Olive's Monster

Olive's monster was stuffed under a floorboard in her bedroom, and recently it had made it clear that it wanted out. Olive couldn't remember when it had become clear there was something under a floorboard in her room, but she supposed it was right around the beginning of her periods; her mother kept stating with conviction that her menarche was a sea change, whatever that was. It was something that changed everything, apparently. Periods were like political assassinations or natural disasters that leveled your house. Her mother never used small similes.

Olive was young for periods and a bit old for monsters: she was ten, close to eleven. Young for menstruation, but she found that despite her strident and well-meaning mother's declarations she didn't feel the still-irregular bleeding was all that bad. It required neatness more than anything, and Olive was up to that. She could ask anyone, literally anyone, including strange librarians and teenage cashier boys, where she could get some pads and not feel embarrassment. Her bedroom monster was much, much harder to talk about, and she'd stammered and blushed practically orange and started but then stopped too many times to count until she finally told her family about her monster. Their reaction was much more like the reaction she might have expected from a less liberal family when she'd brought up her first period: there was blushing, and loudness, and hushing, and after that there was a quiet talk in the living room about what was appropriate for her age now, and about how she shouldn't bring up monsters while people were eating. This arbitrary rule- one in a sparse but regular line of arbitrary rules that adults would toss out at children when they weren't sure what they were saying- was, to Olive, a signal to never speak of it again.

The monster was growing, though. She kind of felt that the monster first made itself known around her first period, but she knew that it was getting larger because it was starting to press up against the floorboard. She had felt a sort of trembling at first, while she was laying in bed. She'd gone to sleep and didn't think about it until a week later when she heard the sort of squeaking one would expect of nails in walls being stressed in a high wind. It was calm and boring outside. She got up to investigate this, and when she stood to look at her door frame there was a push from underneath one of the floorboards, which was suddenly loose. She stamped, and heard the squeaking again. The floorboard smoothed back to its' previous flatness and she got no more from it that night, despite standing just beside it for a half hour after that.

Later- a few days- she came into her room after school and she tripped on the floorboard, which was canted. The ones around it were trembling. She stood up and breathed to slow her heart (her mother had taught her that after noticing Olive's tendency to stop breathing when she was frustrated,) and then jumped on the floorboard with both feet. There was the pulling squeak sound as before, and the floorboards moved in sympathy. She felt bad right away, and lay down on the floor, her abdomen pressed to the part of the floor that was shifting.

"I'm sorry." she said. The whining stopped, and so did the trembling. Then, it stayed silent for two weeks. She doubted her own perceptive powers, since whatever she'd apologized to may not have existed. She carried a light confusion with her. When the two weeks was up she was laying in her bed, not sleeping but not awake, when she heard the nails straining again. It was louder, there were more nails involved, so she got up and this time she lay down on the floor, like someone would lay down on the ice to rescue a friend who's fallen through it.

It was the right move: she saw it right away. It was pressed underneath her floor, in what must have been a crawlspace. She could only see a shoulder or rump: she saw an expanse of long hairs on a body that was broad, and the color was distinct even if nothing else was- the pelt was silver-brown. This, of all things, struck her as being weird,  so she crawled back to bed, keeping low to the floor as she did, avoiding breakthrough (hers or its.)

This became pattern. Nighttime- not sleeping- stretching iron noise, whining- slipping onto the floor- pressing an eye to the cracks in the floor to see a thing, some sort of thing, some...monster? It was a non-human, but other than that it was just...alive. There was the possibility it was cute. She determined to find out if it was, so she took a small hammer from one of her parent's tool boxes and she started pulling up the floor in pieces. The process was rewarding but slow. She would prize up some part of a board and see something that looked like a shoulder blade, a long skinny bone beneath the long-silver-brown, and then put it back. The monster whined, a small little whine like the whine of a very young puppy. She murmured to it as she did this, though not because she was feeling maternal or particularly caring (yet,) but she didn't want anyone to come into her room or even near it to listen at the door. She was careful about her careful parents, who might stumble upon her breathing secret in an attempt to make sure Olive herself was OK.

The boards came partially up and then went fully down, one every other day or so. She saw so much long silvery-brown hair that she realized the hairs were feathers, then realized that it was a mix. There were limbs, basic arms and legs and something else that were either wings or extra arms. An afternoon about ten days since she'd started there was an eye looking right at her from the new hole she created. The eye was perfectly round and it was the color of muck. Olive thought it beautiful. She thought it perfectly beautiful, utter and complete like the circle made with a sextant.The creature, looking at her with either perfect or compromised vision depending on how many eyes it ultimately had, whined lightly. Olive heard a plea in it for the first time.

She began to pack the next day, which was a Saturday, which was a good day for it. Her mother and father were whining about their own things  (Olive thought of her house as Whining, as if that were an Estate name with her mother and father Lady and Lord Whine) and therefore weren't paying much attention to Olive's rustlings in the closet with the suitcases in it. At one point her father yelled through the ceiling, generally toward her room:

"What are you doing up there?" His voice was gruff. He sounded gruff when he yelled, though he swore that he didn't feel that way nine times out of ten. He was simply trying to be audible, he'd said.

