BRIDGE TO NOWHERE

(This is my first attempt at flash fiction. I entered it in the May 2007 contest at The Verb and received honorable mention. Find out more about The Verb at www.readingwriters.com)

            The bridge stands stark and black against roiling charcoal clouds that spit rain in deepening dusk. Iron girders glisten in the headlights as those saner than I rush homeward to warm dinners. We who are not so sane stand alone, feeling rain and wind and haunted thoughts hurl themselves against us as the year slips away. We are the outcasts, the homeless, the good-for-nothings without rules, responsibilities, or remembrance of things past or future.
            Except one memory. I worry about Mickey. Does his father cook or do they live on trans fats and sugar? Will they find the perfect superhero costume for Saturday’s trick-or-treat? Will they sit together at the kitchen table and carve a pumpkin, yanking out the seeds and strings with slimy fingers and soup spoons? 
            Does Mickey touch my photo, wondering what happened to Mom? Does he weep in lonely midnights when he wakes to find me still gone? 
            Schizophrenia slashed me open and pulled out my heart and brain and everything that made me human, leaving a withering rind to rot and stink of lunacy. The drugs the doctors gave me intensified the split. There are no prescriptions that can bridge the gap between the world’s reality and mine. I found only hopelessness and fear. And finally, numbing indifference.
            But sometimes, I creep out of madness. I begin to walk.

                                   *****

            I balance on the curb. My once-house stands tall against the storm. An unlit jack-o-lantern balances on the porch rail. One step, and the journey begins. Rain hammers down, spattering drops backlit by streetlights. It fills the gutter, mounting to the broken toes of my salvaged shoes. I don’t care. I can’t get any wetter.
            I step down. Glacial run-off chills my feet, my ankles, anesthetizing my body but not my mind. Wind-driven leaves, dead and sodden, plaster against me as I slink toward my son. Will Mickey somehow sense me? Will he peer into the night, wiping his breath-steam from the pane as he looks for a ghost? As he looks for me?
            Those inside cannot hear the creaking porch boards as I creep to the living room window. I peer through the sheer curtains. Mickey and his father kneel at opposite ends of the coffee table, building a toothpick-and-string Golden Gate, perhaps for Mickey’s Social Studies class. They frown in concentration, laugh with delight when the glue holds. They are happy, without me.
            Darkness calls. I turn away, leaving them yet again. Leaving them to their bridge. Where is the bridge I need to traverse psychosis? The connection to sanity and safety?
           The night has no answer. Neither do I.

