Guest Writer: Paul Beckman

Argyle Nights

“If you loved me, you would fight with me – you would at least argue with me – you wouldn’t just sit and stare,” my late wife Vanessa would say. “Don’t you care enough to argue – to raise your voice? What kind of man doesn’t have a strong point of view? Or any point of view? I’ll tell you,” she would say. “A man with no love in his soul. A man with no soul. That’s who. That’s who you are.”
Before that period of our life Vanessa would say to me, “Stop fighting with me all the time. Can’t you ever go along? Why does everything have to be a debate with you? If you loved me, really loved me, you would let me have my way once in a while instead of fighting me at every turn.”
Neither approach worked with Vanessa. I tried to change – I did change; but what good did it do? I was wrong no matter which way I turned and on August fourteenth everything began to change. Once the change began to happen it couldn’t be undone. I didn’t know it then, nor did Vanessa. On August fourteenth I began building my fence.
I was sitting in our living room on my lounger being berated by Vanessa for whatever, when off in the distance, through the living room window I saw a stack of white pickets piled high in large neat piles. As her voice droned on I visualized myself walking across the yard to the pile taking a picket and returning it to the living room. Vanessa was continuing her harangue when I came back, and just before I sat down in my lounger I looked at Vanessa, picked up a hammer that happened to be lying on the floor, and hammered in my first picket between us. And all of a sudden her voice was not quite as grating.
The next time Vanessa got on my case was in the supermarket. I walked away and found the pickets section, selected another and turned to face Vanessa. I hammered it in next to the first picket.
I had not planned it this way, but somehow I knew that once the picket fence was complete, our marriage would be over. Oddly enough, I never thought about the picket fence or visualized it unless Vanessa was bothering me. And then on a two picket day I could see the pickets in the horizon of my peripheral vision taking shape as a fence from my right. The pickets proceeded from right to left like the Kaddish. One day there were a few lonesome pickets and then they became the makings of a fence. I was fencing Vanessa out of my life or vice versa.
We had our ups and downs and at one point we went through a very rough period that brought the fence midway. This was followed by a long, quiet, loving time when no pickets were added; but make no mistake about it – I never considered removing any. These good times were just temporary – I knew.
Even though I never thought about the fence at other times, whenever I saw Vanessa, the white picket fence was between us in some stage of construction.
For a while I feared that I was turning into my brother. He was keeping a loose-leaf notebook on stupid, irritating, and annoying things that his wife did. Once the notebook was filled he planned to leave her. “A man should only have to take so much in his life,” my brother said, “and I have decided that my allotment is this loose-leaf”.
He carried with him at all times a small pocket sized spiral and each evening he would sit in his lounger with a glass of Old Overholt and transfer his daily notes into the loose-leaf. Often his wife was right in the room with him, knitting or watching TV, and if she happened to say something stupid, irritating, or annoying my brother would shake his head and add it to his list. Sometimes he only wrote a sentence and at other times he wrote pages. He often offered to let me read his loose-leaf so as to gain my sympathy for his plight, but I told him I’d wait for the end and read it as a novel.
My brother’s wife – she was stupid. She should have let him finish the book and divorce her so she could get on with a more normal life. She would sneak into his desk and add blank pages to the loose-leaf every so often. She should have been ripping them out instead.
My brother was critical and compulsive and very vindictive and I tried to relate his Loose-leaf Notebook to my White Picket Fence. I came to the conclusion that there was no association whatsoever. My brother was off the wall. And I, like his wife, was the victim.
Incredible as it may seem, my brother made no secret of his journal. He told anyone and everyone who would listen, never understanding what a bad light it shed on him. I told no one of my fence.
