Suffering is Relative, a short story

Another short, short story based on a photograph that a few writer friends and I do to challenge each other...

 

The window in front of her was clear enough to reflect the valley that reached behind her, the green hills blurring at the edges of her waning eyesight. Momentarily confused, and seeing a green, stenciled side table placed just so next to a brocade topped chair, the old woman reached out her left hand for her brush, only to find her fingertips grasping across the cold of the window’s glass.

"Ridicule." Madame de Florian let out the word in a puff of exasperation and turned away from the reflection in front of her. It was happening more and more these days. Her body had taken its time in deterioration, but her mind! Her mind had stayed with her, intact, until these last few months. It seemed to be slipping faster and faster down some ice-strewn embankment.

There were no more friends left in her life; well, no true friends. Two of her children still lived, and there were the grandchildren who had recently taken it upon themselves to all procreate simultaneously. As a result, a new flurry of young life had descended yet again into her home.

Instead of reviving her interest in the world, the latest generation pulled her slowly back into her memories. When they spoke to her, she heard words that simply did not exist in her vocabulary. New words! She felt outside of their world, these days, and it sometimes frightened her.

But of course, all humans were the same in the end, motivated by the base instincts. There would never be anything new about that. However, it seemed to her that the baser instincts had finally shed the last of their glamour in the last few decades. It was 2010. Imagine, she had more than outlived the new century, but to what end?

To her wizened mind, everything was condensing into the bottom of the universal jug. When her grandchildren had grown into young adults, and started to speak aloud of financial or fertility problems, she had tried to shush them, to explain that speaking of such things was tantamount to showing up for dinner in one’s underwear.

Her attempts to instill in them a bit of discretion only resulted in polite smiles or condescending reminders that "times have changed, Grandmaman" or one strange retort from her youngest granddaughter, Marthe, "we’re only as sick as our secrets so to hide them is to make yourself sick."

Madame de Florian chuckled a bit to herself, remembering that conversation, feeling the mirth vibrate lightly under her upper rib cage. "Mon cher, Marthe, do you know for whom you were named?"

"Oui, Grandmere, Marthe de Florian, demimondaine extraordinaire!"

"As I am your Grandmere, Marthe de Florian was my Grandmere."

Her granddaughter’s face had lit up. Madame de Florian knew that her consistent refusal to speak of this illustrious family descendant was, perhaps, the last bit of true power she held over her brood.

"Grandmere, you must tell me about her. She is my namesake. Someone must know her after-well-"

"After I die, little bird?" Marthe had attempted a demurral, but the gesture required too much subtlety for her generation. "Not to worry, young one, I am old, and being old, I know finally that I will die. It is ok. Not to worry."

"But-" She knew Marthe was not making another attempt to excuse her lack of charity, but was, rather, trying to get the conversation back on her track, back to her great-great grandmother. Of course, this would not end well for the child.

"Marthe, your namesake is already dead, and therefore, her secrets cannot make her sick." At that, she landed her gaze on her elderly son, Alain, and requested that he might pass her the sherry.

Madame de Florian’s ballet slippers fell softly upon the blonde stone that rimmed the Grasse villa, her home for more than 60 years. It had been the war, actually, that gave her this life; a life lived in an abundance of natural beauty and material comfort, not to mention the sincere passion she’d always felt for her Raylen. "May he rest in peace," she whispered into the early morning breeze.

For years, she’d waited for some guilt to arrive; guilt that she’d been wrapped in the silk lining of a time that for most people had been brutal and sad. But it hadn’t. Anyway, suffering is relative, she thought.

The peonies were just past full bloom, their pink petals overflowing over tight-budded centers. There was an anxiety about the peonies that Madame de Florian tried to fluff off with a smoothing of her gray skirts; she even loosened the lavender, silk scarf wound warmly about her neck, daring to expose the soft folds of skin that had lined her throat for the last 10, perhaps 15 years.

She’d left it and never gone back for it.

Why think of this now, so many years later. She turned away from the house and looked out over the pool and down into the valley, toward Nice. The rent was paid in a timely manner by her solicitor and had been for 68 years now. No one had entered the apartment on the ninth arrondissement in all those years. There had been no fires, no floods. All was well in Paris.