 
                                       The End  

                                  DADDY'S LEGACY


            We begin to learn from the moment that we lie, helpless and damp, on our mothers’ breasts.  They are our primary teachers, but daughters learn lessons from their fathers that mothers and others can’t duplicate, no matter how much they want or try to. Our fathers’ lessons are sometimes casual, sometimes intentional, always never-ending.
            Daddy was slight, only five-foot nine, much smaller than his brother and sister. Hence his nickname: Tiny.  He had auburn hair and brown eyes, which I inherited, and a Louisiana accent, which I didn’t.  Truthfully, I don’t remember the accent.  It exists only on a recording made by the next-door neighbors made at their 1953 New Year’s Eve party.  Sometimes when I’m feeling worn, I listen to him as he speaks self-consciously into the microphone. Then he and my mother harmonize a capella on “You Are My Sunshine.” I hear the love in their voices at their last New Year’s celebration together.
            Daddy passed away a few weeks before I started second grade.  But I learned a lot of lessons from him in seven years.
             He loved the natural world.  On gray November days, he dressed me in my red snow suit and red rubber boots, then shrugged into his Marine drab jacket and stamped his feet into black galoshes. We walked to Walnut Creek, rustling through the autumn-dry corn stalks in the field that lay between the house and the dike.  He held my hand and hauled me up the levee, slippery with the season’s first snow.  We slid together down the creek side and eased through the woods that filled the flood plain, tracking rabbits and squirrels.  Sometimes he took his .22 rifle, and I learned that death and dinner are not mutually exclusive.
            In late April, we walked the same trails, this time armed with pails to gather royal purple, lavender, and white wood violets, which grew so densely that every step we took crushed dozens. “Think we have enough?” he asked, but I always wanted just a few more. When the buckets would hold no more, we wandered home, breathing spring air redolent with damp earth and green, growing things.
           Then Mom helped me cut, fold, and paste construction paper and pipe cleaners into May baskets. We filled them with candy corn and violets.  Daddy walked me through the neighborhood, carrying the box that held the baskets. “Remember, don’t let them see you,” he cautioned. Basket in hand, I sneaked onto a neighbor’s porch and hung it on the doorknob. I pounded on the screen door and dashed back to Daddy, and we became “invisible” behind the nearest tree, grinning conspirators watching Mrs. Sherbo or Mr. Raeburn exclaim over our sweet, scented offering.
           On crisp October days, we drove to wooded hills and dragged dusty-smelling gunny sacks through walnut and hickory trees, gathering nuts. We laid our spoils on the cement ledge in the basement until the husks dried. On winter evenings, he took a hammer and smacked the shells until they shattered so we three could feast  on the tart-sweet nutmeat.  
           Once we worked, he and I, all morning to rake leaves into a pile in the driveway. “Now don’t you dare jump in those leaves,” he warned. Of course I flung myself into the stack, and he stood there laughing with me as I brushed autumn from my hair and clothes. Then we did it again and again, until I was exhausted.
          At dusk I crouched beside him as he struck a match and touched it to the leaves. Tiny flames crackled, and white smoke curled through the night. I pranced around the bonfire, bathed in smoke that stung my eyes, until Mom handed me a marshmallow and a stick that had been whittled to a point. Daddy made sure the marshmallow was centered securely; then he guided my stick to the embers, where the marshmallow would toast golden. I was too eager and invariably set mine afire over leaping flames. The sugar ignited and crusted the candy with charcoal. I blew out the flaming candy, then ate off the crust and did it all over again.  Half a century later, the taste of sweet ashes lingers at the back of my throat.
            Christmas 1952, Daddy showed me that I don’t need to start in safe mode.  Santa brought me single-bladed ice skates instead of a beginner’s double-edged pair, and right after breakfast, we drove to Greenwood Park, where other Christmas skaters swooped across the thick pond ice.  He laced my skates onto my feet and walked beside me, holding me up, as I wobbled around the edges of the pond.  After one circuit, he let go. I stumbled about the ice, ankles bowed and aching, listening to his encouraging words.  When we got home, he grinned and hugged me as he told Mom, “She never fell once.”