One day I came home late from work, bursting with good news about business, but Vanessa would hear none of it. She was irate and from the top of the stairs threw my clothes over the railing and into the hallway. With each toss a picket went up.
And that night I finished my fence.
The next day Vanessa was dead.
I moved all of my belongings into the den and guest room and did what any good Jew would do for the dead. I stayed home from work and sat Shiva – mourning for a week. I tore my shirt, didn’t shave, wore a black arm band, and covered the mirrors with sheets. I took the pillows off the chairs so I would not be comfortable and I said the Kaddish morning and evening.
The next week, a widower, I went back to work. Nothing else changed in my life except that now when I came home from work and Vanessa talked to me I didn’t have to pay any attention because she was dead. Period. Oh, Vanessa carried on for a while – even refused to make my meals and do my laundry, but I held my ground and said nothing. After all, what good does it do to argue with the dead – especially if you couldn’t argue with them when they were alive.
Vanessa came around. It took about six months but she finally realized that I was never going to speak to her again and for me she was no longer living. She went back to cooking and cleaning for the two of us. We even went to some family functions together and never spoke. Vanessa never liked me that much anyway and was probably just sore that she hadn’t thought of it first. Divorce? Don’t ask. Divorce was out of the question.
Of course the only one in my family that said anything to me at all was my brother. “Are you nuts?” he asked. “You just can’t declare someone dead and go on living with them.” “Why not?” I asked him.
My brother looked up and asked, “Do you plan to date?”
Vanessa and I had been married for eighteen years and we, like many other couples, had fallen into a regular routine. She would lay out my clothes for me every morning while I was in the bathroom and I would wear whatever she selected. Both of us agreed that her taste was superior to mine in the world of fashion. Early on in our marriage, strictly by coincidence, she had put out argyle socks for me on a day that we had made love. Argyles had become our signal and it was always Vanessa who initiated the schedule. I had not given much thought to lovemaking since her death, so finding the argyles set out one morning kind of threw me off kilter. I didn’t know how to react or what to expect.
It wasn’t just argyles and jump in the sack night. There was a ritual – even for us. A nice meal with a glass of wine and then I would pour two glasses of wine and Vanessa would bring them to our respective nightstands while I showered. She would sip half of hers and then while she showered I would sip half of mine. After we made love we would lie next to each other, bodies touching, holding hands and sip the rest of our wine and go to sleep.
I didn’t know what to expect this argyle night. At first I thought that Vanessa had put out the argyles by mistake but Vanessa doesn’t make those kind of mistakes. I came home from work and could tell by the smells when I entered the house that it was an argyle night. Brisket and potatoes air met me at the door, and for dessert Vanessa had made her apple strudel. We drank a couple of extra glasses of wine with dinner, but even that didn’t loosen my tongue enough to talk to a dead woman. I lingered longer than usual because of my uncertainty on how to end the evening.
Force of habit had me pouring two glasses of wine afterwards and I didn’t know if they were going to her room, my room, one in each or what. Vanessa, not surprisingly, took control.
She carried the glasses to my room, formerly the guest quarters, and ran my shower. I soaped with anticipation and not wanting to seem too eager I took my time in the shower. When I came out I saw only my glass of wine on the nightstand.
Vanessa was not there. I lay on the bed for quite a while sipping my half glass of wine figuring that she was showering and getting ready. I waited for her return but after a while it became apparent that she wouldn’t be coming back. I finished my wine, fell asleep and dreamt of Vanessa and the argyles.
In the morning I dressed with the clothes that Vanessa had laid out for me. For breakfast she made corned beef hash and poached eggs, my favorites, just as she always had after an ARGYLE NIGHT. And she never even looked at me as she sipped her coffee, nor said a word.