Even so, her breath was coming in short gasps. "Suffering is relative," she spoke out, attempting confidence but missing the mark somehow, only recalling where she’d first heard this teaching.

"Ma chere, suffering is relative to the person suffering, oui?" Her grandmother’s voice had been warm enough to play with the sunshine filling the dressing room of her apartment.

The eight year old Madame de Florian had sat in the brocade covered chair by the green, stenciled side table and watched her grandmother’s reflection in the dressing table mirror as Marthe swept her still shining, albeit mostly gray and chestnut waves onto the top of her head.

"Of course, grandmere." This had been her tentative reply. In reality, she hadn’t really understood. She hadn’t understood until she’d closed the door of that same apartment, 15 years later, leaving behind her grandmother’s possessions.

It had been war, the Nazis headed into Paris, as deadly as any epidemic, but the most dangerous moment in her life had come before the Nazis. There had been a night in the apartment that her grandmother had left to her, a night with an older man, an Italian man. She had had a pink, satin gown made and which she wore to the last ball held in Paris society before everyone who could retreat to the South had gone.

The 23-year old Madame de Florian stood in front of the dressing room’s fireplace so that the man she had invited inside would gaze both at her and at the portrait of Marthe, a portrait made of the politician's lover, the artist's muse, at 24 years of age. The man had done just that, and she'd watched his lose its social smile as he remarked on their resemblance, moving closer and closer to her until she felt her body arch into his, her arms wrapping around his shoulders and neck, his arms drawing her against him.

It was the first time she had felt the heat of a mans skin against her own; the first time that the smell of another human being became so intoxicating that she’d lost all thought. There had been a little pain, and then a great deal of pleasure passed between them during that long night, and the morning that followed. He'd left her, finally, as the sun was becoming hot, whispering into her ear, "I will miss you."

A rather sharp pain erupted suddenly down her left arm and Madame found herself hobbling to her knees in the grass before the overstuffed, pink peonies. The air had become thinner, somehow, and the pain was less discrete in its attention. Her whole chest appeared to be compressed by something heavier than anything she could adequately describe.

I’m dying, she thought. Maybe her granddaughter had been right after all; maybe the secrets she’d locked behind the door of her grandmother’s apartment were finally finding their way out. Falling into the grass, she caught what little air she could through the cement that had seemed to fill her lungs.

She had been pregnant after her night with the Italian, who had already left France, but the baby had not stayed. She’d bled through another night, some eight weeks later, and the tears that accompanied were more relief than anything else. When her family determined it was their time to escape to the South, she had quite easily left everything behind, locked in that apartment.

Suffering is relative, Madame de Florian thought, and then realized she would not be able to take another breath.

　

　

　

Dust and China: A Story Based on a Photo of an Abandoned Home

A friend and I decided to write a story based on one of these photos as a writing exercise...here's mine!

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2316987/Photographer-Niki-Feijens-eerie-images-abandoned-farm-houses.html

 

The woman struggled to pull the last of the china from the hutch. The heat was still coming in waves over the dry grass outside the dining room windows and the wood of the bottom left cabinet had finally succumbed, warped a bit and made her pull harder than she’d expected. Her left forearm ached as she carried the serving pieces to the table.

While she used a dusting rag to wipe her face and neck of dust and sweat, Marta Stone took stock of things. All the wood was shiny with wood oil, the mirror streak-free and her mother’s keepsakes smartly arranged on the doilies she’d crocheted for them. She’d taken a feather duster to the wallpaper and pictures and, as usual, thanked herself for choosing that particular shade of green that held the dust invisibly in its creamy gray floral pattern.  

Inside the breakfront, she knew, were freshly laundered and lightly starched linens:  a good table cloth for guests; two daily table cloths; and three sets of hand embroidered tea towels. She’d even washed the red and green holiday runner she’d sewn herself from a dress that had worn enough in the elbows and seams to be resistant to further mending.

“All kipppy!” Her son might say to her.

She’d risen with the sun as she had every day of their marriage. Unlike Samuel, however, Marta liked a little leftover dinner for her breakfast. A little cold stroganoff and hot, black tea was just right. She’d listened in to the radio until Elsie Beebe came on, and then turned it to NBC for some music. She’d never taken to the dramatic series. Preferred a little swing music. There was enough drama in her own mind, thank you very much.

