Tag Archives: fall2009

“Black Sabbath” by Les Cohen

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KEEP OUT ON PENALTY OF DEATH!!!! was scrawled graffiti-like in black marker above a Reservoir Dogs movie poster on his door. Booming heavy metal base guitar riffs shook the entire second floor. Once a cheerful, bouncy kid, over the past few years he had morphed into a sullen, scowling 12-year-old who seemed to enjoy cleverly taunting, picking apart whatever I said, getting under my skin.

Lately argument, negotiation and further argument had constituted the fabric of our relationship. There seemed to be nothing we agreed on. He had developed an uncanny ability to laser-in on my many vulnerabilities. I grew to dread talking with him. Of my three sons he was closest to his mother, and had taken it the hardest after she suddenly left. Slouching his way through seventh grade, his grades bottomed. I was as sure as any parent can be that he wasn’t on drugs…but I didn’t really know

I took a deep breath and knocked. No answer. I opened the door a crack. He was lying face down in bed. Mounds of dirty clothes, notebooks, school papers and books were scattered over the dusty floor like a minefield, his desk covered with candy wrappers, empty Gatorade bottles, stacks of Alice in Chains, Led Zeppelin and Guns ’N Roses cassettes next to a blasting boom-box. Like a stamp album the walls were covered with rock posters, obscene bumper stickers and obscure graffiti.

“Matt, I need to talk with you, OK?”

He rolled over slowly. “What’d you say?”

The music was deafening, the room vibrating. It seemed that every angrily screamed fifth word was motherfucker. I turned down the volume.

“Why’d ya do that?” he moaned.

“I can’t hear myself think. Listen…let’s go outside for a few minutes. I need to talk with you about a few things.”

“Whatever. Do we really have to? What’s the use? I mean you always take so long, ‘n it ends up wasting my time, ‘n I’ve probably heard it all before anyway.”

He slowly got up, as if with one muscle at a time, edged into flip-flops, ran a hand through shoulder length hair, slipped on a grungy Nirvana tee shirt, and hitched up tattered jeans. I waited in the hallway as he went into the bathroom.

This could take a while.

I’d been sitting on the porch since dawn, drinking coffee and had taken up chain-smoking. The quiet of the warm Saturday morning seemed to soothe my jangled nerves. Trying to think clearly was difficult. I didn’t know what to do with myself this afternoon, when they’d be away. I felt too shaky to watch TV or go to the movies. The books on child-rearing through divorce sat in an untouched pile on my desk. I was reluctant to wear out my welcome, be a self-pitying burden on friends. Car-pooling to two schools, making it to the clinic and hospital every day and shouldering night-call wore me out. Sleep was fitful at best, and appetite was just a memory. It was getting harder every day. The all-important custody issue and the prospect of losing everything, frightened me. My lawyer said the mother won 90% of the time in this state – even in instances of abandoning their own children, but…I still had a chance of winning. I needed to pull myself together before appearing in Court next week.

I heard the musical opening for Pee Wee’s Playhouse, Jeff’s favorite, coming from my bedroom.  Jason’s door was open. He was probably packing his books.

Matt came smiling out of the bathroom. We silently walked downstairs, out the back door and pulled up chairs on the driveway under the basketball backboard.

He was setting his Casio watch. “I’ve got only five minutes so you better begin now.”

Typical shit, once again putting me off-balance.

“You know…I’ve already talked with your brothers about next Wednesday night. I’m going to drive you guys to Cambridge to meet with a Family Therapist. I’ll wait outside. I’ve already met her, and now she wants to meet with you guys. It’ll be just an hour and…”

“I don’t care. I don’t wanna go. I’m not going, period. I’m not crazy. You and mom are the ones that need help.” He looked up. His eyes were red. “Why did you let her go?” Mom says you forced her to leave.”

Me! Forced her? I wondered what other lies she had told them. It had been hard to keep my mouth shut. For their sake I kept it all inside. There had been no arguments or blow-ups for them to witness. We’d been conventionally happy for twenty years, or so I thought. Last week I’d taken down all the wedding and family group pictures from the walls, packed her remaining clothes, books and records and left them on the porch of her new love nest.

“You and your brothers are going to be there together. That’s that. I know it’s been a horribly confusing and painful time. You guys must’ve felt like ping-pong balls being hit back and forth. Take my word, it’ll help to talk about how you really feel with a sympathetic, a neutral person, someone who doesn’t take sides. Like I said, I’ll be out in the car. I’ll never know what goes on. It’ll be confidential, and only take an hour.”

