Robert Sharp

 

 

Early afternoon and there is a man standing in front of our house waiting for the people that used to live across the street. He doesn’t know that they have moved away, so he stands in front of my house waiting in its shadow, waiting and watching for my neighbour.

It’s late afternoon. I’m home from school and some kids have joined hands and are dancing in a ring around him. They dance and sing and stamp their feet. He looks at them and laughs, but he doesn’t budge from his spot. Soon the children will go home for supper like I have. I wonder; will the man have something to eat? I watch from my window.

It’s early evening. The sun’s going down. The man is just finishing off some Kentucky Fried Chicken a delivery boy brought him. Still eating, he carries the empty cardboard carton up our laneway to put it in the garbage pail. Dad says that in a moment the man will be coming up the front steps and ringing our doorbell so he can use the john. Dad’s not too keen on the idea, but he will let the man in; I can tell by the way Mom is looking at him. “How does the man sleep?” I wonder.

It’s early morning. I’ve just awakened and gone downstairs to the living room window to look out. The man is standing outside not moving. His head has fallen forward. His shoulders droop. I watch him till it’s time to go to school. As I’m going out the door he comes to life. He lifts his head. He gives his shoulders a shake and he stamps first one foot, then the other.

“Poor dear,” my mother says. “I wonder if he’d like a cup of coffee?” His body looks like a shadow against the morning sun.

I’m home from school now and I’ve been watching him for hours. This morning, he walked across the street to get out of the sun, Mother says. Then, in the early afternoon, he moved back to his original spot. Some children have joined hands and are dancing around him and chanting, “Gone away. Gone away. Your lifelong friend has gone away.” He laughs at them a little. In a few minutes, when the kids are gone, he will come up on our verandah and ring the doorbell. Mother will let him in.

It’s the middle of the night and the man is still standing out front. His head has slumped forward so his chin is on his chest. His shoulders droop. His arms hang loosely by his sides. I’m very tired and yawn. They expect rain tomorrow. Will my parents give him an umbrella? I don’t know. If he gets soaked to the skin he might go home. I press my nose against the window.

It’s morning and it’s raining. Mother says that Mr. Schultz, on his way to open his store uptown, sold the man an umbrella. And now, there’s policeman standing under the umbrella talking with the man. Mother has gone out with two cups of tea and a towel. A few minutes later, she comes in soaking wet and the policeman goes away. “What about his feet?” I ask. “Won’t his feet get wet?”

It’s after school. The little red-haired girl from down the street is talking to the man. She can barely toddle and shouldn’t talk to strangers. The neighbours are angry and Dad has agreed to speak with him. I can listen through the screen window. Dad tells him he doesn’t think the people across the street are coming back. The man asks in a low voice if he can stay a while longer to make sure. Dad tells him he’s on public property and it’s a free country. He offers the man a cup of tea. I want a cup of tea. Mother gives me one. I don’t like it and I pour it down the sink.

It’s the middle of winter. Snow is piled everywhere around. I take the metal doorknob in my hand. My hand freezes there and I have to wait till the handle warms up before I can open the door and go inside. The man in front of our house is wearing a coat that’s way too big for him. He also wears a wool hat that falls over his eyes; fleece-lined boots he forgot to zipper; mittens, plus a scarf that is wound around his neck three times. He huddles sometimes, and sometimes he swings his arms to keep warm. The house across the street has been vacant for several months. Still he watches. The little red-haired girl has strung Christmas tree lights across his shoulders. He merely shrugs them off into a snow bank when he wants to come inside.

Mother wants him to move into the spare room at the back of the house. Father says it’s a big step bringing someone into the house. “But I’m sure I don’t mind, my dear, if that’s what you want to do.” Mother mentions it to the man when he uses our phone to order Kentucky Fried Chicken. “I don’t mind waiting out there, if it’s all the same to you,” he says. “My friends might come back anytime, and I wouldn’t want to miss them.” The red haired girl is glad. She likes him.

It’s spring. The house across the street is coming down. The workmen are there. The man watches the house disappear brick by brick. He’s wearing rubber boots to protect his feet from the slush. He doesn’t look very well. Toward the end of winter, he looked worse. We brought him warm drinks; vitamin pills; cough mixture; we even offered to call a doctor at our own expense. He refused. He improved as the weather got better. Today he is watching the house vanish. The little red haired girl has brought him cake and cookies and orangeade, but for the first time, he ignores her.

