I get a clean sheet of paper and start writing about my gramps. It’s going to be the best two-page essay ever. I’m going to write about my gramps’s life. He cared about the war and George and me and Mum. He loved the environment and the ocean, even the stingers. He thought George’s stories were the best.
My gramps’s story ends after three pages. I just couldn’t squeeze him into two pages. I bet Ricky Ponting didn’t ever get three whole pages written about him. And mine is a happy story. It ends with Gramps being the best ever storyteller in heaven. I didn’t do research on that bit, that’s just something I know.
~ * ~
At the funeral, the coffin is open. You can see Gramps and he looks okay. His hair is real neat and he is shaved better than I’ve ever seen him. Mum says he looks peaceful. I think he looks uncomfortable, but I wouldn’t tell Mum that. George looks uncomfortable too. He’s wearing a suit with a tie and it looks like he’s strangling.
A man talks for a while at the front of the room, behind Gramps’s coffin. You can’t see him without seeing Gramps. I wonder if Gramps would like that since he was so shy. Mum goes up and talks and I can’t really follow what she’s saying. She starts crying and I look at my shoes so I won’t cry too. My shoes look like they’re underwater, all wavy and stuff. Then a drip falls on one of my toes and I know I’m crying anyway.
George talks and tells Gramps’s favorite story about where stingers come from. We all smile. I like the story. It’s happy.
After all the talking we go up in a long line to look at Gramps. I look and see that maybe he doesn’t mind all the attention now. Maybe now that he’s heaven’s best storyteller, he likes talking to strangers. I slip my iPod out of my pocket. Mum looks at me with a question in her eyes. I put the ear piece in Gramps’s ear and sneak the player under his coat, and then make it play and repeat and repeat forever and ever. It’s my essay about Gramps told in my voice so he can hear it and hopefully hear my ancestors in it, too. Maybe he can hear himself there. I want him to hear it before anyone else does. It’s his story, after all.
Deadly Dreams
The unrelenting heat pounded against the side of her car as Ellen drove the well worn track to work. She absently stabbed her finger against the bottom of her sunglasses when they slipped down the fine layer of sweat coating the bridge of her nose. The back of her cotton shirt stuck to her skin, imprinting the pattern from her seat cover across the damp material. Though Ellen didn’t hold much store in intuition, she had one of those nagging hunches that this wasn’t going to be a good day. She turned up the fan on the air-conditioner in her old but reliable car knowing as she did so, that it wasn’t up to the task of the morning’s heat.
A thump followed by a whump, whump broke Ellen’s pessimistic contemplation. The car started to veer off the road so she pulled over to the gravel shoulder, turned off the engine, yanked on the hand brake, switched on the emergency flashers and got out. She walked purposefully around the car to find the source of the problem; it was the back left tire, flat beyond repair. It definitely wasn’t going to be a good day.
Leaning against the back of her un-drivable car, Ellen now faced the equally unpleasant options of phoning for help, or digging around in the back of her car for a jack and the spare. There was nothing that Ellen hated more than a woman who needed a man to help with the more physical tasks of life – unless perhaps it was figuring out how to stabilize a jack on the crushed red gravel of the shoulder.
As Ellen pondered her choices, she gazed back at the traffic traveling the same road she had been on only moments before. A white SUV was headed towards her and a tiny green car was trying to pass it. She heard and felt the semitrailer coming in the opposite direction and spared a moment to wonder how all three vehicles were going to manage to pass her parked car.
The tiny green car accelerated the best that it could and the SUV hit its brakes. Ellen heard a soft screeching sound and anticipated the smell of burnt rubber that would soon reach her. At the last minute, the green car swerved, its back bumper just brushing the front of the SUV. This slightest of nudges sent the SUV straight towards the shoulder and Ellen’s car.
She barely had enough time to stand and draw in a deep breath, as if she were about to plunge head first into an oncoming wave. When the SUV reached her, she felt it come into contact with her thighs. Then, in a prolonged instant, she felt her feet lagging behind the rest of her body while her legs snapped like crispy bacon. Her torso was hurled into the back of her parked car and she was dead before she heard the grating of the metal that collapsed on impact.