© Paul Beckman 2011

Paul Beckman is a real estate salesman, a writer, snorkeler, traveler and photographer. Sometimes his fiction writing sneaks into his real estate ads.
Some publishing credits: THE CONNECTICUT REVIEW, ONTHEBUS, SHORT STORY LIBRARY, 5 TROPE, THE SCRUFFY DOG REVIEW, FICTION WAREHOUSE, WEB DEL SOL, LONG STORY SHORT, PITTSBURGH FLASH FICTION GAZETTE, RIVERBABBLE, EXQUISITE CORPSE, COLLECTEDSTORIES.COM, and POSTCARD SHORTS.

Guest Poet: Hal O'Leary

Happiness

Since time began
The search has been for happiness.
Philosophers and seers,
Psychologists and bards,
Consensus cannot find.
And we are left to fend and find our own.

Our own!
And there-in lies the clue.
For each of us is born unique,
With different tastes and preferences
With different possibilities
So if we're to find our happiness,
We must discover what they are.
I'm minded of Saroyan's thought
It takes a lot of practice
For a man to get to be himself.
So look to that to make a start
Discover what your talents are.
And in the exercise there-of,
You're sure to find a happiness
That truly is your own.

It's Do and Be, but first,
To Do, you've got to know yourself.
Then do what you were meant to do.
Do whatever's right for you,
Then make the effort to become
The very best at being you
The very best that you can be,

One last note
The sources of our happiness.
There are no more than two,
Anticipation is the first,
The other's recollection
The first takes precedence in youth
Replaced with recall as you age.

© Hal O'Leary 2011

Hal O'Leary is an eighty-five year old veteran of WWII. Having spent a life time in the theatre and as a Secular Humanist, He believes that it is only through the arts that we are afforded an occasional glimpse into the otherwise incomprehensible. Hal is the recipient of an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from West Liberty University.

Guest Poet: Gita M. Smith

Tonton Macoute

Baby Doc Duvalier, round-faced and syphilitic,
   rode into Port-Au-Prince in a Cadillac Escalade
   with two inches of expensive shirt cuff showing.

He waved to the throngs, his soft hands making semicircles,
   his hair pomaded, looking like money.
From inside the armored car, one starving sugar cane worker
   looked just like the next.
My little people, he said, my little ones. They still love me.
My country needs me, he told reporters who had gathered
   in the rain at the Palace of Justice
   where he stood in shined shoes and bespoke suit.

In the streets, people shouted his name and burned fires.
A distant drumbeat rolled towards the capitol. Was that thunder,
   a gathering army, or the dead rising from their shallow graves
   to demand their pound of flesh, at last,
   from the robber son of robber barons?

Once upon a time, the people cowered at the mention of the Tonton Macoute.
But after floods, earthquakes and hurricanes,
   what could the Haitians possibly have left to fear?
Baby Doc, who once ate blood oranges while standing over
   the corpses of his enemies, smirked for the cameras.
The world shuddered.

© Gita M. Smith 2011

Gita Smith is a career journalist, whose work has appeared on The Sphere, Fictionaut, Pen10, Not From Here Are You (The NOT), and her reporting on the South appears at LiketheDew.com, a news site.

Guest Writer: Kyle Hemmings

How the D Train Saved Me Cab Fare One Morning

My car has a flat and my heart is still in flutter from the night before. A girl dumped me for perhaps not having the moves her recently fired boyfriend did. The problem was he made moves on every other woman. Of course, she didn’t need to say it--I could tell by the distracted look in her eyes that I didn’t give good face, the kind the old boyfriend must have had, a carbon copy of some soap opera hero that women keep reaching for in the night, while their disposable boyfriends are asleep. Ain't life a bitch.
But priorities. I need to get to work. So I scram to the D train to make uptown in a flash. Inside, I hold on to metal for dear life and sit down before her. She's old, can pass for someone's disenfranchised grandmother, the flyaway hairs, slop of lipstick, long dress with a few strings hanging like faded memories, not even Salvation Army potential. A roar of metallic teeth, we buck, the train stops at Alphabet Hell. There's another name for the street, but my memory sometimes derails.

So I'm back to the woman. Eyeing her like an old TV show my parents wouldn't let me watch. There's something about her eyes, hazel side of blue, a subdued sparkle that speaks bittersweet and what hangs over us in the night so far away. Could go by a thousand names. Maybe that distracted quality like in the almost girlfriend from last night. The train switches. I'm practically in her lap. Something inside me snaps a finger. We're now each other's mirror. ExcusemeIsay, aren't you that actress, Melena Marpelli?

An impulsive jerk, I am. But Melena was my mother's favorite topic of conversation, her vote for worst actress of 1963, a movie that wouldn't even make a soap opera. Melena, then a starlet often compared to Natalie Wood, played the other woman for a much older businessman who was scarred by the memory of Pork Chop Hill. I can still recall a movie shot where Melina’s married lover, leading a perfect double life, poses at a barbecue with his family. Everybody in that shot, including the children, have smiles that seem to say We have everything we want. By the movie’s end, the married lover has committed suicide and Melena has taken up with a much younger man, addicted to drugs and music, and who constantly cheats on her, grubs off her.