Olive had been packing some long underwear from a skiing trip they'd taken the year before: she wanted to prepare for cold, but was forgoing the bathing suits, since she could swim in her underwear when the need arose. "Moving my desk!" she yelled back from the top of the stairs. She hoped that wasn't overdoing it: furniture moving was maybe demanding more attention than she wanted, but saying "nothing!" would have been a more obvious lie. She waited, and heard her parents talking and using her name. She would miss them after she left, but there was no question for her about whether freeing her monster and leaving was the right course for those up to the challenge. She used the word "challenge" to describe to herself what she was doing. She put in the long underwear, the sweaters, the extra socks and a pair of pretty shoes, since they were new and she couldn't bear to leave them, gathering dust on the patent and the new buckle like everything else would. She packed all of her hair ties in a box and then that box in a box- boxes were useful no matter what your life circumstances were.

The monster rustled while she packed but didn't make any noises. It was Saturday, the planned-for Saturday, so she waited on her bed for her witching hour. She'd intended to make that traditional- starting at midnight on the dot- but fell asleep on her bed, slumped from a sitting position. She woke up startled: her creature (her Creature, she thought) had finally made a noise to wake her, the clever thing. So. Olive stood and  crept down the hall, peeped through the conveniently cracked-open bedroom door, getting a lovely, assuring view of the 'rents sleeping off their customary Saturday bottle of red. Her mother's arm was laying on her father's chest, and her father's head was turned toward her mom. Olive decided it would be all right to miss them when the time came, whenever that was. She decided to let the homesick tearing happen once she was free of said home. She crept back to her room and dropped to her knees and dug her fingers under a floorboard- the floorboard- and pulled. Her Creature waited, its' breath held as far as she could tell.

The board came up easily. She spied the beautiful muck-colored eye watching her and it hurried her, so the next one came up  easily, and the next. She had been worried about making noise and waking her lightly potted parents, but everything was pre-loosened by her Creature's back or chest or four arms or whatever; the beast itself was slowly revealed in long rectangular strips. It was incredible, literally incredible! It- her Creature- was covered in that glossy brown-silver feather pelt (the feathers were so fine they looked like hair whenever it moved) and it had three of those eyes. The arms, or wings, remained a mystery no matter how many floorboards Olive pried up: each time she thought the arm/wings would resolve into either arm or wing there was movement and the picture was lost. She was smiling and crying as she squinted into the sub-floor gloom to get a final understanding, but it just evaded her.

Finally the- Olive's- monster was free, It only had to stand and step up onto the remains of Olive's bedroom floor, near the bookshelves where there was still someplace to stand. It did, with coaxing. Still no resolution about the arms or wings- It was keeping them behind its' back, holding them behind Itself and sticking what might be described as its chest out. It looked nothing like a 'chicken in that position. The girl's wish that It look recognizable vanished, which was for the best. She looked at the (her) Monster and the Monster looked at her. The perfect triangle of perfectly round muck-colored eyes were warm, wettish as if misted over with some tears. Olive was frightened and paralyzed with unexpressed affection for a while: her Creature!

The thing blinked, It's eyes in tandem, and Olive moved. "We have to leave now" she said aloud, to herself, but the Creature moved out of the way so she could grab the duffel bag of her father's that she'd packed. It was too big for her- she hadn't considered- but the Creature leaned down (It was tallish) and spiked one of Its' appendages through the straps. Olive thought: it's a wing! Then she doubted it. She went to the window and slid out, turning to help her Thing but the Creature had somehow changed Its' mass and had moved through the sash easily. She watched It re-configure to Its' true size, and It was twice what it had been in Olive's room. She smiled up at It. The three eyes blinked and watered, unused to fresh air. Then It reached again with Its' arm-wings and pulled Olive herself up to sit on Its' back.

She sad with her legs cris-cross applesauce, a nursery prompt that she would never abandon. She looked around at the roofs, at her window, at the headlights in the distance, and then her new Beast pushed upward. Olive at first thought that the Creature was getting taller all of a sudden, but: they were flying. The Creature (Friend, thought Olive) was flying with Its' wing-arms, the superfine feathering waving in the air, kind of forming into long whiskery fingers. It was frightening- there were heights to consider- but it was also awesome, so that she was too excited to stand up and look straight down at what she was leaving. She felt great. She felt scared. It was confusing.

Her Friend brought them down in a forest preserve that was a few miles from her house. She knew it from her pre-Creature ( Friend, thought Olive-to-self) days walking there with the abandoned parents. This may have been during a summer, though she was unwilling to swear to anything just then. She sat on her Friend for what must have seemed a long time to It, and It shook the girl off; Olive landed hard on her butt and side and let out air, nothing coming out of her but a long wheeze. The Friend looked down at her with Its' unblinking night-brown eyes and sensed her lack of oxygen, or so she presumed: It leaned down and blew in her face with warm and eyewatering exhales until Olive put her hand to Its' mouth. It kissed, or it slurped. She couldn't tell.

The girl had thought to bring a sleeping bag, which was fortunate because it was cold and lucky because it was one of the more sturdy weatherproof kind. She offered it to her Friend because she'd been taught that it was polite by her mama. It did not take her up on the offer so instead she lay down in it herself, and the Creature (Friend? thought Olive-to-self) lay down on top of her. She was crushed, she was being crushed, she must be being crushed, this is what it feels like to be crushed...Olive thought these things on top of each other before she dreamed. In her dream, the Creature and she were flying still, over unrecognizable territory (not that she would know what was recognizable and what wasn't, ) but the fine silver-brown feathers that formed into fingers were touching her. They were gliding over her skin, under her overly heavy clothes; they touched her arms and neck and shins and chest (including the enlarged nipples that she kept hidden in largish t-shirts.) They tickled, or alternately chafed, or made a sucking noise, and she couldn't keep any of the sensations or sounds straight in her head.

