Posted on by Lydia Ink

Normal

The word normal is overused.  And, by the way, ‘normal,’ should in no way cause anyone a sense of well-being or security.  In today’s world, normal means, ‘I have you in my clutches.’ 

Laugh, I don’t care.   I just want a cup of coffee and I’m on my way.  Yeah, look there, a young mom gathering up her kiddos because I’m talking too loud.  That’s okay too.  Keep them safe, mom.   

No, I have money.  Here it is.  I work for a living.  I’m not a vagrant.  Look, my clothes are clean, outside of walking through this city, and I managed to bathe this morning.  Okay, I’m going.  I’m going but remember–normal is deceit.   

You following me?  Well, don’t I’m not crazy.  I will not do something awful.  You cops are the ones that give me the most trouble.  I’m not in a crowd of thugs, so I’m easy to subdue.  If there were five of me, you’d just let me rant on and on, maybe even burn down a building.   That’s normal.   

Listen, I don’t care, seriously.  It’s that mom who just left with her kids–and it’s too bad it looks like she could use a cup of coffee-that I feel bad for.  But listen, I gotta go. My lunch hour is almost up.  I know I talk too loud.  But I’m not a bum on the street.  Besides, too many bums are on the street.  Seriously, where does all the shit go?   

Who am I?  Just a person, just a weirdo person, but a viable human being.  My parents?  Do I look too young to be on my own?  My parents are dead.  They were pretty sharp, my parents, and they got along.  I was a shock to them.  Seriously, I think they could read each other’s minds, so when they gotta around to making love, I just don’t think they thought of the consequences.  I’m surprised really, I survived the womb portion of my life. They grew things, you see, so they probably thought the entire process worthy of exploration.  If I had conversed–not talk mind you–conversed with them at three months, I might have held their attention but that didn’t happen.   

How did they die?  I didn’t kill them, not sure who did.  I was away at school, so they couldn’t blame me.   Later, I read the police reports. I’m sorry I did because there were photographs.  It wasn’t quick.  I mean, there was no love lost between my parents and me, but I was sorry they suffered like that. 

What did they do?  They grew things; I told you.  Grew lots of things.  I had a close call with one.  True, I shouldn’t have been in their laboratory put for Pete’s sake, I was their son and… curious.  Normal?  Hell, no, it wasn’t normal.  The plant was like their damn guard dog. I’d have been strangled where I stood if I didn’t have sense enough to have a pocket knife.   The thing was around my neck before I knew what was happening.  And do you know what they said?  They said that if the thing had bound my hands first, it would have succeeded.  They seemed disappointed, not that I had survived, mind you, but their growth hadn’t the sense to bind, then kill.   

Oh well.   

The plants?  No idea I was at school.   I got their money and their house up on Long Island.  I had that place demolished and go up there every once in a while, just to have a look around, make sure all the vegetation is burned to the ground. 

Don’t look normal at all, thank God.   

Posted on by Lydia Ink

Squint

Sure, after three kids, she gained some weight. And yeah, I missed the thin young woman; long shapely legs, straight golden blond hair, and breasts that stood out with no help from me or her clothes. As my girlfriend, she was uninhibited, as my wife; she was without shame, I’d say.

You see, Officer, I’m not an ignorant man; I know women change, as do men. My hair thinned. She shrugged it off. I developed a paunch; it bothered me more than her and I worked to get rid of it. My wife changed little in attitude. Her weight gain didn’t bother her and to be frank, as I grew older, I kind of liked the thicker hips and stronger arms.

No, sir, the issue wasn’t that she grew older and looked older because she was still beautiful for her age. No, the problem was her eyes. She squinted. Something happened when her eyesight started to go. She squinted to see minor details. She squinted when cleaning the kitchen sink. She squinted when cooking. I noticed that when she squinted, a facade…slipped.

Color? Her eyes? Blue. The ice blue of any Nordic maiden. Her dad and mom were both Swedes. Blonde, tall and beautiful, just like her. Her Dad died some years back and I regret to hear her mother has taken this… situation badly.

You know I told my wife to damnit just wear glasses, but she is… was stubborn. I tried to reason with her but she had that LASIK thing done and sure, her distance improved, but her squinting became worse. Worse! And let me tell you, Officer, she wasn’t the same woman when she squinted. She wasn’t! God’s truth.

Anyway, we were up at the cabin, just her and I. The kids were coming up later. David and Ella were coming that night. Jeff and his new wife (I don’t know how many he will end up with… the nervous sort is our Jeff) Janice were expected sometime. My darling Kimmy, who I don’t think will ever marry, was to show up at 8:30 the next morning. My wife kept the schedules. I won’t be on time for another thing.

David and Ella are pregnant with their first and my wife is very conscious of food. I was helping with the dishes because, you know, that cabin kitchen is small, a coffee cup and plate makes the place look overloaded. We had soup, vegetable, on the stove and fresh bread. Any minute, I was waiting to hear the approach of David’s car. Suddenly my wife has this brainstorm to make a batch of cookies. I tell her, no; she had worked that day. We drove up to the cabin; we worked to clean and air the place out. You know all the things you do when the kids are coming. I told her no; we were both tired; we didn’t need cookies, for the love of Mike.