            I knew the alphabet by the time I was three, and I learned to read before I started kindergarten. Daddy would hold me on his lap in the evenings and read book after book aloud in the days before prime time and substitute parenting. He showed me words that made new words when you turned them around: But became tub, reward became drawer.  On Sunday mornings we lay together on the living room floor, reading the funnies: Rex Morgan, MD; Mary Worth; Li’l Abner; Pogo. In the afternoon he cuddled me on his lap and pointed to places in the atlas, showing me where he’d been: Louisiana, Iowa (where we lived), Montana (where I was born), and the South Pacific, where he fought during World War II.  By the time I was six, I didn’t need the map to find the capital of Iowa or any other state; Daddy would name a state and I would proudly reel off the capital. I adored Daddy and learned in order to please him, but in the process I came to love learning for its own sake.
            He never rushed. Each morning I’d walk him to the bus stop at Fourth and Vine. Sometimes a lumbering bus pulled up while we were still half a block away, and I’d tug at his hand, urging him to hurry, but he only smiled and walked steadily on.  I didn’t know that a five-yard sprint could stop his heart, weakened by a childhood bout of rheumatic fever and further injured by a tour of duty in the South Pacific, including Guadalcanal. 
          Daddy also taught me lessons he never intended.  I caught my first fish on the same pond where he taught me to ice skate.  Daddy cheered when I caught it but instead of letting me bring it home for supper, he persuaded me to give it to the Lewis boys, whose parents had more kids than cash. I was heartbroken.  I had cast my line out and watched the red and white bobber like a hawk. I’d to set the hook and reeled my fish in.  I had done everything just right. Even his pride in me couldn’t erase the lesson: Life isn’t fair.  I had to learn later from other people and other circumstances that I didn’t always need to bring home the fish and eat it to enjoy the flavor of success. 
           After Daddy died, I missed out on a lot of lessons he could and should have taught me. Like how men and women live together in harmony, since by the time I was old enough to absorb it, my mother was a widow with three girls to raise.
        She remarried four years after my father passed away, solely to give us a father.  For six months, I had a seventeen-year-old stepsister, a twelve-year-old stepbrother, and a forty-something stepfather whose only goals were to take Mom’s money and self-respect and to scream at us kids when he wasn’t out romancing other women.  One day, he yelled at me for practicing for my piano lesson and disturbing him.  I swung around on the piano bench and shouted, “We don’t like you. Why don’t you leave?”  He went out, and we never saw him again.
            I never learned how much Daddy loved me, except second-hand.  I thought it was my fault he died.  If I had been a good, loveable little girl, I thought, he would have stayed.  And since I had driven him away, I would have to be the “man of the house.” I tried to take care of Mom and my sisters, but I wasn’t a man; I was just a little girl, guilty by omission.
             He couldn’t teach me that I will never find him in the men I date. I had to learn that lesson on my own, over and over and over. I think I’ve finally gotten it.
           I forgot things he’d taught me. I thought that running around and running away would fix problems, circumstances, me. I dashed for buses, rushed after awards, raced into tomorrow, eager to see what lay ahead and to escape his abandonment.  Finally, after decades of tearing toward the unattainable tomorrow, I slowed down and began to appreciate each moment as my father did.
          Daddy’s buried in Iowa. The brass plaque that serves as a grave marker is weathered green, its words still brave: Joel V. Fiser, U.S. Marine Corps R. Iowa, February 15, 1922-August 6, 1954.  Every few years, I pass through on my way to somewhere else, and I stop to buy gladioli and iris. I park near the old elm and climb the hill. I kneel and brush the dried grass clippings away from the verdigris and pull the straggling spurge that creeps across it, too low for the mower to catch.  I pull the vase, bent and crumbling, out of its nest and fill it with water and blooms. I wipe away tears and wish him well.
             I didn’t forget all of Daddy’s lessons. I’ve passed them on to his grandson and great-grandson, who know him only as a photo on my bookcase. When Christopher was young, I taught him to shoot a .22 and cast a line, to pitch a tent and start a campfire. I bought him his first car. Already, at four, Jax has explored the lake’s edge, intent on the fish flashing through the water and has wandered woodland trails with me, eager to catch a glimpse of rabbits and squirrels. This year we will camp, and I’ll teach him to start a fire and roast marshmallows. We read and draw and talk together, when we’re not too busy building blanket forts and dancing to old jazz.
            Both of Daddy's "boys" have his look, the laughing eyes and dancer’s grace. More than that, they have his loving heart. He has been passed down from blood to blood, and his lessons endure beyond time, beyond distance, beyond death.    

