I'm not sure that I have a lot to say about life at the moment: things proceed apace. Payday comes and we go out, and then we're broke for a while, but so far we've been good about sticking to our budget, and the credit card has only come out for unexpected expenses like pills for kitty cats and car repair and one unexpected night of burritos after some traumatic news. So far so good. Ted's off after Tuesday, so maybe I'll have an adventure to report on later in the week.
So to provide some blogness today, I decided that I would put up a short story I wrote a couple years ago. The general advice is to never self-publish anything, because once a thing is published for free it can never then be sold for money, but I think it's pretty clear by now that I'm never going to be a professional author, so. This story went through exactly one draft, but it's a version of a story I've been rewriting for years -- or at least, part of it is. See, years ago, as a challenge to myself, I set myself the task of writing a story that includes a vision of the Virgin Mary that seems believable, or at least not hokey. I have yet to actually accomplish this, but I've gone through probably a dozen iterations, one of which provided the title for my MFA thesis, "The Virgin of South Oakland". This is the most recent iteration, which I wrote for a law school elective that was, amazingly, a creative writing class. It doesn't have a title: or rather, actually, they're all titled "The Virgin of South Oakland", though they sometimes vary from one another considerably.
Anyway, here's a short story draft of mine. In case you were interested.
***
Brian
was staring at a photo album; not the photos, the actual book, which was navy
blue and covered in fake leather and embossed with fake gold. Inside, tucked between the cellophane
and the tacky paperboard four to a page, were 89 pictures of Brian and his
little brother Ethan standing in front of dinosaurs. Three years before the Post-Gazette had published a map in
the paper showing the location of 89 out of 100 dinosaur statues that had been
designed and placed around the area, mostly in the city, for DinoMite Days, a
promotion conducted by the Carnegie Natural History Museum, which was Ethan’s
favorite place on Earth, probably.
That summer Brian had just gotten his driver’s license, and he had
driven his six-year-old brother around town and out into the suburbs and sticks
to see all the dinosaurs except for the 11 that, according to the paper, “had
not yet been placed.” They took a
picture in front of every dinosaur.
Then his mother bought this photo album for the pictures and showed it
to practically every single person at St. Rosalia’s to brag about how proud she
was that her elder son was such a good brother to her younger.
After
they’d seen all 89 dinosaurs, and the map cut out of the paper was so abused
that you couldn’t even unfold it without tearing it some more, Brian had
promised Ethan that they would go see the remaining 11 statues as soon as they
were placed. But that never
happened. Brian just never got
around to it, and then he moved out to go to school, and now he regretted it,
and it was because of the empty three pages at the back of the album that he
didn’t open it up and look at the pictures.
He
was sitting on the ugly orange couch in his living room, and his roommate Lynn
was staring at him from the worn green armchair; she was curling her toes
through the shag of the stained carpet.
The TV wasn’t on, and neither was the stereo.
“You
wanna borrow my car?” she asked him.
Two
days ago, Brian’s mother had called him sobbing and gasping and praying
Jesus. She’d gotten a call from the
school that the police were there and she had to come immediately.
Ethan,
who had never in his entire nine years hurt a fly … Like, literally, Brian
thought, he yelled at you if you tried to kill bugs in the house, you’d have to
get a damn cup and stray piece of mail to catch the things and set them free … Ethan had brought a baseball bat to
school and beaten another boy so badly that the kid was still in the
hospital. Other students who had
seen the beating happen said that Ethan had walked up behind the kid while he
was getting into his locker and swung the bat as hard as he could at the kid’s
head. There had been blood
everywhere. The other students
also said that the kid had been bullying Ethan for months, since the year
before. On the phone, Brian’s
mother had choked out, “I didn’t know, how didn’t I know?”
Now
Ethan was in his house, being watched over by their mother, not allowed to go
to school, only to church, which he didn’t want to do, and so their mother,
afraid to leave Ethan alone or with anyone else (and also, Brian thought from
the tone in her voice, afraid to be with him a little), hadn’t gone to church
either, or to work – she was using some of the zillion sick days she saved
every year at her job with the County – or left the house at all.
Brian
looked up at Lynn, who was still watching him from the worn green chair. She was chewing on the end of her
ponytail. Lynn hated riding the
bus more than anyone Brian had ever met, and so she was always offering to let
him borrow her car so he wouldn’t have to.
“Yeah,
I’ll take it.”
She
handed him the keys she’d been holding while they’d been sitting in silence and
Brian took them, flung the photo album down onto the ugly orange couch, and
went out into the cold air.
Brian
parked Lynn’s car at the end of his mother’s block, but didn’t turn the motor
off. He sat and watched the
glow-in-the-dark plastic rosary swing from the rearview mirror, feeling a lump
rise in his throat, like something trying to choke him from below and inside
himself. The rosary wasn’t ironic,
even though Lynn was 19 and got drunk at house parties and smoked cigarettes
and skipped classes and all of that.
