I Feel Fine

There is a single fly darting around my house landing in peculiar places: the ivy, the entryway rug, the photo wall.

As I was stalking it, swatter in hand, trying find the perfect moment to strike, I swear I heard my dead mother whisper in my ear, "If a fly can get in here undetected, COVID-19 won't have any problem slipping in."

I guess they don't have the six feet rule on the astral plane.

That's Her.

Whoa! It's been nine days since I posted here!
That seems impossible, since I have been reading and writing like crazy.
I've been saving all my fiction for my creative writing class this semester.  I feel as if I'm depriving my Blogger friends of  the terrifically horrific "October Specials" I've scrawled in my notebooks, but it is for a good cause, I assure you. ("Good Cause" amounts to me getting an 'A' in writing class, and that's all there is to that.)

You may or may not know that October is the month of my mom. Today is her birthday, and twenty short days from now will be her "deathday." Most of the shorts I've written lately have centered around motherhood, but none of them have been about my mother. I wrote a little bit of a shocking impromptu story in class the other night, and now my entire class probably thinks my mom was some horrible bitch who didn't love me, but that's not true. (She loved me.)

You want to know a little secret about our family? We like purple spiders. They mean love.

When my mom was alive, she would watch that TV show "Crossing Over, with John Edwards." In the intro, he explained that his dead mother would communicate her love for him with white birds. My mom decided our talisman would be purple spiders. (This decision had something to do with her sister and thrift store shopping, but that is another story.) So now, every time I see a purple spider, I think of my mom. (Did she know ahead of time that she would die on Halloween--a time of the year when purple spiders seem to be everywhere?)

I remember when she was in the hospital. Toward the end I was spending all my spare time camped out in her room. She tried to stay awake, but she slept most of the time. For some reason, I felt like I needed to be there for every waking moment. I guess I was trying to hold on to her as much as possible. I knew I'd have to let her go eventually, but I was going to soak up every tidbit of time I could get with her. She was dying, there was no denying that, but I'd be damned if I was going to sit back and wait for a phone call from some disembodied voice of some indifferent doctor. I needed to be there with her.

One day, I went down to the gift shop for a little while to stretch my legs and take in some different scenery. They had a string of the large, scary-looking purple spiders on the clearance rack. I snatched them and took them up to her room. Carefully, while she was sleeping, I arranged them so it seemed the spiders were crawling across her feet.

The nurse accused me of wanting to kill her with a heart attack, but my mom smiled when she opened her eyes and saw them.

"So you like spiders?" the nurse asked, dryly.

"I like purple ones," my mom said with a smile and then slipped back into sleep.

In the months after her passing, we would actively search for the purple spiders. We'd see them, and one of us would shout it out, as if we'd come across some rare artifact never seen before by human eyes. The fact is, there are more of them around than I realized. They're on greeting cards and in cartoons and on posters. For a while, it seemed we couldn't get away from them. Even our friends started bringing them to us in the form of jewelry and hair clips and decorative knick-knacks and what-nots. There was a huge, fuzzy, bendable spider perched in the back dash of my car for about a year. (His name was Hector, and I have no idea where he went. I only know that he's gone.)

Nowadays, we're not so quick to scoop up the spiders when we see them. We just smile to ourselves and move on with life, knowing that my mom is out there, somewhere, still loving us. I like to think it's the completely unexpected sightings that are truly messages from her. The ones that throw me off a little, you know? Like that purple car I saw on Georgia Street, the one called a Spyder.

That's my mom. That's love.

Dream: Come See Me

My mother's call left me worried. "Come see me," she'd pleaded. "I miss you." I scribbled down the new address and checked the map. She was fourteen hours away.

Funny, how we do that- measure trips in hours instead of distance, as if we plan to drive straight through, dismissing the sights. 

That's how my father always did it. The shortest distance between two points, and all that nonsense. He was pissed with me when I was twelve years old. I'd pointed out to him that, factoring in the curvature of the earth and the fact that road builders rarely construct straight paths between cities, the shortest distance between two points might actually be an arc. 

He told me to shutthehellup and let him do the driving. 

Maybe that's why my mother divorced him. 

Or maybe not. She told me once that she was tired of playing Caroline to his Charles. I was astonished that she could ever say such a thing, but it rang true. My father had always pictured himself building a cabin, praising God and living off the land. 

My mom, on the other hand, was more of a Hot Lips Houlihand. I never saw her any other way.

She's been calling out to  me for several nights in a row. Sometimes she's still with my father. Sometimes it's my Poppy or James. Sometimes it's a new man altogether. Never mind that she passed away four and a half years ago. That issue never seems to come up when I see her in my dreams. 

