I know, Mom. That’s what I just said.”

“Dammit, Jason. You said ‘ain’t.’”

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry.”

“You pick up her front part. I’ll get her back legs.”

“She’s still warm.”

“And why wouldn’t she be? I came right over didn’t I?”

“Mom! I think she moved.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Pick her up. She can’t bite you now. You just wait ‘til your father hears what you’ve done.”

“Do we have to tell him?”

“No, Jason. We don’t have to tell him anything. You have to tell him. Now get in the car.”

“Can I turn on the radio?”

“No, Jason. You can just sit there in the quiet and think about what you’ve done until we get out past the Simpson place.”

“We gonna dump her in the river?”

“No. We are not going to dump her in the river. I’d have nightmares for weeks thinking of that poor, dead, bloated pig driftin’ on down to the Gulf. Your Granny loved that pig.”

“Did you hear something?”

“No, Jason. I didn’t hear anything except your snufflin’.”

“I ain’t snufflin’. Isn’t. I’m not snufflin’.”

“We’ll dump her in that old irrigation ditch just this side of the levee.”

“Mom, she’s movin’.”

“Jason, wishing and imagining isn’t going to make her alive again.”

“Stop, Mom! We gotta get out. She’ll kill us both.”

“Dammit, Jason.”

The Relief of Ignorance and Intolerance by Innocence -- Creative Nonfiction

In November of 1979 Iranian students stormed the American Embassy in Tehran. Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for 444 days. That was almost twenty-two years before 9/11. Before Homeland Security. Before the TSA. Before we had to take our laptops out of their bags at the airport. In fact, before laptops. Before cell phones.

I was divorced living with my young son in Guthrie, Oklahoma. I had quit my job with the state welfare department because, in that small town, it was too easy for people to find out who and where my son was. And sometimes my workmates and I had to do things that made people angry. Angry enough to threaten us.

My new job was Night Manager at a Taco Bell, in Stillwater, home of Oklahoma State University, some 35 miles away. The pay was only a little less than I made as a Casework Supervisor and I wasn’t involved in taking anything away from anyone. Not their food stamps. Not their income. Not their children. And no one went to bed hungry because the paperwork didn’t get done right or there was a computer glitch at the head office.

Back then, in Oklahoma, we didn’t pay much attention to the problems in the outside world. Vietnam was over. The Oil Crisis following the Iranian Revolution raised the price of oil and Oklahoma’s economy boomed. Ireland and the Middle East, with their seemingly unsolvable conflicts, were little more than unpleasant background noise. And they were far away.

Tuesdays were slow days at the Stillwater Taco Bell. It was located at the end of The Strip, a local term for a stretch of street running south from the University to State Highway 51. Its most plentiful businesses were bars. And their primary custom came from college students. By the time the students made it down to our place, they were in a good mood and hungry. Of course the TV ads for Taco Bell right after the 10:00 o’clock news would bring out those who’d been at home studying or something. More than a few with the munchies.

We knew little and cared less about what was going on in Iran. The Shah was in exile and sick. He was admitted to the United States for medical treatment. Barely a blip in the news.

Americans were not particularly anti-Muslim. Few Americans knew much about them. Other than they hated Jews. And the Israelis hated them back. White Americans despised Black Muslims, people born and raised in this country. Probably more because they were Black than because they were Muslim.

I love college towns. They bring in people from all over the world. And at one time or another, most of those people would end up in our store.

The hostage situation in Tehran changed Americans’ laissez faire attitude toward people they identified as Arabs. Never mind that Iranians are not Arabs.

That Tuesday night a group of six students – two women and four men – made their way into the store at about 11. There were baseball caps and cowboy hats. The men were clean shaven. The women wore the acceptable amount of makeup. They were fresh-faced, all-American kids in a partying mood. A little bit rowdy, but cheerful.

Right after they got their food, two young men came in and ordered food. They had dark skin, dark eyes, and dark hair. They were quiet, well-mannered, and showed no signs of drinking.

The mood of the room changed. The group of six watched the newcomers silently. The two who were “not from around here” found seats as far away from the locals as they could. In a store that size, those seats were not far enough away. Not far enough that they couldn’t hear the low-level comments.

“Rag-heads.”

The two dark young men stopped talking to each other and studied their food.

“Why don’t they go home?”

We closed at midnight and had only two people working – myself and a 19-year-old. A college student like the group of six. But Lisa spent her evenings working rather than bar-hopping or going to Taco Bell for a quick food fix.

 “Sand n****rs,” someone said too loud.

Lisa stopped stirring the refried beans and watched me. I watched the customers and wondered if I should call the police.

Another customer came in – a tall young white man, a little unsteady on his feet. He took off his cowboy hat and approached the counter.

The room went quiet. All the customers watched the new guy. Unaware of them, he ordered food, “Three tacos and a Pepsi.”

He smiled at Lisa as she filled taco shells with ground beef and the prescribed amount of grated cheese, then carefully wrapped them in paper.

The six stood up. Their sudden movement startled the young man and he turned to look at them. We all looked at them. Unsure of what they were going to do. Unsure of what we would do.

“God bless America,” they sang. They sang that reverential anthem at the top of their lungs with anger and malice and stormed out of the store.

Completely amazed, the tall young man exclaimed, “Damn. They’re drunker than I am.”

Home -- flash fiction

“Good morning Ms. Jenkins. Did you go home for the holidays?” he asked over his shoulder as he stepped away with the empty pill bottle.

She thought about that. Spring was such a beautiful time for a holiday. School was out for a week, always enough time to go home. Things would be blooming. The folks would have vegetables growing strong. Lettuces and peas would already be coming off. Forsythia would be done, but the tulips and daffodils would still be blooming. Her mother must have had umpteen varieties of daffodils. Mom always said they looked like bits of sunshine.

She lost her forsythia last winter. Too dry and too cold.

Dad would be ready to put out his tomatoes and peppers, if he hadn’t already. And his potatoes would be big and strong. He liked to have fryers big enough for fried chicken Memorial Day weekend and new potatoes. That was his aim. And corn on the cob fresh from the garden by Fourth of July. He never planted his corn until after Easter, though. When the ground was warm.

She hadn’t missed an Easter at home in she didn’t know how long. First, trips home from college, then with Jim and the children. Except those two years in a row when James Jr. had the three-day measles. Twice.

Jim built her two raised beds. Four feet by eight feet. And she had a long planter on the south end of the deck. That was her “salad bar.” She planted it full of all kinds of lettuces. Just broadcast the seeds. The raised beds, she planted in an organized fashion. Her dad always took great pride in straight rows. Once a farmer, always a farmer.

She had to wait until after Mother’s Day to plant here. Except the lettuces. She just threw a sheet over them. Nights it got too cold. They’d had a nice big salad fresh from her deck, Easter Sunday.

“Here’s your prescription,” he said as he came back to the counter. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear if you went home this year.”

“Not this year,” she said as she slid her card. It had been a difficult year. Emergency trips home. “Not this year,” she repeated. “This year the children and grandchildren came home.”