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Profound Writer
Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: England
Gender: Female
Posts: 1,236
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Short story - please skim & suggest? (Mild profanity)
I'm sorry it's so long. I'd appreciate critique, even if it's just from skimming, and maybe some help with the title, because frankly, it sucks at the moment. Sigh - here goes.
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Raising the Dead
Sometimes you’ll believe anything to avoid flying solo in life. With Jefferson and Esther, believing in nothing was actively encouraged.
As we walked through into the sunlight, the light temporarily turned us all beautiful, and I gazed at Esther, who was rummaging in her bag. There was an alternating bigness and littleness to certain features of Esther’s face that made her appear on days elfin, on others Lost Boy, always ethereal and sublimely ambiguous. Fashion-wise, our slice of the collective dream of the city was stuck firmly in the early eighties, lingering between the hip and the outrageous.
And Jefferson was at the helm of our world, studs in his gloves clicking against the steering wheel. The guy was insane to a point (“After the padded walls, Gwynn, it just gets cliché,”) - some higher force had instructed to change his name to something patriotism-heavy so that he could be ironic before he even opened his mouth. Neither of us knew his real name. That would be too easy.
The truth was he hated the flag with a passion.
We had just burst out from a mall-organism of some sort, carrying bottles of juice from exotic and fascinating fruits, and were sipping them with the built-in thirst that comes from being a full-time cynic.
“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,” Jefferson muttered, sitting down on the cool contours of the marble fountain outside.
“Don’t start.” Esther gently dissected the contents of her shopping bag, forming one pile of newly bought trinkets and a separate pile of trash.
“It’s only the second commandment,” Jefferson hissed, blinking up at the Old Glory sprouting from the mall’s framework. “You’d think they would remember the first three, maybe, before they set about worshipping a picture that looks like it was made from fridge magnets.”
“Do you remember the first three commandments?” I asked, genuinely curious.
A sigh. “Thou shalt not have any gods before me,” he recited. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. … Thou shalt not kill.”
“Killing’s not the third one,” Esther tutted. “You think they’d give up all the juicy commandments that quickly?”
Jefferson shot her a simple and pissed look.
“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s crap.”
“That’s the last one,” I chipped in.
“How do you know that?” he said quizzically. “Right. Don’t sow thy randy seeds in the fields of thy girlfriend’s sister.”
“Shut up,” I whispered. “We’re near the mouth of a Quaker church. I don’t know what you think you’ll gain from being so PG-13 all the time.”
He ignored me. “Not that one? Okay. Thou shalt not steal?”
Esther smirked, shuffling through mental flashcards for a tasty quote. “‘Theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small.’”
“Let it crumble and burn, then,” retorted Jefferson, repositioning his fat aviator glasses with his thumb. “I’m no theologian.”
“We’d never accuse you of such a thing,” I mumbled.
We sat in silence for a few moments, caught between the slapping hands of the sun and the darting fingers of the water behind us. Jefferson’s pupils were moving just visibly behind the dim brown of his sunglasses. He was admonishing his hypocrisy in his head. Jefferson hated to just fizzle out in the middle of voicing his convictions.
“So I was going to suggest,” Esther said, her thoughts breaking out of her mouth, “Maybe we should celebrate Gwynnie’s birthday this year.”
I shifted uncomfortably on the baked stone. I had recently murdered my almost-black hair by trying bangs, and they were scraping my eyelids. If I thought about them for too long, every part of me itched.
“But Esther, honey!” quipped Jefferson. “We’re an inter-war family. Why would we need to celebrate anything?”
“Because, darling,” Esther humoured him, “Gwynnie’s going to be seventeen. Her entire brain is war.”
I tugged my huge denim coat over my shoulders and tried to shrink into the blue of the water.
“You really believe so, Mother?”
“I think so, Father.”
“Gwynn?” Jefferson said. “Do you want to celebrate your birthday?”
I scowled. These two were a couple years older and consistently taller than me. The Mother and Father thing had aged and soured a long time ago for little Gwynnie.
“What kind of celebration?” I demanded.
“Just the three of us,” Esther quickly added. “If that’s what you want.”
“Yeah, I suppose, but - ”
“Wallflowering is bad enough at someone else’s party, eh?” Jefferson said, absentmindedly fidgeting with some piece of wire he had found on the pavement. He coiled it around his index finger and yawned.
“But the three of us hanging out together - wouldn’t that just be … this?”
“Happy Birthday.”
“No, we’d do something special,” Esther told me. “I don’t know. The movies or something. Anything you should desire.”
I looked dubiously into Esther’s hopeful speckled eyes.
