The “Staff Spotlight” is a section where members of the staff can share anything they want with our lovely and supportive audience! On top of being both a Co-founder and Co-artistic Director of Collaborative Stages, Brian is a writer. Below is one of Brian’s stories. I hope you all enjoy it!
‘Til we meet again,
Simmon
Parley in Purgatory
As I pushed my husband’s wheelchair over the cliff I realized I might have made a mistake. Fortunately, it was too late. I watched as his body floundered about, descending into the rocky depths of Haystack Hill, never to return. I found his tumble toward demise obnoxiously typical: After sliding out of the wheelchair, which toppled along the stony cliff wall, he smashed his face against a large indentation in the cliff’s surface. The blow to the face propelled his then lifeless form away from the precipice, sending him downward at almost three times his initial speed. He reached the bottom mere seconds before his mangled wheelchair, which landed on top of him with a faint crunch.
I had already returned to my teal-colored ’94 Honda Civic when I remembered that I had forgotten to remove his wallet pre-push. What a careless move on my part; he must have at least had a twenty. At least. My execution had been sloppy, but at that moment I did not care. I could not care. It was done. He was done. I could not be concerned with having made any mistakes.
After a brief dinner at the Tastee Freeze off Interstate 87, I picked up some dry cleaning and drove home. The ride felt calm compared to the previous trip with Patrick gagged in the back seat, threatening to vomit the little pink pills I had forced him to take to perhaps dull the pain before we left home. Actually, there wasn’t that much force involved. After the accident he was essentially worthless from the neck down. Swallowing was about the only thing he could do on his own. And besides, it didn’t matter if he took the pills in the first place or threw them up in the backseat of the car, they were for his own good, and I was going to do what I set out to do whether he ingested them or not. He wasn’t going to stop me. What was he going to do, run?
I parked the car across the street from my once cheery domicile at 87 Reddy Lane because the moving men would need the driveway in the morning. I had taken the prior liberty of securing a quaint, one-bedroom apartment for myself thousands of miles away in the 29 Palms area; I knew I would need to leave the meddlesome town of Crescent Hollow as quickly as possible after I disposed of the ailing bastard. I had purged our belongings of everything I knew would remind me of Patrick: the raggedy upright piano he salvaged from a warehouse fire when he was sixteen; two mahogany bedroom suites his parents gave us for our first anniversary that I never liked; massive collections of postage stamps, baseball cards, bottle caps, postcards, buttons, and twenty-seven bottles of 1987 Marilyn Merlot. His wardrobe I donated to a church bazaar. We had filled our attic with things that neither he nor I had thought about in the ten years since they were stowed away in the dark, dry, and dingy space between our lives inside the house and the greater world beyond. I figured I’d leave those things behind for the new owners to sift through. I added my freshly dry-cleaned black parka to my previously packed possessions and went to bed.
That night, I dreamed I was sitting on a raft floating down a river dark as night. I was surrounded by fire. Large, sweltering flames of sapphire and gold doused the horizon in every visible direction, though I felt no heat. In fact, I was quite cold, shivering even. I had no real understanding of where I was or where I was going, yet I felt no fear. At that moment I felt calm, relaxed, even normal. As I drifted, shivering, I finally saw a sign float by on a buoy. The sign read: “Meet us ahead.” Meet whom, I thought to myself? From off in the distance, I could barely make out a tiny, faint yellow light. As I got closer I saw that the light came from another raft, much like mine, only more luxurious. Patrick was aboard, only it wasn’t Patrick, it was someone else who looked a lot like Patrick. It was a more god-like form of Patrick. It was half-god who looked a lot like Patrick. He waved to me as his raft approached mine. I returned the gesture and he smiled.
“Elizabeth, this is all for you,” he said, acknowledging our conflagratory surroundings.
“What is?” I replied.
“The fire. I’m giving you fire, Elizabeth. To do with as you wish.”
“Why?” I asked.
He grinned. His smile reached past his cheeks, lifting his face upward. He appeared to offer me his hand, though when I moved to accept he closed his fist tight. He then relaxed his grip and opened his hand again revealing a shabby, wooden square box with an ornate letter P carved just to the right of the middle. He thrust the box towards me, practically throwing it into my arms.
“What is it?” I asked, startled at his slight of hand.
He didn’t respond, and this time he didn’t smile either. His face went somber, blank. His eyes traveled downward, though his face still seemed to stare at me. I followed his eyes, his gaze, to his feet. He was chained to the raft.
“What is that?” I said, pointing to the lock. “What is it for?”
His eyes met mine again and though he said no words I felt a sense that one day I would understand his chain, the box he offered, the fire. Moments passed before I remembered I was cold. I shivered. My raft began to drift away. As the raft picked up speed, a large eagle suddenly appeared out of the fire. With vengeful speed the creature attacked the Patrick-like man chained to the other raft, devouring his liver. There were no screams. No cries for help. No wails of pain. Patrick seemed accustomed to the torture. The only sound I could hear was the black water, sluggishly pulling my raft away.
