Raja-nime's short stories
 

This is a story I wrote for my Creative Writing II class during our fiction unit. It's a PG-13 story--there is language and hints of sensuality, as well as some other themes. If this is against the rules, please tell me so and I'll remove it. Thank you!

Your Rhythm

You don’t hear the door opening. As it snaps close, however, you jump and the sharp unforgiving edge of the stainless-steel knife he gave you for Christmas last year nicks your forefinger, where the blood gathers to a little globe in the shallow crevice. There are a lot of things in that slam, and you realize it was that kind of day at work, that he’s in that kind of mood and that even though you’d be more than willing to give him that to keep his ire from boiling over and scalding you it won’t be enough.

In the living room you hear him click on the stereo and Nirvana’s voice wells up from within his heart-shaped box. You hear him swear—“Dammit!”—concise and short, and Nirvana’s vocal cords are silenced in favor of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” on WQED 89.3. And it hurts a little bit, because it reminded you a little of your old home in Aberdeen, Washington, now a country and several thousand miles away from where you are now.

“What have I told you about that kind of music?” he asks, stepping into the kitchen and rubbing his temples. One hand goes to the polished porcelain statue of the Virgin Mary and runs a thumb over her head before retreating back to his side.

“You’re never home to hear it anyway,” you counter as you finally finish mincing your carrots, which you tip and spill into the green-and-white mushroom salad you’re making.

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“Look, honey, I know you hate it but I can only take so much ‘Ode to Joy’ and ‘The Maiden’s Wish’ before it all begins to blend together and sound like “Pathetique Sonata.” Like a mother would fluff the hair of her daughter you take your utensils and toss the contents of your salad.

“It’s better for you than listening to that,” he mutters, and runs a hand through his faded brown hair, which is beginning to silver a bit at the temples. “You’re just a product of your generation. You have a great mind, Roberta, but it’s just all going to go to waste if you keep on listening to that excuse for music.”

You might have snapped back why the f**k does he care, you’ll listen to whatever you please and last you checked, your brain was not his property.

But that was when you were more than half a woman, when you had a job at the music store and the only Trinity you swore allegiance to was Guns & Roses, Nirvana and Aerosmith. That was when you were worth something more than a set of stainless steel kitchen knives and lace doilies.

So all you can do is say, “Yes, dear.”

*

You were born Roberta Ayres on March 20th, 1982.

You were the surprise of the family and the only girl, conceived out of a little too much pot, a little more alcohol, and not enough common sense. You were a child that was not intended, and though your parents loved you there was always that unconscious sense of resentment and anger that lurked underneath their firm hugs, the hands that ruffled your hair.

Maybe that’s why your brother was always more of a presence to you.

While your own room is little more than a fuzzy presence in your memories, you can still call Nathaniel’s up like an old photograph—the floor was littered with song lyrics, clothes and old underwear, his bed on the upper right corner with the faded black down comforter that was great to sit on (and the cat seemed to agree). His walls were painted with posters of righteous grunge artists and heroes of Woodstock, some of them sagging forward under the aging masking tape. His desk surface was invisible underneath forgotten homework and fungal pizza.

The only thing that wasn’t slightly dirty in the room was his cream-and-blue colored guitar, proudly displayed in the far corner of the room.

He never let you touch it, but that was okay because he didn’t let anyone else touch it, either. But then again, you alone were the only one that got to see inside the head of a boy who would become a star. If you had been just the right amount of good to him that week, he’d tiptoe in squeaky sneakers into your room after Dad started snoring and the two of you would sneak out to the pine woods in the back. And in the dark he’d play his songs, for only you and the stars.

“Someday I’ll be someone, ‘Berty,” he said, “and you’ll be right there with me. And I’ll play this guitar so hard that the Pleadies themselves will keel over dead from their dancing.”

You were eight years old and you believed that, nodding, the motion cementing a pact between you, your brother and the stars.

*

When the two of you finish for the night and his breathing beside you turns to snores, you slip out of bed and into the bathroom with its too-bright yellow light and cold grey-and-eggshell linoleum floor.

You turn on the tub faucet and step in, washing away the dirty and the profane and the ugly, unkind feelings that have accumulated on your body. When you did this after the first time you were so disgusted you broke down into tears, but now you don’t even flinch. You’re grateful for the detachable showerhead.

And when you’re done in the tub you clean up after yourself so that he doesn’t know, and you open the cabinet underneath the sink and maneuver past the lead pipes to that little bottle in the back. It’s small enough that he doesn’t notice it behind the haphazard hand towels nested in the corner. You fill a glass with water and one, two easy swallows and the liquid chases the COCP down your throat.

He can’t know about this.