She went to mass every Sunday in Oakland, walking up from their
apartment to St. Paul. She
reminded Brian of his mother in that way, except since his dad had died about
eight years ago, his mother went to church like, every fucking day.
Brian
had gone to mass on Christmas, and before that on Easter, and before going to
college at Pitt, just a few neighborhoods away, every Sunday at least because
that was just how it was. But then
he’d gone to school, and taken a dorm room his freshman year even though his
mother had wanted him to stay home and commute. Brian moved to Oakland, got drunk at parties, smoked cigarettes,
found a beautiful girl and lost his virginity to her. Her name was Heather, and they had started dating, and he
had told her that they were going to get married some day, and she had laughed
at him for saying this, but at the time he found that charming.
Brian
watched the plastic crucifix swing in front of Lynn’s dashboard. “This is my fault, probably,” he said
out loud to the empty old car.
He
had met Lynn very shortly before beautiful Heather had left him. It had been an unusually hot day at the
beginning of May, and he and Heather were walking through South Oakland with a
couple of other people, laughing and trying to plan how to get some alcohol and
also on a quest to find the Virgin of South Oakland. Brian had been the one to suggest the afternoon diversion,
having heard of the Virgin from his mother. It was a shrine set up in someone’s backyard where
supposedly some steelworker or someone had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary and
then a magical spring had come out of the ground to water the flowers some
little old Catholic ladies in the neighborhood planted or something and now it
was some kind of neighborhood to-do.
They
found it at the end of a dead-end street where rows
of rundown houses hung onto the edge of the small cliff that overlooked the
Parkway. Sweaty and squinting in
the sun, the group trotted down an alley so steep that the bricks that made it
stuck out of the ground like upside down steps. There was a small sign at the top of the alley, rusted, that
directed you to the shrine. To
reach it, they had to go through someone’s backyard.
They
followed a narrow and sloping path through a corridor of tea rose bushes that
were the warm-up for rows of wooden crosses about seven feet tall, each a
Station of the Cross. As the
garden wound deeper down the cliff – not a backyard anymore so much as a sort
of clearing around a rock face – there was a brick shrine with a statue of the
Virgin Mary and a glassed-in newspaper article explaining the origin and
maintenance of the site. Then further
along there was a second shrine, with a kneeler, and more statues of the
Virgin, the clamshell kind Brian’s mother had in her yard, and an explosion of
cloth flowers in all the brighter-than-nature colors cloth flowers come in. Candles in red vases flickered faintly
in the midday sun. Tucked into the
rock face were statues of other saints, showing various wear, either gleaming
plastic or worn plaster, including several pieces of an ancient nativity set, small
sheep tucked into niches in the exposed shale.
At
the bottom of the clearing was the grand finale, a shallow spring that trickled
out of the shale and pooled in a cool shadow. Someone had placed a few bricks around it to allow people
more stable footing.
Heather
had begun to make fun of how tacky everything looked to her, and another one of
Brian’s friends lit a cigarette.
But then everyone noticed that there was someone else there, a plain
looking young woman in a Pitt t-shirt, who gave them all the side eye and said
nothing. Brian’s face burned with
embarrassment.
“Do
you live here?” he’d asked her.
“No.”
Heather
turned to someone else and snickered, but the other young woman didn’t look at
her. She looked at Brian.
“Do
you need healed?” She asked flatly
and gestured at the little black pool.
“No. I’m sorry.” He turned to everyone
else. “Let’s go.”
The
next week, following a final exam, he had seen the plain girl from the grotto
smoking a cigarette in front of the student union. He went up to her and apologized and they talked. She was staying in Oakland over the
summer, and so was he, rather than moving home when the dorms closed. He had bargained to crash on a friend’s
couch, but then he ended up kind of hating that guy, and everyone else he had
hung out with while dating Heather, before she cut off their relationship as
soon as her finals were over. So
at the beginning of the fall he moved in with Lynn, who was his friend now.
Brian
turned off the car. The cold February
air seeped in immediately without the heater on. He wondered if Lynn had a secret crush on him; he didn’t
think so. Was he a dick to not
want to date her because she was plain and sort of strange?
Probably. I’m probably a dick, he thought.
Up
the street, his mother’s house was just like always, with the green awning over
the porch and the aluminum siding and the Virgin on the half shell in the front
yard. He used his own key and just
went in.
“Brian!”
His
mother jumped up out of her seat and hugged him and immediately started
crying. When she pulled away from
him she crossed herself and said, “You don’t come home enough.”