“You’re going to bring Jefferson to a movie?” I scoffed.
Jefferson was far gone in wire world. He was trying to make a star of David. He was always getting distracted and thoroughly bitten by one object, one concept, or (and this only happened a couple of times) one person. Then as soon as you’d wrenched him away from the last fleeting fancy, he discovered his next one. Mercurial monomania, Esther called it. It’s like autism, she had said, but for jerks.
“Okay, maybe not a movie,” Esther continued, giving him a contemptuous glance. “But if there’s anything else that you want to do I’ll try and lure him into it.” She adjusted a reared flick of blonde hair behind her ear. Then, with a whisper: “He’ll do anything for my Scooby Snacks.”
This wasn’t to say Esther had “a thing” for Jefferson, nor vice versa, but she could work him like yarn through the loom. I just put it down to her magical powers and her eye shadow, which was the colour of a wet sidewalk.
I turned to the fountain to think, sinking my fingers through the ugly black grate that stopped children stealing the coins that people threw in there. The wishing pennies winked at me through the water. I didn’t know what I wanted to do on my birthday. I had never done anything before.
“Come on,” Jefferson urged from somewhere behind me. “I want to have plenty of appropriate derogatory comments in stock for wherever we’re going.”
Somewhere between a shoal of pennies and a necklace (Australian Opal; sterling silver; 16 inch display chain; brimming with other worlds) I had an idea.
I turned back to Esther with my eyes gleaming. “A seance.”
“It’s pronounced say-ahnce, my dear,” Esther shot back. “And are you crazy? You don’t believe in that cheap horror movie crap do you?”
I could feel Jefferson practically exploding with incredulity beside us. I whirled around, shoving the scrubbing-brush hair out of my eyes and opening my palms at him. “No, look, I don’t believe … ”
Jefferson spluttered. “I’m receiving a message,” he said, in full Voodoo Mama falsetto. “Your great great great great great - ”
“Will you listen?”
“- great great great great great great great grandmother,” he continued, “is telling me she died a very long time ago. Is that right? Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.”
We paused while Jefferson basked in his own sarcastic self.
“I don’t believe, necessarily, that anything will happen,” I started, slowly and clearly. “However. I would like to give it a chance.”
Esther shook her head and scraped something off the bottom of her boot.
“If that’s what you want to do, that’s what you want to do,” she sighed. “But, I mean, I’ve seen you at plays. You freaked out at the severed head in Macbeth. This is only going to give you nightmares.”
“So be it,” I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll stop dreaming that Jeff is trying to kill me.”
Jefferson (the crank) let out a smile and said, “Fine. You want a seance, I’ll be there.”
I was shocked at how easy it was to win him over this time. After a minute, Esther scooped the trash off of the seat and carted it to a nearby bin marked Plastics and we were ready to leave. It was turning into a uneasy twilight and we all had to get home to our various ecosystems. If we spent too long in our little group, we feared our scents would mix and we’d become one and the same.
Jefferson jumped up and brushed off his battered old button up shirt. It was dog-eared at the collar like a good book and he’d inexplicably gone at the chest with a permanent marker in a cryptic, sweeping scribble.
“Who knows,” he pondered. “Maybe we’ll get to talk to a bog person.”
He left the star by the fountain.
***
Two weeks later we were together again on a tumbledown bank in the middle of nowhere. It was Somewhere to us, of course. Esther was a third-generation hippy (hence the recycling) and it was about eighteen years ago on this bank that she was born. She had come into the world screaming on an old silk scarf - a compromise made for her long-suffering obsessive/compulsive father - and as her glowing pink fingers caressed the air for the first time, butterflies threatened to land on her toes.
I looked at Esther now, sitting with her legs out to one side in a prawn-shape, as the night made her eyes fall black and anxious. She was wearing her usual gear, a million shades of jet black, and a hefty tan suede jacket that broke the image.
Jefferson was staring into the dark water with his usual ennui, his hair crispy and shocking turquoise like sea grass from hours of dying and preening the night before. It was a place of significance for him too, the river, for no reason other than his dad used to take him down there with his two brothers when he was young, “impressionable and over enthusiastic.” I read his look. He was watching bony white ankles puncture the water’s surface in his memory. For some reason he felt that happiness equated to susceptibility, that he could see snapping jaws beneath the waves.
“Why did you want to do this?” Jefferson moaned. “You have no dead to contact.”
“That’s not true,” I replied.
“Oh yes. Then I look forward to seeing ghost gerbils in the sky,” he refuted.