~ * ~
Ellen opened her eyes, squinting at the sun pouring across her pillows. As on just about every other morning, she cursed renting an apartment that had a bedroom with an eastern facing window and thin curtains. But then, as her dream resurfaced, she decided the warmth of the sun was a welcomed intruder today. An inner chill ran like thick treacle down her spine. She untangled her legs from the python-like grip of her blankets and flopped back on the sun-drenched pillow. Two, deep, calming breaths did nothing to erase the creepy feeling that had now pooled at the base of her spine. Ellen slammed her fist into her pillow and bounced out of bed.
Irrespective of the accepted myth that dying in your dream means you’ll die in your sleep, Ellen had a habit of surviving her deadly dreams. This car crash was not her first such dream and she doubted it would be her last. These days she couldn’t turn out her bedside lamp without expecting that her sleep would be filled with dreams; some horrific, some dramatic and some boringly mundane. Those mundane dreams were all too rare as far as Ellen was concerned.
But mundane or horrific Ellen would resignedly take what she got as long as the dream only visited her once. What she had a hard time dealing with was dreams that repeated themselves. These made her fear she’d missed the point of something her unconscious mind was trying to tell her.
~ * ~
To minimize the terrors in her nights, Ellen had developed a system of satisfying her psyche. Every morning she would make a truce with her unconscious mind by spending her rushed shower trying to figure out what had caused her last dream. On good days, this was a quick process where Ellen could easily identify what had triggered her nightmare, what conflict at work or news headline her psyche was mulling over. Unfortunately the death-by-crash dream didn’t have any obvious source – she hadn’t watched a movie with a car chase scene lately, nor had she had any near misses herself. This meant it probably was something too complex to be unraveled in the amount of time a shower lasted, time that she’d gladly spend when she had it free. If she didn’t find the time, she dreaded that her brain would make it for her in a not-too-distant dream. But that time was not now, now she needed to race out the door or risk being late to work.
~ * ~
Ellen didn’t have an overly challenging job but it was a busy one. Make-work kept her mind occupied and helped the day pass quickly. By the time Ellen met Lydia for lunch, she’d almost managed to forget her deadly dream. Almost. It was still hanging around uncomfortably at the back of her mind so she mentioned it as casually as she could.
“I don’t know how you can talk about your own death so calmly,” Lydia said over the top of her iced coffee.
Ellen wasn’t exactly happy with Lydia’s attempt at infecting her with fear. “It’s not my own death, it’s my dream. Big difference.”
“Okay, let’s say it’s not about your death, what is it about then?”
The two women discussed as many options as they could invent in the remainder of their lunch hour – everything from the fact that the tiny green car might represent environmental protection squeezed out by consumerism symbolized by the SUV to the most obvious of interpretations, that the dream was a prophesy. By the end of their break they’d resolved nothing but left Ellen worrying whether her dream was telling her to reduce her carbon footprint or, alarmingly, foretelling her future.
~ * ~
That night Ellen poured a glass
of red wine and took it and a book to bed. She knew there was no way that Bridget Jones’s Diary would trigger a nightmare and red wine generally helped her relax into a dreamless sleep.
~ * ~
The next day was another bright and humid morning. As Ellen drove to work she felt her irritation grow every time her sunglasses slipped down the sweating bridge of her nose.
She heard a thump followed by a whump, whump. Her car started to veer off the road so she pulled over to the gravel shoulder and got out. She walked around the car to find the source of the problem; it was the back left tire, flat beyond repair. A sinking feeling formed in the pit of her stomach. Looking up she saw the white SUV heading towards her with a tiny green car passing it. She barely had enough time to draw in a deep breath before the SUV reached her.
Left for Dead
The flight attendant didn’t even notice that he’d bumped Maggie’s seat as he bent to pick up a pillow in the aisle. Still, that gentle nudge was enough to pull her out of a surprisingly deep sleep. She looked around the cabin and spotted the fasten seat belt sign which told her the plane was finally landing.
