#55:  THERE IS ONE END

“There is one thing that I have to make very clear before we begin our lesson,” she said. “You may be a bullfighter, but I am a nun.”
     “I understand,” said the bullfighter, with a wry smile. “You are but a formidable opponent with whom I have fallen in love.”
     The bullfighter’s smile made Sister Bertrille blush. What was it that Mother Superior always used to say in situations like this? Sister Bertrille closed her eyes tightly and tried to remember.
     “Imagine a long, dark corridor,” she began, and then: “where victory wears a cruel smile.”
     No, Sister Bertrille thought to herself. That can’t be it. “Ah, yes.”
     “For the ladybug,” she recalled softly, “ a dozen roses.”
     “NO!” Wait. “A story to be told softly,” yes, yes, that’s it, “the big trouble with Charlie.”
     Nuts, Sister Bertrille muttered softly.
     Mother Superior was never in situations like this. Tutoring? Maybe. Certainly not with a bullfighter. And Sister Bertrille wondered who she really was? Was she a policeman?   
Yes, yes. A policeman. A policeman stealing car alarms? That could be. For the fun of it. No, no, because I need the money, yes. For my dreams. For my señor, thought Sister Bertrille. No, not my señor.
     But those weren’t the thoughts of a woman in love, were they? Certainly not with a bullfighter.  And if they were, those bullfighters were nothing like me. At least not like this one. But maybe so.
     Sister Bertrille opened up her book, smiled, and began to read, just for fun, starting at the end.

TELEFRICASSEE is a 101 part beastly stew or episode roux of television shows beginning with Our Miss Brooks, Meet Mr. McNutley, Father Knows Best and continuing through Honey West, The Real McCoys, Ben Casey, My Mother The Car, Sea Hunt and GIdget, finally achieving full denouement with Chico The Man and then concluding abruptly with Nip/Tuck, although there are many others, uncredited, to be found in between.

Ricky Garni has worked as a graphic designer, a teacher, a warehouse manager, a wine merchant, a recording engineer, and, for one day, a bathroom attendant in a pizzeria on Miami Beach that had a rather dainty and elderly thermostat and it was summer.  Mr. Garni has written poetry and prose since 1974, and has been published fairly often in print and on the web.  He loves old movies and bicycles and still likes pizza, but prefers the honest, wholesome, North Carolina variety.