The old woman smiles at me with her eyes. "My name isn't Melena Marpelli," she says as if reading a nursery rhyme. "Melena Marpelli died sometime ago."
She rolls her eyes up and smiles.
“I think it was only a month or so ago.”
I’m studying her like a Mona Lisa, deciding if this one’s authentic.

But I believe, as if belief can sometimes lead to a truth of some kind, that Melena Marpelli is still alive somewhere in the lower Bronx. I could be wrong. I haven’t kept up with the lives of faded stars. I believe Melina lives with a younger sister who is her caretaker. The real Melena, from what I remember reading a few years back, is frail and doesn’t get out much. And this woman has Melena's voice. Kind of. I know that voice from so long ago. It’s a voice of what was once a sweet seductive hunger.
I lean forward in my seat and try to speak over the rumble of train against track, the film score of my life this morning.

"May I have Melena's autograph?" I say, my heart a frog and my throat a pond where nothing stays for very long. "My mother loved you in The Secret of Miss Emily Baker. Was it hard faking that limp?"

There’s a mischievous twinkle in Melina’s eyes. She speaks as if to someone over my shoulder.
“When I was younger, I loved Melena Marpelli. I even tried to dress like her, imitate her hairstyle. I loved the character she always played. A foolish girl who was always in trouble. A beautiful girl you couldn’t say no to. You just had to help her.”

The subway lurches and my wallet falls from my hands. The old siren beats me to it, fumbling to get at it. I grab her arm to keep her from falling over. For a woman her age, she seems to be in better shape than I had thought. She hands me the wallet, this look on her face that means kismet or something like. Her eyes are so young. I take out my business card and ask her to sign the back in her Hollywood name. I hand her an engraved pen, which I only carry to impress clients. The train stops at 14th street. We shake hands and she says "It's been a pleasure. I always feel richer whenever I meet someone who remembered me when I wasn't poor. Fame only lasts a moment."
The voice sounds different now. It’s not Melena’s voice. Maybe because I’m much closer I can hear the scratchiness or the drop in tone. It’s a voice that has stopped straining to be someone else’s.

She gets off. A slight limp to her gait. She doesn’t look back or wave. I try to track her but she disappears in a crowd of Monday Morning rushers. I willow-wonder: Where is it she has to go?
I catch a flash of her making her way through the crowd, the elegant if somewhat stiff gait, her fade-out when reaching the base of the escalator. The limp is gone. A different woman. I second guess myself—-Was there ever a limp?

I take the piece of paper, which is now all I have of her and slip it into the wallet. Forty bucks are missing. I feel so much richer.

© Kyle Hemmings 2011

Kyle Hemmings lives in New Jersey. His work has been featured in Elimae, Thunderclap Press, Nano Fiction, Used Furniture and elswhere. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks: Fuzzy Logic (Punkin Press), Avenue C (Scars Publications), and Amsterdam & Other Broken Love Songs (Flutter Press).

