Original prose and stream of consciousness prose from yours truly.
What You Will
 The Door
 Virtual Museum
 Acknowledgements
 Wag Shoppe Central
Murphy's Fire
Timeful Poetry
 Prison Theme
 Invert Theme
 Love Theme
 Short Stories
 Crucial Phi
Prose
 Tall Tales
 Visual Art
Edification Suggestions
 Tight Drinks
 Tight Film
 Tight Links
 Tight Literature
 Tight Music
|
Prose
There is an uncertain something about the murmur of the old oaks at night. As their branches rustle, a soothing, blackblue calm falls around me in silken veils, cold at first touch, and then wrapping warmth like a hearth wood fire under my big black coat. Down the red brick lane that is my favorite to walk, that brisk, brazen wind of autumn carries itself unseen through the arching oaks, initially soft and pregnant, then demonstrative and gusting, whistling in my ears and narrowing my eyes. On the coattails of the wind cartwheel fallen leaves, stirring up dry forest smells in hushed scurry scratches. On a still evening there is a consoling silence amongst the moondrenched headstones. A mossy, wet must hangs low to the dew-slicked ground. The blenched monuments stand ambient, still fathers and grandfathers to me in my special garden, in my Graveyard Gray on a Graveyard Day.
|
My grandma Dean was talking at me, not to me, or with me. She has a tendency to "run her monologue" as she puts it. I had never met my great grandmother and great grandfather. I had asked her about them about two hours ago. Grandma was sitting cross-legged on a bar stool in her kitchen. The stool stood tall with a short back to it. She calls it Archie Bunker's seat and reminds me that it is reserved for Archie when I absent-mindedly sit on it.
She is still presenting her ad lib sililoquy about her father's carnival, her mother's excommunication, and how much I remind her of her brother Frank. Her non-filter cigarettes lay on the counter, the pack half empty, and her small book of matches placed neatly on top. A lit cigarette was in her hand. She has smoked non-filter Chesterfield cigarettes since she started teaching. That was about the same time she started drinking, too. They had told her, no drinking, smoking, or dancing. The very night she signed her contract, she bought a pack of smokes, a fifth of gin, and spent the longest night ever spent in Iowa. She said that she was drunker than seven hundred dollars. I was going to ask how drunk seven hundred dollars actually was, but the player played on.
She told me of protestants and "catlickers", Sunday morning brawls, a little girl running dice cages, fast talk, travel, the value of a claw hammer in the bedstand, prohibition, alcohol, drunken uncle Frank at church, laughter, parties, flirting world War II airmen, and the value of leaving the claw hammer in the bedstand. She ends with a smile and a wink. I loved how her eye sparkled so before she winked. She reaches over to the ashtray and snuffs out the cigarette.
Grandma doesn't smoke or drink, anymore. In the past year, she has quickly developed osteoporosis, caught legionaires disease, and suffered near respiratory failure. She is almost eighty and outlived Frank and his liver by forty years. My grandma always had nightmares of a storm and the sound of workmen's sledge hammers coming down hard on metal stakes. They were nailing down the carnival rides so the storm wouldn't blow them over.
|
~Complaint Department~
© all rights reserved
Joshua Schenck 1998
|
