It's afternoon rush hour, a bit after 5:00 . The subway is packed, people standing shoulder to shoulder in the aisles. I'm one of the lucky few who are seated. A black man in faded jeans and an old army jacket stands sandwiched between the door and a throng of commuters at his back. The train stops at a station, but the doors won't open. Several minutes pass, and still no movement, of either door or train. The man leans forward, face to the window, his open mouth pressed flat against the glass, and begins to wail. A primal, primate sort of sound. A hooting, howling wordless plea for the doors to open. For a way out.

The door opens finally, and the man is gone. A few people on the train laugh nervously. I want to cry. To flee after him.

He is mentally or emotionally disturbed, no doubt. But maybe his is a sane response to a crazy situation. Maybe the rest of us are crazy. We congratulate ourselves on being more stable than that poor fellow. Why? Because we can keep our cool while jammed together like pickles in a jar? An underground pickle jar at that.

The subway does not make me feel sane. I've been riding it almost daily for three years now, but it still unnerves me. I stand at the station, waiting for the train to come take me home. First I feel its chill breath, the cold breeze that precedes its arrival. Then I see the glow on the tunnel wall, the first glimmer of headlights. I hear the rumble on the tracks. The train itself emerges from the tunnel and rushes toward me, slows to a stop and opens its maw, inviting me to enter. Some part of me cries out, NO, don't do it, run away. But I swallow my howl. I board the train, find a seat, and disappear into my book.

Bio Statement: Carol Howard is the author of Dolphin Chronicles (Bantam Books, 1996). Her personal essays have been published in Tiny Lights , ( www.tiny-lights.com/EssayContest/Contest2002winers.htm#turtle ; www.tiny-lights.com/Flashinthepan/flashtwo.htm#closet ); The Philosophical Mother ( www.philosophicalmother.com/callmemama.html ) , Psychology Today , and Readers' Digest . She is a member of the Feckless WOE writing group.

 

I leave the known.

On Interstate 10, I drive through miles of creosote brush broken only by dry creek beds. I exit to Balmorhea. On the left, San Solomon Springs , once called Mescalaro, bubble into a giant, tile-lined pool. I wonder if Lozen, the warrior woman of the Apache, bent to drink here.

To the west the deep blue line of the Davis Mountains rises against the lighter sky. As I drive upwards, I imagine this passage in the 1880's. A young bride reunites with her officer dressed in Cavalry blues. She travels the same route as I do now--following the course of Limpia Creek to the fort. Eroded peaks of jagged red rock spiral above the wagon path.

The young woman sews pebbles in her skirts for weight against the West Texas wind. She worries about Apache raids, but finds freedom in this wild place. I know her from reading Army Wives on the American Frontier . Grace Fuller Maxon, wife of Lieutenant Mason Maxon.

“To those who fight for it,
life has a flavor
the protected never know.”
Anonymous ( Army Wives ... p. 111)

Brick walls now line the entrance to the Fort Davis National Historical Site. Ancient cottonwoods with the girth of five men grow near dry bed of Limpia Creek. Signs beneath the trees warn of falling branches. Their shade enticed Buffalo Soldiers, and the Mescalero before.

woolen blanket
odor of horses
dark soldier

A bugle call echoes across the empty parade ground. I expect an apparition, then realize it is a recording. Glass doors protect the small, cramped rooms of the officer's quarters. A velvet rocker, a bed covered with a faded gingham quilt, metal pots near the hearth, left as if the couple will return.

sitting room
lace covered table
her diary open

( Fort Davis , Texas 2003)

Lynn Edge lives in Tivoli , Texas . She enjoys traveling with her two Miniature Schnauzers.

Your memory slips. Filmy phantoms of your former thought fly away into the Petaluma air, and you wonder where they go? To a graveyard, where assorted bits of discarded data gather and decompose? To a more deserving head? To Starbucks, where they attach themselves to the caffeine breath of some other perky red-faced woman? To a netherworld where memory is no longer important because all that matters is the here and now? 

I don't know, so I'll quit jabbering. I feel like I'm trapped in one of those unfocused, unproductive freewrites, where the quick tapping of my computer keys outruns the few brain cells that remain in my head. Is that what diaper changing does to me?

Elizabeth Kern is a Petaluma writer and grandmother who mothers her family as well as the characters in her novel.