“You’re
a cliché, Mom,” he said to her, the lump in his throat making the words come
out thin and strained. She pursed
her lips and shook her head.
“Ethan’s
in the kitchen, he’s finishing lunch.”
Brian
went through the little living room, with its wooden-footed couch and chair set
and the big TV turned to the Food Network and the cross-stitched pillows his
mom made herself. He edged around
the big table they almost never used in the dining room and found his brother
at the little three-seat table in the kitchen, his skin sort of sallow-looking
against the yellow wallpaper in the overhead light.
Ethan
was thin and small for his age; he needed a haircut. There were circles under his eyes. Brian saw that he had basically finished his grilled
ham-and-cheese sandwich and glass of milk. He remembered eating infinity of those at this table, Isaly’s
chipped ham with a slice of muenster cheese on “D’Italiano” white bread,
toasted in a skillet with butter.
Ethan
looked up at him. “Hey.” When was the last time he’d seen
him? Christmas? Christ, you live like, ten feet away,
Brian chastised himself.
Brian
sat down across from him. “What
happened?”
Ethan
turned his head away and studied the little yellow flowers in the wallpaper.
“He
made fun of me.” Brian felt like
this boy in front of him wasn’t his brother at all. His brother was a smart kid, and cheerful, and fun, someone
Brian was proud of. This kid was
someone else who just looked like him, like in a movie, an uncanny replacement.
“Did
he hit you?” Brian twisted his
fingers together under the table, stared at his brother’s abandoned sandwich
crusts.
“No. He pushed me sometimes. Not really.”
The
lump was growing. Brian felt like
he couldn’t breathe. Silence hung
around them, and then he asked, “What did he call you?”
Ethan
continued to stare at the wall.
“He said I was like a girl, that I was weak, and a nerd. He called me a faggot all the time.” This last he choked out softly.
Brian
flinched. He thought back to his
own high school years at St. Rosalia’s, how he and his friends would call
things “gay” when they meant that they were “lame,” and how now that he’d been
to school and learned about equal rights and stuff he knew that was wrong to
do. “There’s
nothing wrong with being gay,” Brian said reflexively to Ethan.
“I’m
not gay!” Ethan screeched, slamming his little fist onto the wood veneer
tabletop, rattling his empty milk glass and finally looking at his older
brother.
Brian
flinched again and caught his breath, embarrassed by Ethan’s wail. He waited, and looked into his own lap
and said, “Alright, I’m just saying.”
Brian
didn’t have much more to say to the uncanny little boy sitting across from him,
who didn’t seem at all like his brother Ethan.
Out
in the living room, Brian sat on the edge of a chair to talk to his mom, who
had put the TV on mute. Silently
next to him, a fat woman was cheerfully forming dough into lumps and putting
them on a cookie sheet.
“So
what’s gonna happen to him?”
His
mother teared up again and fumbled with her gold chains. “I don’t know. The lawyer says that it’s not
self-defense because the boy wasn’t doing anything to him when he … when he hit
him. But the kids all said the boy
was awful to him, just awful, all the time! Why didn’t the teachers do something?” she demanded, raising
her voice. “Why didn’t he tell me
what was going on?”
Brian
didn’t answer and in the silence heard Ethan’s chair scrape the floor in the
kitchen. The boy, staring at his
feet, hurried through the dining room and the living room and ran up the
stairs; a door slammed.
“It’s
not his fault,” Brian’s mother said, lowering her voice again. “The poor boy didn’t know what else to
do, being tortured like that every day.”
She didn’t look at Brian when she said this. She’s trying to convince herself, not me, he thought.
“But
didn’t he hurt that kid really bad?”
Silence. To his right, the cheerful fat woman on
the TV mutely whipped up icing for her dough balls.
“He’s
still in the hospital,” his mother said.
“I don’t know, I guess he did.
I’m sure he didn’t mean to.
You know Ethan – he’s a good boy.”
He
always had been, better than Brian, who had been a reluctant student and
“defiant,” as his teachers had always put it. Ethan had never known their father, who died in a car
accident when Ethan was just a baby.
He just grew up happy with his mom and his older brother and didn’t know
there was anything to miss.
“I
don’t know why he didn’t tell me,” Brian’s mother said again, staring out the
front window. “You should come
around more, Brian, he needs a boy to talk to. You’re supposed to be the man of this house.”
Brian
said nothing, just stared at the woman on TV with her pastries. After an excruciating minute he stood
up and said, “I love you, Mom.
I’ll come back later this week.”
Instead of going back to the apartment, Brian drove around the
city, because he was ashamed for Lynn to know how little time he’d spent with
his mom and his brother. He drove
all over, crossed all three rivers, got lost, got stuck in rush hour traffic,
drained Lynn’s tank of gas and refilled it. He got back to Oakland around 8 o’clock at night.
