Second Verse, Same as the First...Cowboy Accent All The Way

So, here's what I turned in just a few minutes ago for my class. It went over by a half of a page, but he said this was fine. See if you can find the changes and see what - if any - of the changes you like or dislike. I'm interested to hear your opinion.


Thank you all!

Lightning Bug

     Firefly.

    

     Lampyrid.

     Pyrophorus noctiluca.

     I liked that one best - noctiluca. I found it in the encyclopedia Mama brought home from the Piggly Wiggly that some lady paid for with S & H green stamps but never picked up (she only got A - L because that’s all the lady had ordered, but she promised me she‘d get the rest someday.) It said in Latin that’s what they called them, but I’ve always preferred lightning bug. It sounded like castanets when I said it aloud. The colloquialism made me think of luminous glow in their bellies, flickering in the dark. (Colloquialism was the section I found on language, just before the encyclopedia ran out.)

     Our front yard in Pearl, Mississippi, was filled with lightning bugs. When I was little, I thought they were invisible during the day, hidden by the sunlight like fairies, only to be revealed when the sun would disappear behind the hill’s edge. I’m eleven now, so I know better. Now I know they sleep during the day and at night after they wake up, they go to look for dates, much like my Uncle Rudy.

     After the sun dims in our neighborhood and the yellowed living room lights seep out onto the roads, the steps in front of the clapboard houses crowd with mothers. They sit with their long-haired daughters between their legs, untangling their hair with their fingers and the gossip with their tongues.

     Mama sits with the ladies, sometimes messing with one of my sisters’ hair - the both still had long strands that cascaded down their backs. After I stumbled into the bathroom one night and didn’t see that my braid had ended up wet, Mama chopped my hair off rather than, “…let you end up with typhoid.“ I didn’t want to tell her that the encyclopedia said I’d have to ingest the toilet water for me to get sick, mainly because I was getting tired of all that came with long hair. I liked it better chasing the lightning bugs with my cat, Brown Kitty, than listing to stories and having my head pulled raw by combs.

     Once in awhile, a lightning bug will fly into my hand. I get so excited, cupping my hands around it, feeling it flutter lightly against my palms. When the ache of holding one prisoner for too long tugs at me, I open my fingers and let the lightning bug flutter clumsily away.

It’s been two months since I played in our front yard, since we left Pearl, skirting away in the 1959 Ford van Daddy bought from Mr. Humphreys. He told Daddy the shift was on the column, but that it could pull stumps out like no ox ever could.

     We set off for Hot Springs, Arkansas in the near dead of night, exhausted from packing and crying good-byes. It was be the first time we have ever lived more than 10 miles away from Grandpa and Grandma and I’m not quite sure we’ll find our way back in a timely manner. Still, the ride there was simpler than I expected. Summer was easing into its middle, causing my sisters and me to sweat while we slept in the back seats, even with all the windows rolled down.

     I was thrilled when after months of either playing alone or pretending I didn’t know enough to make whole words out of 7 Scrabble tiles when I played with Amy or Lou Ann, Mama announced we’d be starting school two weeks earlier than back home. She said it was because the kids down here got out earlier than we did because of the roofers. They couldn’t work the tar once the devil had gotten in the wind and caused the air to burn when it touched you.

     School was my most favorite thing in the entire world. I could barely sleep nights before a test, not from fear, but from excitement, the sheer pleasure of handling the freshly mimeographed pages, smelling their sweet ink in the air and the dampness of the pages, and then looking down the pages at all the questions lined up in rows.

     When Mrs. Robinson assigned us fifth graders a project of selecting a country and then presenting it, most of my classmates showed up with discarded shoeboxes filled with cutouts from their mothers’ Good Housekeeping magazines. I had selected Italy and spent the prior three weeks shaping a dome to mimic the cathedral foyer, painting the interior with cobalt blue I had bought at the Ben Franklin store. I used gold for the fleur-de-lis I had painted on the ceiling, fresh sprigs of rosemary to imitate the decorative bushes in the foyer, and then I rigged Daddy’s leftover tiny white Christmas lights to look like sconces near the alter. I turned the lights off in the room when I presented my diorama that Friday, and had borrowed my cousin Kyle’s Walkman so I could play Pavarotti singing like he would be in my chapel. The room was quiet and chilled, even after I turned the lights back on. Nobody in the room would talk to me, not even Mrs. Robinson. Kim Crittenden whispered behind her hand to Christy Whittington and I heard the word brownnoser behind her fingers. I wiped my face, just in case.