“I said I’m not going. I’ve got better things to do,” he mumbled, looking down at the asphalt, picking up a pebble and tossing it.

“Look, I want to make things easier for you, and…in a month you’ll be going back to Camp Moosehead with Jason.

You’ll have a great month just like last year, ‘n you’ll be away from all this. Just having fun. I heard some of your buddies are also returning, and…”

“Whatever…I don’t want to go back to that lousy camp anyway.” He looked at his watch.

“Then what do you want to do this summer?”

“Just hang out. Watch TV. Maybe get a job. Go to arcades. Hang out in malls. I dunno.”

I let it pass.

“Matt, in about an hour your mother is going to pick you up for the afternoon. You’ll be back after dinner so you can do your homework.”

“What if I don’t wanna go this afternoon?”

“Why?”

“She’s gonna have a birthday party for Paul, ’n his three little whiny girls are gonna be there, if their mother lets ‘em.

We’re not a fuckin’ Brady Bunch!”

“This is the first I heard of it. It’s a very bad idea. Well…you’ve gotta explain that to her.”

Beep. Beep, beep his wristwatch chirped.

“Well, times up. That’s your five,” smiling as he got up.

But, Matt,” I sputtered.

He was already inside.

I needed a cigarette, a Valium, and maybe, after they left, a drink. It was going to be another long, hard day.

 

 

Dr. Les Cohen has taught and practiced Internal Medicine in Boston for many years. His short stories have been published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, Archives of Internal Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, Hospital Drive, and in 2000, 2001 and 2005 he won the Journal of General Internal Medicine’s Creative Award for Prose. His essay Two Doctors appeared in our Fall-Winter 2009 issue and his short story A River in Egypt in our Summer-Fall 2007 issue.

“Postcards from the Dead” by Bart Galle

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Our grief group meets in a room where children draw turkeys by tracing around their hands and hang strips of purple ribbon as reminders of the homeless.

We are homeless, too, and trace outlines of our stories over and over, wishing we had a simple word for them, like hand.

At first we barely hear above the torrent of our individual loss. Slowly we become generous with our grief, and one death becomes many. Not the many of Treblinka or Cambodia or Darfur, where many is a particle of dust. Not even the many of Omaha Beach, where you can walk among the crosses and Stars of David or read names and see to the end of the white rows that fit beneath the trees—or, distant from the beach, huddle with the German dead, who lie face-to-face under squat black crosses. This is the many of Josh, Georgie, Alex, Sarah, Tank, DuJuan, David, Julie, Norman.

The stages of grief have left for the day.

Ha!

A man wanted to move on, so he sold his house. Now he lives in two houses.

Tried that!

Grief flows to the sea where everything is true at once, every story matters.

Coyote wanted people to die because they had fingers and he only had paws.

Tell me more stories.

Be specific!

Name names!

We bring our dead with us when we meet. They gather in the corner, all of them young: the one who fell from a cliff, the one who accidentally shot himself, the two who died of a drug overdose, the three who were hit by a car. They play with the child who fell from a window. When they hear their names, they look up. They listen to us talk about replaying a final message on an answering machine, smelling an unwashed shirt, seeing initials and a birth date on a license plate. They hear how we see them in a college student waiting for a bus or a toddler carried from a car to daycare—or a boy shooting baskets before supper. If only the living knew such love.

Then one day they are gone. They don’t need us anymore.

The woman in the picture looks at me, her grin so broad it verges on a grimace. She is reclining on the grass, arms back, legs drawn up. She wears jeans and a tank top. She is a public yard-worker on break, her bamboo rake off to the side. Latina, full-bodied, she looks as if she could carry me like a sack of groceries. She stares at me from a photograph I bought at an art fair and hung on the wall over my computer at work. I look to her for joy, but occasionally she mocks me, puts me in my place, as my son would sometimes do.

I imagine her laughing for him, waiting to meet him at the end of her shift—say, in the square in San Miguel on Cozumel—handing him her rake to carry, him refusing, as he would; them sparring on the way to a little restaurant, where perhaps the others who are dead sit at a table with their drinks, including two for them. They join them, talking and laughing.

If we don’t get postcards from the dead, we send them to ourselves.

The Father’s Day card I keep on my desk has a picture of a moon on it. My son wrote in it that it reminded him of days before depression and drugs, when I would read him bedtime stories from a book that also had a moon on its cover.