                              COYOTE LESSONS

            Coyote hides hang hard on my neighbor's fence line.  In November, the gales rattle them against the barbed wire like the bones of Lakota ghost dancers who believed they, too, could outlast the interlopers. Gray-brown tufts of fur occasionally decorate my doorstep as the edges of the ancient hides disintegrate and the prairie wind sends them swirling on the wind.  These dead remnants warn living coyotes to stay away, hunt in the hills, not on his ranch.  
            My neighbor thinks he's doing us all a favor by vaporizing predators.  He sets cyanide guns and checks them daily.  He hoots and hollers if a bald eagle lies sprawled across the carcass of a coyote it has fed from because he's gotten double duty from one poison cartridge.  That the occasional lamb blunders into one doesn't bother him at all.  It's worth it, he says, to get the goddamn coyotes.
            My neighbor also cusses the mice that have invaded his grain stores.  He buys DeCon by the case.  I make sure that my dog never wanders near my neighbor's land.
            I herd the old, red Chevy truck down the rain-rutted road that divides my neighbor's land from mine.  A speck against the hillside evolves into a young four-legged hunter as I draw nearer.  The yearling coyote pounces through the grass, tossing and gulping mice, ignoring my squealing brakes as I stop on the shoulder.  I turn off the engine and reach for my .250 Savage that hangs in the window rack behind me.  The driver’s door creaks as I open it and step out.  A gust of wind grabs the door and slams it.  The coyote raises his head as the wind carries the sound to him.  He’s a little curious, but unafraid.  There’s a belly to fill; he goes back to feeding.
            I lean against the fender, steady the rifle barrel across the truck hood, and pull the stock tight to my shoulder.  I drop the bead into the notch, then drop the barrel an inch as I sight in on this stupid, damn coyote.  My finger tightens on the trigger and I breathe out, holding myself still.  I don’t want to miss this shot.
            The air thunders against my eardrums and the coyote leaps high into the air as the bullet thunks into the dirt below his belly.  He whirls and runs low to the ground, making his escape.  I jack the spent casing out of the chamber and another shell slides home.  I drop the gun and watch the coyote as he disappears over a slight rise, and I hope, I pray to every pagan god, that that goddamn coyote has learned the danger of stopped trucks and rifle muzzles.  I hope he never gets caught.

 

                        THE PRICE OF SELF-ESTEEM

Professor Jean Twenge, of San Diego State University, has discovered that college kids are more narcissistic than they were in 1982. Could it have anything to do with the fact that the 1980s was the decade of stroking kids’ egos, never letting them fail, praising them for the smallest of tasks? Could we have praised our children right out of close connections to others, even to regarding society as something meant only for their gratification?

 I began teaching elementary and middle school in the early ‘80s, and as the curriculum broadened to include “Project Charlie” and other activities aimed at boosting self-esteem, I noticed that students became obsessed with rewards. My fifth graders and I spent an hour a week, circled on the floor, tossing a wooden polygon with different emotions printed on each face into the center. Each student got a toss and had to tell about a time when he/she felt the emotion that came up. Then we were all supposed to cheer/console/congratulate as appropriate.

Thousands of trees and photocopiers died so that we could hand out endless worksheets to be filled in, colored, and covered with stickers. Most of them ended up in File Thirteen.

I handed back a paper to one of my average students and the first thing he looked for was a sticker. When he didn’t see one, he threw the paper in the trash. The B+ at the top of the paper meant less than nothing to him. He looked me in the eye and stated, “If I’m not going to get a sticker, I’m not going to work.” And he didn’t. The worst part is that his parents sided with him.

Rewards in the ‘80s became extrinsic; doing something for personal satisfaction became passé. If kids didn’t get a sticker, a “Good job!”, a pizza party on Friday because they hadn’t thrown anyone out the window all week, they felt no sense of satisfaction. They weren’t capable of saying, “Wow! I studied my spelling words all week and I got a 95! Good for me!” Someone else had to hand out the praise.

I said then and I say now that self-esteem doesn’t come from a pat on the head. It comes from doing something deemed difficult and overcoming the difficulty. Athletes know this well. No one ever pinned an opponent to the mat or kicked a winning field goal by waiting for someone to tell him how great he is. He practiced, sweated, swore, wanted to give up. But he didn’t. He kept on.

It comes from surviving harsh circumstances. The strongest people, the best leaders, take pride in overcoming poverty, prejudice, and abuse. Would Abe Lincoln have survived the political process if he’d come from a wealthy background? If he hadn’t failed at so many things before being elected? Would Maya Angelou have touched so many hearts with her writing if she hadn’t gone to the depths of pain and come back healed?

It comes from doing a job well. Doctors don’t last long if they do a poor job of caring for their patients. Mechanics find themselves out of work if the cars they repair break down the minute they’re out of the shop. Poor waitresses watch enviously while their competent colleagues count tips at shift’s end.