     It wasn’t the first time the room got quiet after I was done, but I don’t mind. I’m used to sitting by myself at lunch. Sometimes I sit with with June Connell, who nobody – not even the girl with purple fingers that everybody teases and says she has lice – will sit with June. Even that tapered off after awhile and I began to eat my bologna sandwiches alone while I reread the outside of my Partridge Family lunch box.

     Mama took me, Lou Ann, and Amy over to Little Rock to pick out new school dresses. She said, “Hot Springs don’t have nothing that nice girls can wear outside a they front yards. We just have to find the next big town over.” And Little Rock was the biggest - four Sears, two JC Penney’s, and a full 2-story mall just like they had in the movies with its own Swenson’s and Casa Bonita.

     Hours later, we emerged with white crisp bags full of dresses, tights, and slightly-high heeled shoes that tapped like dance shoes while I walked. My favorite dress is the creamy colored one with bright red cherries all over it that Mama found for me hidden in the size 8s. When I turned around to show Mama how I looked, the skirt lifted up and made me look like a ballerina in the mirror. I made sure I carried that bag all around the mall and kept it with me the whole two hour drive home, rather than let it sit in the trunk and get car fumes all over it.

     “This year will be different, girls,” Mama said to the three of us. “Won’t it, Grace?”

     “Yes, Mama,” I replied happily.

     “We’ll get you some friends for sure,” she said more quietly, but she looked in the rear view mirror at me and smiled.

     “Yes, Mama,” I replied hesitantly.

　

     The night before school started, I tossed and turned, excited to wear my new dress and use my new supplies. Fresh pencils have such a fine sharpness that make my signature look even more daring and creative. It irritates me to no end when one breaks, especially during a test when I’m concentrating hard. Every time, I’m forced to walk to the front of the class, being watched as I do, listening to the snickering behind the boys’ hands, a slight push as I go by.

     One time, right after pep club started, Mama spent the night before making my gorgeous regulation gold puffed sleeved shirt. I had worn it that morning in spite of having a test because there was a pep rally after school. I had gotten up to sharpen my pencil and on my way back, I saw Kim Crittenden whispering to Mark Bailey. Before I could figure out what she was saying, Mark’s foot went right out into my path. I came down hard on the floor. Kim rushed to help, she said later, but instead she jabbed my elbow hard. Normally, it wouldn’t have mattered, but Kim knew I was harboring a large scab under the silky golden fabric, a scab she put there just the week before, a scab that easily came loose, causing blood to ooze out and permanently stain the elbows of the shirt. I sat in my seat, in front of Kim and Mark, making sure to wipe my tears only when I could make it look like I was scratching an itch.

I didn’t want Mama to see the stain after all her hard work so I lied and said I didn’t like pep club afterall and I quit.

     My fresh pillow now burned against my cheek, fresh tears collecting on the pillowcase. I fell asleep without dreaming about my new crisp folder or my scented notebook paper.

　

     The next day, Mrs. Hart, my new sixth grade teacher, had our whole class introduce ourselves to each other by coming to the front of the class. As each on came up, the others would make jokes or say their names in funny ways, the way they had for all the years they had known each other. I was the only one in the room who had not been in kindergarten to now with the same children.

     When I stood at the front of the class, they were all silent, listening intently. I saw one girl, called Savannah, lean in to whisper to the boy named Elmer. When she pulled back, I saw her smile at me. As I passed by her desk to reach mine, my whole body tensed and prepared for the fall. Instead, she reached forward with a fresh pencil, offering me one of hers with butterflies on it.

     When lunch came, a small group crowded around me, asking me smiling question after another, so curious about this place so far away, farther than they had ever been. Some looked on with curious gazes; others nodded with seemingly knowing and understanding nods, as if they knew exactly where I was talking about.

     After school, we all clamored together, teasing and tickling as we walked. When we came to our house first, Mama seemed surprised but she recovered quickly and asked would “Miss Savannah” like to join us for dinner. She did indeed and went inside to call her mother, who was only too delighted to have one less person for her maid, Elsie, to cook for.

     After dinner, Savannah and I ran around our new front yard, begin to wear a new path in our new yard. We pulled out my sisters’ cheap Barbies and played fairyland in our bushes.

As the sun dipped below the hang of the trees, the lighting bugs appeared, twinkling under the weeping willow. I put out my cupped hands and captured one between my fingers and Savannah did the same. I peeked inside and watched the lightning bug lighting the inside of my hand, turning it pink. Savannah did the same.

     Suddenly, Savannah took a hold of her lightning bug between her fingers and drug its tail across her shirt, leaving an iridescent trail. She looked at me, smiling, the remnants of her bug in her hand.