I woke to the sound of cars splashing through rain puddles in the street. Rain had drowned the region overnight, causing several flash floods in nearby neighborhoods. That’s what the morning news anchorwoman was saying. I had fallen asleep with the TV on. The clock read 6:29 am, exactly one minute before the alarm was set to detonate in my ear. I yanked the clock’s cord from the wall before the buzzer had even a chance. The morning felt particularly dreary. Cardboard boxes emblazoned with beer, cheese, and household cleaner labels lined my bare bedroom walls, now occupied the few meager possessions I found important enough to salvage. Mostly my clothing items and a few odds and ends I’d collected and for some reason or another kept for more years than I wished to admit: a worn shoebox filled with photographs of me as a little girl, my brothers, some people I never knew; a porcelain pitcher that I had used to collect spare change; an Abraham Lincoln commemorative tin piggy bank; a Big, Bad Wolf bobble-head toothbrush holder with a magic marker permanently jammed into one of the toothbrush holes; an 8×10 painting of Ms. Blind Justice framed in wood, painted gray.
I dressed in my new lavender crocheted halter-top and a pair of khaki slacks. Patrick always hated my obsession with crochet; he said halter-tops made of yarn made me look like I had been caught in a “disgusting net of uncomfortable material.” The sight of a crocheted halter-top made him uncomfortable. I wore them often. Now that he was no longer “around”, I didn’t recognize the same satisfaction such a simple task as getting dressed in the morning had once provided me.
The movers weren’t scheduled to arrive until 9:30 am. I had boxed up the unalarming alarm clock along with my toiletries; folded up the sleeping cot I purchased after disposing of those awful beds, unplugged the television, wrapping it with the excessively long power cord; and made one last lap around the house, checking drawers and cabinets for lingering items. Then I decided to take one last early morning walk to the Farmer’s Market downtown was in order.
Downtown Crescent Hollow never looked anything like a painting to me. There was nothing picturesque about it, as travelers-through wanted to claim. Sure, it boasted tree-lined streets, copious parallel parking spaces, blue-, green-, and auburn-colored awnings outside cute little shops called Deb’s Knick-Knacks and Abbott’s Ice Creamery and Dessert Shop and Walinda’s Curl-Up and Dye. There was only one old-fashioned little Post Office that closed early on Wednesdays so the postal staff could join their families for Wednesday night church services at one of thirty-seven Christian-affiliated houses of worship. There were five banks, yet not a single fast-food chain or nationally owned supermarket. Harold’s Pizzeria was two doors down from Flyin’ Flapjacks And Fish Fry, and there was an independently-operated A&P straight out of John Updike next to a flower shop owned by a woman named Rose. Downtown consisted of a single street, Maple Avenue. The northern end eventually changed into Blueberry Commons: a posh, middle class country club community complete with swimming pool, golf course, and a tennis court. The southern end forked into two directions, one leading to a modern, condominium community mostly inhabited by retirees, the other towards the interstate. Several small neighborhoods, like my own of Handley Acres, were situated along this road.
Nothing was more than a five or ten-minute walk in Crescent Hollow, no matter how out-of-shape you were. Deborah O’Conners, the woman who ran Knick-Knacks was the one known exception. A morbidly obese woman, weighing in at about three-hundred and twenty pounds bone dry, Deborah, or “Deb” as she liked to be called, took about twenty-five minutes to get out of her driveway, yet she insisted on walking, her rump and thighs swishing back-and-forth, thundering at every step. Her husband, Mark, a musical director at the Presbyterian Church just up the street, was an effeminate six –feet-tall and, soaking wet, might have weighed a hundred- and-five. Once Deb got out of their driveway, Mark would drive along beside her in his mini-van in the event that she might pass out from exhaustion or over-heating. They had no children.
It was people like Deb and Mark who really contributed to my disappointing view of this miserable town. On the surface they were all church-going, pleasant, productive, vital human beings. The reality was that they were all fat, lazy pigs married to queeny church musicians who had sex with the mailman who was married to a racist slut. Crescent Hollow was polluted with swine, bigots, xenophobes, and adulterating whores. They were all a big bunch of flakes hidden behind pretty little storefronts and brick townhouses painted white with black shutters. Their affection for the lack of mainstream, big named corporations and the town’s abundance of wholesome, family oriented community living made my life hurt.
