Very perceptive, Chelly. I culled this from a novel I wrote a couple of years ago called ‘Finding Irony,’ a love story. I’ve reworked it several times and polished it as a short story. In the novel version the narrator attempts to make contact with his dead mother to get her help getting in touch with his just-killed love (her name is Irony). Turns out Irony isn’t dead but only deceiving him because she’s tired of the relationship. Therein, as they say, lies the irony. I haven’t made any of the rest of it into short stories, but I have a couple of others culled from a novel called ‘The Second Virtue’. Mainly I write novels. The short stories are a (so far unsuccessful) ploy to find an agent.
Thanks for your kind words,
Dennis
Short Story / Mother's Blinkies
With one eye in the natural world and one in the supernatural, Mother was quick to notice when something was going wrong. “There’s no word for what I have because normal people don’t have them,” she told me. “I call them blinkies. They come quick as a blink and faint as angel breath—blinkies.” She wondered why I didn’t have blinkies too, since I was her son and was home schooled, and especially since I had her brown eyes. I tried, and she tried to teach me, but I was blinkie-blind. I never doubted they were real though. They were as much a part of my everyday life as the bowl my oatmeal came in until the day before Thanksgiving the year I was ten years old, the day she died.
We waited to board our flight to Chicago to celebrate Thanksgiving with Grandma Greta. Mother sat across from me with her carry-on bag on her lap. She wore her traveling clothes: hiking boots, worn blue jeans, oversized flannel shirt, red bandanna around her neck, felt hat she found at Goodwill. Her brown hair spilled out from under the hat in tight curls. She leaned across the space between us and whispered, “You smell something funny?” I strained my nose but detected only a blend of airport smells, disinfectant from the vinyl seats and sterile clamminess from the air vents. “Something about the people,” she went on. Her eyes took on a stunned look and crossed a little as she focused on her shadowy sensation, trying to deliver it into the natural world.
“The woman who left her bag with you smelled funny,” I offered.
“That’s not it.” She held her head high and turned slowly on her seat, sniffing. “It’s a smell of death,” she announced finally. “It’s everywhere.”
Once in a back alley I saw a dead cat, so I knew what death looked like. I looked from person to person in the boarding area, searching for the glassy eyes, the mouth frozen open, the stiff body.
“It fills the room.”
I breathed deeply, detected nothing, certainly nothing like the smell of the cat in the alley.
Her eyes locked on mine. “It hangs over you like a fog. Something’s about to happen. We can’t get on that airplane.”
“What will we do?”
“We won’t get on that airplane.”
I knew her determination wouldn’t waver; there would be no airplane ride to Grandma Greta’s that Thanksgiving.
“I couldn’t decide between a cinnamon roll and a cranberry scone.” the woman who left her carry-on bag with us returned with a paper bag in one hand and a steaming Styrofoam cup in the other. “There should be a rule against flaunting sweet rolls in a public place in front of defenseless chubbies.”
“You should get both,” Mother said as she pulled the woman’s carry-on bag from under her seat.
“They go right to my thighs. I’d look like that tire man in the commercials—you know, Mr. Michelin.”
“Believe me; they’ll never make it to your thighs. Get two of each.” Mother slung her bag over her shoulder. I followed and we marched up the concourse to the terminal. She held my hand. I was old enough to wish she wouldn’t, but too young to tell her. “She could eat every donut in the case,” she said when we were out of the boarding area. “Wouldn’t kill her. Wouldn’t save her either.” We turned the corner into the terminal lobby. “Good thing we didn’t check luggage. You see, there’s an advantage to being poor: you’re flexible. If we had more clothes we’d feel compelled to take more with us and we’d have suitcases.” We worked our way through luggage-encumbered people in line for check-in and headed for ground transportation.
“The woman with the donut . . .?”
She stopped outside the doorway and turned to face me. “Won’t take my advice to stuff herself and wouldn’t take my advice to stay off that airplane either.” She spotted an empty cab and pushed through the smokers outside the doorway. “People don’t realize how little time they have to enjoy life. That’s the woman with the donut; that’s everybody.”
As we left the terminal an idea slipped through my head I thought was a peek into the future but it wasn’t a true blinkie like hers. I know because it never came true. The idea was a flash image of Mother, hands clasped together, tears running down her cheek, smiling at me. Maybe it was a memory from a Christmas play at school.
Our new plan was to take the train south. She didn’t tell me this; I knew because she told the cab driver, “The Amtrak station! Hurry!” I watched through the cab’s back window as the airplane that was to be our ride to a turkey dinner with Grandma took off.
“Hurry!” she prodded the cabby from the front passenger seat. “We’ve got a train to catch.”
“Train station’s been there a century,” he answered. “It’ll wait for you.”
“But not our train. We’ll miss it if you don’t hurry. I know what I’m talking about.” She knew something, but not that we would be late for the train. “There, you need to get around that car,” she went on, pointing to the cab in front of us. Our cabbie gave in and tried to pass, but when we pulled even the other cab driver accelerated hard, making a cab race—two full-sized sedans straining to pull ahead of the other. We were neck-in-neck as we came to where the highway goes from three lanes to two. Our opponent in the other cab stretched over his steering wheel as if the extra inches would count toward his lead. Our own cabby crushed his foot against the throttle, pushed his back into his seat, and locked his eyes on the lanes ahead.
“Uh. . .” I called over the back of the seat. “We’re heading for. . .” I pointed through the windshield.
She saw the impending disaster and tried to break into the cabby’s concentration. “God damn it! I said hurry, not get us killed!”