Guest Writer: Kim Farleigh

Condemned

Natalia screamed: “I don’t want your money!”
Patricia’s eyes were soft with pity, the silence denuded of tranquillity.
“I don’t want to speak to anyone!” Natalia screamed.
She went behind the bar to ring her mother, her left hand thrashing as she spoke on the phone.
“I’ll wait up for you,” her mother said. “Please don’t worry!”
Natalia gulped between outbursts.
“It may’ve even been someone I know,” she cried. “Someone I know may’ve even seen it!”
“Everything’s going to be fine,” her mother said. “Don’t worry. We can talk when you get here.”
Moist tracks gleamed on Natalia’s cheeks.
She put the phone down and dabbed the corners of her eyes with a tissue.
“Why don’t you have a place where people can put their bags?” she demanded.
“Sorry,” the bar manager replied, “but we can’t take responsibility for everything.”
“You don’t take any responsibility for anything! You let anyone in here!”
Even you, the bar manager thought.
“Can you go back behind the bar, please? We have to clean up.”
“You don’t care about anything!”
“Please; can you go back behind the bar?”
“Bastard,” Natalia muttered.
The barman yelled: “You deserve it!”
“Arsehole!” Natalia yelled.
David felt moral concussion. Good behaviour had never been a consciously sought-after characteristic in a partner. Most people just don’t behave like this! It had never even been a consideration – something just taken for granted.
The empty bar’s timber floor now seemed crudely exposed, like the bones of a decaying beast.
“The only reason I came here tonight,” Natalia told David, “was to see you. I want your telephone number. And I’m not interested in friendship. These people say anything behind your back; they’re jealous of you.”
Her throat sucked in, then pumped out, red tracks on her marble eyes.
“And,” she grimaced, “I’ve been robbed! Keys, money, ID, mobile, everything! And I only wanted to see you!”
They left the bar. It was drizzling. A serene darkness hemmed in the dampness.
“Patricia asked me how things are going with you,” Natalia said. “She wants a disaster. She loves you, but she won’t admit it; I’m sincere and bold: I can’t stand these cowards.”
David found positive self-perceptions baffling – even surreal.
“I come from a rich family,” she wailed, “and I’ve been well brought up – unlike some of those people!”
During his youth, David had shared a room with his brother and father, cheap cupboards, old clothes, and nothing else.
“And I respect certain values,” she continued, “not like them!”
He’d never noticed anything bad about those people; but he hadn’t been brought up well either.
“You have to be careful,” she said. “There’s so much jealousy. Personal comments can be used against you. You’re too nice to realise it.”
Incandescent reflections decorated puddles, reflections transforming the things themselves.
Human, faceless entities swarmed in a wet, sombre murk. Neon colours shimmered in the murk.
The fist-flying wind clobbered David’s face.
A taxi stopped beside them.
“I’ll ring you,” she said.
They stared at each other; then their mouths began swimming in silky contact. The rain, striking like soft nails, flashed in headlights. Their mouths swirled like aquatic creatures, dolphins in three dimensions, the wind howl-clattering, a haphazard-direction-swing wind.
She’s kissing an inferior being, he thought. And she doesn’t know it. Escape before she finds out.
She got into the taxi and waved as she left.
The wind and rain made David squint. Tongues moving like marine angels, David tried to forget what he was; she must get into a taxi now, he had thought.
People were huddled in doorways like penguins. Rain rippled the footpath. The need to escape had filled David’s mind like background radiation, the thought that she was going to change her perception of him inevitable – she’d already indirectly said that she couldn’t stand him. Unjustified admiration filled him with levitating emptiness.
The rain whipped its liquid lashes; a running woman accidentally clipped David in the face, the woman spinning and saying: “Oh! Sorry!”
He thought: What a night!
Sparkling, liquid-confetti drizzle, illuminated by a streetlight, resembled a radiant teardrop above a couple who were waiting at a taxi rank. The couple looked around, independently of each other, waiting in silence.

*

Nobody cares, Natalia thought, as she got out of the taxi. If Patricia cared would she have just offered me five euros? Of course not! She’s done well in business. She’s rich. Five euros! What was I going to do with that!? I had nothing! None of them could care less. No one offered to come with me to the police station. People stop listening when their mobiles ring. Everybody else’s problems are irrelevant. We’re all just individuals living alone. Alone! Love doesn’t even exist! It’s just an act! My own mother doesn’t even care. She just says: “You’re too complicated!” There’s no heart, no real emotion. It’s all about the fear of being alone, about escaping from inadequacies rather than confronting them.
David’s bedroom’s light intensified the uneasiness he felt about not having extracted joy from kissing beauty, his soaking hair plastered too heavily onto his head, like a burden.
Maybe I’m just overreacting, he thought. Although belligerent, unfounded certainty is a definite turn-off. It just feels wrong. I’ve never kissed a beautiful woman before and felt perturbed. It’s weird.
Natalia’s mother opened the door.
“What took you so long getting here?” she asked.
Her tone was pleasant.
“I was with someone.”
“Everything’s going to be all right.”
Natalia took her coat off and went to the bathroom and dried her hair.
It could have been Juan, she thought. He hardly said a word tonight! He just sat behind us with that cold look on his face; then he disappeared without saying a word. It might have been him!
And not the homeless man who’d entered after Juan had left.

