Muse Ut Vos Postulo Suus

Jim Doran

Inspiration piece:

Hunting Irony
Hildie Block

“Roy owned the only drive-thru funeral business in Maine.”

She looked at this line and frowned. “This is stupid,” she said. “This is stupid. This is stupid,” she said and started to cry.

She opened a new document and wrote “Business Owner Dies at 58.” That’s better she thought. She touched the phone, her sister’s number on her mind – but retracted. “I said I would do this. NOW DO IT,” she scolded herself so harshly that the cat leapt off the nearby chair.

“If only everyone else reacted like that.” Her children didn’t listen to her like that. Her husband ignored her “Honeydo” lists on the fridge. The only sanity they granted her was in this room, her writing room, alone to do her freelance work. It brought in the money for the good stuff, the better meats, the organic veggies, the vacations at the beach. So they gave her space.

She hit the space bar. Then, the return key. Her bitten nails clacked on the keys, not hard enough to strike a letter.

Letter.

She opened a new doc.

Dear Dad,

What the hell were you thinking

Love,
Holly

“DO IT!” she yelled out loud. Something broke downstairs.

“Damn it,” she muttered and went to see what it was.

A day passed. Breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, brush teeth. She’d put the kids to bed, she’d done the wifely duty of watching TV while her husband held the remote and channel surfed until she was sure her brain fell out of her head, rolled on the floor and under the couch. There, under the couch, the cat batted it around.

Now, she was alone and retrieved her brain from under the couch (the cat purred at her) and attempted to reinsert it by banging her forehead on the computer keyboard.

And then, like a squirrel who has just changed its mind about something, she dashed downstairs.

When she returned she had the Obituaries from the day’s papers.

“I’ll read these,” she said determinedly. “I’ll get ideas.” And she did. She read them. Loving parent, brother, grandfather. Passed away quietly at home. Services. Long illness.

Not one of them said “Shit where he lived.” Not one of them said “irony.” Not one of them said, “in a twist of fate that everyone could see coming.”

She opened her internet browser and looked for the news story hoping to get a grip on the words. The words that wouldn’t say what she was thinking “YOU STUPID BASTARD,” but would say, um . . .okay, that was the problem.

She found the article. She read it, twice. The tears welled up with the anger and frustration. In the article the accidental shooting was blamed on his dark clothing and his white mittens. White mittens? Seemed out of character. This bit of information made her head spin. Why would he have had white mittens? Seemed so unmasculine. Orange hunting jacket sure, but not this night. This night, a navy pea coat and white mittens.

She started again.

“Business Owner Dies TRAGICALLY at 58”

She changed TRAGICALLY to IRONICALLY and then changed it back. Hmm. “Hunting Accident,” but that implied that her father was hunting. Which he wasn’t, he was getting wood from the wood pile. That was the assumption.

She stared at poster on her wall that had a baby on it, the baby was playing with a revolver. The line beneath the black and white photo said, “One Child A Day, Everyday.” This was her life. She was the staff writer for the National Coalition to Ban Handguns. And she wrote for other folks too, because truth be told, the Coalition didn’t need her that much. Most of the writing happened at the other lobbying firm, Handgun Control International.

Roy Green, owner of the Sportsman Gun and Ammo, died suddenly Saturday in his backyard, the apparent victim of a stray deer hunter’s bullet.

That sounded too much like a news article.

She wished she had her father’s resume. Who was she kidding. He didn’t have a resume. He’d owned this shop for over 30 years. That’s who he was. Roy, who owned Sportsman. The gun shop up on the highway in a building that used to be a bank. Still had the drive through windows but they were bricked up after some incident in the early 80s.

Roy Green. Dead at 58. Survived by family who didn’t speak to him. Mostly.

No. Survived by daughters, and sons-in-law, grandchildren and an uncle. Services to be held at Grace Lutheran. In lieu of flowers . . .

Donations To What? The NRA? Handgun control? Boy Scouts?

To the Roy Green Memorial fund for gun safety. Yes. That was the answer. That was something she could call her sister with – a message, a job to do. A new way of making sense out of it all. An intersection of belief. “Here” – Here is the where we can meet Dad. This is our common ground.

Because no matter how you sliced it, Roy Green was the merchant of his own death. Owner of the only drive thru funeral business in Maine. But Holly could change all that.