I wonder what she's up to that she should need to call out to me so often. It doesn't matter. I can never reach her. There's always a flood or a fire or maybe the roads wear away into impassable rivers of mud and sludge. I get bogged down in the muck. No matter what vehicle I take, car, boat, bicycle, Radio Flyer, I can't seem to remember until I wake up that I know how to fly...

Age-Appropriate Answers

Let me tell you a true story, except for the names; I'm changing those to suit my fancy and to protect the ignorant...er...I mean innocent.

I was twenty years old when I was pregnant with my third child. (go ahead. judge me. I deserve it. I was too young to have even one, let alone three children. later on, when I was twenty-two, I had a fourth child. stupid. stupid. stupid.)
All of my children have the same freeloader for a father (I like to call him Earl). I'm not proud of this fact. I'm just throwing that in because it's sort of crucial to the story I'm telling.

When I was about seven months along with my third child, I was sticking all the way out to here, so there wasn't much hiding it from any of my "tsk tsk"ing neighbors or my "Oh Jeez, again?" coworkers, because pretty much anybody who could see me knew that I was pregnant.

My three young foster brothers, for instance, were aware that I was about to spew forth yet another stinkmonster into the world. Our family easily populates half the Earth. We are amazing breeders. We found something we really know how to do and we just kept on doing it. Some of us are still doing it. We are relentless.

Anyway, one afternoon, when I was preggers with the third, I was at my mom's house, keeping an eye on my three young foster brothers who were 11, 10 and 9 years old at the time. (actually, I should tell you that these foster brothers are actually my biological cousins and that they are natural brothers to one another having two half-siblings on their mother's side, which goes to support my theory about populating half the world.)

Back to the story- I was watching the fosters and taking advantage of the laundry facilities all at the same time. I was in the laundry room, just off the dining room and the oldest boy, uh, Jethro, was sitting at the table having a snack and watching me fold clothes. My mom was at work and expected me to run the household according to her strict design until her return later that evening. Basically, I was to keep the boys from murdering one another or trashing the house. I had a lot of confidence in myself that I could do this.

My two oldest were babies at the time, and so they were having an afternoon nap. The other two fosters, Jasper and Judah were playing in their room. I could hear them "fighting" with swords, but there didn't seem to be any actual bloodshed, so all was well. I continued to fold clothes.

Jethro eyeballed me and my humongous belly as I pulled laundry out of the dryer.

"How'd that baby get in there?" he asked, out of the blue. It threw me just for a moment, but this was not an uncommon question, and I had read all the parenting books. I knew that I was supposed to give age-appropriate answers and never divulge more information than the child actually asks. Short simple answers always worked best. Or at least they had in the past.

"Well, moms and dads make the baby and it grows inside the mom until it's born," I answered. He was eleven. Most eleven-year-olds know this. I felt safe giving this answer.

"But how did it get in there?" he asked again. I gave him the once over and checked the clock on the wall. It was nowhere near time for my mom to come home.

I snapped a towel and folded it twice. "Well, the dad puts the baby in there." I turned away from him toward the washer, as if to signal that the conversation was over. But it wasn't.

"But how does he do it? Where does he put it in?"

My shoulders slumped in defeat as I sighed heavily into the empty well of the washer. I was remembering all the way back to when I was eleven and thinking why doesn't he know this? By the time I was eleven, I knew where babies came from. I had seen dogs and cats and cows and hogs and even chickens going after it. I had witnessed kittens and puppies being born. I had even watched out the kitchen window when the vet came to help our Shetland pony give birth. I knew about the adulterous birds and those fickle bees.

"Well, Jethro, the dad and the mom have to like each other a whole lot, and when they get together to show how much they like each other, they make a baby."

He thought about that for a while, chewing on his snack with great intensity. When he took a second bite, I thought I was in the clear. Yippee.

But no.

"I need to know how that happens," he demanded, as if I'm holding out on him, and this forbidden knowledge will somehow help him become supreme ruler of all things Jethro. "You need to tell me where he puts the baby. How does it get in there?" He forced those last two words out so hard, I thought his teeth would pop out.

I looked at my brother, gnawed on my lip as I thought about it for a second, and then just blurted it out, as if it would be more painless if I just got it out in the open in one swift movement. Like ripping off a bandaid, right? After all the kid was ELEVEN! He should have already known this!

"Jethro, you have to have sex to make a baby." There. I'd said it. There was no taking it back.

You may have realized by now that I am not exactly a good decision maker. It doesn't matter how thoroughly or how briefly I think a thing through, I will inevitably arrive at the completely wrong decision, no matter what. As always, I had made the wrong decision in telling my young brother how it is that babies are made.