The Farmer’s Market, situated on an empty lot that at one time had been a furniture store, was nothing like the rest of the town. The owner of the store, a Mr. Xavier, allegedly caught his son, Herman, tinkering with the fuse box one night after the store closed. The meddling caused an explosion that destroyed the store and all of its contents. Mr. Xavier and son both survived unharmed, but Herman’s father accused him of having sabotaged the store intentionally – as revenge for not being named the recipient of the store in his Xavier’s will. Herman was incarcerated and his older brother, Sonny, became the sole heir to their father’s fortunes, a massive insurance settlement. The lot became the Farmer’s Market some time after the city cleaned up the debris. The city commissioner didn’t want the charred, empty lot to discourage or depress the townspeople. Or so the story goes.
A small, black woman named Minnie Aiken who had worked at Xavier’s Furniture, and even supposedly carried on an affair with Herman once he returned home from college, primarily oversaw the Market. She told a very different story about the fire, and she also could tell you a thing or two about almost everyone who lived in Crescent Hollow. She claimed that Mr. Xavier was ashamed of his son’s “friendliness with a black woman,” especially one so many years Herman’s senior.
“That man, Mister Xavier, as I called him, I was always polite, he had his boy Sonny, the retard… Oh I shouldn’t say retard… he was just…. Special. Slow actually. No… he was a retard. Sonny… he had Sonny mess with the fuses so that they trigger a fire. I heard them talking about it. About ‘fixing’ the fuses that is. They were saying all day that the fuses were ‘messin up’ and they needed to be a fixed. I thought nothing of it, until late that night when all the commotion about the fire had spread. I ran down the Avenue like the rest of the fools and saw the fire. And I heard Mr. Xavier, I was always polite, tell the fire chief that he caught his boy Herman ‘tinkering’ with the fuses trying to set a fire. They arrested that boy right there on the spot. He was such a good, sweet boy… he didn’t even try to put up a fight. He was shocked. Stunned by it all, I’m sure of it. But see, I knew why he was shocked, see. I heard Mr. Xavier and Sonny talkin’ about the fuses not working. If they were broke than how do they say that Herman was doin’ it on purpose to set a fire, I asked myself? It was all a big mess. But nobody would listen to me, all on account that I was apparently trying to corrupt the town by having sex with all the young, white men. Herman finally wrote me to stop trying to clear his name. It’s all a big mess, you see. I don’t even really know anymore what happened. Herman never told me nothing and the pieces just never quite fit together. All I know is that Mr. Xavier, pardon me, is a no good lying, bastard. And that boy of his too… retarded bastard that one is.”
“But…were you and Herman…intimate?” I had asked after she first told me the story some six months back.
“I’ll make no comment towards that matter,” she replied in her own fashion. And that was that. I asked her again on several occasions, but she would never disclose any information.
“I’m just a stubborn black woman surrounded by white folk. What do I know?” She said that often enough to remember it. She also told enough scandalous stories about the men and women and even some of the children in the town that you couldn’t help but want to visit her as often as possible to get the dirt on this supposedly unsoiled town. That was why I ventured down to the Farmer’s Market on the old furniture store lot. Minnie felt the same about most things as I did, only she was less miserable. She knew my whole life story, practically every pathetic detail. She was a dear, sweet woman. But what I really loved was her juicy gossip that confirmed every awful notion I had about Crescent Hollow and its spurious inhabitants.
The early morning downpours that practically flooded Blueberry Commons and half of downtown hadn’t kept the Market from opening. As I entered through the open gate of the chain-linked fence, I noticed an unfamiliar feeling in the air. I had reasoned that the particularly damp, thick April air mixed with my wardrobe of knitted yarns was the cause of my unease. But when I found that Minnie wasn’t present in the Market that day, the humidity failed to resonate as the strangeness I was experiencing. I didn’t bother asking anyone of her whereabouts; she was clearly not around. And the thought of speaking to anyone suddenly made me tremble. I had only just a few hours before shoved my quadriplegic husband in his wheelchair off a cliff not 30 miles away. I was uncomfortable.
I had wanted to tell Minnie goodbye before I left. The movers would be arriving shortly and there would not be another opportunity. Goodbye Minnie, I thought. This sappiness felt new to me. Who cares about Minnie? She’s practically one of them anyway. For all I know, she’s telling sordid stories about me and my pathetic, cynical, wretched, and catty life. As I turned to exit the Market, I suddenly remembered of my dream. That man, the Patrick-like character, giving me fire and that box with the letter P engraved on the top. And the river. That black river. And the eagle, swooping down to devour his liver: Why his liver?
What in hell was that all about? I wondered.
As I began to cross the street I considered what injustice this striking man must have committed in order to receive such harsh retribution. Or maybe he wasn’t being punished. I stopped and pondered. Maybe this was just his manner of living. Maybe this man spends his entire life showering glorious gifts upon beautiful women like myself, which causes him brief irritation when he must leave them, but he quickly recovers and moves on to his next target, his next voluptuous female. I was attempting to piece together the meanings and symbolism in the dream when suddenly, out of nowhere, the Hawkeye Moving Company truck came barreling down Maple Avenue, hitting me head on.
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