Two Stories
Hey.
I'm not really sure how these short stories (~1,950 and ~1,870 words, respectively) will be received by the PSO boards, but I figured I'd give it a go anyway. What's the worst that could happen?
I've been reading a lot of J.D. Salinger's short stories recently and wanted to try doing a small body of work in a style roughly similar to his. There are some very direct references to Franny and Zooey as well as as few others, and the second piece is very roughly based on the lyrics of one of the songs from dredg's beautiful new album, "The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion." Happy reading--comments appreciated!
"Higher Education"
Spoiler!
"Higher Education"
By Jack Lawrence
When the hospital's sliding double doors spread apart to announce the entrance of Ramona Glass, all six of the lobby's occupants turned their gazes from their shoes to various other things in the room. She stood there for a few seconds, halfway in and halfway out, and looked from one profile to another, searching for a moment's eye contact without finding it. A cool November gust carried a stray maple leaf in from the afternoon and sent it tumbling past her ankles, where it swished over the tiled floor, turned a few cartwheels, and then fell still, pale side against the floor. Ramona took a quick inward step to let the doors close behind her, and an immediate, artificial hush fell over the lobby. Finally someone, a scruffy, tired looking man with his elbows resting on his knees and his fingers laced between them, looked up.
Ramona walked to an empty seat, which happened to be just two removed from the one occupied by the man, and sat. She used her good hand to lightly sweep her bangs from her eyes and gave him a quick smile.
"Hi," he offered after a moment.
"Hello," Ramona said. She glanced at the grainy talk show host being broadcast silently from the television perched between one corner of the lobby and the ceiling, and then she looked to the front desk. "Where is the receptionist?" she asked.
The man followed her gaze and shrugged. "He left a few minutes ago. Are you badly hurt? Emergency room's right down there if it's bad."
"No. I think I only broke a pinkie," Ramona said with a glum half smile. She saw him glance at her right hand, which was cupped protectively in her left, but she did not look at it herself.
"How'dja do that?" he asked.
"I fell out of a tree."
The man seemed to consider this for a moment, and Ramona thought she could almost see the gears of his mind turning as he weighed the potential truthfulness of this explanation against her tumbling brunette hair, shin-length skirt (which bore an almost garishly orange print of birds in flight), and thick woolen sweater.
"I was on the way down," she clarified.
"Always harder coming down than going up," the man agreed with a hint of a sarcastic smile in his voice.
"What are you in for?" Ramona asked, scooting one seat closer.
"Alcohol poisoning."
He looked away and then glanced back a few seconds later to clarify. "My son, I mean. He's 17."
"Oh," Ramona said. For a minute, neither she nor the man spoke. Ramona's eyes fell to her funnily bent pinkie and its middle digit, which was slowly being consumed by a deep murky blue, and then she turned her attention to her boots. She had loved those boots. They were heavy and black with a lusty gleam on the top and with thick treads underneath that were more than good enough to play kickball on, but at the moment she was feeling a little nonplussed with them. It had been thanks to her boots, after all, that she had clumsily missed the crotch of the tree, lost her grip, and fallen almost ten feet to the ground.
"I haven't had the wind knocked out of me since I was a kid, you know?" she said suddenly.
"What?"
"When I fell, I mean. I landed on my side, with my hand under me. I didn't even know about my finger until I caught my breath."
"Are you a... big tree climber?" he asked, pausing cautiously near the middle of his question.
"I try to be. It's hard—I mean, ha, it's hard, as you can see," she said with a conceding smile and a quick gesture toward her injured hand. "I mean sometimes it's hard to climb a tree. To be a tree climber. It doesn't seem like it would be a difficult hobby to have, but people look funny at you if you're an adult and you still climb trees. They look at you like you're doing something you shouldn't be doing."
The man nodded vacantly and looked away for a moment. "What brought on the urge today?" he asked.
"It—" Ramona began, just a bit too loudly, and stopped. She restarted her sentence at a more passive volume. "It's midterms," she admitted. "I'm supposed to have an exam at two-thirty. That's—" She paused to lift the cuff of her right sleeve with her left index finger so she could peer at her watch. "That's in half an hour," she sighed. "I live right on the edge of the campus, and there's a tree I can see from my window that I've always wanted to—you know, to climb—so I went out there this afternoon to try to get some, I don't know, some Zen flowing, or something. Now I'm going to miss my exam."
"You always wear your watch on the other wrist like that?" the man asked.
"What?"
"You've got your watch on your right wrist."
"I'm left handed."
"So?"
Looking slightly taken aback, Ramona mumbled, "Like I said."
