Reading this Friday at Stories LA!

1716 Sunset Blvd. LA CA 90026

8 p.m., with a glass of wine in your hand

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We leave together, walking down past the theatre to where Mirto’s little yellow Lupo is parked on the sidewalk of a narrow and crooked street. I am late to meet Adonis so accept Mirto’s offer to drive me.
“You leave tomorrow for Milos?” she asks once the car hits second gear.
“Adonis bought tickets for the morning’s first ferry. Yuri and Katerina are already there to open the house.”
“It took you long enough to make up your mind.”
“Yeah, well, there’s something about Katerina that I just don’t like. She’s always so sexed up, you know? And all her talk of infidelities, it makes me uncomfortable.”
“I’m always sexed up and you like me.”
“I’m being serious, I have to go spend a week with this woman.”
“Touchy today…”
“I’m not touchy, I just don’t think the tone she takes with me is appropriate. I mean, I’m dating her boyfriend’s best friend.”
“She’s after Yuri for his money and she assumes you’re after Adonis for the same reason, she thinks she can confide in you. But it’s not your business to get in the middle of their relationship. Go, do your duty with Adonis, and get back here in time for us to go camping. Michalis is counting on you to keep him company.”
I’m tired of Michalis. Ever since we had sex I feel I need to constantly remind him that we will never have sex again, but he’s Mirto’s best friend so there’s no avoiding him. And if it means a week of sleeping on the beach with Mirto, I’m happy to ward off a few more advances. “Okay, I’ll do my best. I just wish you had told me sooner about camping so I wouldn’t have to squeeze.”
I see Adonis’ Peugot parked on the corner. “You can drop me here,” I say. She pops the clutch and puts the car in neutral, pulls on her emergency brake. And again her hand is on my thigh.
“Squeeze or no squeeze, we’ll make it work. Do your duty, don’t meddle, be back in Athens by Monday. The ferry workers are talking strike, so don’t get stuck.”
“I won’t get stuck, I promise. I’d swim back rather than miss a week of you topless,” I say.
“That’s more like it,” she says, her hand moving up my thigh, her shirt drooping as she leans in towards me. Adonis walking in the direction of her car.
We kiss quickly and I jump out. Mirto peels away before Adonis reaches us. “I was worried you had forgotten,” he says. “I was just going to get my phone from the car to call you.” He takes me by the wrist and leads me towards the café. “Who was that dropping you off?”
“Just Mirto. She offered to bring me here if I stopped to look at a dress she wants to buy.”
“I wonder if I’ll ever get to meet this Mirto.”
“You’ll meet her soon enough.”
“Was the dress nice at least?”
“A little loud for my taste.”

The Museum of Broken Relationships (partial catalogue)

 AN1025  Receipt for Two Spaten Beers (17.32)

 AN1225 Set of Matching Blue Plaid Sleeping Bags that Zip Together with Matching Blue Plaid Pillows (Retail 160.)

 AN0214  Fake Microphone Rose  (A Valentine’s gift.  It originally said “I love you so much.”  When I accidentally erased the message, he re-recorded a fake message.  Which remains recorded.)

 AN0728 Travel Sunscreen with Carabiner Clip

 AN0729 Half Bar of Irish Spring Soap

 AN0824 Two Sets of Camping Silverware (One missing a knife.  One missing a spoon.)

 AN1025  Cracked Wineglass with 237 Pennies (Accumulated over 12 months.  Meant to prove our love would never wane over the years, each penny signified a time making love.)

 AN1013 Plastic Ring (From the quarter machine at the corner donut shop.)

 AN0425  Souvenir Mai Tai Glass with 68 Pennies (Accumulated over 6 months.  Failing to prove our love would never wane over the years, each penny signified a time making love.)

 AN0428 One Pawn Ticket (125.)

 AN0430 Mismatched White Tube Socks (Plastic grocery bag of.)

 AN0513 Delinquent Bill Notice (237.)

 AN1025 Recurring Dream (You’re warm as summer sand and close. When you leave, which surprises me every time, I’m in an empty room with unfamiliar people.  Everything turns gray.)

 www.brokenships.com

We find an empty stone bench along the rim of the hill and she pulls the lace fringe of her skirt up over her knees to sit cross-legged. Around us the city dips and rises in its millions of rooftops and the sea sits hiding just behind the haze. I look instead at the newly exposed skin of her inner thigh.

She sees me looking and takes my hand, slides it under the fabric and high onto her skin.

“It is nice,” she says. “I haven’t been up here since my last grade school field trip. I’m glad you suggested it.”

I put my other hand onto her other thigh.

“I haven’t told you yet what happened last weekend,” she says. “When we were out at Vibe this woman I had never even met grabbed me by the arm and pushed me into the bathroom and started kissing me like crazy – and in front of all of these other people. Everyone in the club must have thought I was gay, but it didn’t matter, she just couldn’t be stopped. I swear not even Takis has ever kissed me that way in public.”

I take my hands back out from under her skirt. I want her to understand my jealousy but do not want to put it into words.

“Wow. And what about Takis? Did he see it? Did he accuse you of being gay?”