They woke up the next morning- well, Olive woke the next morning with an entirely different noise near her ear: the Friend was making a chuck-whhirrrr noise on her right but when she looked she couldn't find It. She rose and put on her shoes and then went to find It, before even having her morning pee. She walked down a path that she thought she knew but that looked very different than what she remembered. The chuck-whirr noise grew so she followed, ignoring her bladder, ignoring the traffic sounds from the far-off highway that came on the wind, ignoring the wind. It took her to a copse, then a small gulley surrounded by trees where the Creature was half-buried in peat and old leaves, whirring and chucking from the back of its' throat. Olive spoke to It.

"What are you doing?" she asked her Friend, and It answered by continuing Its' noise. She looked around the hole it had dug for itself. The soil wasn't like what she'd seen in the area before: it wasn't like the playground dirt she'd sifted in her earlier years, and it wasn't like the dirt she had crept on when she went behind some bushes with a boy she knew from said playground, later. Then it was safe enough to practice kissing, and she sifted the earth as she did so. She had a basis for comparison. The Friend's dirt was different, so she reached out to sift it; when she did, her bladder let some but not all of its' tension go. Her pee made the weird dirt at her feet congeal, almost instantly. Olive looked at it, some of the dry earth still in her hand, and the Creature changed its' noisemaking.

"Ssssrrarrarrarr," It said. It was calm as the most peaceful lake Olive could think of. Its' eyes blinked, one at a time, a triangle. The girl was calm when she bent to pick up the new mud she'd made of the weird dirt and her own urine, placid despite the slight look of revulsion on her own face. She didn't notice her face, was the thing: she was noticing the mud, how it held the shape of the inside of her fist, how it was better this way than dry, come to think of it. Her Friend kept making the new noise, and she kept shaping it; she fell to her knees to try to get more and when she saw it wasn't enough she pulled down her pants and peed on the gulley floor until she was empty. Part of her knew she was gross, more gross than she had ever been, probably- and that was including her infant days, which she knew to be tremendously gross if her mother's vivid stories were anything to go by- but most of her liked the mud and the texture. Most of her liked the way she could make things with it.

She looked at the Friend, or Creature and It looked at her. "SSrrraaaarrah-arr" It said. She nodded in agreement and leaned down into the strange, blue-black, pungent, fantastic mud at her feet. She started squishing it into something...it was person-shaped, this thing she was making, and though she didn't feel it at the time it looked remarkably like a parent: it was a likeness of her parents, made into one, with her mother's wildish hair and her fathers perpetual hat. She molded on a likeness of a cardigan her mother wore constantly, and she put a little slate in one of the hands about the same proportions of her father's cell phone. She hummed while she did it.

Post-Mortem. 5 Months.

Crying makes you transparent, I've found.

There's time and distance between me and my beloved, and my other beloved: my sister, and my mother. I can see my sister again. The distance bit is the thousands of miles between us: there  could be more thousands, but four is enough. It makes for some emphatic emails:

"Did you do anything about the ______? I told you to take it to ________, while he's still with _______.  They are moving to a different house, they'll have two bedrooms- remember that? So he won't need _______ after that. Personally I think the term Conscious Uncoupling is a lot of Unconscious Pretention (ha ha!)"

...I'm not being fair: I should mention that my emails sound like that, not my sister's. Otherwise there's a good deal of "Miss you" and "This sucks", probably much more than regular people's sibling emails. I don't know why we have such a thick and resilient bond, but we do. I value my sister for many, many reasons, but I think the main one is that she is another me. She has chosen to lead a selfish life, and I get to lead one vicariously because of it.

My sis isn't a selfish person. She's just chosen a few Ways to Be that require a fundamental focus on what she wants, what she really really wants; she picked it up from our Aunt and Uncle, who also chose to be selfish in their own ways. The first thing for all of them is the choice not to have a child or children, and depending on which group of friends you belong to, gentle reader, you'll either be shocked- SHOCKED!- and possibly deluded, thinking that they don't know what they're missing; the other group will think well, of course.

The other and less overt way that my relatives have chosen to be selfish is that they live their lives without fear of garnering ill wishes. I find this part the most difficult. I myself wish to live without that fear, but am sometimes terrified that it's the wrong choice. What if worrying what people think is justified? What if I live without this fear but it turns out there was this one person, an influential and/or inspiring person who might have helped me become a better ______, but without thinking I farted while in front of them in line at the Tesco and now they will ever think I'm self-centered and smelly? What if in so doing I ignore someone who deserves my care and attention, just out of habit? I like to think that I'm more concerned with being an asshole than being perceived as an asshole, but I don't think one can really be that clear-sighted about oneself without hallucinogens. And I wouldn't know how to begin scoring some of those out here in the bucolic British countryside.