     When the doctors dragged Madeleine out of the red smile that curved
across her mum's stomach, Jimmy thought she looked like an astronaut,
or a diver in one of those huge suits in the movies he watched on
Saturday afternoons with his dad. A nurse cleaned away the gunk, and
Jimmy peered at his reflection in the glass bowl. Madeleine's mouth
was wide open, flashing pink gums, and the inside of the bowl fogged
up.
     Madeleine slept in a cot in the corner of Jimmy's room, beneath a
mobile of sea creatures that bobbed and whirled with the breeze of the
lazy ceiling fan. Jimmy would watch at night as his sister reached her
tiny hands up towards the whorled tail of a wooden seahorse, the spiny
explosion of a plastic puffer fish. The moonlight trickled through the
blinds and made the room look like the ocean.
      Bathtime was a glorious, splashy affair that stretched on through the
evening. Madeleine would lie placidly at the bottom of the tub, her
arms and legs starfishing rhythmically in the foam-frilled bath before
she surfaced, spraying the room with a halo of water. She would shape
her mouth into an O and stare goggle-eyed at him before bursting into
squeals of silent laughter. The bowl clattered against the sand-coloured porcelain.
      At the pool, people stared, offering their sympathies, or specialists'
business cards pulled from the depths of their bags, minty from
forgotten wads of chewing gum, edges splayed and furry like seaweed.
Madeleine was the only baby in her class who could open her eyes
underwater.
     Jimmy's mum and dad decided to renovate the house, to turn it from a
sea of hallways and cave-like rooms into something vast and open-plan.
Jimmy sat in his mum's lap and squinted at the architect's spiky sketch, which was drooly in places where murky drops of coffee had landed. The walls were all going to become windows, and the thick dark doors would be replaced with etched glass.
     One night, something rapped loudly against the new glass wall. Jimmy
slid out of his bed, and the blood roared in his ears like waves crashing against age-worn rocks.  Madeleine was balanced against one of the tall masts that secured her cot to its rocker, clutching at the edge of her blanket.
     They made fish noises at each other.
     When the renovation was complete, Jimmy's grandma came to visit. They
could hear the purring of the water taxi long before it arrived.  Her coral-coloured lipstick wore away as she kissed her family's cheeks through the glass.  Later, she sat outside beneath the sun umbrella and crossed her scaly, barnacled legs, which were rivered with blue veins. Her earrings were dark pearls that pinched against her earlobes and glinted as she primly sipped her tea.  The clusters of onlookers kept a respectful distance. The cameras they clutched had lenses that shimmered like pearls, and the photos they took would be speckled with tiny grains of grit.
     The tide of night slowly rose, skirting blackly around the house's glistening shell. Jimmy clambered on to the craggy arm of the couch, angling between his parents,  and stared through the lounge room wall.  It reflected him in a way that distorted his limbs, stretching and softening them so that they appeared jointless.
     His grandma swept towards them, clutching her cup of tea. She had a
loose-legged way of walking, as though her legs flowed through something thick and supportive. Madeleine followed, gently lolling her
arms in quiet imitation.  The dark wave of night slipped over them with a sigh, drawing them beneath its wet, inky curtain.
      In the morning, all that remained was the sandy socket where the house
had carved a slim footprint in the earth. It began to rain, and the
crowd unfurled umbrellas like anemones and stared with glassy eyes.

Stephanie Campisi is a writer of the weird and wondrous. Her work has appeared in magazines and anthologies worldwide, including in her native Australia, the US, the UK, the Czech Republic, Singapore, and Argentina. You can find her online at www.stephaniecampisi.com.
 

It was her penmanship that caught his attention. Ida Olsen from Wrenshall, Minnesota, wrote cursive letters that were compact and smart, forward-slanting like they had purpose. Her capital Q started with a strange old-fashioned loop that made the whole thing look like a 2.

If he was honest with himself, he supposed he thought it would be nice if one day he saw those perfectly formed letters addressed to him.

Dear Ida, he wrote, sneaking glance around. If he wasn’t facing his monitor, his boss would frown at him in that half-moon way. My name is Adam Flynn. I work at Clarence University, where we pay you to write hand-written notes on behalf of Dean Yates. You wouldn’t believe how the alumni respond when they get this kind of correspondence! My job is to log all the checks they send in afterwards. I guess I just wanted to thank you for all you do for the University. Sincerely, Adam Yates.

He didn’t tell her that his parents were professors at the University. He didn’t add how he still lived at home but wanted to move out. He didn’t tell her he was having a hard time saving enough to afford a security deposit. He left out that he was an English major and maybe that’s why he didn’t have a better job.

She wrote back within a week. He saw the envelope and his heart beat a capital Q.

Dear Adam, it was nice of you to write. I enjoy helping out the University, where my husband Ernie played football and graduated in 1949. He passed away not long ago. It’s just me now and a big, empty house. The letter writing keeps me busy. If you are a student, I hope you are working hard. I wish you all the best. Sincerely, Ida Olsen

Adam took the letter with him to lunch. He ate his sandwich under a tree in the sunshine and brushed crumbs off the paper.

Dear Ida, he wrote that same afternoon, The Alumni Relations office has asked me to personally deliver a thank you gift to you, on behalf of all you do for the University. Are you available for me to stop by next week?

It was a lie, of course, but so what? He pictured her wiry gray hair, and the dark-wood insides of her house. She would smell like baking and maybe arthritis cream. She would pat his knee and thank him for coming.

He would take a taxi because the bus didn’t go out to Wrenshall. He’d take some cash out of his security deposit funds to pay for it.

