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So I was going to post some stuff on fictionpress, but I can't decide what genre they are. So I'm slapping them up here in a cut. Feel free to read them and let me know what you think. Or feel free not to. Whatever floats your boat.
I Will Be Home Then
The hand holding the letter began to shake. With a cry, Colleen fell to the floor in a heap, as Doris, tears streaming down her face, knelt beside her. Colleen’s body was racked with sobs, the letter drifting to the floor nearby. Doris, holding Colleen’s shoulders, tried to comfort her, but Colleen’s mind was nowhere near that kitchen. It was with Alexander. On that grassy field in the foggy morning. She saw the commotion and confusion of men and boys and saw flashes of light around her. Looking down, she saw Alexander, covered in blood, and became panicked. He looked at her with those smiling, beautiful eyes. She tried to find the source of the bleeding. He whispered, “It’s ok, it’s not from me. I’d feel it if I was hurt.” She tried to calm herself, pausing to smile sweetly at her young husband, but continued her search. Smiling at her, Alexander said, “I feel very tired… I think I’ll take a nap…” Laying his head back, his eyes closed, and his breath left him. Colleen cried out, but Alexander didn’t respond. Falling onto his chest, she felt the blood on his clothes and jumped back.
A door slammed like a gunshot and suddenly, she was back in the kitchen with her mother-in-law. She began to cry even harder now, afraid and unsure of what to do. She felt Doris lift her by the arm, and she rose, unsteadily, to her feet. Slowly, they both trudged to Colleen’s bedroom. Doris, sitting her daughter-in-law on the bed, pulled a stool from in front of the vanity mirror and sat near her, doing her best to comfort the child-for Colleen was now so lost in her sorrow that this was how she appeared to the older woman-but unsure of how to do so. She offered her handkerchief to the girl, telling her to dry her tears, that Alexander would not want her to cry, would not want her to be sad. Nearly smiling, Colleen handed it back. “It is so soaked with your tears, it cannot dry mine.”
Although later, Colleen would not be able to explain to anyone, including herself, how she had made it through that time, she did. As did Doris. Months passed, and soon Colleen gave birth to Alexander’s son. He was healthy and happy, but his mother saw unmistakable signs of Alexander in him, and many days was unable to look at the child without crying. They named the child after his father, at the suggestion of Doris. However, after a time, Doris was forced to return to her own home in a nearby town. She had only been planning to stay with Colleen until Alexander had returned, but she could not stay forever. She offered to take the child with her and raise him, to allow Colleen some time, and Colleen agreed.
Years after Alexander left his mother, Colleen remarried, having all but forgotten about Alexander. She bore her new husband three children and lived the life of any normal woman. She did not speak of what had happened.
One day, on her way home from the grocer’s, Colleen suddenly stopped and dropped the heavy load she was carrying in the middle of the street. Her eldest daughter asked her what was wrong and, following her mother’s gaze, saw a fair young man sitting beneath a tree, dressed as a soldier and pausing for lunch. The fair young man did not look up, and Colleen, coming out of her trance as suddenly as it had begun, turned from the soldier and began to run to her home. Her daughter followed behind as best she could, but could not quite keep up. By the time she reached home, the girl’s siblings and father were both standing, confused, outside, while Colleen screamed, between flinging things out of the house, through windows and doors. The children all became terrified, thinking their mother to be mad. Their father, having sent his son to town for help, tried his best to calm the girls.
Then, there was silence. Colleen’s husband took a tentative step towards the house, but was startled by the sound of glass shattering. Running into the house and up the stairs, he looked for Colleen. He found her, the dust soaking up the blood from her head, below the window.
He heard the sound of footsteps outside. Rushing to see who it was, Colleen's husband saw the fair young man Colleen had seen sitting under the tree. "Hello," he said. "My name's Alexander."
When Your High Horse Dies
Working my way down the long white hallway of the nursing home, carrying the bouquet of fresh flowers, I thought about all the times my father hadn’t come through for me. In fact, I would have been hard pressed to think of a time when he did come through. He was chronically late, never had a job, barely held on to the car and the house, and rarely ever even just sat and listened to me talk. But I didn’t much hold this against him. Despite the drinking and the chain smoking, and the periods of verbal abuse of my mother, he was still my father. To be honest, since there had never been a precedent set for a father, I simply became accustomed to him never being around to help. I didn’t envy other kids their attentive and caring fathers. It wasn’t ever something I had, so it was never something I missed. And since society from the time I was born taught me that I should love and honor my parents, I did. Well, the honor part, at least.