     I smiled back weakly, feeling my lightning bug clamoring against the bars of my fingers. I picked him up by his thorax. Looking at Savannah, I dragged his body against my shirt, leaving a trail behind. I quickly dropped the remainder and looked down at my belly, all beautiful and lit now, already fading. I smiled at Savannah and she returned it, all big and loopy and giddy. She grabbed my hand and off when ran into the bushes, into fairyland.




copyright - All rights to the work posted on this site are retained by Cass Van Gelder. If you'd like to use some of my work, please ask. To do so, the permissions must be spelled out in writing...from me...I meant it. I have mean cats; don't make me use them.

The Story That Started It All - NEW POST

I'm a writer.

There's no news there. There will be no ticker tape, speedily printed off in some suited man's hands as he gasps in shock. I am, I am, I am.

To me, it's no big deal, but I've found it's a huge deal to a lot of other people.

When they find out what I am (and yes, it's what I am and not simply what I do. And I like that.) they want to ask all kinds of questions, and one of the first ones is usually about what kind of writing I do. Even the doctor I went to while I was up-chucking the last 15 days worth of lunches, even he cracked a child-like grin when I told him I was a writer and immediately started in with a barrage of questions, mainly about what type of writing I was doing and how had I gotten started and oh how his little boy was wanting to write and would I talk to him.

I never mind those kinds of questions. Never do. Granted, they used to frighten me. It wasn't long ago that I had sudden success, very unexpected success. I was not prepared. They don't do that. They prepared you for failure, particularly as a writer, but never for success. I had no idea what to do and I had no one to talk to, and certainly no one who sympathized with me.

I remember attending a party up in the hills of Berkeley (which included the instructions, "Go past the two pink rocks..." on the directions.). I had been followed about by no less than 9 people who either wanted to give me advice (of which they had no experience to base it on) or they wanted me to give them advice (of which I had even less experience to give them).

I was petrified.

So I disappeared.

Not just from the party but from everything having to do with writing. It was far too overwhelming. I felt guilty. I felt scared. I felt, I felt, I felt. And it was too much. It would be another 7 years before I could go back to it seriously, after I started practicing Nichiren Daishonin's Buddhism. (And no, I don't like proselytising. Just consider it my own little Coppertone ad.)

I'm better at it now. I still get a little skittish when I'm face-to-face with people who are aware I'm a writer. I'm not really sure why, but the fact is what the fact is.

Among the questions I'm asked, people want to know why and how. Why write what I do and how did I get started. I can actually answer that about this particular novel. It was started with a question of its own, one from my mother.

She had been an artist who taught classes all around town, including in our own home. Though my sisters participated, I could not, would not, have anything to do with her classes. She had always wanted to know why, and around this time period, during a phone call one Sunday afternoon, set to asking me again. I didn't have a clean answer then, but I did know why.

What follows is the story I wrote that was eventually published in "Burning Car Magazine" to answer that question.

I prewarn you. It's graphic. But, as my mother said after having read it, "It's not true, but in our house, it could have been,"

Here is Mama.

