Gracie Girl’s Neighborhood

Hope may be a thing with wings
but I am a thing with claws
scrabbling at the unforgiving walls
and seeking purchase where it cannot be found.
Which and where and when I do not know
and if there are answers
they've flown away now.

Phone rang.  It was Dave, a writer friend.  We talked for over an hour, mainly about punctuation.  He has big plans for the ellipsis.  He's mad for ellipses.  I tell him yeah, I have similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only in short fragments or long, run-on thought relays that the literati call stream of consciousness but I like to think of disdain for the finality of the period). - Sarah Vowell

6:04 AM, Thursday, February 1, 2007

Charlie woke with a start, the crashing of a sheet of snow and ice falling from the roof of her cabin to the ground below too loud for any woman -- or dog -- to sleep through.  Her malamute, Benny, whined at the intrusion into his dog dreams, and sat up to look at his mistress expectantly.

"It was just snow falling off the roof, Benny.  It must've warmed up some overnight."

Charlie clambered out from under the heavy quilts and blankets that insulated her bed and felt the chill as she flipped on the bedside lantern and searched for her slippers.  Once they were found and quickly slipped onto her feet, she stood and started for the narrow stairs out of the bunkloft.  "Come on Ben-Ben, you can go outside."

The large malamute wagged his tail and gracefully leapt from the mattress and slithered past his mistress to run down the stairs ahead of her.  Charlie laughed and followed, and braced herself for the wintry blast sure to come as she let the animal out to romp into the snow.  What she found as she opened the door took her by surprise.

"Jim!  What the hell?"

The tall man strode masterfully into the small mudroom as the dog wiggled past to get outside.  Charlie closed the door as Jim sat on a bench to remove his boots as if he had been invited in.  He looked up from his task and assessed her, sheepskin slippers and up, longjohns and flannel shirt and sleep-tousled hair.  "You're lookin' good, Charlie.  Lookin' real good."  He chuckled as he pulled on his own slippers, slippers she'd thought of burning.  She wished that she had.

"I don't care how you think I look, Jim.  What the hell are you doing here?"

"My cabin too, Char."  He crossed into the small galley kitchen, opened the fridge and pulled out a jar.  "Have you had breakfast?"  He extracted, then bit into, a dill pickle, holding out the jar to her as if limp, salty cucumbers were a suitable food for an hour before the sunrise.

"I don't eat those things at this hour, Jim.  And you know exactly what I mean -- why are you here?  You know...  I told you that I needed time alone and I meant that.  That doesn't mean time with you showing up after four days."

Jim crossed to the fireplace and began sweeping out cold ashes, left from the fire that had burned out during the night.  He said nothing.  Charlie watched him go through the motions of building and lighting a fire, silent and ignoring her, as if this were any morning, as if this was like any of their weekend getaways to the cabin.  Her husband's audacious behavior was annoying, but starting a fight wasn't going to solve this problem.

Charlie opened the door and called "Benny!  Benny come get your breakfast, boy!"  She grabbed one of the dog's towels from the rack behind the door as the snowcovered animal bounded into the door, shaking and snorting happily.  She started to dry him off.  Jim suddenly appeared in the doorway between the mudroom and the interior of the cabin.   

"You need to take better care of the fireplace, Charlie.  You'll burn the place down if you don't clean up after yourself once in a while."

It was a standard Jim tactic, she was a slob, nothing was ever clean or tidy enough for him.  There would always be some dire consequence of her lack of fastidiousness.

"Jim, you need to go home.  I'm completely serious.  Either go home or let me know that you want to be here so that I can go somewhere else."

"Charlie, you don't get to order me around.  You want everything your way.  You're forgetting that I have been more than patient with you.  More than patient.  I could've very well told you to hit the street, you know."

"Fine, Jim, fine."  She went back up to the bunkloft, leaving Jim standing in the kitchen, scooping out kibble for Benny.

She came back down.

With a small handgun.

***

This is how it works: you get 5 words and with these 5 words you have to write an entry. The words might or might not be related. You decide how to combine them, and how long your entry will be. You tag your entry with 5wordchallenge and whatever other tags you like. Finally, you put the words in bold.