“Takis was too drunk to notice anything. He was too drunk to notice the red lights on the drive home.”

“So what about this girl then – what’s with her? I mean, who just grabs random strangers in bars?”

Mirto laughs. “Oh come on. I’m irresistible. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed.”

I turn to look over my shoulder at the city below, then turn toward the ruins in front of me. “What country do you think they’re from? Spain? Portugal?” I point to a family taking pictures in front of the entry to the museum. Mirto looks in her purse for cigarettes.

The Jackalope has been a common feature of Juniper Lake since long before prospectors came to tear at the flesh California’s mountains. The Chumash and Tongva tribes used Jackalope horns festooned with soft hide streamers as “Whisper Rattles,” said to call in the rains of spring and all the celebrations of intimacy that come with it.

The most recent sighting of a Jackalope was made by a Mr. Edward Earl, who managed to capture the ellusive creature by photograph only a few weeks ago. After a hard winter the horned rabbit was looking rather gaunt, but, as Mr. Earl noted in the Juniper Lake Lodge guestbook (located in the main foyer to the left of the gift shop) the hungry Jackalope still had enough energy to pose for pictures. “The animal vaulted to and fro, always ready to mug for the camera,” he said.

Mr. Earl came to Juniper Lake searching for the ellusive jackalope following the footsteps his ancestor, Admiral Duncan H. Earl of South Carolina. Once the latter had retired from his sea faring career, he pursued further adventures by chasing the rare beasts across our country’s blue mountains and fertile plains. However, it was at our modest lake where the Admiral met his end. His body was found face down on our western shores, his clothes ragged with chew marks, surrounded by long footed paw prints. Pages of his journal were caught in the tall grass, some can still be found on display in the Juniper Lake Archives.

Detail from Admiral Earl’s journal circa 1901.

Just a Swingin’

That’s pretty good, you say.  The part about the civil war—I liked that, you say.  And the Tastey Cakes, you nod.  I see a smile, the same one from when I knew you before.  We’re on the porch swing just like the old days except your parents have moved into town since then and instead of the Wade’s woods on the next hill over we see the street in front of us where unfamiliar kids play.  To the right the neighbors’ rotted lattice is almost close enough to touch and a push mower and gas cans splay unromantically.  It’s not even close to night, but the day is shutting down.  Garage doors screech shut and hose nozzles shoot out city water (not well) onto small gardens. 

There’s just one thing, you say.  I know what you’re going to say before you do.  Why doesn’t Birdielee just escape?  Kick her way out or something? I let you say it.

Writing Diary: Birdielee (Why Doesn’t She Escape Right Then 101)

Gothic Tradition: The Gothic heroine (here Birdielee) tries to solve a mystery (usually a missing mother), then, bam, she is trapped in the very mouth of danger which, of course, is the home.

The Supernatural:  Don’t rule it out at all.

Danger Within and Without:  If danger lurks within (rotted floorboards, animals with rabies, the ghost of the elder Mrs. Scott) then the danger without cannot be discounted (backhoes, raw earth, shopping malls, a loss of community, a loss of place and time, a loss of self).

Maybe Birdielee is better off inside!  

I tell her to meet me at the Akropolis. It is just barely summer, the crowds not yet overwhelming, the heat not yet unbearable, but I break a light sweat walking up the steep hill from the Plaka. Mirto had half-heartedly offered to pick me up – half-heartedly because she knows and mocks my penchant for walking – but as always I declined. The changing of the seasons and the excess of iced coffee has me even more agitated than usual, and I had hoped that the steady rhythm of my steps might serve to calm me before seeing her. They had not.

At the ticket booth I fumble through my wallet, show an outdated university i.d. and pay my reduced fair, then continue my trek. I stop at Mars Hill, watch early season tourists in khaki shorts slide around on the rock where Paul is claimed to have preached, and I attempt (in vain) to read the bronze inscription at the base.
I continue up the hill, up the limestone path through air filled with ancient dirt and the grayish green of olive trees and the brown blue smoggy sky of Athens, up ancient marble stairs through an ancient marble archway, entering the Akropolis through the Parthenon of ancient fame.

I am standing near the karyatids when Mirto finds me. She wears the patchwork denim skirt that she bought with her mother’s credit card last week in Kolonaki, the one that seems too long for her small frame and short legs, the one that seems to scream nouveau riche. I gaze and gesture at the perfectly carved female forms in front of us, I explain the significance they have come to hold for me. I explain that I have been giving them names and assigning them stories, that I plan to write a story for each of them.
“They all look the same to me,” she says. “Is this why you made me come all the way up here?”
“I just thought it would be nice,” I tell her. I just thought it would be nice if we could be alone, I think. “Nobody ever comes here but tourists, but that doesn’t make it any less beautiful.”
She looks at me as if I am crazy. I will never understand this Athenian disdain for their monuments.

Juniper Lake is home to our county’s only wild chevrotain–a solitary, small water deer with a slightly ornery disposition. Although extremely rare, our chevrotain seems right at home here. It responds to names that begin the letter “D”–Deer, Darling, Daggermouth. A couple of years ago, a bunch of local boys started call it Dork, and the name has stuck since then. Dork doesn’t seem to mind.