He looked up her address online. 254 Cross Street. He waited a couple days until he was sure she had the letter, then caught a cab from in front of the Union. The driver scowled when he said Wrenshall. Adam ignored him.

The ride was longer than he thought, and bumpier thanks to all the back-roads. But her house was just like he pictured it—white with black shutters. Three stories. He could feel its emptiness, just like she’d described. My house is empty too, he thought. Even with people in it.

He could already see the hairline cracks in her plaster wall; he could feel the rough knit of her afghan on his elbow. Ida would listen to him. Her writing told him she was kind and understanding.

He knocked on the door. He waited. He knocked again. He peered into a nearby window and saw a hand. He swallowed. He saw a wrinkled wrist poking out from a sleeve. Nothing moved.

He raced back down the steps. “Go,” he said to the taxi driver. “They’re not there.” He counted how many times he blinked on the ride home, to keep from picturing her hand. He got to 13,034 before the driver pulled up in front of his house. The fare was more money than he’d brought with him.

He had to go inside to ask for money, and then he’d have to tell his parents the truth. What would they say? What would he say? Someone had to get Ida out of the house and notify family. Right? She could be hurt. What if she was just unconscious? What if she was dead? The taxi driver cleared his throat.

He grasped the door handle. He had from the driveway to the house to think of a lie. So he could keep writing her like nothing had ever happened. He would never tell anyone. His letters would pile up on her floor underneath the mail slot. Twenty, maybe thirty by the time someone came. But they would get there. Eventually.

Dear Ida, he would write, I’m sorry I missed you.

Lara Zielin grew up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, eating cheese and reading anything and everything she could get her hands on. In addition to DONUT DAYS, Lara is the author of MAKE THINGS HAPPEN: THE KEY TO NETWORKING FOR TEENS and she is currently at work on a new novel, PROMGATE. Lara lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, with her husband, dog, and cat. For more information on Lara, please visit www.larawrites.com.

“And the signs along the highway all said
Caution: Kids at Play.”
--Meatloaf

Joy parked her VW bug up near Cowles Mountain and, before long, we were both in the passenger seat, going at it while Springsteen’s “Thunder Road" played on some quiet FM station and a perfectly round, full moon watched over us in a sky devoid of clouds. She did this thing where she bit my earlobe and whispered that she loved me. It drove me crazy. Curved slightly on the right side of her mouth, her lips gave her a look as if she were always slightly amused. I wanted to touch her every time she smiled, put my hands on her body just to feel connected.

Months before, I saw her at an all ages club, and worshipped her while a band called DeadEnd covered Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face.” We’d been seeing each other ever since. She was smarter than I was, more experienced, and I still benefit, all these years later, from the things she taught me. Often while we were driving together, Joy would stop at a red light, and then—with a look of raw lust in her eyes--reach over and squeeze me on the knee. I realized over time that Joy’s every movement was intended so that I would learn.

During a pause, Joy turned her body to avoid the gearshift, her lips grazed my flesh (they felt like fire on my cheek), and she moaned a little in the back of her throat in a way that stopped my breath. I placed my fingers at the back of her neck, felt the soft intersection where her hair met her skin, and grew drunk on how her throat smelled like the cinnamon she’d had in a hot apple cider from Starbucks. I inhaled her scent, and then I pulled toward her me.

Gently, she rolled beside me and looked in my eyes. She seemed sleepy but content, as if I’d satisfied her in some profound and necessary way. “You’re so open to me, she said, almost sadly, “so innocent,” and then she touched my face with her outstretched fingers—her skin on my skin like a medicine, healing me.

This one night in her car, while we were parked on the mountainside, staring up at a moon that was bright, but offered no answers or insight, was long before the sky above us fell, long before I knew what was down the road, long before Joy pulled her car over to the side of the street not far from where we first made love just to tell me that there would be no more parking, that his name was Michael, and that, eventually, I would get over it.


James Pierce's work has appeared in various print and on-line journals including Flashstory, lingo, and The Dirigible. He calls Dubuque, Iowa his home, and wants you to know that the important parts of this story are true.