Category Archives: fiction

Telephone Call

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Um, so you are pregnant?

Yes.

We are worried about you-about the baby.

Why?

Well, no job, no church, your boyfriend does not want to marry you?
We need money!!! Mom should get dad to send money. They are so judgmental. If they wanted to help they would send us money.

Mom is worried you will do something stupid…to the baby.

What?!

You know, like putting your cat in the fridge?

The cat is fine. The cat wanted to be in the refrigerator.

Promise me you will not put the baby in the fridge. Or the washing machine or dryer. No appliances. babies do not belong in appliances.

Hi, I am the Narrator…

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Hi, I am the narrator. Elea was annoyed with me for napping on the clock so she is giving me extra assignments. Typical.

She wants me to discuss nature versus nurture.. Claims the subject is too close to home for her. Says I am the professional and she is the amateur so, yeah, show her how it’s done…

Team Nature argues for the biological expediency of our genetic code. Nature says, basically we are all just a sequence of predetermined impulses and urges and we are what we are–Darwinian productions, all water and code.

Team Nurture says, no! Humans are more than a sum of our chemical parts. Love matters. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, all that…

Why the flippy intro?

Well, H and C have rather wantonly stirred their genetic material in the petri dish of human determinism and Elea says I have to give you–sparse and gentle readers, a crash course on the odds.

Or whatever…

The Narrator Naps

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Hey. Wake up. You know you came highly recommended and you need to do your job (bozo).

N (sleepily). Huh? Did you just call me Bozo?!

Yes. I did (albeit sotto voce). You have decent hearing.

N. Light sleeper.

Whatever, you are on the clock sista. Where did those two knuckleheads go?

Last I saw them, they were headed for Miss Havisham’s.

Miss Havisham’s? I did not write a character named Havisham. That was Dickens. You know, Great Expectations?

N. yeah, I know. That is my nickname for the extenuated older female relative that they are traveling to scam cash from.

Um, how exactly?

Well a basic combo–Honey Bunch will shop her impending delivery of a child, Cowboy will back her up with some well-played humility and yes ma’ams and both will suggest that if Miss H can’t spare the ducats they could sleep on the futon.

She has a futon?

Oh, yeah, it is buried under 20 years of laundry and a bag of high-end dog food.

How can you sleep through all of that trudging/scheming/prevaricating?

N shrugs. I am a professional. Seen it all.

The Narrator Ruminates

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There is nothing more monotonous than watching someone think. Well. One more thing–reading about a person thinking.

As in–the narrator thought. She chewed on her dilemma. She explored scenarios in her head. She plotted, schemed, planned. Ultimately she just sat and thought, just like The Thinker only more clothes, less abs.

She thought about maternity wards. They have a hushed holiness about them. She thought about the nurses who kept such careful watch over the wee babes. Everything feels safe in a maternity ward, except perhaps for mom. Mom can be stressed. Heck, mom can even fear for her life, her child’s life.

As a professionally trained, bonded, and insured narrator she had performed the necessary internships in nursing homes, elementary schools, courts of law and fast food joints, but it was her elective stint in OB that had stuck in her craw.

The babies are so perfect, so new. It is as though their nurses are their angels–washing, swaddling, protecting their little patients. In a world of chaos and violence that frequently spills out over the heads of children, most were given a day, maybe two of safety.

After that all bets were off…

Incidentally it is Christmas

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Honey is big with child and the child in question belongs to her baby daddy whom she calls “hubby” even though their common law arrangement would generally favor boyfriend over husband.

The narrator refers to him as “Cowboy” although he is more of a car or truck boy, no cows in sight.

It is winter which means that Hubby is wearing jeans with his wifebeater T-shirt and Honey is wearing a faux fur hunting cap, flaps pulled down.

They are traipsing through snow and the beagle puppy in Cowboy’s arms whimpers and squirms in the cold.

They have run out of gas and it is dusk. Cowboy is scanning the darker corners of a parking lot for an early model car with easy gas tank entry. They need to “borrow” a couple of gallons to get home.

The fading light, the young impoverished couple trudging toward shelter evoke the memories of a sacred crèche until one is able to discern the nature of their quest and the utter absence of either a donkey or a sacred city.

No. This is a different. One cannot see Joseph in a muscle T siphoning gas from a beat up chevy cavalier.

Petty larceny on the road to Bethlehem? Only if it is Pennsylvania.

Honey B and the narrator

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Honey likes memes with cats, puppies, and rude phrases which stretch the patience of the narrator, who generally perches over her shoulder quietly tsk-ing.

The narrator is concerned about the way caustic emotion seems to erode Honey’s traction on life and grammar.

Honey writes about her predicament:

Tore up? Wat ya mean tore up? I din tore nuthin’!!!!
It was you that tore stuff you bleeping bleep.
Your the one who tares stuff!

Honey, your spelling and grammar are abysmal, chastens the narrator.

Honey looks dumbstruck, not because she doesn’t want to tear into the narrator but because for some reason she can’t .

Weird.

She blinks at the narrator. Why can’t I cuss you out? She asks glumly.

Well, it is my magic powers of narration. A gift from the author, who, incidentally finds your mad swings at communication tragi-comic. Would it kill you to write “you’re for you are?”

Author vs narrator

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Everyone knows an
author is the person or being who writes the book.

A narrator tells the story.

An author exerts considerable control in a story unless…

Unless her creations rebel. Or his.

If that happens all heck can break loose. And by heck I mean hell and by hell I mean it. Burning fire and all.

Narrator is cush. Cush as in cushion. Friendly. Not friendly, third, second, first person. Narrator doesn’t care about perspective. Narrator just says real quiet-like, let’s move this along.

Insubstantial as smoke

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After Herculean attempts at allo-lactation, she gives up. Her mermaid ancestors have failed her. In the intervening days she has prevailed upon a highly skeptical she-goat to abide with her and the child to act as a wet nurse.

Gwendolyn the goat: lifesaver.

The failure of the experiment fills the dragoness with a nameless grief. It is irrational and contradictory to expect dragons to parent much less nurse, but this failure cuts her deeply. She is keenly aware of her scales, her reptilian heft, so much about her unmotherly.

She sits in the mouth of her cave and rakes her long talons into her scaly hide in a mindless show of hopelessness.

What are you doing?

Gwendolyn demands when she arrives to find the baby hungry and his mother a crumpled figure of despair.

The dragon chuffs. Turning away to hide her own blood and the gashes she has made in her skin.

Gwendolyn stomps her feet. You must get ahold of yourself! You have a baby now.

The she-goat curls up next to the hungry baby and nurses him.

Get up right now! She commands. Go clean yourself up. We have work to do.

The dragon reluctantly obeys.

What if it was Scout?

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I think it is safe to say I love Harper Lee. So much so I named a pet “Scout” and have been itching to name a kid Harper for a decade.

Atticus has seen me through some tough times.

But here’s the thing, because of my outspoken telling of our family story (adoption, RAD, abuse) I know a lot of victims of child sexual abuse.

Most are white, stable, well-educated and financially stable.

They are not Mayella Ewing.

And yet I believe the reason why 90% of these people are extremely quiet about their stories is the grim stereotype associated with Mayella.

Think about it. How would our perception of abuse victims be different if it had been Scout, Jem, or Dill who had been abused?

Would you tell your story if you knew people would think of you as a Ewing?

Would you fight any harder if it were Scout?

And, for a diehard TKM fan this is hard; Mayella Ewing deserved better. From her wretched father of course, but how about everyone else in Maycomb? Was there no one who could have helped her?

More than 50 years later I will say it–
No
At least very, very few…