So...and so. Back to time, and distance. It seems my husband has noticed that I am in two places at once. Worse, it seems that being split like that- no matter how well you are able to straddle things- does the inevitable and pulls you apart. I have always hated conflict: when I was very little I would hide under tables to avoid anger, especially from our Dad, who was a man who could really sell things, and one of the things he sold was his emotional state. He wasn't hysterical or normally filled with rage, but when he was angry I would hide under a table in mute terror until someone (Mom, usually) came and found me hours later. It's just me. I hid in the face of anger. I've become much much better at having it out, now that I'm an adult and the tables are all too small to hide me effectively; still, when I'm split in two like this the old habits are so accessible. But my husband called me out, and we had it out, again, much the same as we have before because we're a couple that's been together longer than five years, and I cried.

Mom, the other beloved, wouldn't have patience for me either at this point: she'd tell me to get on with it. She'd be right, natch. But I join the millions who hide or drink or make copious amounts of decoupage to avoid anger, afraid of- something. Afraid of being transparent, I guess.

Little Bathsheba

Washer Bathsheba was really a nice person. She was one of the people who washed the dead, and was avoided, and it made her upset and tricked her into snapping at innocent by-standers. Fortunately this corpse was fresh, and it was alone. The niece who'd called the neighbor who came in through the unlocked door and found him dead on his silk fainting-couch had been witch-like in her prescience, and Bath was grateful for that. There wasn't any festering, for once, and there weren't any maggots. She still screamed every time she saw one, useless over-reaction but for the release. It was unusual for a Washer of the dead to stay sensitive to maggots, but she remained that way and she never apologized even when her washing and the quiet sing-songing and the stitching was in front of a big crowd.

This one was a relief both ways. No crowd, no bugs, just the empty flesh that retained some little specks of the person who had died, and that would be sallow or flushed or blocked up depending on the life the dead one had lived. Washer Bathsheba could see the specks, which were like flakes of dandruff or dead skin that floated around the body while she cleaned it. Nothing about it was magical: there were no sparks or colors or tiny voices of any kind, and really the sing-songing she produced in the back of her head (only a little better than humming) was a way for her to soothe herself while the flecks of soul that were sticking around settled in an oval on the floor or table or, in this case, a silk-covered couch. They would fade into the colors of their surroundings by the time she was done with the eyes, which was the last thing. She might hurry or move abruptly if she was tired or surrounded, but the eyes took care and she stitched the lids together better than any Washer in the county. You couldn't see any stitching at all- it was if the dead person's eyelids were linen and she was making the hem of a great lady's summer dress. No matter how long the eyes took Bath never stuck  around to see if the flecks did anything else, like metamorphose into crystals or be swept up by mice in waistcoats. She was uninterested past a certain point.

While she worked on the uncle, a solitary man who looked younger than his reported age and never had any of his own daughters to find him dead on his treasured couch, she thought about Bag Boy. He was a nice person, she thought, like her; he could become crabby because of his work, like her. He didn't deserve snappishness in return (she truly and fully believed that wars happened because people were testy with each other and it became inescapable that they revved up their threats and implied threats to a point where they must include artillery.) Anyway: Bag Boy was her age, or younger, and was avoided because of his job as well, though there was little rationale for society's squeamishness in his case. He bagged purchases, that was all. He jogged from one stall to the next, taking the objects or food or long bottles of colored liquids from the hands of the merchants and putting them carefully in the customer's net bags. He'd wrap the bottles with tissue paper that he carried with him in his satchel, and he'd wait for a tip, not speaking. He was quieter than even she was at her work, and he walked like a cat, and had the knack of knowing which sales were imminent and which were a lost cause. He'd take his feline feet toward the next sale that he knew was thirty seconds away from happening so that he was simply available whenever the merchandise in question needed a bag, and he'd ignore the doomed negotiating that had every appearance of being about to climax. He was the weathervane, and it was creepy to the marketplace hawkers. They barked at him to get away when there were no customers.

That people were easily spooked was another of Bath's truisms.

After she was done with the solitary but beloved uncle, she left without ceremony. The prescient niece had come in halfway through the ritual, but she'd said nothing and had pressed some coins into Bath's hands as the Washer had gathered herself to leave. Bath never looked at the money she was given until she was well out of range of the grieved- to do otherwise would have been irredeemably rude, to her mind; other Washers didn't feel that way and would haggle right in front of the newly anointed body if they felt they were being underpaid- and she decided this time she would find Bag Boy and talk to him. They had spoken before, mildly and about the weather, but Bath was so much in need of someone who would understand her isolation that she wanted to risk something. She had no idea what speaking to Bag Boy would risk, but she was willing to believe there was risk in speaking to him just so she had something to hang her misgivings on. What would be the risk? What can happen? She thought, a little Soother in the rough. Bag Boy was there and she walked up to him.

"What is your name, anyway?" she started.

"Roy," He answered. "Bag Boy Roy." He smiled as he said it, and she had the impression that he'd been waiting to say his name to someone so that he could introduce the rhyme of his name and title instead of waiting for the asker to make the inevitable tiny joke about it and then laugh disproportionately.  Washer Bath could relate to the feeling, if that's what it was.

"Well I'm just going to call you Roy." She had said that in a tone of exasperation, as if it had been a debate they'd been toiling over for weeks instead of the first three personal sentences they'd said together. Then they talked about dying.

Roy was curious about her job, and didn't mind that she wasn't curious about his. He'd said it all: "They think I can predict all kinds of shit just because I can predict which sales are about to go and which ones won't. It's just paying attention." He'd shrugged and asked her about her work, which was fine. He wanted to know how it was that you got into the business of Washing; how you chose what things to wash them with, a sponge or cloth or was it a sponge-and-cloth tandem method; what part of the body you started with and if that every varied and why. She hadn't thought about much of it: she found her own silences lengthening, and sounding distressing to her own ears despite the fact that she was used to silences. "I have to talk to you tomorrow. I'm tired now, but I can tell you the answers probably after I sleep."

