CHANGES OF HEART
Five Short Stories of Change that Alter Lives for Better or Worse
By
Patricia Ryan
C. Copyright, Patricia Ryan, New York City, 2013
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Description:
These short stories deal with what people do when change enters their lives.
Written clearly and concisely, the stories are tragic, ironic, touching and hopeful.
Whether it’s about love, loneliness, or the yearning for recognition, in each story a decision must be made to give up, or keep going, in the face of new information.
CONTENTS
GRAFFITTI
CHANGE OF HEART
THE REAL PARABLE OF THE TALENTS
ALL OUR LOVE
A FULL DAY
GRAFFITTI
When the late night TV host made the surprising announcement that they wanted to do a show with the unknown persons who were writing all over subway trains, walls, buildings, and so on, Ralphie didn’t hear it at first.
He always had this buzzing in his head as if the world were totally silent and he was making his own noise. It was as if he were part of those experiments on college kids where not a sound is heard until the sounds of their own bodies and minds became private crickets around their ears.
He always had a feeling that there was smoked Plexiglas in front of everyone he talked to, and when he listened it always seemed as if he were at a drive-in bank window where, by the time the voice came from the mouth behind the protective glass, through the wire speaker, and was amplified out into his face, this voice seemed dubbed onto pictures of the people who were supposedly talking to him. But who, in the split second between words spoken and words received, had already moved into the next action, the next words, and the dubbing was out of sync.
Because of this, he was always responding seconds too late to what was really happening. It made him feel dumb.
Ralphie had first started putting his name on subways cars one day on his way to school, when a train he didn’t want roared into his station and amplified his own buzzing to the point where he had to recognize the silver giant’s presence.
It stood there, like an overpowering bulkhead at his face, for what seemed forever. It didn’t go forward or out of the way so his train could come in. It wasn’t explained. It just sat there, provocative, defiant, seductively offering its bare silvery shell with a pugnacious air.
Ralphie wanted to respond to this provocation by pushing it, hitting it, somehow to tame it, conquer it, violate it.
Join it.
So from his backpack he took out the black marker needed for art class, the only class he cared about, then stepped to the edge of the platform, nose to shiny nose with the train, and wrote in a doodling hand and size his name “Ralphie,” and not having anything else about himself that he could say, put the next most familiar thing to him after it, his street number: Ralphie 129.
The train shook itself back to life immediately after he was finished, almost as if he had told it, “ I’ve used you, now go,” and it took his mark slowly forward, and then, in a frenzy, throughout the city.
He loved it.
He became obsessed with this joining of himself to parts beyond him. If he had known about such things, he would have known it was like riding a horse for the first time, the coming together with an outside force that moved you past your immediate environment, and which also had a life of its own. And while you had some control over it, it was a tenuous cooperation in surprises and expansion.
Now he wanted part of him to ride all the time, at a large gallop and flowing with the wind. Or a “Ralphie 129” on every car, so when the train started up his mark flashed like slowly revolving strobe lights, or a leisurely canter.
After a while, lots of people began to notice. Some indifferently, some angrily, and some with a curiosity that silently asked, “Who the hell is Ralphie 129?” Some thought it was one of those ads for a movie that is painted on city streets and makes you wonder what it means until they are ready to tell you.
Apparently the rest of the city’s young caught on and wanted to be wondered about too.
We know the rest.
Ralphie at first was scared, but delighted by the TV announcement since he thought recognition and acceptance would be his, at last. But was it a trick? It was against the law to “deface public property.”
De-face?
For him it was just the opposite. It un-de-faced his face. Still, nobody seemed happy about it, so he was cautious.
But just before the show went to commercials, he thought he heard them say that everybody was interested in this “new phenomenon,” and that if whoever was responsible would agree to be interviewed, the producers would see that “the artist’s” First Amendment rights would be protected.
The artist! A thrill ran through him. This was the same thrill as when he first put his name on the silvery flank and watched it carried like his hand touching all the new and intimate parts of the city.
He knew in spite of some potential for trouble, it was important for him to go. More than that, it was irresistible.
================
The late night TV program, which had for him taken on the gossamer haze of a half-awake dream, was put together in the hard lines of daylight. The feeling he always got when he watched these convivial, chatty shows, of being permitted to visit a pleasant, private home usually denied him, could not be connected with the grim warehouse in which he found the TV studio. At first, he thought he was lost. But soon he saw the signs and followed them to the appropriate office.
He was not prepared for what he found.
It looked like the stage door of a rock star. Young, sullen faces of New York’s new “graffiti-ists” were everywhere. Faces of disdain, of vagueness, of boredom, of confusion. The producers of the TV show were not prepared either. When Ralphie watched TV, the feeling he always got, that people just slid effortlessly around each other, was now replaced by the producers’ staccato of friction, resentment and confusion. They were caught at something they wanted to handle with a minimum of effort and to which they now had to pay full and reluctant attention.
Therefore, they paid attention to no one.
Ralphie felt a surge of humiliation at being lost in the crowd again, and an embarrassment which he didn’t understand.
He had thought that he had created a unique method for himself that allowed him to participate in the city, even though the city had always wanted to refuse him. A way to become a natural, assumed part of it, the way the subway was a part of it. He thought he had solved for himself a problem that many others had not: he had not allowed himself to be buried. And he was here, at this TV show, to continue his transfusion of life through the vein he had created.
But now it was gone. Among all these others, he was buried again.
================
The platform was as it had always been. Dim, humid, enclosed. A room for lovemaking. That is, when he had been engaged in that lovemaking. When it seemed that being part of this kind of intimacy was also acknowledgement.
He stood at the edge, as he had always done. He could tell from the distant sounds what the train was doing and what it would do next. The way you could tell a person’s condition from his breathing.
From his back pack, he quickly fished for his beloved black marker, that attached member that gave and receive
d love, and held it high in the air.
He timed it like an athlete, as he always had.
And he jumped.