She took a deep breath as her brow started popping with sweat beads almost the second after she’d cleared the last. It was hot; still mid-summer hot although it was already September 3. The blinds did some good against the glare, but nothing could keep out the dust from the warm wind that had persisted over these last few weeks.

Marta moved back to the chair, sat down and started dusting off the rest of her wedding china. She’d taken out every bit of it that morning and one by one, cleaned them of their recent layer of dust. There was a pile of now dingy, irregular sized rags in a pile to the left of the chair.

Every once in a while, as she’d adjust herself in the chair, the wicker seat creaking in opposition to Glen Miller or The Andrews Sisters, Marta would lift her face to the blowing curtains, eyes blinking against the fine dust, and check for the sound of footsteps on the wood planks of the front porch. It was just to the right of the dining room windows, and the table had always been the best place to wait for him.

“All done,” she whispered but stayed in her chair, the last rag lying in her lap while she rubbed her left forearm with her right hand.

The year was closing into itself. Marta and Samuel were not farmers, but their neighbors were. The August harvest had been pitiful, and no one expected any more in September or November. Seemed to Marta that the world was closing into itself, too. She wasn’t college educated like her son, but she listened intently to the news on the radio. To President Roosevelt when he talked to them during his Fireside Chats.

She also didn’t have much use for the Bible. She went to church on Sundays because that’s what made a community. Even so, these last years might be making a believer out of her. First the big Crash. Then, drought and year after year of bad harvests. Men leaving their women and children behind to go somewhere, anywhere they could find work. The worst of it though, according to Marta’s thinking, were the bad men marching across Europe. Franco might be the devil’s own child. And, this Hitler.

Marta swooshed away a few flies from in front of her face. The hot air just kept on moving across the fields, pushing through her blinds, parting her curtains and laying down an endless sheet of dust into her house. Seemed sometimes like the wind and the radio waves were carrying the same message Pastor Rooks preached from his wooden pulpit. She swore all those tendrils of evil were gently ricocheting against the walls of her empty house and forming a new reality to bear.

She started to feel the anxiety creep right through her skin and stood up so quickly the rag on her lap dropped right onto the table instead of the floor. Marta picked up the rag, and cut her breath off by leaning over to scoop up the rest of them off the floor. She saw the yellow fuzz of her slippers and realized she was still in her housecoat and needed to get changed.

Dropping the rags one at a time into the laundry bin along to “Plop-plop, fizz-fizz, what a relief it is…” chirping out of the kitchen radio, Marta did begin to feel some relief and indulged in a little one-two-three down the hall to their bedroom in time to the Tommy Dorsey horns that followed the advertisement.

The bath water was running, the temperature tepid. There was no truly cold water these days. She pulled the sheets off the bed and walked back down the hallway to drop them on top of the soiled dusting rags in the laundry bin. She’d get to them after her bath.

A loud knock sounded in the dining room. She was alone in the big farm house so she backtracked a little and turned down the radio and placed her hand on the phone, ready to reach the switchboard if need be. After a minute or so, and satisfied enough that her heart stopped beating itself into a dither, she put the handset down inside its Bakelite cradle and walked to the dining room.

The serving pieces were on the table, still waiting to be restored to their bottom cabinet, and the chair stood upright at the angle she’d left it. However, the little tripod table with the cutlery box on top of it had tipped over. The cutlery box was remarkably intact, albeit on the floor, but a few silver spoons had slipped through the space where the lid had separated from the box proper.

Sighing a little, she moved quickly, up righting the little table that had been Samuel’s mother’s and replacing the spoons into their rightful, velvet beds. She was about to close the lid of the box when she heard a terrible sound; somewhere between a gurgle and a piercing scream.

Turning slowly, Marta realized with genuine disappointment that the sound was coming from her throat, through which stuck a medium length, but very sharp and relatively thin fillet knife. She could see how nicely she’d polished the knife, as well as the blood trickling down her throat and into the neckline of her housecoat in the mirror that she had just cleaned a few hours earlier.