It’s not that he was the worst dad. He never hit any of us, which really contributed to my hesitation in telling anyone about the things he said to us. It wasn’t like he scarred us, well, me at least, for life. We just learned not to hang around the house a lot. We weren’t bad kids. We made friends all the time, so it wasn’t difficult most nights to find someone to say we were hanging out with. We always felt bad trying to explain why we never wanted to be at home: we didn’t think we really had an excuse. But we still didn’t want to be there, so we’d just say our parents were going to the opera or something. I’m not sure how many people believed us. The kids who did must have figured that our house was so small because my parents were always going to the opera.
And forty years later, here I was, once again walking down the blinding white halls of my father’s home of the past five years. Mother died six years ago, and soon after that we convinced him that he shouldn’t be living alone. He was eighty-one when she died. We all felt bad, but of the three kids, none of us had room in our houses to take care of him. He actually picked out the nursing home. We didn’t want to feel even worse for picking somewhere miserable for him to live out the rest of his life. We all came to visit him as often as we could. Me being the one living closest, I visited the most. Usually once a week. He’d always ask me to bring fresh flowers. After Mom died, he started keeping fresh flowers in a little shrine with her picture and everything. It was almost reminiscent of a middle school crush. The florist knew my whole family by our first names. (We’d tried growing our own garden of flowers to bring to him, but we never could quite keep it up. It’s not a good feeling to carry a bouquet of wilting and pathetic flowers into a nursing home. Makes you feel like a cheapskate.)
When I got to his room, I knocked lightly and cracked the door. He was laying in bed, as usual, looking out the window. He did less and less over the years, until then when he really didn’t do much but play cards with a few of the other guys in the home. We tried to get him to play board games and things, but he never quite got into it. I crept in the room, closing the door as gently as possible behind me. I set the flowers down by the picture on the nightstand. It was taken when I was nine. Mom and the kids. Every time I looked at that picture I realized again how beautiful my mother was. Even when she died, she was beautiful. She could have had any boy in town when she was young, and she knew it. But she wasn’t arrogant. She walked with an air of confidence, though, which is only for the privileged few who are that pretty. I never understood why she chose my father. I’m not even sure if she knew. I think that’s the real definition of love, though: when nobody understands why you want to be with someone, but you know you do. She must have regretted that decision at least sometimes, but she did a marvelous job of not letting any of us know.
I sat down in one of the cushy armchairs in the corner and waited. Sometimes I’d wait for an hour before he’d say anything. Some days only seconds. Some days I’d give up and leave without having heard a word from him. Visiting hours only lasted so long, and I generally only got there with an hour and a half left because of work and things. It all depended on his mood and what he was thinking about. It wasn’t rude or mean silence, it was pensive. I suppose you could call it companionable.
After about five or ten minutes of silence, my father turned his head from the window and looked to the picture on his nightstand. After another minute or so, he spoke.
“She was beautiful wasn’t she?”
“Yes, Dad,” I answered. “She really was.”
He continued to stare pensively at the photograph. “I never noticed…”
Sailing Through the Pines
Rudolph sighed and laughed softly at himself. He slowly stood up from his position in the closet where he had been sitting. It was two years since it happened: why was he still like this? He put back a few dresses that had fallen off the rack, and closed the door. Trudging out of the room, he went to the kitchen and got himself a snack, wheat-thins and cream cheese, which he brought with him back to his study. He flipped on the TV and started watching a show about crab-fishing in the Bering Sea. On commercials he read the morning’s newspaper.
He passed much of the afternoon this way. That evening, he trudged back to the kitchen and made himself a sandwich and poured a glass of diet iced tea. As he passed the living room on the way back to his study, he gave a sad look to her chair, but tried not to look at the pictures hanging in the hall. His head was down as he passed a wedding picture, a picture from their honeymoon in the Pocanoes, and a frame holding pictures of their first five children when they were young. He went into his study and found a show about the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.
At eight o’clock, Rudolph was dozing when the phone rang. He woke, and picked up the curved blue receiver. “Hello?”