The house is gone. The man is going through a crisis today. He spent the morning staring at the vacant lot across the street. This afternoon, he is pacing up and down, waving his arms around and from time to time gesticulating. He’s repeating bits and pieces from Hamlet. “To be or not to be…” he mumbles.”Word, words, words,” he mutters. “A rogue and peasant slave!” he shouts. Towards the end of day, his pacing slows to a shuffle and his shuffle stows to a standstill. “There is a providence in the fall of a sparrow,” he recites, his arms hanging loosely by his sides. “What will you do?” my mother asks, for she is now standing beside him. “We are what we are what we are…” he answers staring wistfully at the vacant lot.

The man has been standing there for seventeen years. Time has flown. He’s been a part of my life from my early days at elementary school, through high school to college where I flunked out. I watched my parents age. I moved away. I married the red haired girl and became a parent myself. I remember once, as a child, I fell off my bicycle in front of him. He helped me up, brushed me off and sent me inside to my parents.

Of course, it hasn’t been good for him standing outside all these years. He aged more rapidly than anyone else in the neighbourhood. We worry about him a *great deal. We wonder what goes on in his head when he stares at the vacant lot across the street.

We have all suggested that he go somewhere else, that he go into a home or something. My wife tied to reason with him, to coax him, and in exasperation to threaten him. My father even offered to take his place on the sidewalk. But none of it worked.

“I’m a part of here,” he told me once. “I’m settled. This is my home. I want to end my days here.” There was a slight dribble of rain and he opened up the umbrella my wife had given him. “All my friends are here,” he added while looking across the street.

This morning, the postman gave him his first pension cheque. He endorsed it and asked me to cash it for him. I said I would. I wonder what would happen if after all these years his friends did show up. I wonder what he’d do.

 

 

 

 

ROBERT SHARP is retired and lives in Toronto. This story originally appeared in print in Who Torched Ranch Diablo.

Amanda E.K.

 

 

Session 15: July

Naked women hanging on the walls taunt me with their lack of pain.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

This place smells like sanitizer and ink and the sweat from under my arms. I hold my breath and curl my toes. There’s a crack in the corner of a scuffed black tile exposing an insect graveyard.

I groan as the stinging drag of the gun grazes my shoulder. I try to focus on the music overhead. Reggae, rockabilly. There’s a worn bit of stuffing seeping out of an old green chair. A pile of magazines collects dust on a coffee table shelf.

Ow, ow, fucking ow.

“Need a break?” asks Paul, sensing me tense up.

I clench my fists and cross my legs and tell him to ignore me.

“Impossible,” he says.

I smile but he doesn’t see.

Paul: dreadlocks, Rasta hat. Rose tattoo with a woman’s name. One hand on my shoulder, the other on my neck. I want to push him up against a wall. I want to feel his hands go lower, lower. Although not today — day two of my cycle from hell. God these cramps don’t help.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I squeeze a stress ball while the painted ladies stare me down — Jess’ prints, an artist with half-shaved purple hair and tribal tattoos up the sides of her neck. She’s just finished with a woman’s forearm and comes over to inspect Paul’s work. I’m used to this. I’m inked from left to right across my arms and chest — flowers, herbs, leaves, vines.

“Gorgeous,” says Jess. “It all looks alive.”

I thank her through my gritted teeth.

On my forearms: aster and chrysanthemum. Baby’s breath and clover.

We take a break and I slip a Xanax with some Skittles. I use the bathroom without looking in the mirror. I like to be surprised. Outside, steam rises from the pocked and crumbling pavement as a summer storm rolls in and I see Jess through the window struggling to light a cigarette. Not a cigarette — a joint. I join her and so does Paul.

Jess and I talk music under the awning — shoegaze, grunge, goth. She’s into Nirvana. I tell her to listen to Women. We can both agree on Joy Division.

Paul blows smoke rings into the parking lot, into the mist where they morph and fade. When he goes quiet, like now, he’s thinking about Imani. Wife. Thirty-eight and had a stroke last spring. Still in and out of hospitals and lacking basic motor functions. I want to help alleviate his pain. Remind him what I have in common with his daughter — eight years old and in a situation I’m all too familiar with.

