What’s Left To Hear
by Thomas Elson
At this stage of my life I’m unable to
walk down steps without pain; so, after my Saturday confession, the priest suggested
I leave through the sacristy - but not to linger. There were other penitents,
and the exact nature of another’s wrongs must remain private.
I hurried through the sacristy, down the ramp, past the kitchen, across
the fellowship hall, into the vestibule, then sat in the back of the church. What
are they going to say that I haven’t heard?
Once you’ve heard someone tell you that he smothered his lover
because the man was dying of AIDS; once you’ve been told about a toddler
dropped into a fire because he had urinated on his father’s boots, you’ve
already heard everything.
by Thomas Elson
“Just drive over to where
the boathouse used to be,”
the man said clutching a
plastic cup of bourbon,
his eyes not quite as
bloodshot as
they’d be in a few more
hours.
People have always kept me warm.
You’ve seen me. Or those
like me. Sturdy, offering protection – whether to dock or launch. You may even
have been inside my cool comfort sheltered from wind and sun, rain and snow.
When I was younger, I
hosted scores of folks who wanted to congregate inside my second floor meeting
room, use my storage areas, my launching platforms. When I grew older, the
socializing lessened, and people came to me for seclusion - a hideout.
Many have secreted
themselves here, but none like you with your warm eyes, your softness of being
so missing from this place, your elegance so unlike this area with its big hair
and big watches and big feet that displace things.
That evening when you
approached, it hurt to see him with you. When he trailed behind, when he
entered you, when you cowered. Cringed. Crumpled while your sounds reverberated
within me. He was someone better illuminated by florescent lights than
moonlight. But moonlight was all you had – moonlight and me. As he tried to
leave, part of me collapsed upon him, forced him under until he ceased to
breathe.
I remembered how you
stayed, then how we visited and grew close. You told me stories about the
department store, the four-room- red-brick grade school you attended - run by
nuns who brooked not one iota of misbehaviour and demanded discipline and
scholarly pursuit enforced with prayers before school, a student daily Mass at
8:20, the Angelus at noon, prayers before dismissal at 3:30.
You described the Fish
Hatchery on the east side past the lake, the activity of the beavers with their
lodges, their branch dams, and their flat-tail paths you followed as a young
girl. The banker’s house and his son’s
permanently hoarse voice you thought was from his trying to get his
parents’ attention. A little farther south, the hidden house, you said you were
forced inside once.
I comforted you with the
slim rays of sunlight crawling through tiny breaks between the slats. The
musical echoing. The splashing and lapping of water that sound as if a heart is
beating.
Two years after I ended
his brutality, he was found and hauled away. He deserved it, but I could not
allow that to happen to you. You were safe with me here - contained and sheltered.
In my element.
I
thought you would be protected by my pitched roof rising sixteen feet high
above the interior walkway. The dock jutting ever so slightly outside the
structure, past the shore and into the water. I was reassured by familiar mould
and confluence of algae with fish carcasses. I told you they were going to
renovate, to rehab, to repair, to paint my sides, replace weathered and torn
shingles, reinforce my moorings. Instead those men came with their eyes to the
ground as if avoiding the sting of recognition. They chopped, destroyed, then
they removed me one section at a time, until they discovered you.
You comforted me during
winter months when I was abandoned. You kept me warm, and I sheltered you as
long as I could.
And I’ve always loved
you.
His Butterfly
by Thomas Elson
He sees
butterflies.
He is no longer the
seventy-eight year old with high blood pressure, cold hands, and a perpetually
sore right shoulder picking up a prescription refill as he walks through the
pharmacy section of Safeway.
It has been decades,
nevertheless, today he is a nine-year-old fourth grader in Sacred Heart school,
who fell out of a tree and onto the exposed barbs at the top of a playground
chain link fence. He is walking home with a shred of skin flapping against his knee
as blood stains his ripped Levi 501 jeans - the ones with the buttons he hated,
the only ones sold at Jett’s Department store in this little post-war town with
not enough housing for families of men freshly discharged after World War II
and Korea.
He
limps from fence to sidewalk to trek the five blocks home without mentioning
the blood and pain from the gash, when on his left he sees his mother’s face on
the driver’s side as their two-tone green 1953 Oldsmobile Super ’88 pulls to
the curb. The car stops. His mother exits the car, opens the rear passenger
door, and he, without hesitation, hops in. No words spoken. It’s as if she
knows - what, where, when, and how.
He
recalls nothing until they arrive home. She tells him to stand in the bathtub.
He struggles to remove his jeans. She allows the blood to drip. Then, as if by
magic, and with a surgeon’s grace, she lifts the flap of skin from the knee
with the little finger of her left hand. Cleans the wound with her right hand,
applies mercurochrome, then removes a Band-Aid from its tin container,
fashioning a butterfly shape, pulling the cover from the adhesive, placing it
over his knee. He hears muttering about a tetanus shot.
Decades later, the school is still there. As is the fence with its twisted links – now covered with protective tubing. Sometimes the image of that butterfly recurs –
when picking up a
prescription refill,
when not in a hurry,
when he reads the
Band-Aid labels –
flexible fabric,
sensitive skin,
liquid spray,
the rounded butterfly –
he remembers his mother’s
magical powers.
Thomas Elson’s stories
appear in numerous venues, including Mad Swirl, Blink-Ink, Ellipsis, Scapegoat,
Bull, Cabinet of Heed, Flash Frontier, Ginosko, Short Édition,
Litro, Journal of Expressive Writing, Dead Mule School, Selkie,
New Ulster, Lampeter, and Adelaide. He divides his time between Northern
California and Western Kansas.
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