He took it well, and they parted. She did sleep- she slept deeply, since it had been tiring in a deep way to think about how she spent her days as if they were a map instead of a slop of feelings- but she wasn't any closer to some narrative that would describe her experience with corpses.

When they saw each other the next day, Bag Boy Roy just looked at her and folded his arms, waiting for her prepared speech. She said: "You have to come with me." He looked at the marketplace- it was quiet that day, there had been no ships full of tourists with strange currency burning a hole through their tucked-away coin purses- and said "Uh-huh." Bath took his hand, as gently as she took the hand of a heartbroken client, and took him outside their town. They walked hand-in-hand for two miles and stopped at a shack. There was a woman inside it, sitting in her chair (it looked comfortable, with quilting and a footstool; it was incongruous with everything else about the derelict shack) who'd died only an hour before Bath had gotten the message. Again, it was a relief, because this job was similar to the last: no audience, no town sounds, no worms. She let go of Roy's hand finally and moved to take the woman under the armpits. Roy came around to her feet, pointing his palms down, ready to take direction.

"I have to move her myself. She's light and I'll be fine. She's light." Bath was lifting, and the woman was light. Her flecks of soul moved with her in a small cloud. Roy just stood and watched, unsmiling for once. Bath asked, "Do you see that?"

Roy looked around. The shack was one living area and a toilet in a closet, built into the back of the space for that purpose. There didn't appear to be any bed. "See what?"

Bath could see it, this floating city of specks, forming around the dead woman and staying there in a way that was unlike regular dust. It was obvious. "That cloud around her."

Roy squinted- it was dark inside the woman's house. "No. A cloud?"

"Never mind" Bath said. She'd never thought to ask if anyone else, a non-Washer, could see the cloud when she was in her Training. She learned the strokes of cleansing, and the appropriate aromas for every kind of death: lavender for fearful, verbena for comatose, tuber rose for any child, and she taught herself how to sing-song, which was proper. She was only eight when she learned, so...no questions about non-Washers, and now she was at a loss. She wasn't supposed to bring someone who didn't have a personal interest in the dead person's death, but she hadn't thought it through (she was only eighteen.)

Bath started washing the woman. It was lovely. The woman had obviously had some kind of peace, on her incongruously comfortable chair: She'd been smiling, and her face was relaxed. Bath used tuber rose, a first for an adult under her hands. There was no precedent for it as far as she knew, but she couldn't imagine someone being offended. She thought about it and decided that she would take offense if anyone was offended, most likely putting an end to it right there since no one argued with a Washer. Roy watched her from the chair that Bath and the woman had vacated for the floor. It was the weirdest thing about this weird day, because he wasn't bothered by the fact that the woman had died in that very chair a small time before. He sat in it with his arm slung over the pillowed back: he wasn't easily spooked.

Bath finished, and stood. There wasn't anyone waiting, which happened sometimes: some people were outside of the regular shoal of society and it was part of the written contract when a Washer took the Oath (it involved five or more people witnessing to make it official. It could be anywhere, including in a tavern or a bathroom or in your own bed, if someone needed you and there weren't any other Washers around. Bath had been woken from a dream of washing a young woman with the same coloring as herself, so when she was roused to take the Oath and get herself immediately to the farm of some town bigshot who'd had a heart attack she felt like she had just moved in her dream and never woken up) that they clean those who had no family, for free. The woman she'd just finished seemed to be one of those, though you never knew: occasionally a fee would show up for her out of nowhere, sent by her usual messenger. There was never a note with these. She wished there was a note for everyone she touched. Sometimes-a-note-and-sometimes-not wasn't enough...writing, she felt (how she could tell this was impossible to say since she was fully illiterate.)

She looked at her work, and Bag Boy Roy looked with her. There were the flakes, the scales, the tiny leftovers of soul that were hovering just above the floor now, not cloud-like. Bath looked at them and they seemed brighter in the gloom than she remembered any others looking. Roy looked around her, still not seeing, trying to see.

"Are you done? Is there anything else?" He wasn't impatient. He waited for the answer even though he wasn't even a full arm's length from the door.

"I am. Nothing else" Bath said, but didn't move. She watched the bits of soul drift, brighter and bigger than before.  Roy opened the door and went outside, and in a moment- newly interested: her first moment as a Watcher- she joined him.

I'm Afraid So

The Home Office has our passports again.

After an excruciating early summer- one involving a death in the very very immediate family, for those of you who might not read me regularly- I rushed around. I rushed from my mother's apartment, full of memories and dusty junk and practical considerations, to get home to the UK. I really wanted to see my family, my tight, reliable little love generators; also we had to get our passport Visas renewed. In the interest of timeliness and the mad crunch of the calendar, we decided to postpone the memorial service so that I could do that rushing I mentioned and we could send in our passports like good little US Nationals and get them renewed and then go back to the US with only the regular amount of tension about when to return because of work and school blah blah.