For a while last summer we didn’t see Dork at the lake, and it caused us some concern. It turned out that Janet Redanais had caught it and was keeping it amongst her lawn gnomes in her overgrown backyard. When I finally found Dork, she was shaking from dehydration and hiding behind a tiny cement wheelbarrow. Janet said that she was lonely, that she needed something to keep her company. I told her to get a cat.

flash fiction version

Birdielee didn’t know when their friendship had taken this turn—from a series of even trades to more weighted ones, smacking of blackmail and deceit.  It had devolved slowly. 

“I promise I won’t say anything,” Birdielee Bright said to Samantha James.  She tried to keep the pleading out of her voice, knowing Samantha would hate it. They were standing on the steps of the school library on Main Street in Bel Air, Maryland, USA.  The town was blandly quaint with a quickly receding history as evidenced by fading Victorian architecture and an ambiguous stance on the Civil War.

 “H-o-l-y shit,” Samantha said again as she looked down at the brass skeleton key in her hand. 

There was a sound, shrill in the air, like a chorus of crickets in death throes in a frigid, out-of-season dawn.  It rose up then died away leaving something empty and tense.

Birdielee looked over at Samantha James and saw how thin her shirt had worn (that pathetic pink princess baby tee cast-off), how her face looked like a spring-loaded clothespin, snapped shut and hungry.  She thought of Samantha’s mother who only packed her daughter Tastey Cakes for lunch—chocolate during the week and orange on Fridays—because she got them free from her job at the Hostess plant. Birdielee’s mother used to pack a real lunch, sandwiches cut into triangles and perfect light cakes with shortening frosting for dessert.  Birdielee’s mother didn’t have to work—she stayed home and arranged flowers in vases.  Birdielee’s mother always smelled good like lilacs and fresh baked bread.  Birdielee’s mother had been missing for years.  

Mrs. Scott, their teacher had been embarrassing and hysterical when she saw the key missing right after lunch.  You’d have thought if the thing was so damn important to her she wouldn’t have brought it to school at all, but she couldn’t help showing it off—the prop she used year after year in her pet lesson about county history.  Mrs. Scott’s family had been in Harford County since the dawn of time.  It was the key, literal and metaphorical, to her family home, long since vacated and next to a raw-earthed corporate business park, but still standing, preserved, complete with original furniture, rotting outhouses, and wild speculation about the disappearance of her mother more than 60 years ago, when Mrs. Scott was a girl and the town had a railroad and promise.

Birdielee’s father, a man who made fine furniture and rarely left his woodshop, assured Birdielee that her mother was in California, happy, living at the beach in a white house collecting shells in a pail each morning.  But there were a few things fishy with that story: 

1.     How could she be happy without her daughter?

2.     The Penny Saver “Have You Seen Me?” ad that someone brought to school had shown a pretty woman age-progressed to account for the last seven years.  It was Birdielee’s mother without a doubt.

3.     Harford County was a small county with a vintage population, but two mothers had disappeared, one of them last seen at the Scott place.

The new-growth forest was tangled black lace stretching out to where the highway curved across repossessed farmland.  Birdielee and Samantha hopped over the guardrail, now the only access to the once-sweeping driveway.  

The key screeched in the weather-beaten front door when Samantha turned it, bringing back the afternoon sound of dying crickets.  The floorboards of the porch were weathered like driftwood though the ocean was far away.

Broken dishes, clothes, the spilled contents of photo albums, bottles with the residue of once-promising health elixirs, torn newspaper ads, everything heaped, hurricane-style, knee-deep on the floor.  It was as if the occupants had gotten up mid-dinner and struck off for somewhere else.

I’m upstairs looking through an old trunk when I hear that screeching sound again, and when I walk down the rotten staircase I see that Samantha has gone and locked the door behind her.

There are a few ways to explain this turn of events: 

1.     Samantha James was jealous of my nice-smelling, cake-baking mother. She went to look for her so she could have her all to herself.

2.     The house is cursed and takes people.  It’s an impossible force to reckon with.

3.     Maybe I was born into the wrong time.  Samantha James belongs over there in the new mall they’re putting in across the road, and I belong here with the alleged ghost of Mrs. Scott’s mother.     

I’ve had time to think about it, and I see now that Samantha is sick or at least, very, very sad, but I don’t think she’s so far gone that she’ll leave me here.  She’ll come back.  She has to, because even though the highway is close, the cars speed by so fast and no one hears me pounding.   No one even remembers or cares that this abandoned house is here.  No one sees my face at the upper windo
ws, behind the wavy glass.      

Come to our party!

Directions: Get yourself to Broadway and Alpine in Chinatown (Alpine is two blocks north of Sunset/Cesar Chavez) Take a right on Alpine. You will pass Spring and Alameda. (If you hit Hill, you’ve gone the wrong way). Take a left on Main. Follow Main for about 1.5 miles. You will pass Ann St. and go over train tracks. Moulton is the fourth street on your right. Take a right onto Moulton Park near the light blue gate.

Enter gate. Take an immediate right. Then a quick left. Party at the end of the row.