Instead
of going back to his apartment, though, he drove to the end of the neighborhood
and parked Lynn’s car at the top of the steep alley that led to the grotto
where he had first met her. The
plastic Jesus had been swinging in front of him all afternoon at the end of her
rosary, and Brian thought that maybe it was a sign or something.
He
walked down the dark alley carefully. In front of him a big tomcat came out
from under a car and watched him with an unconcerned gaze, and Brian moved into
the middle of the brick lane rather than get in his way.
“Sorry
to bother you,” he said, holding up a hand to the big orange cat, who’s eyes
followed him sanguinely as he passed.
The
metal gate’s lock was cold in his hand and there wasn’t a lot of light in the
garden – just a very bright porch light left on by the last house’s owners. The rose bushes were bare; the crosses
were still there, lined up like skinny soldiers. Brian saw two candles guttering in their red vases as he
made his way over the frozen ground.
Who lit them? Who came here
everyday to light these things?
Who were they lit for?
Brian
looked up at the saints in their nooks; they looked cold, and strangely
embarrassed.
“It’s
my fault,” Brian told them, meaning that: he was a dick for not wanting to date
Lynn, and for being relieved that he didn’t live with his mother anymore, and
relieved that he’d didn’t go to church anymore; he had abandoned his brother,
who had turned into some kind of crazed murderer or something, after being such
a happy little boy; he had disappointed his father, who was dead and couldn’t
even realize it; he had just generally been an average and unremarkable little
shit, like you might have expected if you’d known him all his life.
Brian
looked down towards the spring, almost invisible in the darkness. His mom believed in all of this and so
did Lynn – did it work? Was it
just a few drops of water and you were fixed? His breathing was heavy and his chest hurt – maybe he was
having a heart attack. Maybe he
would die young, like his dad, in some stranger’s backyard.
He
started down towards the little pool of water, but then slipped on the bricks
surrounding it, icy in the cold.
He fell and slid the rest of the way, splashing into the pool and
cutting his hand on the sharp shale rocks behind it when he tried to stop his
fall. His chest felt as though it were being bound in rubber under
his soaking t-shirt, exposed beneath his unzipped jacket. He hauled himself out of the little
indenture in the rock, sitting hard on the ground and putting his back against
the uneven slate hill. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit!” He was crying
now. He closed his eyes.
Brian’s
mind drifted along on the sound of the traffic passing on the Parkway. His inner eye pictured their
headlights, and then all of a sudden the face of his six-year-old brother,
waving in front of the Mr. Rogers T-rex, which had been his favorite because it
had a zip-up sweater and the puppets on its stubby little arms from the show he
loved; Brian breathed raggedly and watched this vision, rapt and suddenly
exhausted.
He
ceased to hear the traffic and more and more heard the sounds of the shrine,
the trickle of the spring, the rattle of branches, a soft creaking he didn’t
know the source of. Behind his
eyelids were completely new forms that had no corollary in his real life.
His
inner sight intensified and he began to see a figure. It was a woman, average in height and build. His mother? Lynn? No. She wore a long blue coat, or a cape,
or a robe. She had black hair, was
dark and beautiful, much more beautiful than Heather or any other women he’d
ever seen in person. The sight of
her filled the whole of Brian’s imagination. A light like the far off headlights surrounded her but never
touched her. Brian felt the lump
in his throat and the panic in his heart disappear. He breathed easily.
And
then a desperate fear climbed out of his gut and ran like spiders over the
inside of his chest, onto the skin of his arms and neck and face; adrenaline
tasted like metal in his mouth. Brian
had the sudden thought that looking longer at what he saw would ruin him in
some way forever. He opened his
eyes and the vision passed. For a
moment he felt ashamed and cowardly.
Brian
got to his feet and climbed up the alley, so steep its bricks jutted out like
upside-down stairs. The fear had
passed and he felt calmer now. And
then he felt the sudden urge to run all the way to his apartment to tell Lynn
what he had seen. His exhaustion had
evaporated, turned to exhilaration – he felt like he could run forever in the
cold night air.
Brian
stopped in a pool of lamplight when he realized he could no longer see the woman’s
face in his mind’s eye. He could
see her figure and the light around it.
He could even see more, things he had not seen, everything, the cars on
the Parkway, with their streaking headlights; his little brother at home in his
room and his brother’s victim tucked into bed in the hospital; Pitt students,
fresh and soft in their coats and their youth; the close, warm basements with
their Christmas lights and Solo cups, comforting like old newsprint and filled
with his friends; his father, throwing a baseball towards him in the park; the
rivers, vast like seas, and the bridges that stretched over them; the
dinosaurs, multicolored, guarding their homes on corners and suddenly alive …
except for her face, Brian could see everything.
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