When I say "rushing," I should clarify that it wasn't very urgent. I was mostly sitting around eating my way through the pie or goulash or pitcher of Manhattans (note: never think of a pitcher of Manhattans as food. Just...don't. Think of it as what it is, which is tasty, tasty poison.) Mom had died and there were phone calls galore, but other than that and showering, I had plenty of time to wash my clothes and pack. But being in that literal post-mortem is a little like being stoned, in that everything in the world is going along at the regular pace but your brain is plodding, gooped up in bullshit about getting certificates and getting in touch and getting a bunch of movies at Barnes & Noble for a really good price. (My sister and I, after eating an entire pitcher of margaritas together, tripped into that local BookDonald's where we found an amazing amount of movies that we realized, in tandem, that we LOVED and had to have immediately. I can highly recommend a light spending spree during that kind of slow-motion grief. Really soothes the soul, for exactly four minutes, which means it was worth every penny.)

And I got home, and I slept a bit, and I had a sandwich. And then my hubby and I filled out the form and I sent it in all speedy-extra, and waited a week or so, wondering. We had a month. Then last week he got a letter that said basically this:

Dear Visa Applicant,

We have received your paperwork. We have your cheque for the inordinate amount of money We must have for the processing of your application. We shall put that cheque in the bank and watch for the bounce. IF IT BOUNCES OR IF WE JUST DO NOT LIKE THE LOOK ON ITS' FACE AND DECIDE TO HAVE A PROBLEM WITH IT, WE SHALL LET YOU KNOW. Via the regular mail. Sure, we asked for your email address and alternate email address and home phone number and work and mobile and every other number where you might be reached by phone....What of it?

We will pass it along after that. 

Oh, and We may wish you to visit a post office and have some data taken again, for no discernible reason. What of it? If we do We shall notify you, in writing, through the Royal Mail, We're afraid. 

We shall pass it along after that.

And one might wish to...postpone things. One might wish to delay one's holiday, or long automobile trip to the sea or the mountains or the places that produce comestibles, or one's long-postponed trip to one's ailing Nana. One may be wise to remain where one is, at one's home rather than engaged in any travel, in case We should wish to get in touch with one. We may wish to do this, We're afraid. 

We intend to pass it along immediately after We decide to contact you, or rather not. It's up to us, We're afraid.

One cannot reach Us through any means of communication on this great Earth, be it through email or telephone or carrier pigeon. One should not try as it should be futile. However, should one need most urgently to reach Us, one might refer to a page on our website that leads you, through a clever and hilarious series of links, to a form that may or may not compel Us to return your passports and applications untouched by Home Office hands; thereafter one may re-apply. What jolly fun! We make no mention of what will happen to your money should you do this. 

Ta-ta,
The Home Office, UK Visas and Immigration


So we had a mini-panic, but then rationalized that it was still weeks away, and we'd done everything by the letter, and our pictures taken at the Tesco picture booths were hideous in just the right passport-y sort of way, and our fingerprints were intact, and our bank balance was hardy enough to stand the nuclear first strike that would constitute the cheque's clearance. All was well, for the moment. A week later, we recieved another letter, and it said basically this:


Dearest Visa Applicants,

Do you remember when We informed you that We might require additional information that could only be obtained through certain branches of our post office? No? We will wait while you reaquaint yourselves with this instruction.

We thought not. 

We at the Home Office should like to invite you to visit one of these post office branches- and here We must pause to inform you that you must bring more currency, and it must be in cash form- no, We do not joke about money (see first letter, paragraph I)- and have your picture taken, among other things. 

Did We not like the pictures you sent with the application, as specified? No, We did not. We thought they were tacky. Or overexposed. We could tell you had them taken at the Tesco identification photo booth. 

Once you and your family have appeared and handed over your fistful of coin and had your pictures taken with proper identification picture cameras, We shall surely pass along your application for perusal. 

We at the Home Office also wish to inform you that you do not rate a sign-off. 

PS After the above is completed, your Visas could be on your way in as little as eight weeks! Though perhaps not...We remain unconvinced. -H.O.


...Now THIS- this one rated a full-blown panic. We had three weeks at that point. So we sprang into testy, A-Type action, and got the thing done in less than 24 hours. The next day I wrote a letter to them. I'd called some harried woman at the actual Home Office once I finally found a phone number to call that didn't automatically connect me with a recording of a man with a Royal Shakespeare Company Voice saying "YOU wish to speak with one of US?? Preposterous! Away with you, maggot!...YOU wish to speak with one of US?? Preposterous! Away (etc)!..." The harried woman gave me an actual address to an actual building that contained people; moreover, they were poeple who would be handling our application! My letter said basically this:


Listen, Home Office:

I appreciate you have a little business here. I appreciate that it's a lovely little racket, and to keep it going you have to give everyone the illusion that you are both extremely busy and extremely mean. Thugs are thugs, and their methods differ only in the embellishments they use to decorate their brands of intimidation. 

But, seriously: re application #YouKnowMyNameLookUpTheNumber, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME??? MY MOTHER DIED. SHE DIED AND I CAME BACK HERE TO SEND YOU MY BLOOD AND ALMOST ALL OF MY MONEY SO THAT I COULD GO HOME AND ATTEND HER MEMORIAL SERVICE, YOU VAMPIRIC BUREAUCRAT CREEPS!!

Give us our Visas. Keep your money for buying your heroin or your viable human kidneys or whatever it is you need that much damn money for, but SEND US OUR PASSPORTS WITH OUR UPDATED VISAS RIGHT IN THEM. you assholes. OH MY GOD.