Good night moon,
Good night cow jumping over the moon.
Good night stars.
Good night air.
Good night noises everywhere.

It was a card he sent to himself from the dead. I open the card, look at the words, the letters, the lines, then imagine the pencil, then the hand, the arm, the head bent over, concentrating, moving the hand.

 

 

Bart Galle is a medical educator and visual artist living in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is a Loft Mentor Series Winner in Poetry and the winner of the 2008 Passager Poetry Contest for writers over 50. His poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets 2009. His paintings and poems have appeared previously in Water-Stone Review, White Pelican Review, Minnetonka Review, The Comstock Review, Main Channel Voices, Passager, Coe Review, Eclipse, and elsewhere.

“Duckblind” by David Willis

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I was doing my weekly duty with Dad by taking him the park on Saturday.  As usual, I picked him up at the assisted living place (I guess that’s what they call nursing homes now), and I bought us some sodas and sandwiches on the way.  It was the middle of May and we sat on a park bench near the small pond.  He was feeding the ducks and I was sucking on a soda can trying to get the last drops out from the bottom.  I had an amnesia of sorts, sucking on the can repeatedly expecting there to be something in the far reaches.  Definition of insanity, I guess.

It was a nice day at the park and I wasn’t sweating as much as I usually do this time of year.  There was a tiny breeze that occasionally worked its way through the dense oak trees near the lake.  Dad insisted on this bench near the water; the only one without much shade.  If someone was sitting on “his” bench, he would sit down next to them and stare at them until they left.  The small pond had a large, man-made rock formation in the middle where, I’m told, they originally wanted to put in a fountain but the city ran out of money.  Now it was so covered in duck and goose feces that it looked like a giant ice cream sundae floating in the middle of murky water.

“I poisoned a duck once,” my father said out of nowhere.  He paused from throwing the ducks puffs of stale white bread and relit his cigar.  Ashes tumbled off the tip and rolled down his thighs like rain over a windshield.  “I left a marble rye on the counter too long and I guess it went bad.”

“Okay,” I said.  What, exactly, does one say to that?  It’s not like Dad ever cooked and he’d had his share of nights hugging the toilet from misreading the expiration date.  For him, fine dining now was buying an extra biscuit at the fast food place where he got his coffee in the morning.  I crushed my soda can on the ground with the heel of my boot and waited for him to speak.   He concentrated on the ducks as if he was willing them to the bread, and the deep creases on his receding hairline cut deeper the harder he focused.  The scar on the middle of his pate where the melanoma was removed over the winter was still pink.

“Dad, you really should wear a hat,” I said.

“Did you know that they hanged a dog at the Salem witch trials?” He said and flipped a round piece of bread in the air, giving it backspin.

“Sorry?” I said.  A white duck with a streak of grey on its right wing leapt out of the water and jumped between three others near my father’s feet.  The three meek ducks scattered.

“Salem.  You know, that thing in Massachusetts during the colonial days?”  The bully duck was cleaning up what the other ducks had not gotten to yet.  Three white ducks quacked under their breath, if a duck can do such a thing, and started nudging back to where Dad mindlessly tossed the bread.  “They say those girls went crazy because they ate some moldy rye bread.  LSD or something-or-other.”

“I guess the history channel is showing something besides Hilter these days?”  I said, trying to joke.  Dad kept a piece of bread in his hand with an arm outstretched.  He turned his head at me and half-smiled.  The bullied ducks were getting more courageous.  The glutton was begging Dad loudly for the piece he kept in his hand.

“Pink elephants, right?  Isn’t that what they used to say about stuff like that?” Dad said.

“My friends in college said ‘freaking out’ usually,” I said.  I almost said I used to say freaking out.  Regardless of what Dad suspected, there was no use confirming that now.

“Hmph,” Dad said.

He held the piece of bread in front of his face and turned it from one side to the next.  With just slightly bigger glasses on his head he could have been looking at a diamond.  He threw the piece high in the air, and in a cloud of feathers and bills, all of the ducks converged on the bread at once.  The bully flapped his wings and retreated.  The might made right.

“Isn’t that something,” Dad said and broke off another chunk from his loaf and handed it to me.  “Did you see that?”

I don’t think I ever had.

 

David Willis is a graduate of the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and received his Masters’ Degree from CSU, Chico. He lives in the Florida panhandle with his wife and two sons. Dr. Willis teaches English at Jefferson Davis Community College in Brewton, Alabama.