“Roberta?” His voice echoes from the other room, still slightly tinted with Mateus Rosé and the ham-and-cheese omelette you made for dinner.

Your heart pounds as you place the pills back behind their nest. “Coming, sweetheart.”

So you go back to his bed, and he fingers the cross at your throat, a wedding present from your father-in-law.

*

When you hit nine years old, Nathaniel left you. He learned too well from his parent’s habits. He tried to apply this knowledge to crack and ended up with blue lips and a Sleeping Beauty complex, so they laid him to rest in a velvet-lined bed and closed the door so that no light would seep through and wake him.

Your father was the only one to actually attend the funeral. Your mother stayed with you in your little hippie home, and her wails and sobs floated up to you every so often. And you? You simply lay on the black comforter, stroking Boo’s fur and listening to her purr. This room still smelled like Nathaniel—and somehow that made the distance between the two of you even longer. You could only stare at his guitar, the link between the two of you, and try to talk to him through that, plucking the strings and seeing if you could find his voice.

You wanted to keep his guitar, but when you walked into his room the next day it was gone. Your father and mother had thrown it out, and for that you never forgave them. There was no rage, no ranting—but even the comfortable yet distant love that existed between you three dissolved. You functioned separate of them, and they from you; no longer connected by even the shared love of music, trippy abstract art and disdain for anything organized.

*

“I want an explanation for this.”

He punctuates his sentence by slamming the white bottle down on the table, hard eyes staring into yours, even as they seem to sink into his face with the wrinkles that have begun to form.

“What the hell is this?”

“I believe that is what they call the Pill.”

“Yes, yes, we know you can be a snarky b***h, but why the f**k are you taking it?” He begins to pace in a circle, moving his hands about in the air. “You know how God feels about contraception.”

“And you know how I feel about having children,” you say, and while you expected yourself to start crying and apologizing you feel something a little bit like anger welling up inside you. That’s good; perhaps it will set aflame the courage you’ve sought for these past six years.

“What you feel is irrelevant. You made a promise to the Church when you joined, and I intend to make you uphold that promise.”

“And let’s not forget why I ‘made’ those ‘promises.’ Who I sacrificed my entire life for.”

He sighs, withers, sits and takes your hand. “Honey…I get mad because I love you. I want us to grow closer to God together.” His voice and eyes are genuine, but you have ceased to care. “We need to hold each other accountable.”

You remain silent. Your hand is a stone, cupped in his, and your eyes hold no mercy—just a growing certainty that you messed up those six years ago and that you still have time, young as you are, to make it right. At forty-four he does not have that luxury.

“We’ll talk when we get home,” he says. In response you turn your head aside as he moves to kiss you. He swears and stomps away like a petulant child, slamming the door behind him.

Well, what can you say to that? Show’s over, honey, and as much as you loved it the credits have finished rolling. You’ve got to move on.

So you move over to the little shelf, and your hands stretch up and take the Mary porcelain statue, but somehow it slips and you’re short, oh so short, and it’s very smooth and it glides right through your fingers, onto the ground.

The head’s the first thing to land, face smashed in by the linoleum and the cracks travel up, branch out, spiderweb all over the Mother of God. And when it’s over you’re just standing there, looking.

And slowly you start to grin.

You walk into the living room and turn up Death Cab for Cutie’s “Soul Meets Body.” And you empty your duffel bag of the sweaty, festering workout clothes you never meant to wash, making sure they end up on his side of the bed, and start tucking away only the pieces of yourself you want to keep. Packing the clothes that YOU bought, the things you have earned for yourself. The rest can easily be forgotten.

…in my head there’s a greyhound station
Where I send my thoughts to far off destinations
So they may have a chance of finding a place
where they’re far more suited than here….

*

You met your husband when you were nineteen and working at fye, snapping precious pink bubblegum and leafing through Rolling Stone.

He was much handsomer then, at thiry-nine, and though he was twenty years your senior he stood out in sharper definition to the slouching, vapid teens scanning through Evanescence and Destiny Child’s CDs. He stood out because he was the one who went straight for the “Christian Music” section, dusty and long forgotten. You laughed when he picked out a few and brought them to the front.

“Why are you laughing?” he asked, his voice the solemn monotone of a minister. But his eyes held good humor, like his deep voice, and you thought you might have liked that about him at the time.

“It’s just…odd, don’t you think?”

“What’s so odd about singing praises to the word of God?”

And he began to tell you lies, beautiful lies that left you gaping like a child. He patiently answered your questions—Did giants really exist back then? How could Goliath be killed with just a rock?—and as time wore on he stopped looking at the CDs and focused only on you, listening to your yammerings and analysis of the Bible he gave you as though your stupid teenage revelations were the most important thing in the world.