For Mary Kostick (1911—2000)

The phone rings three, four times. I wait for her to pick up, picturing her white Florida bungalow shuttered against the midday heat. Each time I'm afraid the phone will go on ringing, but she answers, at last, in her quivery voice. 

"Aunt Mary, it's Arlene," I say.

"Arlene?" She coughs once, then again. "Arlene, how nice of you to call, dear." Her voice sounds rusty, as though she's using it for the first time in days.

We discuss the hot, humid weather in Beverly Hills , Florida , and Closter , New Jersey . When I ask about her health, she says, as always, "Not too good, but I don't want to complain." I provide bits of news about our family, once clustered in working class neighborhoods in Brooklyn , now scattered in fourteen states. She takes it all in, remembering the birthdays of people she hasn't seen in decades.

Then I tell her about the sepia-tone picture of my parents I just found while going through my mother's crumbling photo albums. "They were visiting the Statue of Liberty. It's dated May 1940."

"That's just nine months before you were born," she says, amazing me once again.

"I know. I'd like to think I'm the twinkle in my father's eye. He's wearing a pinstriped suit with wide lapels," I continue. "My mother's wearing a broad-shouldered suit, black hat and white gloves."

"She always dressed so smartly," Aunt Mary says, "the smartest dresser of all the brothers' wives."

I compare the photo in my hand with my mother as I saw her yesterday, in mismatched polyester slumped in front of a blaring TV, smiling vacantly at me.

"And I remember how beautiful you were at all the weddings," I say, "with your black hair in an upsweep and your sleek black cocktail dresses. Red lipstick, too. You always wore bright red lipstick."

"Do you remember when Uncle Abe and I took you to the rodeo?"

As soon as I hear her words, I remember that day, more than fifty years ago, and the smell of hay and barnyard animals as we climbed the stairs in Madison Square Garden . Since they had no children of their own, they would borrow me every so often. 

"We saw Roy Rogers and Dale Evans," I say, "and then we went to the Automat. I had macaroni and cheese and a real cowboy with boots and a cowboy hat sat at our table." For a moment I am that six-year-old again, breathless with excitement, glancing shyly at the cowboy from under my wispy blonde bangs.

Aunt Mary has a coughing fit and I wait for her to catch her breath. Then she mentions my uncle, who died at eighty-one while sitting at their kitchen table. "He wasn't an easy man," she sighs and I agree. We leave the rest unsaid.

Soon I say goodbye and she thanks me over and over for calling. "It makes my whole day," she says. We both know the next time I call, she may not answer, but this, too, we leave unsaid.

Arlene L. Mandell, a former writer/editor at Good Housekeeping magazine and retired English professor, lives and writes in Santa Rosa , CA .  Her poetry, short stories and essays have appeared in several hundred print and electronic publications and seven anthologies.  For a copy of her poetry chapbook Variations on a Theme , contact her at poetessalm@aol.com .

 

Rupert thinks I'm crazy. Why would a girl be interested in learning to box? Well, he don't know everything. Just cuz he's 24 and has a job driving a forklift don't make him no expert. I don't care what he says, I'm going to sign up for that class at the community center.

Ever since Ma and Pa died four years ago in a car crash he's been bossing me around. The first few years were OK, I guess. I mean, I was just a little kid and needed him. But I'm 12 now and I'm tired of him being my lord and master.

Yesterday he told me about his plans to move us to L.A. so he and Bianca-with-the-tight-pants can move in together. So where does that leave me ? “You'll just have to learn to adapt, Eloise,” he tells me. “Just be thankful Bianca can put up with you.”

Something boils up inside me when he says that. That's all I need, another person bossing me around. And I don't know nobody in L.A. What about my friends, my life? Let his face learn to adapt to my fist, is what I say.

I found this itty bitty garter snake down by the river a few days ago. When I bent down to look at her (I like to think it was a her), she got all wound up and started striking at me over and over. I wasn't anywhere near enough for her to get me.

It made me laugh, her being so small and so fearless. If I wanted to hurt her, there's nothing she could do about it. But I kinda felt sorry for her too. So I put my hand down and let her strike my knuckle a few times.

I could hardly feel a thing as she bit me over and over with those tiny teeth. But you know, when I left that little snake I was smiling. I think I helped her feel better about herself.

Glenn McCrea, Santa Rosa , CA

The old sign, approximately 30 inches square, sits at the back of my closet, brought out now and then to show an interested person.