Maggie kicked her backpack aside and poked around with her toes, feeling for her shoes. Her right shoe slid easily onto her foot but the left one was MIA. In a maneuver that made her happy she kept up her yoga even when travelling, Maggie twisted her torso and groped around what the airline’s marketing department unashamedly proclaimed as “spacious legroom”. Still nothing.
The same flight attendant whose pillow gathering had wakened Maggie squatted down in the aisle and asked, “Anything I can help you with?”.
How embarrassing, Maggie was having a conversation with the best-looking guy she’d met in a couple of years and she was about to proclaim that she’d lost her left shoe. Nope, no way was it possible to squeeze a pick-up line or double entendre into this answer. “Um, I’m not sure. I can’t seem to find one of my shoes.” Maggie tucked her naked foot under her seat as she sat up, suddenly remembering it had been a while since she’d bothered with a pedicure – like a decade.
“Oh, sorry, that was me. It had wandered into the aisle so I snuck it into your backpack. It was unzipped and I figured you’d see it when you woke up.”
More embarrassment followed as Maggie tugged the edge of her backpack that promptly and unceremoniously disgorged the wayward black pump. With her swollen foot halfway in the now-tight shoe, she raised her eyes to meet the sparkling blue pools of her rescuer. A sweet smile and flirty-thanks were forming on her lips as she caught sight of him four rows up, helping a very short Asian man stow his carry-on in the overhead locker. She sighed realizing there’d be no chance for her to try out her best pick-up line or a witty double entendre on this flight.
~ * ~
In the taxi, her phone rang and Maggie spent most of the ride to the hotel getting confirmation of the maximum discount she could offer her customer. This company was actually just a prospect but Maggie liked to think of them as the customer that would help her blow away her sales target and get that bonus she’d already spent at least three times. First, she’d buy a new car – her car was a bomb and it would be lucky if the scrap yard would take it. Second, she’d book that trip to Paris she’d promised herself five years ago. Third, she’d pay off her credit cards – all four of them. She reached down to tug at the side of her left shoe – maybe she could manage to buy a new pair of practical work shoes with her windfall as well. The pair she had on were expensive and should have been something she could wear on a morning flight, stand up in all day while giving her winning presentation and go on to party in all night long without undue pain. Should have been, but weren’t.
Traffic wasn’t bad so she had a full hour to sit and relax in her room before it was time to walk to her customer’s offices for her presentation. She kicked off her shoes, the left one took an extra flick because it had fused to her swollen foot, and turned on CNN. Nothing put her life in perspective like some depressing world news.
Fifty-five minutes later Maggie’s head snapped up at the sound of an ambulance down at street level whirring past. Rubbing her neck, she promised herself no more late-night proposal work before an early flight. She stepped into her right shoe and glanced around for her left one. Unbelievably, that torture-device had taken a stroll without her. She had a good mind to put on the hotel complimentary slippers and leave that dumb shoe wherever it had wandered. Then she remembered the many ways she was going to spend her bonus and dropped to her knees to find her wayward footwear just under the edge of the couch.
The customer loved her presentation. Maggie had the answer to every question and only referred to her backup material once. If it hadn’t been for her fidgeting because of the pain in her swollen left foot, she’d have been the ideal sales rep. She could already taste that French Champagne, sipped while seated on the banks of the Seine, as she and her new best client piled into a taxi heading to the restaurant where the deal would be sealed.
Several hours later she was deaf and crippled. If this idiot insisted on one more nightclub she’d rip up the unsigned contract and beat him with it until he agreed to trade shoes with her. The only consolations at this point were the free (cheap, domestic) wine she was drinking and the fact that just her right foot throbbed, the left one had lost all feeling two hours earlier.
~*~
When her boss called her into his office, Maggie tried not to hobble. It was important to her always to look professional and these shoes, no matter how much the left one killed her, screamed success. Or not. Her boss had just received the news that Maggie lost the deal. She didn’t hear much after that because she didn’t want to know. To distract herself she scrunched her toes and focused on the physical pain while her mind ran through her finances.