*

David lay down on his bed. The agitation that had been stirring in his head began to turn to relief when he accepted that he had been too obsessed with exterior beauty. The agitation had been an unconscious sign. He felt a stabilising sensation of alleviation when he realised that he hadn’t given his real needs their due consideration. He hadn’t accepted just how much he admired sincere weaknesses until that night. Something, he thought, that’s definitely human. I can’t have a relationship with someone who’s convinced of their perfection, he thought. There’s no humour in that, no self-deprecation or sardonic self-analysis. It would just be complaints, self-righteousness, no awareness of the need for improvement; and little chance of seeing virtues in others.
He got up and went into the bathroom and began drying his hair with a towel. This craziness, he thought, this unsociable behaviour: its disturbing and obnoxious. Her beauty gets destroyed by it. And usually women look more beautiful than they actually are because of their personalities – not the other way around!
He lay on the bed again. And especially in Spain, he thought, where women can be as charming as it gets.
Feeling dryer he also felt lighter and fresher. The worse thing, he thought, is that you know that behind that blissful smile of hers, and behind that deep laughter, there’s something disturbing that’s just waiting to erupt. It’s like sailing over a smooth, blue sea, under a blue sky, knowing that the water is laced with icebergs as sharp as broken glass. You know that the peace is going to be disrupted by a sudden, hull-splitting collision with a chunk of bitter ice. Some men like the unpredictable excitement of this, but not me. Give me a smooth, glistening sea, free of reefs and icebergs, any day. I prefer beautiful simplicity. Madness completely shocks me. It’s much more entertaining observing it from a distance, not having it in your life.
She didn’t ring him anyway. There was even a moment when she had thought: I wonder if he was involved in a plan with Juan?

© Kim Farleigh 2011

Having a taste for the exotic, Kim has worked for aid agencies in three conflicts: Kosovo, Iraq and Palestine. He hasn't recovered. He probably never will. He's thinking of doing it again! His stories have appeared in several magazines in the US, Australia and Europe, including Whiskey Island, Southerly, Island, Haggard & Halloo, Feathertale and many others.