I carried the sign all over Chicago during 1966-68 when I marched with Jesse Jackson for Operation Breadbasket. The sign implores people not to buy at the A&P grocery chain, which we picketed because of their discriminatory policies in hiring minorities.

There were quite a few white people like me in the movement. Those who survived the taunts of both white neighbors and black people who didn't particularly love us, stayed through thick or thin. I was one of those. I believed in what we were doing with all my heart.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Chicago during the summer of 1967, and a huge march was formed. I was elated to be with Dr. King, I wanted him to achieve his goal of equality for all people, and I joined the march with my soul on fire.

I remember the terrible humid heat, the dust and the thirst. I held my sign aloft proudly, though my arms ached and ached. The sign already had splotchy tan stains on it where hot coffee had been thrown at me in a previous march.

I moved toward the middle of the row of marchers, as it was safer than the edges, where overhanging tree limbs held hostile youths with rocks to throw down on our heads. Seasoned marchers wore hardhats, but my head was bare.

Then it hit. The missile had been thrown from the right-hand side, from a row of hecklers who were all wearing caps that said “Veterans of Foreign Wars”. What hit my cheek was a grapefruit rind. My cheek swelled immediately, and because the cheekbone and eye had also been hit, my right eye blackened also. Later at home, my husband said my cheek looked as if all my teeth had been pulled on that side.

I continued till the end of the march and we disbanded. I could not see Dr. King because of the crowd, but he used a loudspeaker to thank us all, and to tell us he would be back again next year for an even bigger march.

I have never before or since felt my humanity as at that moment. I felt my divinity, too. I felt my oneness with all the people around me, and I knew that I was living a moment that fulfilled my highest purpose.

I continued to march and work for Dr. King's goals until April of 1968. That was when Dr. King was assassinated. He never made it back to Chicago for that planned grand march.

I was just one of the Whites in the crowd of marchers during that historic time. I can still feel the heat and dust, and smell the sweat of all who labored for justice that day.

 

Anne E. Silber lives in Colorado Springs , Colorado . She has published a Young Adult novella, numerous articles, and is working on an autobiography and a collection of short stories.

www.annesilber.net

 

“The first cut is the deepest

baby, I know the first cut is the deepest.”

Cat Stevens

When my sister was 17, I remember her coming home from a dance late winter's night. I can see her throwing the coveted maxi coat on the floor and running up to her room. Only after trying the coat on, did I make my way up the staircase to sit silently outside her bedroom door. Inside, I could hear the muffled sounds and breaths of the pain of first cut. I was not sure of what I should feel worse about-- not being able to understand and make her feel better, or my selfish thoughts of just wanting that coat. I sat in the hall with the coat wrapped around me and listened to her tears.

30 years have passed.

I found myself amidst the holiday revelry, shopping for toys for my youngest. I am alone.

I watch the husbands and wives, girlfriends and boyfriends, lovers and lookers on my mission. I walk among them detached, so sad. Earlier that morning, I had been cut.

I do manage to enjoy a grande peppermint mint hot chocolate, so I know deep down I am not in line for Forest Lawn. Only my heart is. I think of constructing one of those giant mausoleum buildings, and placing portraits of my lost loves in there. One of those drawers certainly will not do, I could fill a granite building at this stage of my life. Filled with those red candles the dead read by.

I sip on my chocolate, and continue on. As I make my way to the toy store, I pass briefly through the women's department at Macy's. I spot it. Black. Mid-length. Small coat buttons from an Austin novel. I slip it on, and make my way to the register.

“Please charge it, and could I borrow your scissors? If it is ok I would like to wear it now.”

Kathleen Beard

Farmington , Maine

klbmaine@netscape.net

There was a day, I remember, when every cell in my body cried out for me to stay.  I did not want to go home.  I could not imagine leaving.  But it was September; time for returning. 

On the last day of the last hike of the summer, I stood outside the shelter where we had slept and looked out across the mountains.  Ridges upon ridges skipped into the distance like a fading echo, each one a softer shade of blue.  It was the mist that got to me, though.  The way it hung in the valleys all still and silent.  I was the only one awake.  I basked in the pink glow of the newly risen sun and felt the air cool against my skin.  The musky smell of the soil filled my lungs as I contemplated the prospect of streets and traffic and buildings with electricity.  I noticed that the mist floated there as though it didn't want to leave either.  Or like it was comforting someone, saying that everything would be okay.  I wanted to dive from my high perch into its soft gray gauziness. 