I see myself being for Zariya what I never got to have — a mother to watch me grow from a child into a woman.

But I know my place and keep quiet.

 

 

Paul asked about my burn scars during Session 1.

“I got them the night my mother died,” was all that I could say.

My body, marked by fire, confronts me every day.

I value friendships like religion, when friends like Paul — a man who’s never eyed me with disgust — are few and far between. He says he’s revising my skin to match the beauty underneath.

 

 

Back in position — me beneath, he above. I breathe heavy, inviting the tip of the gun to pierce my expectant skin as I offer up control of my sensations.

Paul: long fingers, full lips.

Broad. Dark. Fine.

I want to eat him up. Take care of his needs not met at home.

I imagine us exhausted on my bed, lying tangled and content.

He presses down with a dark blue and I suppress a groan. A lock of my hair falls down my arm. He brushes it away. A shiver runs through me and there’s a warmth, a rush of blood between my thighs. I cringe and curse my body’s timing.

Dreaming of the numbness of drink, I say we should head to Skylark when we’re done.

He wipes the blood and ink away and looks me in the eyes. “As you wish,” he says, and I feel like the Princess Bride.

 

 

The next morning, I wake from a dream, sweating and damp with blood.

In the dream, Paul was watering my mother’s grave with a can of scarlet ink. I approached, as though invisible, and crouched behind the stone. The ink sprinkled my skin, unseen by him, and as it merged with my tattoos, every vine, leaf, and flower sprouted from my flesh and sunk its roots into the earth. From above, the full moon dripped silvery blue light like a cosmic feminine taboo, and I felt connected to all the women in my family line before me — all their unique experiences of pain.

 

 

Inside my elbows: daffodils and poppies.

In the shower I smile and cry while shaving my legs. (Water doesn’t feel like the opposite of fire when it draws out my most difficult emotions.)

It’s getting harder not to tell Paul how I feel. That I’ve fallen in love with him for his soft encouragements and his patience and his daughter I can’t help but see as me. I’m trying to respect his situation — like I did last night, despite his leg pressed against mine under the bar. There were subtleties coming off him like sidewalk steam. Eye contact that read like a teleprompter. It’s obvious he’s attracted to me too, he’s just got to play it safe.

He won’t cut his hair while Imani’s still sick. One of the few details he can control. His mom plays nanny, nurse and cook, and goes to work when he comes home.

“I haven’t been that devoted to anyone since, well, never,” I said after a couple drinks. “Is it weird that that actually sounds nice?”

He gave a sardonic laugh and looked away.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked, hoping for an invitation to spend time with Zariya — help her with homework or braiding her hair.

Instead, Paul asked me for the story behind my scars. And since I was tipsy, I started at the beginning.

 

 

I was four years old and staying with my grandparents while my mother was in Rochester for another cancer surgery.

They said I used to sleepwalk. They found me that morning in the yard, screaming in the grass — yelling: stop, drop and roll!

A man in a glaring red suit and red hair had come into my room and poured a potent liquid on my bed. I asked him who he was. Fire Man, he said. I’ve brought your mommy with me. Then he dropped a match onto my sheets, where the fiery form of my mother licked up.

By instinct I reached out and held her tight for what was to be the last time.

That same night, at that same hour, my mother passed away at Mayo Clinic.

I never heard the cause of death. My family must’ve figured I was too young to understand, but in their silence I read the truth of my assumptions. That it was me. That I’d created Fire Man to make her disappear, because then maybe there’d be no more excuses for why she wasn’t with me.

They said the fire in my room was an accident, started by an oil lamp — my memory altered by my age.

I never showed anyone the blackened match I found in my sheets, that I kept clutched in my fist like some cruel souvenir.

At the funeral my mother slept with potted flowers that stung my eyes with fragrant tears.

Every year since then, I attach a fresh bouquet to the stand beside her grave. Then I burn the old petals in my kitchen sink, and save the most resilient for display.

 

 

Paul took my hand in his and said, “I’m so sorry you went through that, Venetia. I get it now . . . your interest in Zariya. Thank you for telling me.”