Guest Writer: Ed Dean

The Road

From my darkened driveway I watch a brilliant orange sky light up the evening after a very long week on the road. Thank God it’s Friday! It’s not that I’m physically tired like my father was after a long week in the factory or mentally tired like my school teacher sister, I’m just emotionally drained. But when I walk in that door I know I must garner enough strength to feed the psyches of three loving faces.
Actually my week on the road is TNT—Tuesday through Thursday—Monday and Friday are office days. Monday is usually a planning and briefing session and Fridays are debriefings but this Friday caught me in an emotional extension on the road.
The office techies keep saying that we’ll soon be replaced by the Internet and ‘computer-to-computer’ decisions. Sometimes I wish it were true but in my heart I know that ‘pressing the flesh’ will always have a place in the human sales equation.
Colored clouds float by spewing dramatic dark orange, and red highlights entertain my thoughts punctuated by headlights of other cars scurrying like ants on a hill, weaving their way to some quiet solitude. I am no different. I sit in the driveway with my headlights off and linger in contemplative review letting my psyche rewind. I too am one of the ants. I stop to look skyward once more before opening the door and remember the old Indian saying; “It is a good day to die!” But which life would cease? Is it all worth it, this double life of duplicity and deceit? I am only a minor player in corporate America. I truly am a road warrior and it’s a life that I have learned to love and respect. Every lonely sunset has become my friend, my lover, my mentor. There is never a duplicate, just as love is, easy and forgiving. There are smiling faces behind that door only for me. To be loved is a special thing and I think I have found more than my share in this double life.
As a Young Turk in my mid-twenties I received my golden spurs; road warrior by choice and avocation. Eager successful years promoted me to an expanded agenda with titles that I proudly accepted along with the ensuing money. Titles are always part of the package and are only meaningful on an embossed business card. Was I good; was I right? You judge because I know you will!
Early on I borrowed a great ploy from a mentor. When I landed in a local area, my eyes searched for a street urchin. I gave the carefully chosen kid a mind-boggling five-dollar bill to carry my card up to the receptionist and announce my appointment and presence. I was rarely kept waiting. My natural success was never about my ability to talk but more to observe and listen. Corporate customers lie more than any peddler in the world. They assume their crown will hide everything. But the truth is on the factory floor. A twenty-dollar lunch with a line supervisor gave me everything I needed to know.
Endless hotel and motel chains with earned honor points became my second kingdom but in the end it was only a plush lonely bed at the end of the day. Of course, there were lavish dinners out with exec customers but most evenings end with a B.L.T. room-service sandwich with two scotches from the mini-bar.
As in any upgraded city-center hotel, there was the ‘road warrior’ clan. Black Jack always seemed to be my shadow. He was neither black nor Jack; he was simply Dan. The moniker came from his prolific love of Jack Daniels. He never asked what you were drinking, but ordered a Jack-on-the rocks and let you choose a mixer of your choice. He personified the negative side of our trade. Jack loved to bemoan proliferation of skirts in our brotherhood. Most of the women were pharmaceutical or retail reps and rarely industrial, but Jack never missed a chance to hit on them every chance he got. Jack’s mantra was; no sex was worse than bad sex but most of us chose conversation and camaraderie at the bar. We were a fun loving family of ‘Can you top this?’ and most of the time it was “yes.”
Personal or professional problems were rarely up for discussion but when it came into the mix both genders’ advice flowed faster than the booze. We were family for the night.
When you work the Midwest, snowstorms and bad weather are facts of life. Familiarity with the hotel staff or guaranteed hotel reservations are your only port in the storm. When you’re one of the lucky, the peddler creed says that you share that extra double-queen in your bedroom. Your eyes search the bundled bodies in the overbooked hotel lobby and you offer. If your heartfelt invitation goes out to a ‘skirt’ you might be branded as a ‘dirt bag’ but most of the seasoned ‘road warrior’ gals know that it’s a sign of respect and accept graciously.
Sex is never the equation but only happens as an answer to a long night of camaraderie in the hotel bar. It is that natural and constant need of humanity to be validated by the intimacy of wanting and being wanted.
A late breakfast in the dining room brings news that the highways will be open by early afternoon. Hugs and well wishes flow over the tables and within a few hours the vast migration of the road warriors would suck the hotel empty.
You learn early on never to check your baggage. Carry-on is the only way to go. Ten minutes to the parked car and a dreary log jammed expressway-hour home and you realize that you’re just one of the leaf-cutter ants in the colony heading down the jungle road with your prize on your back. The headlights quickly pop on like stars in the early darkened skies and after fifteen years on the road, you wonder, “How long before I get the home office promotion? How long before I have only one life to lead?” But as you pull up into a darkened driveway and contemplate; you know she knows; she knows but tolerates the deception as the pretty little lady at all the corporate functions. She smiles graciously and makes the required small talk and does her part to be the perfect corporate wife. She is well paid for her pain, but money will never soothe her emotional scars. Was she a ‘sell-out’ just like me? She had a talented career that she chose to disregard for an easier life.
I can hear the lyrics to Tina Turner’s song, ‘What’s love got to do with it’ rattling around in my brain. I know it’s just a matter of time. How long before she gets tired and takes the kids and leaves? How long will the duplicity last? Have I become just another ‘Black Jack’ road junkie? And then you finally admit to yourself that you’re an addict and the split in your personality is becoming permanent.

© Edward Dean 2011

Edward Dean grew up in Dearborn and Highland Park, Michigan until being drafted into the army and subsequently into the N.S.A. Having been in sales and marketing most of his life, Mr. Dean is now semi-retired and spends much of his time writing. His own experiences in the military, traveling throughout the U.S. and Europe, and as a wine enthusiast provided much of the background to his book. Mr. Dean has three books in the works, including a sequel to The Wine Thief.

Guest Writer: Sandra Davies

Curve of Early Learning

“Mind the edge!”