She stepped forward, reaching out as if to grab the tall, enamel and silver covered carafe, a gift sent to her from Germany by her son before the war, and which presently sat on the table, close to the edge.

The man, now on the other side of the room, thought she meant to grab at him with her old woman’s claw. It terrified him so he backed up into the hallway outside the dining room and waited until she fell and eventually, stopped twitching.

Fletcher didn’t know if the woman was dead, but she wasn’t going to harm him none anymore, so he walked around the left side of the dining room table and dug his hands into the box of silver forks and knives and spoons, dropping them by the fistful into his extra shirt, the sleeves and waist tied off to make a bag.

After a quick trip to the bedroom, and another, small handful of pearls and gold, Fletcher walked to the kitchen and turned the radio off. There wasn’t much to eat. The old woman had been alone in that house for at least a month. He’d come upon the pitiful little funeral a few weeks earlier. Gravestone read,

Samuel Robert Stone

February 1, 1868 – August 9, 1939

Loving Husband and Proud Father

 

           Decided he’d pass it by just then; head down to town, see what he could scrounge at whatever soup kitchen they’d got going. Then, he’d head back after the parade of mourners was long gone.

     Fletcher filled his belly well enough even on the widow Stone’s meager provisions, and then took the bath that she’d started. Weren’t no use wasting all that water. He slept like a baby on the big feather mattress, and then switched up his dirty clothes for some of ole’ Samuel’s clothes.

     He determined to grab the last of the hard-boiled eggs and bread from the kitchen, and then head out that way, the back way. Fletcher threw the food on top of the silver and jewelry, and switched on the radio before letting the screen door snap shut behind him. Didn’t want anything to sound out of place should someone come snooping.

     He had to pass by the little cemetery on the way to the path through the trees, down to the railroad tracks where he’d put a few days between himself and the widow. Fletcher knew the dead could really do some harm if you didn’t pay them no respect. He noticed an older headstone, same size and stone as ole’ Samuel’s. It read,

Robert CarruthersStone

March 21, 1894  - July 15, 1918

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

The son, seemed to be. Made him still for a minute, wondering about the meaning of that one, until he lost interest and headed across the dry lawn to the trees.

The crunching of the dead grass was loud under his new boots but even so, Fletcher managed to catch the excited radio announcer from Marta’s kitchen crying out, “The second world war is upon us…”    

 

 

White Noise (for Paul, 11/2003)

What do you do
when you’re cold
and alone you
turn on the wall heater
pull up gray velour sweats
and a pink tank top covered
with an old pink sweatshirt
and coat your icy feet with
fleece socks. You
cover yourself
and the chair where you sit
with a down comforter from
your bed. You drape a lambswool
shawl your mother made for herself
across your shoulders and
wrap your lonely hands
in the triangle ends. You
rent a couple of DVD movies
watch them on your laptop
tin sound on extra loud.

You drink hot ginger
tea and when the clock strikes
you shiver to your bed
blow out the faint glow
of your candles. You huddle
in flannel sheets and wrap your
little human body with
cotton and feathers. You smell
chlorine in your hair and
remember the salt on his lips
the heat he held you in
the hard muscle hold offering
the surrender you could not take.

You curl your knees, tight and soft,
into your belly and cross your
fleece coated ankles under your
bent thighs. You wrap your hands
between pillows. You breathe in
fresh air underneath your
blankets. You surrender to
the shuddering. Your
tears dry and you
start again drawing heat
from your core into
your limbs. You remember
the poetry CD playing
that very morning. The
Beats teaching you thought
emotion comes from the stomach
(not the mind). You finally
understand why the way
to a man’s heart is through
his belly. You wish for his
presence. You pray to
God to feel the ocean’s
shell pried open and
bringing the warm
trade winds.

What
do you do
when you’re cold and
alone. You feel the imprint of God
on your eyelids
on your soft cheeks
and the down of
your blonde body.

What
do you do
when you’re cold
and alone. You remember quietly
faith holding your hips and coveting
your worship. You breathe deeply
into your hair, the hot dust from the wall heater
the fresh clean of your pink sweatshirt. You
close your eyes
watch your breath. You calm
your little human body. You drift
dream, the heater spending
your long hours of work
all, night, long and
you leave it on.
You sleep.