His eyes...so big with disbelief...and the look on his face as he sorted it out in his head...ugh. He jumped up from his chair, straight as a board with the shock, the horror of this knowledge. My knees gave out for a second when I realized there was no fixing this. What was done was done. Can't take it back.

Jethro shot around the corner to the bedroom where his brothers, his younger brothers were playing and I heard a muffled, desperate purging of words spill from Jethro's mouth and into Jasper and Judah's ears. A brief moment of silence overtook the house. I imagined this was the moment of clarity that some people have when everything comes together to form a perfect picture in their minds. I didn't want to think what my little brothers were picturing just then. In unison, all three boys began to moan with denial. They made their way back into the kitchen to confront me about my carnal sins.

Tragically, there was no bottomless pit handy into which I could throw myself.

"Is it true? Is it true?" Jasper asked, desperate for me to deny these accusations. "Do you have to have sex to make a baby?"

There I stood before the judge and jury made up of my three poor, sheltered brothers who didn't even know enough of the world to understand about something as simple and primal as sex. In the back of my mind, I was trying to form a defense for my mother for when she came home and realized I'd corrupted her precious children for life. If I could word it just right, I was pretty sure I could turn it around and make it seem like her fault.

"Yes, you have to have sex to make a baby," I told the boys. No sense in changing the story now. The damage was done. Their eyes widened and the "Nu-uh"s and the "No WAY"s overpowered the room. I could barely hear myself whimper with self-loathing. Judah's moment of clarity arrived just then. I could almost see the thoughts form in his head.

"That means you had sex!" he yelled, pointing his finger right at my swollen tummy! I am sure I turned bright red.

"EEEEWWWW!" Jethro moaned, "with EARL!!!"

"THREE TIMES!" Jasper realized, holding his first three fingers up to make sure that everybody in the room knew me for the shameful fornicator I was.

"Yup," I admitted and turned back to the laundry. I didn't want to talk about it further, but you can bet I heard about it later from my mom.

I don't know why she was so upset. Nobody murdered anybody else, and the house looked really nice when she got home.

Dream: Out There

Blind.

That's what I was, and I was thankful that I'd practiced being blind as a child...just in case.
But this, this was not the same as toe-ing my way across my safe bedroom, bumping into soft, upholstered furniture, giggling at my own awkwardness.

I crawled sightlessly across a strange, cold, cement floor on my stomach. The coppery, pungent smell of thick blood filled my nostrils, and I realized that the blood was mine. There was little pain at this point. I'm not sure if that's because I wasn't hurt as badly as I made myself out to be, or because my subconscious was repressing the pain in an effort to keep me sane enough to escape this increasingly perilous situation.

Somebody had done something bad to me, and now that it was over and the Bad One had gone away, it was time to find my way back home. Blindly.

My fingertips traced the cracks in the floor. I pushed into them, using them for leverage to pull my weak and damaged body along. The slipperiness of the warm blood helped me to slide myself more hastily.

I had no idea where the exit was. A welcoming waft of air blew past me. I turned my face into it and smelled the tantalizing aroma of freshly baked blueberry muffins.

Mom. 


Home.


Safety.

I followed. I grunted as I scooted, scaring myself by not crying. Surely I should be crying. How inhuman could I be that I didn't think this was worth a few sobs?

Fuck it, I thought. I'll cry later when I'm safe at home with my mom and a basket full of muffins.

But that couldn't happen either. Mom was already gone. Much more gone than I was at that point, and I almost cried at the memory of that, but stifled it when I remembered that I was wasting time thinking about this nonsense. I should have been concentrating on getting the hell out of there.

A wall. I bumped into it and felt along the bottom, struggling to reach a doorway. It seemed to take a very long time, but the closer I came, the louder the low hum of an air conditioner became. I don't know why I didn't notice that before. I could have used it as a guide.

I think I was in a garage. I began to notice the stench of my father, like motor oil and cigarettes swirling in my head. This made sense to me, because he had been a mechanic all the years I lived with him growing up. Nowadays, he's a truck driver, and I have no idea what he smells like.

Irrelevant!


The passageway was there. I felt along the bottom where the door meets the threshold, and I pulled myself up by grabbing the knob and hoisting my body against the wall. I was heavier and weaker than I had ever been. I wasn't sure if I would be able to walk after this. Just my luck to be blind and crippled in one little outing. This is why I should never have left the house. These are the kinds of things that happen out there.

The light spilled over me like pink, silk ribbons.

Mom.


Home.


Safety.