If you don't send us our updated Visas I will personally go piss on the graves of every one of your publicly buried Monarchs. Then I will throw my urine on each one of your living Royals, starting with little Prince George and working my way right up to the Queen Herself, so help me. You do not threaten an American with institutionalized laziness- and that's exactly what it is, you fuck-nuts- and not expect a tsunami of urine-throwing. America teaches the rest of the world how to be gross. Do not test us on this. The entire British Isles do not have enough soap to wash away the piss that will cover your nation if I do not get what I want.

With Utmost Sincerity, 
Me

PS Get bent.


....Perhaps it was a bit too rage-filled. And I did not send that letter; I sent a moderately desperate please-Sir-may-I-have-another entreaty instead, since we were working with such little time. It would do none of us any good- and it certainly wouldn't get me to my Mom's service any faster- if we were abruptly put on a no-fly list right before the event was to take place. So we're waiting, like patient little ducks.

If you're of the persuasion, send us thoughts of expedition and efficiency, or just calming white light. Prayers are fine too, it can't hurt. This could get pretty traumatic, and very, very stinky.

Love to all.

Travelling

It was so much easier to just stay on the plane, but she couldn't. She had to move off of the 777 or whatever giant flying cargo vehicle she'd just flown in on, be herded off like everyone. She had to make sure her paperwork was ready before she toed the line on the floor that marked thirty minutes to the official behind the plexi-glass half-shield that protected the biometric equipment from foreign sneezing. Or domestic sneezing, for that matter. The Homeland Security officials didn't discriminate, favoring one type of person's sneezes over another's. That would be rude.

So she took her little customs card, the one that asked you to really and truly declare the vegetables that you had brought in your overhead luggage from the homeland. Or the explosives or flammable materials, or the large amounts of money in any currency. She knew her passport information by heart, and she had nothing remotely flammable in her carry-on, though she had thought of setting her eight pair of panties on fire just to purge their collective funk from the suitcase. She'd taken to washing those in the bathroom sinks during every flight, one or two at a time. She used the soap available in the hand-pump dispenser, and if she was lucky she'd been bumped up to Club class and the soap was lavender-and-verbena scented. That helped with the funk, but didn't really eradicate it. It had been seven weeks since she'd been anywhere like a laundrette...Anyway: not flammable, no produce of any kind, no wads of cash. Dingy panties, passport and traveller's checks, rain parka, dancing shoes, many t-shirts that gained or lost relevance depending on which side of an ocean she'd just landed on, jeans that may or may not be kind to her starch-blitzed middle (it had been five weeks since she'd worn anything other than one of her two pairs of sweatpants.) Light colored hoodie. She'd bought that after she noticed that Security officers took aside and frisked a disproportionate amount of people in dark hoodies, and looked at hoodie-wearing as some sort of international gang sign. The men and women on duty would frown at you with their mouths or brows if you wore a hoodie, but she couldn 't give up the fleecy, embracing comfort yet, so she wore her light-yellow long-sleeved security blanket and had her story ready when she came to any kind of checkpoint.

The story was key to getting done what she needed to do, and she had practiced it in a terminal mirror before every re-telling for the first week of her travels. It had slowed her, and she had missed flights and had had to wait whole hours (once even a day, spent sleeping on benches as if she were just delayed, as if she were a retiree going to Greece or Florida or something,) but it had it's purpose. She knew the story by heart, or by soul, really: it reflected more her soul that her heart, she felt, if the listener were willing to peer deeper into the narrative. They weren't, generally. It was often enough just to tell the story and watch the official person glaze over with irritation, since that meant she had a very good chance of getting through because the official person didn't want to be bothered. She was the buck that was passed, and it had insulted her for a while, stung her un-sought-out soul. She learned not to resent the reason she was passed through the gates or doors or turnstiles or x-ray chambers. There would be a sympathetic ear somewhere in this next jaunt to Heathrow Airport. She was in Atlanta, in the States, and she had to (wanted to) turn right around and get the 8:10 am to Heathrow- it would be a swing, a high-stakes, adrenalized amble through the airport to get to the employee lounge computer to book her standby and then to the gate before last call, but she had the rubber-soled footwear for the job and she's never twisted an ankle in her life. Plus she had the story.

She made it to the front of the line, and was waved on to a booth with a semi-mild, semi-young man in it who looked neutrally at her passport and didn't grill her about leaving her suitcase unattended. She held her breath a bit, and let it out slowly. She had to time when to begin her sonnet- everyone was different, everyone's sense of the beginning of things was so varied that this was the hardest part of her mission, making sure she didn't step on someone's line or crush the silence rather than breaking it gently like an egg. She breathed. She waited for it, waited for it- he looked hard at his screen, he was reading the notes in her profile, and she had to allow him that and yet not allow him to come to a judgement about what he found out- she waited for it- he glanced up. She began:

"I know, it's a lot of stuff in there, right? It looks bad. I think it looks bad, does it look bad? I'm not sure what you guys are looking for, I just get on the planes because- well, it's there, it's in there, right?" She paused,  moving her face into a rigor of openness.

"It looks..." the official began, but stopped. She counted to three.