“Hi, Dad!”
“Hi! How’s it going?”
“Just great, Dad…”
They talked for five minutes or so. His son had called to say that he had gotten another day off of work and wouldn’t have to leave on Christmas day. After they hung up, Rudolph returned his plate and glass to the kitchen and then climbed slowly up to the attic to get some Christmas things down. Years before, his wife would have been helping him with this, but he tried not to think about that. He left the boxes in the living room, to wait for his daughter’s arrival. She always helped put up Christmas decorations, especially for the past few years.
Before he closed the door to the attic, he grabbed another box. This one was full of old home-movies from when the kids were little. This he put on the kitchen table. He closed the door to the attic on his way back to his study, where he pulled out his projector from a bookshelf half full of books and half full of old electronic equipment. He hung the projector screen on the door of the kitchen closet, the same closet where they had marked the height of all his ten children and his seven grandchildren.
He spent hours that night just watching the old movies. Some of them he remembered taking, some of them he didn’t. After a time, he would start talking about them, explaining who people where and what was going on, to no one in particular. When he found the video of his honeymoon, he began to cry. Turning off the projector, he trudged back to his bedroom and opened the closet. This was the one place that he could still pretend she was here with him. Her clothes still smelled like her, he could hear her voice, see her smile. He was sometimes ashamed of this: that he, an old man, should need such comfort. But he did need it. In stories, people dream of their lovers. In reality, very few people are blessed this way. This was the place that it hurt most of all, but it was also the place where he would go when he felt the gloom overtake him and leave later feeling better. It was where he could remember her the way she had been, not laying in a coffin in a cold room surrounded by flowers.
He sat in the closet, crying, thinking on everything they had been through together, and all the times he wished he had done differently. He was reliving everything again. After a time, his tears slowed and he fell asleep in that closet.
He dreamed of Nora, again a laughing, smiling woman. It was the first peaceful sleep he’d had in months.
Esther
Once, very long ago, Esther was popular. Her house was constantly full of people, coming and going. There was always something going on, always something to do. She was an amazingly kind and generous person. If ever she encountered someone who needed something she had, be it money or a cup of sugar, she gave it before she was even asked. She loved helping people, and loved even more seeing the smile on the faces of those whom she helped. Everyone in town knew Esther. She was the one many of the kids looked up to, and adults always seemed to listen to her, even when she was only a child. She had a way of talking that made whatever she was saying make sense to everyone.
She was not an extraordinarily beautiful woman; there was nothing particularly outstanding about her features. When she was young, people often complimented her large, brown eyes. As she grew, however, her eyes became more in proportion to her face. Her nose was on the large side of normal, and there was a bump in it. She didn’t mind this; it reflected something of her grandfather’s nose. Her skin wasn’t snow white, or a lovely golden-brown, the color she supposed people who went tanning were aiming for, though they often missed. Her hair was not a brilliant blonde. This she liked. Blonde just wouldn’t have been the right color for her, anyway. She didn’t think herself particularly ugly, and indeed she wasn’t, and that’s all that she desired. She hoped that her personality would more than compensate, and often it did.
Esther never married, though. This is not to say that no one ever loved her. There were quite a few boys who had asked Esther to accompany them to balls and to have dinner with them at one point or another-but she never said yes.
It’s not that there was something wrong with any of these boys, and she was always kind in her rejections. They were perfectly fine people, and often good friends of hers. The only thing was, she didn’t love them. Not the way she thought she should if she were to be dating them. Esther always thought courting wasn’t so you could learn to love someone; it was so that you could be with someone you already loved. She appreciated all her friends, and cared about them, but she didn’t love any of them.
Except one.
He was a friend, but in a different way. She certainly didn’t see him as often, and there were quite a few times when, having been apart from him for months, she would question everything she thought about boys and courting and such. But then he would come home, or call her one night and talk for hours, and she would remember with full force why she made the choices she had.
He wasn’t particularly beautiful, either. She had stared at his picture long enough to know that. He had a rather large nose, but it had character. His eyes weren’t that brilliant blue or green that catches your eye and holds it, no matter what. She couldn’t say she saw a spark in them, or a light of generosity, gentility, or any other aspect of his character. She couldn’t even honestly say they were the most beautiful eyes she’d ever seen. She still thought they were lovely. If someone had asked her what kind of hair style she thought was the cutest on boys, she almost certainly wouldn’t have said his. But there was something endearing and almost reflective of the past in his hair. He looked like a normal person, but a movie star at the same time. What’s more, he was brilliantly smart, and nearly as kind as she.