Response – the Fishwife, by Jim Doran

Inspiration Piece by Maureen O’Donnell

The Shadow of Saint-Quentin

Maureen O’Donnell

The fountain twisted high over a pool studded with tiles of blue and yellow and white. Three stone fish with forever-gaping mouths froze in the air, twisted together in mid leap toward the sky. They laughed water. Anna knew the fountain in her mind, well before she saw it in the square of the town that lay just outside Saint-Quentin.  Her black-laced shoes, too-tight from long walks over several days, scuffed over broken cobbles.  She had not planned to come back to the Square, but that morning she stood in line, bought her ticket, and another for her son.  They were not due in Paris until tomorrow.

She followed a near-invisible path, tugged on by something that fell just shy of memory. She chased the mimic of memory, but it danced ahead, easily outpaced her shuffle. It drew her through the remains of a stone arch that presided over weeds and a discarded bottle.

A pair of small feet tapped out hop-skip-jump on the broken road behind her.  Jump.  Thud.  Thud-thud.  She turned and caught sight of the boy, all long limbs and knobby elbows and a mop of brown curls that she couldn’t bear to shear away.

He disappeared behind the tumbled-over wall, and panic squeezed Anna’s chest.  Then she saw him, twisting and leaping through the neglected space.

#

Children dash through the square. They shriek, the fountain laughs, adults whisper words that escape loud anyway. Somewhere a siren complains.  Anna squirms inside the dry, starched weight of a white pinafore.  The crisp white folds lock her down, reflect the sunshine with the cheerful reminder that she’s not to go and play.  Fingers pull her hair into barrettes, but curls and girl resist. She makes a bid for freedom, toward the fountain. A record crackles to life and spills a woman’s voice from above the Square.

“There’ll come a time, now don’t forget it,” she croons around faint crackling sounds.  A record she hasn’t heard before.  Anna looks up, and tries to count the open windows, find the new sound.  One.  Two.

#

Time had battered the windows above the town square into listless black eyes that stared down on an abandoned space that made the grown woman small. She tugged at the lace collar of her dress, and felt the pull of the fountain and the fish.

#

“Non! Anna!”

Her mother’s cry was a thing of the past, a thing to be dodged if she was quick enough.  She felt the collar of her pinafore loosen and laughed.

“There’ll come a time, when you’ll regret it…” The music rambled on. The little girl wove between people great and small, and burst through a knot of children gathered around the tiled pool. She dipped her hands into clear, cold water, and it flew off her fingertips and over their heads. Motors coughed and sputtered; bodies twitched; people and sirens screamed.

A woman sang, en Anglaise, “when you grow lonely, Your heart will break like…”

The record skipped to a stop. Anna clung to the fountain and stared, wild-eyed, at knees and shoes. The world was motion, all but her.  She was frozen, mouth gaping, frozen like the fish above her head.

#

Her fingers scrabble dust. The world explodes into fire and became a cheerful afternoon. She tastes grit and metal in her mouth, realizes her lower lip is between her teeth. Phantoms tug at her messy, little-girl curls. They run across the square, shout like people, then ghosts, then like people again.  Planes drone overhead, through the thick cotton-fuzz she now feels in her ears.  It is Sunday, but Anna cannot hear the bells of Saint Quentin, or the singing.

#

Loam-brown eyes, mimics of her own, meet hers. She clings to a fountain that today has neither fish nor tiles.

“Maman,” the young boy says. “Maman, do you know this place? Do you know it from before the war?”

They are in the Square: she sits, he stands, in the broken space that makes her feel small again. Open windows eye them suspiciously. It is 1914 in the town outside Saint-Quentin, and pointed helmets wink at the sun. It’s 1918, and bombs strip skin from buildings and shatter foundations of men, and the world becomes just a little more like hell. 1934, and her son stares at her with a child’s eyes, eyes that can never know war.

“Do you know this place, Maman?” he asks her.  She clutches a fountain that is hers but has no fish.

October of 1918, the Germans run: she is a child, one of many refugees. One of many and all alone. Music plays in a funny-smelling army tent while she sits on a cot and swings her feet, asks for her mother.  Still alone.

Summer of 1934, somewhere in the town that is not so empty, an old jazz record spins to life, and the American woman sings. The boy doesn’t seem to notice.

“Your heart will break like mine and you’ll want me only, After you’ve gone…”

“No,” Anna says to her son.

The singer answers, “after you’ve gone away.”

—

“After you’ve gone.” (1918) Music by Turner Layton, lyrics by Henry Creamer. Broadway Music Corporation, New York. (Public Domain)