Do you know what she did? She wrinkled her nose at me, squinty eyes and all. I kept it together that time. I knew she was nervous. Anyway, the kids were running a late and she, by golly, was going to make a batch of cookies; David’s favorite. Peanut butter. Not much to tell after that. She started in and I kept washing dishes. Fate, because I was washing the serrated bread knife. She was measuring out the soda or the baking powder; I don’t know which, and she squinted those ice-blue eyes.

Did I mention she was a different woman when she squinted? Yeah, well, you weren’t there. She squinted, you see. Right before me, as her eyes narrowed, her upper lip lifted. It seemed to me her canines elongated and her skin seemed to tinge a lime green. What shocked me the most was her hair, grey-blonde, lifted and tangled in like lightning speed. She looked like a mad scientist–mad. In went the soda or the backing powder and presto-bango she was the woman I married in a blink of an eye. But I saw it. I saw what she was. It took me over 40 years but I saw and without so much as a blink; I cut her throat.

Shocking, really, my own strength. Adrenalin, I suppose. She didn’t suffer. Well, maybe a little bit, but it was over quickly. I will say I could see the young woman I married, despite the blood (lots of that) before her soul left her body. But her eyes, you see, I finally… what can I say… her eyes looked, I suppose, innocent? I can tell you one thing officer, I wasn’t overjoyed or anything, but I was oddly…content. It was like getting an answer to a lifelong question. Funny, huh? David and Ella were shocked, of course; the knife was still in my hand. I don’t know how long I was standing there thinking of her last expression. No questions, no accusations, no surprise, just a sort of smugness. Then I hear this soft voice saying, Dad?

I was mortified he had to see his mother like that. I tried to explain, but you know, you see your mother with her throat gaping open and blood all over, explanations are difficult. You know, I get his anger. He might thank me someday that he never had to see his mother morph into a witch. It all could have been avoided if she had worn glasses like her mother. I mean, her dad and I talked about it, and he always warned me–it’s the eyes that will get you, son, the eyes.

Posted on by Lydia Ink

Missing Shakespeare

“Let slip the dogs of war.”

He heard it first in a Star Trek movie years ago–he couldn’t remember which one.  Stirring his coffee and decided he couldn’t remember which Shakespeare play the quote was from either.  He knew whenever he thought of that quote now; he thought of his ex-wife.

He thought of her often. When that wriggling little black mass of gooey memory started forward he took the dog out and tossed the ball until they were both exhausted.  He worried because old Fido (his actual name) didn’t want to run and play fetch as often or as long as they used to.  That was a problem because lately that mentioned black mass of destruction was surfacing more often.

He knew why his second marriage was failing.  He married her on a whim.  She was there; he was there, a need met, and he thought he might as well continue meeting that need.  It was fine for the first six or seven months until she decided she was in love.

He dressed appropriately, was even happy on the day of the nuptials but now…

Now his coffee was stale and overcooked and the nice neat-as-a-pin house he lived in had a thin layer of dust dulling the sparkle he remembered.

His second wife couldn’t cook and that was fine, it was just the two of them and he enjoyed cooking.  She enjoyed reading and at first that was fine.  They enjoyed walking downtown to the used bookstore, he would walk away with an edition of Sir Walter Scott he couldn’t believe he had the good luck to find and she would walk away with a bag of paperbacks.

At first it was fun.  She tried everything on him–everything.  He even flipped through her books once but when he came across some descriptive parts of the male anatomy, he thought he’d leave it up to her.

The marriage was about a year old when he found himself wide-awake beside her.  She was softly sleeping while he puzzled about life throughout the night.  What scene had they played out, what plagiarism in bed did they perpetrate?

That’s when the face of his first wife drifted in front of him and he sat bolt upright.  What if he slipped, what if he got so caught up in the current rush of love making but uttered in ecstasy his first wife’s name?

His first wife read Shakespeare and used to quote long segments at a time.  She read and reread the plays.  She looked so lovely during the festivals they attended.  They were young, inexperienced and let slip away the teachings of commitment.

He didn’t mourn her memory but her memory of Shakespeare. The taunts, the jibes, the certain bawdy humor and a sense of a night walk with ghosts and skulls and the best of ill luck. The slap and suck of sweat dimmed quickly in comparison.

He stirred his coffee and watched the dust motes on the windowpane.

Posted on by Lydia Ink

Musical Chairs

I wish I could cry when I had time to cry. Crying at inappropriate moments seems to be my bailiwick in ripe middle-age. Driving up to the teller window at the bank is not an appropriate to cry. My mouth opens to speak and then suddenly cracks around a sudden onslaught of tears. That’s humiliating. Some poor young girl, who can wear tight fitting tops and look good in too much silver, tries to either ignore me or be overtly kind; either reaction adds to my weeping fit. All the while my mind calm and cool is pacing out sentences such as, ‘just what the hell is the matter with you?’