 

Session 16: August

I’m on the phone with Paul to plan my next appointment. He tells me Imani tried taking her own life last week. I don’t know what to say.

“Can we meet?” he asks, choked up like he’s been crying. “I need to get away.”

I find him at Skylark and wrap him in a hug. His large frame feels lifeless in my arms.

He moves on from beer to liquor.

“I’d prefer death, too,” he says into his glass. “She can’t even be a mother. Zariya hardly knows her.”

His sentiment knocks me down. Did suicide cross my mother’s mind as she lie immobile in her bed? Did she think death might make a better mother than would a patient?

I shiver and finish my drink.

Underneath my upper arms: heather and hydrangeas.

Paul studies the bar top, picking at a chipped mosaic tile. “This isn’t what I planned,” he says. “I planned to have a wife. I planned to have a family. I planned . . . ” He trails off, finishes his drink, and sighs.

“Wanna go for a drive?” I ask. I process best when going fast, and I have a feeling so does he.

 

 

Eighty miles per hour. Ninety. I feel so fucking free. The road curves and I’m thrown against him. I lean out the window while he takes the wheel, my hair flying in my face, wind in my pores — a sensation I want to bottle and drink from for eternity. I scream at the night, commune with the waning moon, that feminine cycle from which the Earth is born.

Paul asks me to pull over.

I say nothing as I can see he’s working out something to say.

“Imani won’t get better unless I’m present. Some days,” he says, “it’s like I’ve lost my own identity. Like all I am is Dad, Husband, Saint. I’m sick of people’s sympathy. I’m only thirty-three. I want a normal life.”

“I want that for you, too,” I say. I’ve ached in all too familiar ways.

Paul kisses my forehead, and we sit in silence, fingers linked, watching for shooting stars through the bug-spattered windshield.

 

 

In the arid early morning I dream again of Paul.

We’re in the graveyard with Zariya, running through the cemetery with such a gusty chaos that a storm begins to brew. We find shelter in a mausoleum, and she smiles at the disorder, welcomes it as kin. The clouds open up, making puddles of new grass. I see my mother’s gravestone, glowing fiery with light. Imani steps out, the picture of perfect health. She hugs me and I cry out as cords of skin rise from the lines of my tattoos. The inky ropes of leaves and flowers wither, flake, fall lifeless to the ground. I grasp frantically at their liquid shapes, but they only stain my hands.

 

 

There’s a heavy lingering sadness from my dream for several days. I wander the city, searching for a sense of self. Not finding it in drink or smoke or unrestrained indulgence. Feeling lonely but avoiding friends, avoiding closeness for the fear of loss.

At home I start fires to watch things blister, shrink, and blacken.

Cassette tapes and marshmallows. Junk mail I’ll never read.

On my biceps: Queen Anne’s lace, magnolias and ivy.

 

Session 17: September

At the shop, I’m getting lilies for Zariya. My scars are mostly buried.

Imani isn’t better.

Paul studies my design and arranges his inks in a neat arched row.

He’s quiet. Too quiet. I should say what’s been on my mind for months, so I finally just say: “I’m here for your family . . . anytime you need.” And maybe I don’t need to, but I say, “No ulterior motives.”

Silence. Piercing, irritating, like the cramps low in my belly. I hold my breath to ride a wave of pain. I hate when he’s unreachable.

Paul takes a break and I take out a pouch of Pop Rocks. I love their fizzy entropy. I go outside to smoke but keep my Xanax in my purse. I want to be a good example to a future daughter of my own. I want to stop chasing what I can’t actually have and be okay with who I am. I’ve been burnt by love too many times because I go in treating partners like they’ll leave me.

I want to be someone’s person who will stick around.

I want to be rooted to the ground so deep that I sink in — to bloom in perpetuity, thriving on decay, and flourish where I once was singed and fade where I must fade.

On my chest above my breasts: Forget-me-nots and orchids.

 

 

 

 

AMANDA E.K. is the editor-in-chief of Denver’s Suspect Press literary magazine, and she’s a member of the Knife Brothers writing group. You can find her work in Suspect Press, Birdy, and at yubikwetes.wordpress.com where she writes creative non-fiction vignettes.