     She scratched out the pre-printed homemaker and wrote in neat school-girl handwriting occupation: artist. 
     She would lean over my school papers, and Daddy’s tax returns, muttering to herself, sometimes rubbing her eraser so hard she bore a hole right through. She felt she had earned the right to the title. She taught classes on weekends at the Fine Arts Center – a wide-load mobile home, transformed after it had been turned over to the city,
     With expansive, theatrical gestures, she would encourage a roomful of smock-covered students to experiment with their brushes and pens – to be brave and explore. To not only attempt what the instrument could do, but what it might do.
     Being seven and too young to be left along, I would be dragged down to the Arts Center every Saturday in the heavy heat. I would watch as the ladies in pastel polyester pants would arrive, one by one, in boat-sized Fords and Lincolns. They would wrestle with the supplies in the passenger seat, pulling and tugging, all the while fighting with their overzealous, pink-bowed toy poodles to stay in the car.
     Most of the women would smile as they went by, first to me then to their reflection in the front door glass. Usually a touch to the teeth to remove some lipstick while the dogs yapped in the background. Mama always opened the door with a friendly, “Hey, how you doing?” letting the sweetness of her heavy Southern accent wrap around them.
     Before the class would start, Mama would come out, slipping a slice of cold air with her. She would sit down beside me on the scorching concrete steps with a lemon tea, half-melted ice floating on top. She rearranged her shorts to keep from burning herself, knocking off loose gravel that collected on her exposed thighs. Time and again, she would sit beside me, brushing my hair back off my face, trying to convince me to come in the air-conditioned coolness of the fake wood rooms. 
     She wanted me to sit still for one of her classes instead of waiting for her outside, feeling the tiny pin-pricks of heat and exhaustion of being along – she wanted me to experiment and be brave like the others.
     But I couldn’t. I always said no.
     She’d shake her head and go back inside, hurt, positive I just did not want to be with her. But it wasn’t true. I loved Mama, but I admit I couldn’t bear to be in the same room with her when she was like that, her swooping arms and graceful movements, so different from the woman I knew. A fist grabbed my insides and squeezed when I would watch her.
     Brave strokes were not what she made in front in front of her face when he thrashed his arms at her. Her wiry arms would instead wrap around her head. She would huddle in a corner while he stood over her, screaming her name, breathing out words I was not allowed to use, waving wildly, throwing his arms at her face, her arms, her body, anywhere he could hurt her. Sometimes with fists. Sometimes not. Sometimes his hand filled itself with the nearest instrument – a pillow, a book, a wrench. Wherever he could reach, whatever was nearest.
     I could not move to help her. Instead, I would lay waking in the night, listening carefully, fingering the handle of the butter knife I kept under my pillow – I was not old enough to be allowed to use the steak knives even at the dinner table.
     One night, I heard her, her voice different, more fearful, more desperate. I crept out of the bed and pressed my ear against the door. I could hear nothing then, not even her breathing. I pulled at the door slowly, making sure to not go further than an inch, otherwise I would wrestle awake an oil-hungry hinge.
     I could see her, her back against the wall. Her hands were still sweaty from clenching them tight over her; matted hair clumping together. Light from the kitchen bellied under the door. She breathed in deep, wiping her hand across her forehead. He had left her alone.
     I could hear him in the kitchen, clanking through drawers, the suck then pop as he opened the refrigerator. He would be hungry. Exercise always had that effect.
     She was trying to lift herself up with one hand when he came back around the corner, a gleaming flash of light in his hands. He pushed her back to the floor and crouched in front of her, drops of spit on his balloonish lip. He pushed his face into hers, grinding his temple against her sticky forehead. The light flashed again and then in front of her face. He held himself so close to her the barrel almost toughed both of their temples.
     “We’ll go together, baby. Isn’t that what you want? Huh? Be rid of me and you? Isn’t that what you want, hmmm?”
     Her arms dropped like doll parts, attached only with rubberbands, useless, at her sides. She was so quiet.
     “Please…,” she whispered to him.  “Please.”
     I was standing behind the door, nightgowned and wondering what it was she was asking him to do – to stop it, or to do it?
     He laughed, a crack of sound in the darkness. He reached for her head and pulled it back, looking almost as if he were cradling her in his hand. He started slowly, caressing her neck with the barrel. He let it glide languidly across her dark skin, her strong collarbone. I saw her shiver from the cold metal. He smiled to her, then drug it between her breasts while he watched her. His fluid movements stopped with the barrel pointed down, directly into her belly.
     “It wouldn’t take but one shot and I’d be rid of you both,” he said as she stared at the luminous flash of metal. “Just one shot.”
     She closed her eyes, her shoulders loosened. I watched her as she breathed, carefully. Slowly, she raised her lids, trailing the barrel, his hands, arms, face, eyes; she stopped. Her filmy gaze looked past his black slits.
     “Please,” she said again.
     He watched her eyes go wide as he drug the pistol down, between her legs, resting his other hand on her thigh. But she didn’t move. She only looked forward, one hair to this side of him.
     He wrapped his arm around her head and pushed at her face, holding it, pointing directly at his own. His meaty fingers were digging into her cheeks. A grin broke across his face.
     Click.
     A shudder went through her.
     Nothing.
     He let her head drop on the hardwood floor as he rose from the corner and laughed. Mama pulled herself up, her back against the wall now. Trembling, she had her eyes open, but still glazed and unfocused, still staring past him. His shadow engulfed her body as he glared down at her. With one swift movement, his foot flung out, kicking her where the gun lay between her legs. She crumpled into a ball, groaning, clutching her curving belly.
     “Fat bitch,” he muttered as he left the room.

                                             ********


     “Free yourself. Don’t be restrained by what is expected. Go boldly and daringly into your work,” she would still tell the blue-haired ladies who sat clinging to every word.
     Broad strokes she would make, colorful, but without once ever leaving a piece of herself on canvas; so crippled inside and unsteady. Boldly and daringly, she told them as she heard the definitions of her life come from a man she would never leave.