Semi-Daily Scribbles

The grey-green clouds were the first indication I'd stepped off the bus and into the wrong neighborhood. I held my breath until my lungs burned, then I choked down the moist, heavy air around me. I thought for sure I'd be dead in seconds from poison, but I survived. The air tasted like liver and I gagged, but I was alive. I scanned the ground and saw holes; some shallow, some six feet deep. If there was a pattern in where and how they'd been dug, I didn't pick up on it. I couldn't figure out what the silver substance was that rippled in the craters closest to me, either. I was very careful where I placed each footfall as I moved slowly across the pitted terrain. A shriek, from overhead in the dead twisted trees, scared me and threw off my balance. I toppled forward, my knees hit the ground in a squishy thud, and I landed full on in the muck. My eyes stung and I wiped at them with the sleeve of my sweater. I'd missed by an inch the total submersion of my head in a hole filled with jiggly liquid. Then the hole spoke.

"How did you get out? Misshapens are kept down below. For your own safety, naturally." I began to speak, but all I heard was a grunt and a snort. I tried again, each word a strain to enunciate. The squeal that came out was louder than the shriek in the trees. I clutched at my mouth. It was gone. "Reach around to the back of the second stump," said the hole. "There you go, just a little further to the right."

The vapour materialized without provocation. Mist billowed from hollowed out trunks and turned the atmosphere rank. Bebe knew better than to be stranded on the road as the storm approached, but then she was a reckless woman. Precipitation laid an easy escape to waste, and Bebe slipped on one of her many transgressions. Her mistakes mounted, but she repeated them often because the outcomes were so pleasurable.

Wealth.
Notoriety.
Power.

Bebe swindled strangers and relations, rich and poor, to ensure her name never left people's lips. Bebe was chaos in bodily form, and the next trick up her sleeve was to tame the elements. The universe was hers to shape as she pleased. The universe, to make sport of Bebe's plans, employed a trick or two of its own. The storm raged, the road stopped short, and time ran out. Bebe's fate closed in, its fetid breath hot on her skin.

It took Walter 30 years of day-in-day-out rehearsal to let the water roll off. He'd always been a soaker, a holder, a grudge-lover, a moper. Forgive was the F-Word. Just couldn't bring himself to say it, let alone do it. Walter eventually developed the level of facility required to let go. His gnarled heart untangled; claws softened to where he could keep them neat and trim. Over the course of those 30 years, Walter's leading man exterior had become worn down and dull. There was no longer a good side to capture. The façade slid off, and he was forced to give back much of what he'd never really earned in the first place. With his pride cut down to size, Walter learned compassion was a tonic for his upset spirit. He drank it in, and felt both full and weightless. He'd hogged all the best light for far too long, and accepted with gratitude his new role as a utility player on the worldwide stage of sages and fools.

The detritus of life tumbled from Lynda Filson's pockets like unsupervised Jiffy Pop®. Litter trailed in Lynda's wake as a convenient way to retrace her numerous steps. Out on her rounds, Lynda worried, and hovered, and wrung her hands a lot. There were so many details left unattended that her days were filled with activity from morning to midnight. She spent countless hours deadheading strangers' flowers. She trimmed back candle wax to expose the wick wherever a taper sputtered. Lynda clipped coupons for cotton swabs and cereal and left them in neighbors' mailboxes. There was no task too trivial for Lynda, but her efforts often went unnoticed. People did notice, however, her trail of petals, paper, and flakes. Lynda's legacy left her forever known as the town eccentric. She wasn't familiar with the word eccentric, so Lynda reckoned it meant Minder of all the Little Things, a title that fit her just fine.

Life is a laugh and a romp because Matilda keeps decrepitude off her heels. She simply avoids all reflection. Matilda refuses to allow the pile up of years to mock her from the other side of a mirror. She knows better than to look at faces and places overly long, and with a squint of the eye and her hard-as-granite melon tilted just right, everything looks soft and pliable. Matilda does, however, catch odd phrases on the wind like, "That insufferable woman just encases herself in a leathery rind of denial." Such is the nature of the odd phrase. Words can mean all sorts of things. Matilda lives with myopia and a rudder hard to starboard, and is happiest when she uses these gifts to blast convention out of the water.

The face in the mirror bewildered Mildred. She was young and lissome only yesterday. It was just yesterday honeysuckle perfumed the air, and Mildred picked peaches for a cobbler. She promised Jack Montgomery she'd bring her cobbler to the Friday Nite Pot Luck at the Grange Hall. His band was to play afterward. There'd be dancing. Yesterday she finished the hem on her new blue dress. It was only yesterday. Mildred, hat in hand and trench coat buttoned up to her chin, stood and stared at the hallway mirror. There was somewhere she needed to be, but she couldn't turn away from the sight. The reflection was familiar, and yet she did not know the woman in the gilt frame. Brown eyes clouded and moist, dark skin marred by a mottle of furrows and ashy patches. Mildred wondered if the deadened expression on the face ever changed; if the intruder had ever been beautiful. The air was heavy with honeysuckle, and a question and a promise rolled around and around in Mildred's mind. She heard the first few bars of "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" and slowly unbuttoned her coat.

Nelson collected dark tinted brown, green, and blue receptacles because he boiled up and bottled things like Eschscholtzia Californica, Chamaemelum nobile, Hypericum perforatum, and Humulus lupulus. It was a classic case of Mind vs. Body in a war of wills, and Nelson brewed all sorts of curatives in hopes that the two factions would call a truce long enough for him to earn his daily bread as a tow truck driver. When it came to labor, Nelson's best efforts, and nearly all his physical exertion (which his doctor told him to get more of), occurred during REM sleep.

During these voyages to Nod, Nelson did not laze about. He had codes to crack, while tutu-attired lemurs hurled fruit from the bois d'arc at his melon, before timers on bombs wound down to zero. He also had souls to save, like the family of seven, plus their black giant schnauzer, which he pulled from a submerged RAV4 that jumped the Jersey barrier after a poorly negotiated cloverleaf and splashed down in a storm-bloated retention pond. That was a tough assignment, for sure, and Nelson woke up soaked and breathless. His shoulders ached from the weight of eight heads he struggled to keep above water. Essentially, there was no amount of tincture that helped Nelson get his brain, and all his other bits, to work as a cohesive whole.