The solution? I go home, shut the door, ignore the loud party the neighbors are throwing in the apartment below me and tell myself to cry. Cry to your heart’s content. Nothing.

I often wonder what it would be like to take on a lover again. When I was young, making love was so simple, I would just pretend he was someone else and the climax was spectacular. Admittedly, the afterglow was decidedly flat.

I have always been a realist. I understood then as I do now that if you choose a lover for the effect, then one must be ready for the reality of non-committal after glow. In short, one-night stands (all I was interested in) didn’t know how to act after love. He either smoked, paced the floor, hands shaking, worried about his wife, or he went for a glass of water and fell asleep on the couch. There are other stories, all of them just as boring.

Taking on a lover now may be interesting. I don’t have the strength to lie anymore, so what would brutal, honest love making be like? Would I cry? If so, one of two things would happen. He would put his pants on backward trying to get away from me or make me tea and pat my head. Either way, the circumstances remind me of the bank teller in the tight top and too much silver, and I know I’d laugh like a bitch. Men don’t understand laughter.

Love without the dogged-dread of commitment is like losing at musical chairs. I remember only once playing musical chairs as a child. I don’t suppose that’s played in the western world anymore–all of our political correctness not allowing anyone to standalone, cast out, moved over to the side. Now we all just stand on one side of the room or the other, and no music plays at all. Safer anyway, I suppose, like allowing the lover to spend the night on one’s couch and feel relief when he’s not there in the morning.

So there I sit in my apartment, a party down below and me allowing myself to cry and feeling noncommittal. I think about turning on my computer and watching a French film and I think about making myself an omelet and I think about adopting a cat. Nothing. But tomorrow when I’m sitting at my job and thinking about what I did the evening before, I’ll want to weep at how pathetic I must have appeared to no one there, yet feel relief that no one is there.

So rather than think, I walk to the bar and drink sticky sweet sherry because I can’t think of what to order and watch the band play songs they don’t know. I see a face I pass during the day and he nods my way, too bored or too shy to come say hello or too relieved to be in a crowd alone. This, I think, is how post modernist love making was born; no musical chairs, no mistakes, no crime and no tears.

Posted on by Lydia Ink

Her Sister’s Room

Wandering into the room, with chores and small goals on her mind, the mistake was made.  She was usually so careful, but even the best of plain girls make mistakes.  Her error when through the doorway became apparent when the air became still, hushed and in between that hushed era and the next noisy moments (the scraping of chairs and clanking of metal upon metal) she lived years of revelation and revulsion.  Life folded out before her, sighing, full of regret and self-incrimination.  It was as if she had already lived through the consequence and looking back to the day her life changed.  She was beyond the belief of her own existence.  How she could have been so careless, so absent minded regarding her own health and psyche in that brief eternity she knew would follow her forever?

With the first harsh word that sounded like a scrape upon an old blackboard, intentional and mean-spirited, her mind went from realization to self preservation.  What did she think she was doing, what right did she have?  That grating voice, the voice her sister reserved for only her, sounded like a rusted gate slamming shut against all freedom.

Her sister and her friends, all beautiful and flouncing when outside and before crowds of admiring, small town fans had crowded into her sister’s room.  Her sister’s room; off limits to such disasters as she.  When indoors, behind the secret keepers of wood and curtains, the darlings of old church ladies and weak old men grew fangs and gained a foreign language.  The door to her sister’s room hid sibling’s vices.  The quick squashing of ill rolled joints smoldering between prettily painted fingertips, the slush of clear filmy liquid capped with rusty sounding metal lids was quickly stuffed away behind flowing, bright material that draped her sister’s room.

She often wondered if her sister appreciated the royal hang and drape of her room or insisted upon the princess material she might hide and secret away the reprehensible thing. The latter assumption was a now fact as she walked mindlessly into the dark den.

She and her sister had separate rooms and upstairs away from her parents.  But the second story was no stopping point for those who were limber and in on her sister’s secrets.   The laughter, the hushed moans, and the sharp whispers to “shut up if you want to do this again,” that only she could hear and her parents never fathomed.  She kept her distance and played her music to silence the hissing laughter that leaked from the thin slits that illuminated her sister’s bedroom door.

And now she was in her sister’s room, in broad daylight, with only a direction from her mother to take her sister’s bedding to the charming side of the family.  Cream and red with bits of stylish black woven into the six hundred thread cotton sheet.  She herself had white by her own insistence.  What a thing to think at a time like this.

Makeup smeared and a masculine chuckle and she did not want to look up–if only she had thought if only all of her sister’s friends weren’t standing around with smiles as diabolical as demons.  She felt her stomach lurch when she heard someway say cover him up.

And then a faint call, a singsong wavering request from downstairs.  She was to come down and help with chores and leave her sister alone with her friends.

She brushed past her mother’s smothering smile, while feeling like the last person in the world.