There is something about departure that makes your days rush forward all at once like a tide, so you feel them hard and strong.  All of the orange-red sunsets, the early morning spider webs along the trail, the granite boulder peaks where I could see into Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts, and on a clear day into Connecticut and Canada - they came to me then.   As my eyes reached out to hold on to the scene before me, I thought about the fact that mist doesn't rest on anything.  It just holds itself together through the force of its own nature.  My summer mountain days were like that, too, and I felt them floating around me. 

Maybe there is nothing more beautiful than standing on the top of a summit and feeling the immense silence that comes from the way the wind wraps itself around you.  But for me, it was the mist against the blue on that last morning.

Sindee Ernst writes from Owings Mills , Maryland . Her piece, “Touch,” appears in this column's First Flash.

There we are, playing hooky from the office, all that paper dammed and rising past flood level, overdue bills strewn across the floor like trash washed up at Mad River Beach, so no wonder we've gone off the grid for a few hours, except we haven't really, because there we are at this creekside table, Jake with his power drink and me with my nonfat decaf “Why Bother,” arguing about money and sex and upholstery—I mean, just about any couple together this long could be sitting in these molded plastic chairs and it'd be the same, so I'm feeling generic, like we've been typecast in some bad old daytime rerun, and why did God or whatever pluck me out of that wreck the summer before last anyway, because this sure as hell isn't making it worth that higher power's trouble—when I see someone in the creek, no raft or dinghy, not even an inner tube and a six-pack, but in the creek, which is real deep because of El Niño and all, and if I'm chilly sitting in this five o'clock dry blue breeze, maybe this guy's closing in on hypothermia, though I see he's got his clothes on, and I begin to think: what the . . . ? and should we be doing something, like is he in trouble, I mean, he's not yelling or sinking or anything but he just doesn't look right—and then I remember how last night on Seinfeld those slackers finally got theirs, thrown in the slammer for laughing while they watched some fat guy get robbed in backlot broad daylight, but really it's karma for nine years of every week not caring about anything except their shoes, their cell phones, and their Honey-Nut Cheerios—but me, I do care what happens to the guy in the creek, only I don't know if he's there on purpose, and if he is there on purpose, whether it's for living or dying, and I think about that bopper Lambert stopping to help change a flat and getting run over kneeling by some stranger's car in the dark, and I think about Kevorkian and wonder whose life is it anyway? and as he drifts downstream I realize it's James in the water, that guy who's always wandering up Western, and he looks like maybe he's just taking a bath, his way, a school of bait fish for a washcloth, though I hear his brother yanks him off the street once in a while, cuts his matted dirty blond and Maytags the grease from his clothes, but right now sad James is still with us, and he looks all right to me actually, like maybe, after all, he knows exactly what to do to keep himself afloat in this world, and if he does, maybe there's at least one person I don't have to worry about saving.

This flash won Bust Out Stories' * 1999 New Writers Contest . In the cracks between bread-and-butter tasks, Robin Jacobson leads freewrite groups, mostly because otherwise she'd never get a chance to write. Her new chapbook, The Exit Marked Paradise: North Bay Poems 1994-2003 is just out from True North Press ( info@truenorthpress.com ).

 

Tonight, my sleep is fitful, and even the sensation of clean sheets excites me into wakefulness. From this jumble of tossed blankets, I m nearly able to calculate the place in the shadows which opens into that other dimension. I am oppressed by the conviction that it is time to get up now, really. The moonlight conspires, like music, to stir me.

And when I do manage to doze, images of marble angels appear behind my closed eyelids. A flutter of stone wings, a wind, those beautifully sad expressions. In the obscuring darkness those grieving forms—so human—seem about to change positions.

I think about the taboo of entering a cemetery at night. In the dim, silent hours, when things are quiet here, maybe whatever lives beyond takes tentative steps through the graveyard toward us. How much progress might they make on their midnight journeys? Might they come on a night like this, when moonlight spreads a path across the sleeping city, to stand at the foot of my bed, to question or take me?

I am not frightened by this thought, but the possibility keeps me alert. In the stillness between breaths, I can almost hear the sound of stone feet loosening from stone pedestals.

Susan Bono came across this Flash in a journal dated May, 1998.