It comes from making yourself useful. Service, not self-serving external prizes, leads to self-esteem. The heart lifts when you help an old man boost his package onto the postal counter; when you shovel a neighbor’s walk after an unexpected snow; when you let a person with one item go ahead of you in the checkout line.

It comes from taking responsibility for your life. If you’re trapped in victim mode, you’ll never think well of yourself. “I have a lousy boss, but I have to stay in this stinking job.” “I could have done it if (fill in a name, any name) had just given me a little more time/help/money/sympathy.” “It’s not my fault the transmission fell out. The boss should have given me stronger bolts.” And so on and so on and so on.

Bottom line: You’re the only one who can give yourself a boost. You may need some help from counselors, health care providers, or other support people, but you have to do the work. As for those ego-centered college kids, in about 15 years, they’ll be wondering how their wonderful selves got to be so lonely.

•                                      CHILD
   
  
  Child --
  Cloistered close in
  Cornfield and creek,
  Confined in Midwest green
  And Midwest minds.
  
  Child --
  Of sandstone buttes and purple mesas,
  Dry and desert, creosote-breathing,
  Distant-seeing;
  Ancient winds stir in your soul.
  
  It’s a crime to raise a
  New Mexico child
  In Iowa.

         SAY WHAT YOU MEAN OR DON’T SAY ANYTHING AT ALL

Crest toothpaste spends millions, if not billions, on advertising, and they pay big bucks to ad agencies, script writers, and others who produce their television commercials. So with all this expenditure, why can’t they hire writers who say what they mean? Case in point: A knowledgeable black man stands in front of a white screen, telling us that “ordinary” toothpastes protect only a few items on a checklist of dental hygiene, but Crest protects them all.

Now I have to wonder, why does Crest want to protect gingivitis, cavities, plaque, gum disease and other baddies? And what does it protect them from? If I were choosing a toothpaste, I’d choose one that protects my teeth against these problems, not one that protects the problem, as the pitchman states.

Crest isn’t the only victim of semi-literate writers. Even the Associated Press screws up, as in the recent story on the flooding in Jakarta, Indonesia. According to the story, residents scrambled onto rooftops to await rescue from soldiers and emergency workers rafting in to – what? The way the sentence is written, it implies that the soldiers and emergency workers are attacking the residents; therefore, the inhabitants must be rescued from them. Could it be that the people are awaiting rescue by the soldiers and others? The reader certainly can’t tell from the way it’s written.

Even small presses aren’t immune from idiocy. The calendar in the local Free Press announces that every Sunday you can meet to pray for the meth epidemic. And what kind of prayer is effective for a drug scourge? Wouldn’t it make more sense to pray for the “victims” of the meth epidemic? Or pray for cessation of the plague of Drano and battery acid?

Caption writers on TV are some of the worst offenders when it comes to punctuation and spelling. A PBS show told antique collectors to “protect furniture against moisure.” Anybody have a clue what moisure is? Or how about the ABC news caption that identified a 13-year old? Or the CBS story about teen drivers who do “hard breaking.” Or the myriad writers who blithely write about people who are 35-years-old? Proper use of hyphens seems to have gone the way of the mastodon.

And let’s not forget apostrophe abominations. I wish I had a nickel for every sign that says Kids meal or kids shoes. To the punctuationally literate, the lack of apostrophe implies that kids (more than one) either meal or shoe something.  If the sign writer means a meal or shoes that belong to kids, s/he should write kids’ meal. And one of my very favorite rants involves house signs, usually woodburned or routed by an itinerant woodworker that tells passersby that this is The Smith’s, which is fine and well if only one person named Smith lives there. Or perhaps there’s a forge out back where someone crafts ironwork. If there’s more than one person named Smith living there, make the damned name plural! The Smiths. No apostrophe.

All the above examples could be avoided if the writers had paid attention in fourth grade. English is our language, and every person over the age of 10 should be fluent in its usage, spelling, and punctuation. Or s/he should get a job that doesn’t require her/his poor language skills to be presented publicly.

I could go on and on, but I’d have to take a double dose of Paxil, and that thought depresses me.