A nurse appeared from the hallway with a clipboard raised to approximate chest level and called out, "Mr. Semlak?"
The man stood up.
"Your son is awake," she said with a promising smile.
"Hey," the man, revealed to be a Mr. Semlak, said as he stood and turned toward Ramona. "You said you live by the university?"
"Yeah."
"Did you walk here?"
"Yes."
"Do you want a ride back to campus? After I get my kid sorted."
"Oh, that would be amazing," Ramona said gratefully. "If I can get my finger splinted quickly or whatever it is they do, yeah. That would be awesome. Thank you."
"I'll find you," the man said, and then left with the nurse.
Ramona sat back in her chair and turned her head to look out the glass doors. An ambulance appeared at the end of the hospital's long driveway, lazily turned left, and was soon lost among the traffic, anonymous without its siren. She thought for a second of a drone exiting the hive on some mysterious and unofficial errand. The surface of the lake gleamed silently against the horizon.
The doors suddenly hummed and spread apart to accommodate a rather delicate young man of perhaps twenty. His hair fell around his face in reaching finger shapes and his shirt hung wetly from his shoulders. He looked around at each face in turn before settling on Ramona's. He seemed cooly surprised. After staring for only a moment, he seemed to remember himself and walked to a seat near hers.
"Professor Glass?"
She looked up and said "Hello" as the boy sat down.
"I almost didn't recognize you. Are you okay?" he asked with guarded concern.
"Will be. I fell out of a tree," Ramona said wryly, holding up her right hand so he could see the pinkie. The boy cringed empathetically and whistled low.
"Broke my glasses, too," Ramona added.
"Yeah, you look really different without them."
"So what brings you to the hospital on this fine Monday afternoon?" she asked.
The boy exhaled dramatically and asked, "Really?"
"I told you mine," Ramona insisted.
"Alright," he agreed, straightening up a bit and lifting his hands, palms out, in a gesture of warding. "Now, hear me out before you decide I'm a weirdo."
"Of course."
"It's really not that bad."
"I believe you."
He chewed his lower lip for a brief moment as he contemplated how best to proceed, and before doing so he shot a series of suspicious glances at a few of the other people seated in the lobby. At last he whispered, "My sister killed herself when I was ten. She, like, drove her car off a bridge, into a river."
Ramona uttered a small surprised noise, but without pause, the boy continued his story.
"I always wondered why she did it. I mean I wondered what could make someone do anything like that. Like, was she sad, or pissed off at somebody, or what? And sometimes I get this weird feeling like maybe she didn't have any reason to do it at all. She did it just to do it, you know? Just to see what it would be like. So I bought this old bike from some frat guys that were having a garage sale yesterday, and a few minutes ago, I... uh, I rode it off the pier. You know, the one that goes out over the lake."
"You rode it off? Isn't that like a fifteen foot drop?"
"I dunno," he said with a careless shrug. "For some reason I just... wanted to do it. Because it's something no one does, you know? People don't just kill themselves, just like that. But she did. I wanted to know what that would feel like. I landed on something, I think, because I got the wind knocked out of me. The handlebars probably rammed me in the chest or something. I mean I think I only blacked out for a second, but there were definitely a few gulps of water. And it was right as I realized that something was wrong, right when I landed, that I suddenly felt like I knew how it must have felt. To do it without a reason, just to experience it. And then to feel that huge jolt of regret right after the freefall, and to only have a second to wonder if you were wrong. Anyway, I thought I'd broken some ribs or something and you can practically see the hospital from the pier, so I started walking. But actually... I think I'm okay now."
Ramona blinked. Tree climber, she thought.
"Man, I haven't had the breath knocked out of me in so long. It's so surprising, you know? I really thought that was gonna be the end."
For a few seconds they simply sat, neither one looking at the other.
"There was an exam today, wasn't there?" the boy said suddenly.
"Yep," Ramona agreed. "Was."
"What, did you cancel it?"
"I'm canceling it right now."
"You can do that?"
Ramona lifted her chin nobly and produced a dramatic snap of her fingers.
"Well, I dunno, I just... I didn't know you could just cancel an exam, just like that."
She shrugged. "I don't know. I got the wind knocked out of me today too. First time in probably fifteen years. I'd call that cause to celebrate."
"You did?" he asked hopefully. Ramona nodded once, a deliberate down-up motion. "Broke my first pair of glasses, too."
"Yeah, you said that."
"Excuse me," a man interrupted, entering from the hallway for the first time since Ramona had been there. "Have either of you been helped?"
"Kind of," Ramona said after a beat. "But not with this," she added, holding up her bent finger.
"Ah," the nurse hissed through his teeth. "Yeah, we'd better get that splinted."