Now, to be honest, Esther had thought long and hard, and more than once, about her feelings for Rupert, for that was his name. She tried, sometimes, to convince herself she didn’t care for him that much at all. And it worked…for a while. But it would always come back.
It wasn’t that Rupert didn’t care about Esther, either. He had, once. And they had talked about it often, always carefully, without saying more than was necessary to get the point across. But these conversations had made Esther’s heart feel like to explode for happiness. She knew sadness could hurt, but it was at these times when her happiness was so strong it hurt her physically. But after a time, he had discovered that he still held a proverbial torch for another woman, and Esther saw her hopes vanish.
She was invited to the wedding, but managed to gracefully back out of going. Not long after, Rupert and his new wife, a beautiful, wispy little thing with blonde hair and bright blue eyes, moved away. Esther watched from afar as their things were packed onto the train, as they said their goodbyes to family and friends, and as the train slowly lurched from the platform.
After that, she tried and tried to convince herself she didn’t need him, and it would be fine, but every time she thought of him, she simply wanted to cry. As she grew older, she was asked to balls less and less frequently, and still she turned them down, hoping against hope that Rupert would someday come back to see her. She would dream of romantic stories, often in which one or both lovers died in the end. This wasn’t because she wanted to die, or that she wanted Rupert to die. She didn’t want anyone to die. But she had always felt that death was a beautiful thing in its own right.
As time went by, her house became empty more and more often. Her friends moved away or simply found new friends. Esther was still as kind as ever, but she had a sort of melancholy about her that seemed to affect everyone around. Because she would never speak to anyone about her feelings, feeling too ashamed to do so, people tried to comfort her and make her feel better, but after a time, they all gave up. They continued to invite her to parties and balls when they were hosting them, but she always refused, and so the invitations slowed and eventually stopped coming altogether.
Esther grew old. She stayed at home all day, only venturing out to make an occasional trip to the grocers. People saw very little of her. They would often hear her playing the violin, as beautifully as ever yet much more mournful than when she was young, but they would try not to listen for the songs she played would infect anyone with a sorrowful feeling, something very few took pleasure in.
Every day, even when she had no intention of leaving the house at all, Esther would wake early, before the sun, bathe, and dress herself as though preparing for very important company. She would clean anything in the house that was dirty and wash her clothes from the day before, have a small lunch, and clean the kitchen again. She spent most afternoons reading or playing the violin. Sometimes she would feel the urge to write, and would seat herself at a small desk, one made for a schoolhouse, and simply write for pages and pages. She wrote about everything: her life, her thoughts on the world, questions she had about existence. Sometimes, she would even write stories about lovers. Then she would take all the pages she had written and stack them neatly on top of the pages from previous afternoons, leaving them a small chest she kept near the desk. Then she would make a small dinner, after which she would clean up, play for a short time on her violin, and then, after perhaps sitting up for a bit longer, just in case, she would go to bed. Every day was just the same.
One night, however, she lit a candle, something she rarely did, and sat at her desk after dinner, writing and writing, continuing from that afternoon, and even that morning, when she had chose rather to write than to clean. Sitting at that child’s desk, in her best blue gown, she wrote of love and lovers. She poured out every feeling she ever had onto those pages. She wrote her anger, her sadness, her happiness, her disappointment. She wrote her melancholy, her joy, her exhaustion and her frustration. Every page she wrote she set upon the stack in the chest. Just as she reached the end of one of her pages, the candle, by now very much decreased in size, flickered and went out. Allowing the page to dry for a moment, she set it on top of the stack in the chest, covered the inkwell, and went upstairs to bed.
That night, Esther dreamed again of Rupert. In her dream, they were young and pretty and happy again. They laughed together, and danced, and smiled knowingly across rooms at each other. They kissed, and Esther smiled.
Esther was still smiling when the sun rose in the morning, and the birds singing outside her window thought she looked more beautiful sleeping that way than she had in many, many years.
Ok, and I'm going to watch my YCTC DVD.