Lisa crawled out of the recesses of the basement utility room, muttering to herself angrily.  For some reason, the pilot light on the hot water heater was going out every night.  Each morning of the past week, she'd gotten out of bed and gone to the bathroom, and discovered only cold water was available when she began to wash her hands.

If Steven were there, he'd have called someone to diagnose the problem and fix it, someone who enjoyed crawling around in dark, dusty utility rooms.  But Steven wasn't there and she didn't have the money to pay a plumber or a handyman or anyone else.

Getting free of the water heater and the bulky furnace, she clicked off her flashlight and stood.  Gaining her full height, she whacked her head, hard, on the edge of an air duct that she'd forgotten about.  "Son of a bitch!"  The house was empty.  She could take the liberty of saying exactly what she wanted, there were no children to hear.  They were at that "sponge" phase, and if they'd heard her, they would be running around yelling "son of a bitch, son of a bitch," at completely inappropriate times and places.

But they weren't there.  She was surprised at how hard the fact hit her, even now, weeks later.  The reality of her life now slammed into her with a ferocity.  It hurt more than the tender spot now swelling on her scalp.

Lisa stepped out of the utility room, closed the door behind her, pressed her back to it and slid to the floor.  Resting her elbows on her knees she lowered her head and thought that she would cry, but no tears came.  She sat silently, trying not to think or feel, trying only to keep breathing.

Her cell phone rang.  She quickly pulled it from her pocket, hopefully.  It was just her mother.

"Hi, Mom."

"Hello, dear.  How are you?  I just had to call to tell you who I saw today!  It was your cousin Mindy and her new fiance!  Her charming young man finally popped the question, isn't that lovely?"

"That's nice, Mom."

"They're getting married in June.  A June wedding, they're always so special!  Won't that be lovely, with roses all over the church..."  Her mother nattered on about Mindy's wedding.  "Won't that be just perfect, dear?"

Lisa couldn't pretend to really care.  Not anymore.

"I said, wouldn't that be perfect, Lisa?"

"Sure, Mom.  Perfect."  Her voice offered a glimpse into her private misery -- if someone wanted to notice.

"Oh, Lisa, you're all down in the doldrums again.  You're impossible when you're like this.  Call me when you snap out of your bad mood."  The line clicked and went silent.

Her mother didn't know, but she didn't want to know.  It was easier to lay blame and walk away than to ask, to learn of Lisa's pain.

Steven had disappeared, he was gone.  So were their sons, Matthew and Jacob.  Matty and Jake.  They went to the park and never came home.

The letter from the kidnappers came three days later.  She was instructed to tell no one, to alert no authorities.  Every demand had been followed precisely, with no deviation.  She paid, giving up every penny that was in the bank and then some, selling most of her jewelry in order to make the ransom.

But the kidnappers didn't release her family.

Two days after the ransom drop she got a phone call.  It was Matty, the five year old, sounding small and terrified in a message sent directly to her voicemail.  "Mommy?  Mommy?  I'm scared.  Where are you Mommy?  Will you come and get us please?"

That was two weeks ago and there'd been nothing else.

She didn't know what to do, where to turn, how to live every day with the secret and the harsh and horrible fear that she would never see her family again.

Lisa slumped to her side and lay on the cold tile floor.

That's when the tears began to flow.

This is how it works: you get 5 words and with these 5 words you have to write an entry. The words might or might not be related. You decide how to combine them, and how long your entry will be. You tag your entry with 5wordchallenge and whatever other tags you like. Finally, you put the words in bold.

In one week the challenge will be passed on to someone that participated in this one, by electric firefly, who hosts this week's challenge.

There's a power interruption at the SixApart datacenter and the only product that's affected is LiveJournal, not Vox, TpePad or the 6A or MT sites which says to me that 6A hasn't consolidated their servers into one location which is, at the very least, poor asset management.

If you've ever wondered what the Not Remotely Onion thing is all about, it's that my real blog is at the-onion.net, not here.  I do post there, so go read!

I have developed a burgeoning (and, I imagine, soon-to-be overwhelming) addiction to Rold Gold Honey Wheat Twist pretzels.