There was an awkward silence and Maggie figured she’d missed something. A glance at her boss told her she’d missed him standing up to close the meeting and chase her out of his office. As she limped out, no longer trying to hide her discomfort, she visualized her old bomb driving into the base of the Eiffel Tower consuming both in a huge fireball.
~*~
It wasn’t Paris, but a week at the coast wasn’t such a bad vacation either. And her car might be a bomb, but the radio worked. Maggie sang along, optimism washing over her in waves, as she pictured herself at tomorrow’s job interview bedazzling the CEO of the company based just two blocks from the surf beach. The job was perfect for her and, doubtless, her future boss would see what an asset she’d be to the firm. She smiled imagining the reaction of her future employer if he somehow caught sight of the backseat of her car. Her natural organizational skills were on display for all the world to see; an open-top bag with overflowing clothes and shoes spilled across her boogie board with her cute little dog, Belle, nestling in the middle of it all. She would definitely unpack her car before putting on her power suit and driving to her interview.
Belle loved car trips and Maggie loved the company. She’d been surprised how easy it was to find a hotel that accepts pets. The extra pet-deposit she paid didn’t concern her since Belle never damaged anything other than her chew-toys. Besides, money soon wouldn’t be a problem, this job she was about to land paid 20% more than the one she was about to quit.
Maggie saw Belle climb up onto the arm of the door in the back seat out of the corner of her eye. She looked in the side mirror just in time to watch Belle drop that beautiful, professional, pinching, tormentor of a left shoe out the window. It bounced onto the gravel at the shoulder and Maggie stuck her arm out of the car to wave it a relieved goodbye. Any company with offices so near the beach would be happy to hire someone who came to their job interview wearing sandals. As far as Maggie was concerned, that one left shoe could rot where it landed.
Cabin on a Stream
Kenneth hated the nursing home but once he bumped into Miranda while visiting a friend, he couldn’t relax until he’d moved in. At 92 he probably shouldn’t be living alone anyway.
After tapp
ing lightly on his door, Miranda walked in and asked Kenneth if he wanted her to wheel him down to lunch. He waved his hand and answered, “No thanks, I’m not hungry. But can ya pass me that picture on your way out?”
The picture had been the topic of much speculation in the staff lounge because Kenneth spent hours each day staring at it. Miranda finally asked what many of her colleagues had wondered, “Kenneth, what’s with this photograph?”
Kenneth closed his eyes. Was there any point in telling her?
“It all goes back to before the war when I was a little tyke and got thrown by our horse. The doc gave me some potion to cut the pain but it didn’t really help. Ma would sit with me, tellin’ me stories until I fell asleep. She built this beautiful dream world for me to play in. A world where we lived in a cabin nestled in a bend of a quiet stream. I imagined that cabin and that stream on so many nights that I could paint it like from a photo once I got a bit older.”
Miranda looked at the picture. “This isn’t a picture of a painting is it? It looks like a photograph of a real place.”
“Nah,” Kenneth grabbed the picture, “that’s not my painting.” His eyes focussed on a point well beyond the old black-and-white photo, well beyond the walls of the nursing home.
“Imagine how much fun my wife, June, and I had, dreamin’ of movin’ to that cabin on the stream. For 2 years, we lived in a tiny apartment with my painting remindin’ us where we wanted to be. The fact that it wasn’t real didn’t bother us none, no siree, dreams were enough. Then that blasted war came, curse the Germans and the Japs both, and I went away to help. It seemed the right thing at the time and June was proud of me for it. She waited for me with that painting and our dreams, back in that little apartment, while I went as far from a dream as anyone could travel.”
Kenneth’s eyes turned towards the picture in his hand. He polished the gold frame with the cuff of his sleeve then scratched his cheek. “June was a great letter writer and those letters sure helped keep me sane. Course, they didn’t come too regular, it’s not like a US Mail truck could just track me down wherever the Army sent me. But they came and that’s what mattered. Only when I got home and found someone else livin’ in that little apartment did I realize that the last letter I’d gotten from June had been written months earlier.”