Fye fraternizing later led to dinner dates at the wharf, informal things that you absolutely loved and he tolerated, and because you wanted to please him you just “tolerated” them too until he moved on to five-star restraunts and sparkling champagne.

“I would like to be with you,” you laughed one night, too drunk on food and starlight to notice his wince and the downward crease of his brow, “but I guess I’d have to marry you to do that, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, I’d like to marry you.”

He was silent for a moment. “There are a few requirements.”

And so you gladly eloped with him, snuck out one night while your mother was sleeping and your father was stoned and staring at the white noise on the screen, and you left a dandelion at Boo’s grave. You didn’t have time to visit Nathaniel, though. That was your one regret as you drew a straight line in the airplane all the way to Pittsburgh, as you let Father Martin pound into your head the things that would lead to your absolute misery six years from then, as the Bishop doused your head with cold water and let you partake in the scant meal; a sip of wine, a thin wafer that tasted like cardboard that would give no sustenance, not even spiritual. And only then did you wed, and the kingdom and the power and the glory lasted about two years.

*

You’ve left a note for him, your ring and your cross on his pillow.

But do you feel good as you walk through the streets, duffel bag over your shoulder, wearing a nice lacy top with a camisole underneath as you let the lights of the city sweep you away.

There are many paths you could take—you could finally go visit Nathaniel and say goodbye. You could find another nicer boy, and probably move in with him, and start this cycle over again, except perhaps this time with a little bit of a happier ending.

Or you could go into the guitar shop you’re approaching, buy the nicest guitar you can and just rock it out until the stars start dancing. Maybe you’ll be the next big thing, like Nathaniel was supposed to be. But right now there’s just you and the street and the freedom you’ve obtained, and even though you know he won’t let you go without a fight you don’t care. Right now, under the dancing stars, you are who you are meant to be.

The bleat of a car horn, clipped and cut short, causes you to sidestep to the gray curb and in the process accidentally smother a dandelion. And a snatch of song passes you by and races on ahead into the lights of the city.

A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere.

I got an A on this.

Yes, the dividers I guess were a bit hard. I couldn't think of any other way to do them that would look good, though, and I don't know how to align it to the center.

I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Knowing Yorick

A creative nonfiction piece written for another class

I never really thought much about how close I was to death while attending St. Bernard’s. Always so close to the rows and rows of graves and gravestones, remembering the few times I had to slink through the chain-link fence to get some lost ball.

It never seemed to be a creepy place with hundreds of bodies discarded by flighty souls and put to rest. It was just a green place with a lot of stones sticking out of the ground, neither uncomfortable nor welcoming—the feeling a child gets when he’s visiting Nana in the nursing home. It is a terribly lonely feeling, and all one can think about is getting in, getting out.



There is a great irony in the way that the symbols on the graves are set up, as though families, desperate to believe that some remnant of their precious one’s soul could be tamed and preserved in this world. Flying birds, fleeing away to symbolize eternal life. Arches stand for a victory in death. Flame or light symbolize resurrection. And the list goes on.

Are these conscious actions on behalf of the deeply religious to preserve what they’ve lost?

Yet nothing changes the fact that these people are dead, snuffed out of our existence for eternity. We try to move on—but does our hope that someday we’ll clutch again what we have lost keep us from really ever letting these incidents go?

What’s gone is gone. The bird does not come to alight upon the grave, but instead flies heavenward, face always forward, never looking back. There is no triumphing over something so permanent, something that will sever the mandible from the cranium, something that will turn our hands to claws and our carefully cut hair into a shaggy, beastly wonder.


Vaguely, I remember that graves were where vague stories sprang from, various wonders and intrigue at the names fading away from the limestone or bronze. Erwin Buelow. Handsome fellow married at 19, met his wife Dorothy one day while wasting his day doing the Charleston. He was a clocksmith, she the gentle wife who stayed inside so that her skin would always be white.

“Johnson, a beloved spaniel.” A pup weaned from his mother’s milk and adopted by a young boy who tired of him quickly. When they moved away, they left poor Johnson to starve until cries alerted the neighbors one day, and animal control cleaned him and took care of him until one day he found a nice, warm home in the wrinkled hands of an old man who liked reading Shakespeare and Thoreau, and there he lived out the rest of his days.

These stories are not the truth—not even close to it. And I will never know what that truth is. They are no longer here to tell that tale, and all that is left is the headboard of that final bed, with names, days of birth and perhaps a symbol or two expressing either great sorrow or futile hope.



The cemetery remains in my memory like a curled-up cat, out of sight, out of mind.

I do not relate to the shock of Hamlet’s “Alas!” at the plight of Yorick; death was not a forefront in my mind but rather a slow realization, a waking up to the truth of the matter.