I was just furious. He was amiable for all of thirty minutes that morning when he gave me my present. It was one of those old cone-shaped damsels’ hats, oddly fashioned out of shiny black fabric and card. A wisp of net fabric swirled from the point. He had written Lady Guinevere across the rim in silver paint, with his surprising calligraphic skills showing through. (I had worn it into McDonalds, trying to look mysterious.) But as soon as the freshness faded, he was back to his usual self.
“The truth is,” I declared, “I want to contact my … dead … English teacher.”
The truth was, I wanted all three of us to finally believe in something other than rock ‘n’ roll.
The night was upon us. I gathered together all our unwieldy belongings - Esther’s ancient and obese leather satchel, Jefferson’s laptop bag - and placed them under a bush that looked memorable enough. I had done some minimal reading on the matter of seances and I had one directive in my head for now.
“Jefferson.” I sat down on a rock jutting out from the grassy clumps on the bank. “Come here.”
Jefferson obediently came over, twirling an uprooted weed between two fingers and a thumb.
“We have to talk,” I informed him.
“About what?” He sounded concerned. Behind us Esther minded her own business, humming Ghost Riders In The Sky to herself.
“You need to believe in this for me,” I pleaded. “Don’t look at me like that. Please. Can you be open minded? If you don’t believe it will happen, then it won’t happen.”
He looked pained. “You sound like a motivational poster … ”
“Please, Jeff.”
“I can try, Gwynn,” he grumbled. “I will try. I’ll reach down and grab that idiotic eight-year-old me by the scruff of the neck. He still believes.”
I half-smiled. Everything he said unnerved me, just a little.
There was just enough light dripping down from the moon for us to see. We shared the three candles I had brought. The wax was soft and chilled under our fingers. I hadn’t brought the incense after all. The grass under our folded legs was altogether too dry and crunchy to be trusted. Basically I hadn’t thought this through at all - but I was determined that it would work.
We went through the motions. The crickets observed as we “charged” and lit our candles, placed them nervously between our knees and tried to relax. I talked to my muscles. I told them to settle, that they were water, copper, mere conductors for energy.
Esther closed her eyes and listened to the gentle chirping of the river, the fuzzy syllables of the wind. Her hair was tickled by the breeze, electrified. For a minute I could feel a friendly, fertile ambience approaching, like warm water rising in a bath. I felt sure we could do it.
Jefferson was uncomfortable. He cut into the silence. “I swear I can still smell my father’s godforsaken aftershave.”
“Shh,” said Esther.
My bangs poked at my eyes again. I tried to ignore it. I stared into the candle.
“Oh. We have to join hands,” I remembered. “Scoot up.”
We moved closer together, the candles trembling precariously. I grabbed Esther's hand, which felt powdery and warm, then Jefferson’s, stiff in fingerless gloves.
“Now breathe in through the nose,” I instructed. “Out through the mouth.”
They breathed. Jefferson then seemed to laugh eerily to himself.
“My dad’s wife, Chelsea … ” Jefferson began. Esther and I pursed our lips.
“Your dad’s wife Chelsea what?” snapped Esther, smashing the mood.
“She was a midwife,” he went on, unflustered. “That was her solution for everything in the world. Breathe in. Through the nose. Now out through the mouth. Breathe.”
“Why are you ruining this?” Esther whined. She had flipped out. “It’s Gwynn’s birthday and you choose now to start relating your life story to us.”
“The sickest thing is,” he rambled, “she was there right after it happened.”
I was hushed. I felt unusual. Like energies were clashing between fingertips. Esther, fire. Myself, water. Jefferson, earth.
“When what happened?” said Esther, exasperated.
“When - the mother thing. Esther,” he stuttered, quaking, “Esther, the mother thing - ”
Esther’s eyes darted back and forth between us, still awkwardly holding our hands. “Jeff?”
Jefferson’s head had rolled forward, his shoulders curling in. I’d never witnessed anything like it in my life - it was like a female supervillain being told she’d had a miscarriage.
“Dad put down the phone and told us and she dove in,” he continued, his voice muffled and erratic. “Just swooped in with her Botox eyebrows and fake red hair, holding me in this headlock of cashmere, stroking back my hair and telling me to breathe.”
Jefferson had tightened his desperate grip on us, smothering our wrists, and melting slowly down into the ground. The wind grew colder, and unfathomably louder. I had fallen into the cheap horror films Esther described - I could have sworn I heard coyotes, the candles were spasming -
“It was suicide,” he went on. “Could I have given her my breath, Chelsea? Could I breathe her back to us?”
“Jeff - ” I called, finding myself shouting.