He pressed on.
“What’s the matter with you? Stop it!”
He turned to look at her and spoke his last words, “Lady, I told you; I’ll get you where you’re going.”
Mother’s family converged on Milwaukee for her funeral and to decide what to do with the few things she’d accumulated in her life, including me. Grandma Greta and Uncle Alex drove from Chicago; Uncle Max bussed down from Duluth; Aunt Jessie flew in from Indianapolis. It would have been an Andrias family reunion, but no cousins or in-laws, and, of course, no Betty Andrias, my mother. I was in the hospital the whole time except for a few hours when Uncle Max snuck me out to go to the funeral home. Grandma Greta and Uncle Alex decided delaying the funeral until I was released from the hospital would keep them in Milwaukee and away from their lives too long, and I was too young for funerals anyway. Uncle Max disagreed and took matters into his own hands.
My left arm was in a cast and white tape wrapped my ribs so tight my breath came in puffs. The policeman who pulled me from the cab said if I’d been a few inches taller I would have gone over the front seat and through the windshield and there would be three dead from the accident, not two.
Uncle Max found my clothes in the hospital room closet. I couldn’t get the shirtsleeve over the cast, so he tore it open. My coat was the same, but he zipped it closed with my arm inside and the loose sleeve tucked into my pocket like a one-armed boy. He distracted the nurse while I slipped out of the ward and onto the elevator. We took the bus to the funeral home.
“She was cut pretty bad, but they put bandages on the worst of it,” he said as we walked the last block. His long legs moved in slow motion as he matched my pace. He wore the navy-blue pea coat he always wore, and carried his arms folded across his chest. He had the swaying, duck-like gait of a sailor. “Be ready for that; don’t let it upset you. It’s still Betty.”
“Okay.”
“She would have wanted to say goodbye. The others don’t agree, but they never understood Betty.”
“Okay.”
Uncle Max was the youngest of Mother’s siblings. He loved to tease all of them, even Grandma Greta, but especially Mother. He may have had her sixth sense; I don’t know. If he did, it came out in him differently.
Uncle Max led the way past the woman who sat behind the counter in the entry to the funeral home without saying a word. The casket was in a small room upstairs. He went through the door first and waited inside.
“How long has she been here?” I kept my eyes away from the casket.
“Since this morning. They’ll move her downstairs for the funeral later. We’ll have to get you back to the hospital before then.”
“She came here after the accident?”
“They took her to the hospital first; the same one you’re in. They tried to revive her in the ambulance, but there was no hope. By the time they got her to the emergency room she was gone.”
“Why didn’t she see it coming?”
Max sat in the chair at the end of the row and motioned for me to sit next to him. “I wondered about that too. Maybe because it wasn’t important to her.”
“Not important?” I looked directly at her for the first time. The casket covered her to her chest and bandages surrounded her head like a halo, but her face was okay except for a scratch on her chin.
“She worried about the people she loved; that’s what I mean; especially you.”
“She knew something was wrong, but she didn’t know what. She thought the airplane would crash.”
Uncle Max leaned forward to look into Mother’s face and nodded his head slowly.
“Why didn’t she know the cab would crash?”
“Maybe because you would have been killed in the airplane, but you weren’t killed in the cab.”
“She was killed.”
“Or maybe she did the best she could, given her options.”
“Don’t you think she regrets dying like that?”
“Like what?”
“With no warning.”
He looked at Mother’s face in silence.
“She had warnings for everything but when the most important thing came. . .”
He took a deep breath. “You’re right, she did have warnings for everything and I think she had one for this too.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “The best anybody can do in life is to take care of what’s most precious. Whether you see the future or you don’t, it’s the same. You have to take care of what’s most precious. That’s what Betty did.”
We sat in silence the rest of the time we were in that little room. Before long there was a tapping on the door and Uncle Max said he had to take me back to the hospital. I noticed a posting on the bulletin board as we left, Betty Andreas: Visitation 1:00; Funeral 3:00; Interment in Garden of Peace Cemetery following.
I was back in my hospital room by 2:00. Uncle Max didn’t go to the funeral though I’m sure he wanted to. He stayed with me. I watched the minutes tick away on the clock on the table by the bed while he paced by the window with his hands in his pockets. When 3:00 came I looked across the room to find him watching me closely. “Always take care of what’s precious,” he said. “It’s the best anybody can do.”
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raindragon16 reviewed Version 1 -
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I want some description of the crash because the transition just confused me, I had to read it 3 times to fully understand there was a bad crash in the taxi cab.
I like the conversation between him and Uncle Max. It’s very direct and clear, but the boy seems to be a little too calm after seeing his mother dead, almost dying, maybe he is just in shock, but I wouldn’t expect a boy to be so matter-o-fact.
That’s the only points I can see that need you attention.
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avedis reviewed Version 1 -
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A great story, basically pretty well written.
You set up questions in the reader’s mind, then went on and answered them – very skillful.
Nothing much I’d change, just two sentences that are clumsy.
“They were as much a part of my everyday life as the bowl my oatmeal came in until the day before Thanksgiving the year I was ten years old, the day she died. ”
and
“As we left the terminal an idea slipped through my head I thought was a peek into the future but it wasn’t a true blinkie like hers”
I’m not quite sure about waiting until 3.00 to say something, though I get Max waiting with the boy instead of attending the funeral.
Good story, good moral.
chelly reviewed Version 1 -
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you were able to keep my attention…i wonder are you planning to keep this as a short or expand into a novel? I would like to read more of your work it is pretty creative.
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