A warning since before memory, always an edge to beware, to be forever aware of.

First, at Liddle, had been slabs, as thick as three of her three-year-old fingers, flat patterned stone, hard and often sharp when new, both separating bed from bed and on which they lay, degree of comfort dependent on the depth and newness of the heather piled thereon. Their edges had too often bruised or marked her, although in time more so by accident, in darkness or too many people in the space. Sometimes her brothers pushed her, but less so once she had learnt to scratch and pinch.

And beside the central fire the stone slabs sunken in a square, a fifth slab as a base, joints sealed with clay so as to stop stone-heated water seep away too fast. Here the need to watch for hot for heat stayed long after fire had gone and pain from heat was different, and far greater. And pain could be from ashes or the splashes from the water or the spitting from the meat when it was cooking.

And as she gained years the edges of her wanderings extended, beyond the need to stay in sight: first of her mother then of the younger boys she was required to watch.

Later still, and with her father, walking to another edge, the edges of their family land, land long belonging to their family, their families and their ancestors. A time of light, near always light, she had not noticed it before, had slept despite the light before, and her father had reminded her, had told her of the inbetweentimes of the almost always dark time which also came with greater cold and wind and wet. That year the edge she saw of land was where the land met land; stones and hollows and narrow running water marking boundary lines between the edge of what was theirs and what was not.

Not until another dark and the following time of light, when she was surer-footed, did he take her to the edge of land itself, to where the land did stop and the bones of land were visible, stone slabs laid down, layer piled on many layers, beneath the thinnest layer of soil and grass. Slab upon slab, just as they built their shelter walls, but these high stack-piled edges were pounded endlessly by mass of pushing heaving water - her father said it never stopped, was ever-present noise and movement, as was the movement of the air, although air changed in noise and where it came from, and how strong and whether warm or fierce or flecked or filled with water.

From here she saw the final edge, where far-off edge of water met the that-day light-filled sky, and she wanted urgently to know and asked her father and he told her he did not know, that no-one knew, but that if she looked to where the sun was now, midway between the edges, in between its coming and its slipping down, below its highest arcing in the sky she would see that there was more land, that the water did not go on forever, but that where the sun slipped out of sight, there again was where no-one he knew had known or seemingly could ever know.

Three or four more light-dark times and then she did know more. Knew then that men could come from the edge of sky met sea, knew then that men could hurt as much as edge of stone, as much as heat and even more, another hurt that did not mark her skin, could not be seen but gave an edge of hurt to everything that came thereafter.

One man had later been less hard, had tried to make amends and after she’d lain down for him, and then again to birth his son – more hurt but yet another kind - had given her a ring, shiny black and heavy on her finger, as his hand had been on her at times. But time did thin the edge of hurt, of people known and now long gone, and he was not so hard as many, so that when he died and his bones stripped and laid at Isbister with others, honour made with totem white-tailed eagle bones, and when soon after she was taken by another, she broke his ring as symbol of her hurt – this time an empty aching hurt - at losing him.

[Isbister, in Orkney, is the location of what is now referred to as the Tomb of the Eagles, a Stone Age burial chamber where half of a jet ring was found in 1976. Subsequently the tomb was excavated and found to contain some thirty human skulls and hundreds of bones from humans and white-tailed sea eagles. Ten years later the second half of the ring was found and given to the farmer who had discovered the first for him to place them back together for the first time in more than 5000 years – an act which, he said, ‘caused the hairs to stand up on the back of his neck’. Liddle is the site of a nearby dwelling, identifiable from its square stone water sink wherein hot stones were laid to heat the water after heating on the hearth and before being placed on the burnt mound midden.]

© Sandra Davies 2011

Sandra Davies is an artist and printmaker and recently-emerged writer of fiction, with a long-established interest in family history. Born on the Essex coast, she now lives in Teesside in the north east of England, both places having the flat landscapes and sea-edged horizons considered essential for a sense of well-being. More writing can be found at lines of communication and some prints at Print Universe
This piece can be found in Sandra's excellent book Edge which comprises Curve of Early Learning, Arc of Adaptation, and Circle of Celebration