"See you in class," she said cordially to the boy, and stood up to follow the nurse.
"Hey, Professor Glass?" the boy said, rising with her.
"Hmm?"
He paused for a moment. "See you in class," he echoed, and then turned and left through the sliding doors.
Ramona, still cradling her hand, joined the nurse and began to walk with him down the hallway. When they were far enough out of the lobby's earshot, the nurse asked, "Did I hear him call you 'Professor'?"
"Yep."
"You teach at the university?"
"That's right."
"Wow," the nurse marveled. "I thought you were a student."
"Oh, believe me," she replied, "I am."
"Distance"
Spoiler!
"Distance"
By Jack Lawrence
"Marion," said Arthur Glass to his wife as he opened the back door, stepping in from the patio with his left hand full of mail and his house keys jangling from his right.
His wife, Marion, did not reply. She was busy with the dishes, and moreover, the sound of the roaring faucet clouded her already poor hearing so effectively that she had might as well be in another world when the water was running. She looked up intuitively, perhaps having felt the door opening behind her, and gave her husband a thin, apathetic smile.
"Marion, turn off that damn sink for a second," Arthur barked. He set the mail down on the kitchen table and carefully lowered himself into a wooden chair. Marion turned the faucet off and asked, "What?"
"I said turn off the water."
"What do you need, Arthur?" she demanded. "I'm doing the dishes."
"I know you're doing the damn dishes," he replied. "I brought the mail in."
Marion hesitated for a moment and then said, "Thank you." As she turned and reached for the faucet, Arthur stopped her by holding up a small, smudged, lightly wrinkled envelope that looked as though it may have at some point survived an attempted folding.
"We got a letter from our daughter," he said. His eyes twinkled faintly, wearily, but surely; he still had the eyes of a much younger man. Marion knew his eyes always betrayed his excitement, and she had learned to watch them. She slowly turned around and pressed her palms against the edge of the sink.
"From Ramona?" she asked finally.
"Ramona would be our daughter, yes."
"There's no need for that, Arthur."
"For what?"
"That. You know what I'm talking about. That voice."
"My apologies, dear."
Marion sighed. "A letter. She couldn't just call, like a normal person. What did she say?"
"I haven't read it yet. Does it look like I've read it?"
"Arthur," she said, rolling her eyes and snatching a nearby hand towel with the tips of her fingers. She retrieved a glass from the clean side in a similar fashion and began to dry it.
"I thought we could open it together," he said from the table.
"That's fine. We'll do that."
"Well, I wouldn't want to interrupt your damn dishes."
"You aren't interrupting anything," Marion snapped. Her back was turned. "Go ahead and open it."
Arthur put the letter down gently on the top of the stack and began to unfold the newspaper. He leaned back a bit in the chair, producing a series of sharp wooden creaks, and spread a random section of the paper open in front of him.
"Oh, you're impossible," Marion said.
"Don't you know that child loves you?" Arthur asked.
"I know she loves you," Marion corrected, still busying herself with the dishes. To her credit, she had not turned the water back on.
"I remember when we were bright eyed, bushy tailed thirty-somethings," Arthur said in his best reminiscent voice.
"Oh, not this," Marion groaned.
"And we met this beautiful little girl with white-blond hair and a pointed nose named Ramona. And we decided that she was the one, and we signed the papers and she came to live with us. Do you remember that?"
"She has brown hair, Arthur. It's black almost," Marion said.
"No, my love, her hair was as pale as the sun until she was about eight or nine. I can't believe you wouldn't remember that."
"Oh—oh."
"See, you do remember. There's a picture of her somewhere around here where she's standing in front of those garbage bags we had one year, the orange and black ones that looked like oversized jack-o-lanterns when you filled them up with leaves. She's got a huge grin on her face and her cast raised all triumphantly up in the air, and her hair was as blond as can be."
"I remember that picture, Arthur."
"I know you do," he said, absentmindedly sliding the letter across the table with two fingers into a bright splotch of sunlight pouring in through the eastern window.
"She was always such an odd child," Marion remarked quietly.
"Well, I'm sure if she could go back in time and rewire her brain to mimic that of a social butterfly, she would happily do it for you."
"Oh, please," Marion said snippily as she put down the glass she'd been working on and took another from the sink. "She didn't even go to her prom, Arthur. Remember that? Instead she sat at home, in the attic, plucking away at that silly typewriter of hers."
" 'Plucking away.' And you say I'm impossible. She was writing a story, Marion. Don't you have any respect for her at all?"
Marion sighed theatrically and put the still-dripping glass back in the sink. "Of course I do. Why do you make me out to be this ghoul when it comes to her, Arthur?"