But even so, I do not think I would want a gravestone of lime or granite or any such rock. Wood decays with time—as all things should—but there is still something impersonal about it, something that does not suggest that life goes on even after I die.

I want something that will take my useless shell of a body and use it to nurture its own life. I want something that will make people’s hearts lighter when they see it to counteract the heaviness that rests inside them. I do not want a bird or arch or flame, no symbol to suggest that I have somehow triumphed over the one thing that no human ever can.

I have a gravestone in mind.

I want my “headstone” to be a tree, or some sort of rosebush. It does not have to be big; it just has to be something that grows and thrives in the soil. And then my soul can leave, free and at rest, knowing that the shell of my body is being put to good use.
[/i]

A request from someone over at the Baskets of Luff Charity. Enjoy, darling!

Bearing Through the Night and to the Morning

The girl would whisper a story into the carpets at night, voice growing distant and sleepier as though it were traveling farther and farther down a road.

She watched the girl, the girl of the doe-eyes and the small-hands and the soft-light, the girl who had whispered her into existence with a flick of the finger and a drowsed, careless murmur.

Perhaps the girl knew the power she held; perhaps not. All that She knew was that she existed, and that it was the girl’s power that had made it so. She had opened her eyes one night—or was it night? She had no powers of perception, no concept of what existed outside of her own life—and the girl had been there. And She had been filled with something, something wonderous and new and unusual.

That had been the first night—perhaps it was still the first night, with intersperses of light in between, for She had no concept of time or place beyond this room, beyond this little girl. And She was curious, curious—but She couldn’t, at least not yet, reveal her presence to the girl. She did not know how to.

Outside the door came the murmurs of someone or something—She didn’t know what, but they did not make Her neck stand on end or Her heart race, so She was not afraid of them. No love for them, no hatred.

Then the crack of yellow light in the door narrowed and vanished, and She learned frustration. Did they not understand? Did they not see how vital that piece of light was? Otherwise—

The room began to snarl—from the closet, the bed, the little creeks and squeaks the room made that would make a small child freeze up, eyes wide in the dark, and breathe. She bent Herself over the girl, felt the snap and lean and acquiescence of Her bones, ligaments, muscles, created a shield of Her body to keep the bad things away during the night. And She braced herself for what was to come.
_________

The last time Carrie had been frightened by a nightmare had been so long ago that she couldn’t really remember it that well. Her parents said it had been her growing up. And perhaps that was part of the reason.

But that night she was thirsty and her throat—so dry. She needed a drink.

Carrie opened her eyes.

And there She was—arms and legs bent around her like a cage, back to her and defiantly facing forward where a bad thing—

She winced as it bore down towards Her, listened as She hissed a little but still glared up at the dark thing, the bad thing, the thing that would have borne her away to a less peaceful place.

It roared and retreated to the closet. The shining eyes set in it blinked once, twice. And then it was gone. No…just resting. Waiting for another night….

She sighed and unwound Her body from Carrie, back still away from her as she ran a hand over the ugly-looking gashes in her side, running her hand over them gingerly.

“You’re hurt…” Carrie said, and extended one arm towards Her.

She stiffened and whirled around, Her ginger hair piling on and falling a little bit over her shoulder. Back hunched, eyes wide and wet-looking and gleaming in the demi-light, hands poised as though to run away.

“No,” Carrie said, “Don’t run.” Then she smiled, growing a bit sleepy.

“…You were the one who protected me,” she murmured drowsily, and her grin widened. She seemed to fix on it as though it were the only thing She could see, so Carrie kept going. “And they closed my door, anyway, even though I wanted it open, so the bad things couldn’t get me. And you protected me, didn’t you?”

She paused, and then seemed to give a curt nod to Carrie.

“Thank you. You’ll stay, right?”

Another nod. Shy. As though the answer were obvious—that even if She wanted to, She would never be able to find Her way from the side of this child, this child who had created Her from the swipe of a finger and a soft, whispery voice.

Carrie’s eyes began to droop, and sleep washed over her like waves in an outgoing tide. But even as the smile tapered down a bit, there was something else she wanted to say, something…but she wasn’t able to get but one word out.

“Love….”
_________________

She started at the word and gasped. And from there on She was no longer She, but Love. Love could not remember ever having a name before this, or one after this; this was what she was made of now. This is the name that her creator had given her.

Love….

A snarl from the corner and she darted back over to the bed, covering the child, leaning a bit closer this time and looking over her shoulder at the great, hulking mass that was making its way towards the bed.

And the girl never needed fear the night again. Love would make sure of that.

For Love is what will bear you through the night, little one, and Love will be what greets you when you wake.