                       ADMITTING AND PERMITTING

            My heart knew when I was eight.  My head lagged behind for years.  I'm a writer.  I wrote my first book, a story about a sparrow's nest, when I was in third grade.  The librarian told me my hand-printed story on Big Chief tablet paper wasn't a book.  It was a story.  I didn't know the difference.  All I knew was that someone I trusted told me that my writing wasn't acceptable.  I didn't write again until high school.
            I wrote bad poetry and some not-bad poetry, and some really incredible poetry that even now years later charges my emotions and reminds me what it was like to be fifteen.  I also started a romance novel set in a castle in England with the typical English hero and American heroine.  No matter that I'd never been in a castle, or to England, or that the only hero I was conversant with was the three-years-older lifeguard to whom I'd given my heart in secret. Come to think of it, my hero looked a lot like Steve, but taller.
            In college I wrote more poetry, short stories, and started another novel.  I also got the message that one couldn't make a living from writing and that my best bet would be to get a degree in English literature.  So I did.  
            And I started journaling.  I accumulated boxes full of my life, in blank books of all sizes and colors. I married, divorced, married again.  I worked in surgery, as a telephone directory assistance operator, a heavy equipment operator, a bartender, hotel clerk, and a pipe cutter in an insulation factory.  
            The insulation plant gave me two fifteen minute breaks a day and half an hour for lunch. I used the time to write.  I started "Silverton Summer," a romance set in a Colorado mining town, in a blue 6x8 spiral-bound notebook.  I wrote it for six years.  The notebook gave way to a Selectric typewriter.  I labored through summer vacations from my teaching job and sent the finished manuscript off to Avalon.  I got a contract back.  I was a published writer!
            I didn't quit my day job, though.  In my mind, I was still a teacher who wrote on the side.  When my then-husband introduced me as his wife, the writer, I laughed in embarrassment.  But I started writing a romantic suspense novel, set on a high country ranch in Colorado.  Eleven years later, Avalon bought it, too. 
            During my time as a teacher, I also wrote for newspapers and magazines and was published and paid, albeit minimally.  I was writing.  I was paid.  I was still a teacher who wrote on the side.  
            Midlife revelation took me away from my marriage to a strange town, a new teaching position, and minor fame as a published author.  After a year in Naturita, I moved to California, to the Bay Area.   Now I had no job, no house, nothing to keep me from writing.  My sister gave me a bed and support and I waited tables for walking-around money.  I wrote.  I sent queries.  I got magazine assignments.  I sold short stories.  I took a screenwriting workshop.  Now I was writing.  I was no longer a teacher writing in my spare time.
            Instead of dreading sitting down at the computer, I looked forward to spending several hours a day, working on law articles, movies, and a collection of short stories.  When people asked me what I did for a living, I replied, "I'm a writer."  Now Mill Valley has more writers per capita than any place on earth.  Every other person you meet is a writer of some kind.  
            Perhaps it was the Marin County energy, the New Age mentality, the freedom to write, or a combination of all three, but my writing prospered.  I produced two screenplays, revised my suspense novel (not a romance) for the seventh time and kept writing.
            The remote reaches of Colorado had captured my heart, though, and I moved back to the ranch.  Substitute teaching gave me the freedom to write and the minimal income needed to exist here.  And I revised the suspense novel for the eighth time.  I moved to a larger town and became involved with a critique group. Two years later, they had read the book, made suggestions, and encouraged me tremendously. I made corrections and sent it off. It’s too soon to hear, but I have hopes.
            Now I have no problem telling people I'm a writer, since that’s what – and who – I am.  As soon as I admitted that to myself and others, I became a writer.  My heart sings when I create word images.  My head will explode if I don't keep the ideas flowing out, and who wants to clean up that mess? So I write, write, and write some more. Life is good when you follow your bliss.

             

                                LAST STOP

honky-tonk chords
jump on the air
blue smoke dances
to a hard hard beat
like hard dark bodies
and silk made of blood.

and the words curve down
the honky-tonk sound
sliding and slipping
like a rollercoaster trumpet
riding a riff
on the last-stop song.