"And it was published," Arthur added, ignoring her question. "Don't you still have the copy she gave you?"
"I don't care if the president of the United States put his personal stamp of approval on it." She crossed the kitchen and sat down across from her husband. "A girl's prom is a major milestone in her life," Marion declared, snatching the envelope from the pool of sunlight Arthur had placed it in. She held it up to her face, squinted, and put it back down again.
"I wonder if they mentioned that when they handed her Doctorate to her," Arthur mused, lightly scratching his chin.
"Oh, shut up."
"I'm serious, Marion," Arthur said, rising stiffly to his feet and taking the envelope. He walked to the window and spread the drapes, widening the stream of light until it engulfed nearly the whole table. He scratched the white stubble on his cheek and turned to his wife, who was gazing disapprovingly at him and drumming her fingers on the table.
"You're serious?"
"I'm serious. Do you really think success is measured in proms attended?"
"No, Arthur, I do not. But I think it would have been nice if she had shown even a passing interest in finding a nice boyfriend when she was that age."
"Well, I guess mothers and fathers will always see differently on that particular issue," Arthur laughed, eyes once again turned to the world on the other side of the window.
"She'll probably never get married, you know."
"That's fine by me."
"That means no grandchildren."
"You don't have to be married to get pregnant, Marion."
Marion rolled her eyes and sighed exhaustedly. She rose from the table and walked to the sink, where she at last turned the faucet back on. Arthur afforded her a few sideways glances, but he knew enough to recognize the end of a conversation when he saw it. He looked down at the letter in his hands, lightly bent it forward and backward, and then tucked it into his jacket pocket.
Then he smiled, turned, and left through the patio door.
Though he had already read it twice before coming into the kitchen that morning, Arthur carefully slipped the letter from its envelope, unfolded the three leaves of college ruled notebook paper, each still bearing one ragged edge where it had been attached to the wire spiral, and started again from the first line of his daughter's delicate, neatly spaced handwriting.
Dear Dad and Mom, the letter began.
Today is another cloudless November day that is exactly like my imagined version of the morning we all came home together for the first time. In my mind's eye I can see us walking shoulder to shoulder in a line, like British soldiers, with me in the center because I'm littlest, and each of you is holding one of my hands. I'm short so I have to reach, and I look like a letter Y. Mom is young and happy and dad is quietly excited as he always is. On the porch I picture a stuffed scarecrow sitting in a swing I know we never owned.
Today I fell out of a tree and broke my pinkie finger in two places. My right pinkie, luckily. That's right, Mom, I'm still falling out of trees. Just like when I was a little goil, still blond and scared, and I fell out of the apple tree in our yard and broke my arm. I'll never forget the look on Dad's face when he called you from the hospital. I was so afraid that the biggest trouble of my entire life had just found me and there would be no coming back, because the pain in my arm would be nothing next to the pain of whatever my impending punishment was to be. But instead you took me out for dinner because I had survived. Because I was still here and would live to fall another day. Somehow you knew that this was the ultimate and somehow only conceivable gesture of unconditional love. I still remember.
I guess I could have just called, but I've simply never been a phone. (And that sentence didn't come out exactly right but I have never been an eraser, either.) Anyway, I decided to write this down because when I was sitting in the hospital waiting to get my hand patched up, I had some very odd conversations and I realized how much I wished I had been able to scribble down all those words before they were lost. Have you ever felt that way? If not, that's alright. I'm used to having silly ideas that don't perfectly translate to anyone else. But if you're still reading, then I think you'll agree that there's some kind of weirdo magic that happens when you read a letter. It's like a wormhole through time. When (if) you unfold it years from now, you're transported right back to where you were the first time you read it. I thought I could at least give you that, since I've been notoriously sketchy about providing a lot of other things daughters are traditionally charged with providing. I thought maybe you'd like a time wormhole so you could revisit Past Ramona if you ever should see fit. What a crazy bunch of ideas a broken finger can give you, ha ha.
When I get a break from crushing my students with the weight of the academic world, could I come home for a few days? I've been thinking a lot recently about unconditional love, that old standby, and how very much of it I've received since my young, scared, blond days. I miss you, Mom, Dad. Maybe you're tired of the distance I've allowed to fall between us lately, and that would be understandable, but I'm trying to catch up. Please wait for me. I am not very far behind.
Love, R.
Arthur closed the letter for the third time and began to tuck it back into its envelope, but before he could finish, he paused and slid it back out. He simply held it as he stared out over his patio into the woods beyond and the sky above. It would be a long time before he found a reason to go back inside.
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