He looked up and his eyes were illuminated and disconcerting, his cheeks shining with tears all of a sudden. He stared right into me, digging into my wrists like a mental patient saying, Listen! I’m not insane! I’m not really insane at all!
“And ever since then,” he yelled over this great cacophonous whirlwind we were within, “I’ve not been right. I’ve been fully wrong, do you understand me? Nothing seems good or honest or trustworthy to me anymore. Not since she stepped into my mother’s essence, with her phoney beauty spot and her tooth veneers, sneering, disinfecting the spirit of my mother from the house for good.”
His knees weakened and the candle fell. Before we knew it, too fast, the starved grass was aflame. Esther and I screeched and leapt up, but Jefferson seemed immobilised, lead on the ground, but still holding on. The fire teased the soles of his shoes as we tried to move him away.
“Dad and Chelsea said they were just friends. Then it was that my mother was happy,” he was chanting. “They said she was in Russia - Russia for God’s sake - but she was rotting in some shithole in the inner city.”
The branches of trees above us began to thrash as we slowly dragged him from the fire. It was spreading tenaciously, cancerously. And there was Jefferson spouting his guts at us. Who would’ve guessed it would take an emergency to get that to happen?
“I could have …*I could have walked to her.”
My heart, for the first time, felt a new sensation - overbeating. I felt flooded, like a moon person, moving unbearably slowly all because I was terrified.
“It’s spreading,” I heard Esther wail. “Will you shut the hell up and walk for yourself?!”
I looked around the foliage. If I could find our bags then surely I could get my phone, alert someone, drive the danger out of here, but all the bushes looked the same in the pulsating glow of the fire.
He got up all of a sudden, joints swinging like a puppet’s and suddenly acknowledging the fire with wide eyes.
He announced over the roar, “I’ve come to a conclusion.”
We were hugging his arms, caught between the growing flame and the river. The heat played with our sight, making the stars ripple.
“Nothing is real.”
He smiled.
Like a general charging into battle, he broke our grip and began to walk away from us. Towards the fire, arms spread wide.
“Jefferson!” I shrieked.
When I reached out for him my fingers seemed to go through him. Esther ran towards him, about to explode - but he simply pushed into her collarbone, making her reel backward in confusion, and carried on walking. Then he was there, calm, beatific, reaching down into the fire -
Then the sky disappeared. I saw it just vanish with my own eyes, like a slide being changed in a projector. When it returned a behemothic crash of thunder rang out overhead, and I realised it was raining. The lightning had drilled right through Jefferson’s skull and he dropped to his knees, hands over his eyes.
The rain came hard and the fire waned into ash. The crackling stopped, the thunder stopped, and all there was to be heard were three teenagers weeping, pressed into each other and clinging on for dear life.
***
“Your goddamn conclusion,” Esther was sobbing, attacking her eyes with a tissue. “You could have damn well concluded your damn life out there.”
“What was that?” I heckled him. “Why did you do that?”
“God damn it,” Esther kept saying.
“On my birthday, you bastard.”
“That’s what he is - a bastard!”
Jefferson blinked up at us, squinting in the fluorescent light of his apartment. His hair was pasted down on his forehead, looking like it had absorbed the colour of the rain itself. Esther and I had just barely caught our breath again, and were crouched about him, trying to mentally crawl back into our skins.
“Jefferson, say something.”
He grinned.
“Maybe you don’t realise it in your state of madness,” Esther tutted, blotting her cheeks, “but that isn’t a word.”
“I’ve told you,” he said, steadily. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t even remember half of it.”
He turned his head and it made a fwoomf noise over the fabric of his couch. It was one of the only items of furniture in his crummy apartment, but it made it a home.
“Oh, don’t go to sleep!” I yelped at him. “Jefferson!”
Fwoomf. “Yeah?”
“You’re not really that screwed up, are you?” I asked him, tearing up a little.
“Yes I am,” he chuckled. “No. It’s … it’s weird, you guys, but … it’s gone.”
“Oh,” Esther exhaled. “Huh. ‘God bless us, everyone.’”
I said nothing.
I wasn’t disappointed for not contacting the dead. Something far more valuable to me had awakened. Little by little, I had witnessed a creature climb forth from the bog where all presumed it had perished. It had clawed, paused, clawed again, and emerged, filthy and ragged and entirely welcome. Reborn.
The humble apartment was filled, wall to wall, with a risen soul.
__________________
Never get so attached to a poem
you forget truth that lacks lyricism
and never draw so close to the heat
that you forget that you must eat
- En Gallop, Joanna Newsom
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I'm glad you liked it. See ya around!