"I have those conditions, and the medication for both of them is controlled, so I can't just walk into a-" she paused to think about which country and which city she was in, remembering the name of their most virulent drug store- "Rite-Aid and have them call my doctor. Who's in England. So..." she sighed with fatigue, not faked. "So getting it means I have to go back, more than I want to, I just want to stay and finish what I need to do. There's a memorial service, and..." She let it trial off, looked at him with dry and sleepy eyes.

"What are you doing in Georgia? What business brings you here? I see by this you're usually coming to O'Hare. Chicago's in a much different area of the country." He snorted just a little after he said it, conveying his mild disgust for the Midwest.

"I know! There's so much business that I had to do there-" This was true, there was business. There were meeting with lawyers and alienated family members and actual services to attend or attend to in the Midwest. There was grief, of course. There was sobbing that would have to happen when she attended to said business. She touched down in O'Hare International Airport over and over but she never, ever put her mind or her hands to the business. "I end up getting there but I have to go back, I did that about three times, I swear it was-"

The official looked at her instead of the screen, held that look. "It was eight."

She gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. The thing that made everything work was the story, and the thing that made the story believable was the telling of it: the details got more elaborate with every disembarking, and they surprised her as much as they informed them, and her reactions stayed true and consistent. She'd gasped because she was really shocked, because she didn't realize it was eight times. "God I have to stop" came out of her mouth before she could school it, but it was behind her hand so she thought he hadn't heard. "Anyway, I now have to go back again! There's an 8:10 flight back to Heathrow, can you believe it? But I have to get my daughter and bring her with me for the thing. The service. God."

"I don't know about- well, you can see how someone might think you're taking something back or bringing something here that we said we didn't want here? Like drugs-" he was making the speech, but she interrupted.

"I wrote it out on my form there! The only drugs I have are the ones I told you about, my prescriptions. I have to have an injection of one of them soon, actually. I'm coming up on my scheduled injection." She had no such medication, though it was true that if she didn't take her scheduled dose of Pregabalin soon she would feel really bad in about an hour. She would ache everywhere and she would have an even harder time napping on the plane to Heathrow if she didn't get that dose; she'd said it was an injection because everyone knew what a diabetic seizure looked like, and so far every official she'd encountered that dilly-dallied with her passage stood aside when she brought up the specter of a hypodermic needle. She wasn't diabetic but she never said she was. It was mutually beneficial for them to jump to the conclusion, but for some reason this semi-mild, semi-old fellow didn't flinch.

"Security worries about more than drugs, thank you. You could be trafficking jihadist literature or something like that. You could have been hired to transport illegal machine parts." He was clearly impovizing.

"You're joking. You must have seen some weird contraband, right? Machine parts!" She chuckled. She was certain she could get him on her side, give him the emotional equivalent of a pint with a mate right there at the kiosk.

"You wouldn't beleive it. There's machine parts that are contraband, on my honour." (He took a moment to look at her face, and did she notice a twinkle in his face? Was there a klatch, was there a camraderie that had just started?) "So, technically- you could have machine parts. Illegal machine parts from Russian tanks or some rot. Old laws."(...there was!)

She put her best sheltered housewife expression forward, and cry-whispered "What on Earth do people need those for??" as earnestly as the semi-hush in the security lines allowed. The man smiled, breaking his face into fully-mild, and did the stamping and the finger-pressing and even offered her some of his hand sanitizer when he was done. She'd introduced herself and learned his name was Colin as he was rolling the tip of her thumb on the clean biometric thumb reader. She told him her name, and she told him a little bit of the story she told them all.

"I have to go to a memorial service for my aunt, my great-aunt- and she was like a mother to me. Cancer got her. It got my uncle too, I hope the God they are up there eating a bunch of my Mom's strawberry-rhubarb cobbler right now, looking down. And I have these conditions-"

Colin, listening, looked at his screen again and asked her to wipe her hands on a new baby wipe, which he supplied. When it was done he said "My uncle too. Cancer." He flicked his eyes away from his readout and up to her for a second.

"Don't you hate it like, like the worst you could hate anything? But I have two medical conditions and they make me hurt- they are basically just nothing but pain." The woman was well into the details that she could never forget and so kept her voice casual. She noticed that using a casual voice during this part was what impressed; she'd learned to appear even-keeled while she yammered to strangers the strange circumstances of her mystery illnesses. For some reason they always believed her, and to her mind the facts that she hurt all the time and couldn't sleep for no good reason and might be losing her eyesight and was definitely losing her teeth were the parts that sounded most like bullshit.  Colin responded with sympathy and hurried her through, getting out from behind his kiosk to walk her to the next desk, even. She thanked him with urgency. She almost cried with relief and full-body gratitude, saying "Bless you" probably a few more times than was prudent, but she was babbling. She'd have to watch that for when she got to Heathrow: too much was a tip-off, even if what was in overabundance was humility. People didn't trust it.

She got to the employee lounge. She got to the gate. She waited, possibly-misfit eyes losing focus so that she had to close them and listen for her name, which she didn't like to do (she wanted all her senses, as we all do.) She was called- she got on the plane, and her seat assignment was in a low number, so that she was in Club class and she had two loungers to herself since there had been no pair of people willing to pay for the un-separated honeymoon seats in the dead center of the Club section. She sent up a prayer, a beg of good Karma for the security sentinel Colin. She tore open the plastic film that covered the softer-than-Economy-Plus quilted blanket she was offered, even though as a friend of an employee she should smilingly refuse it. But she was a grieved woman and she was sure she could explain that to the flight attendant who had looked at her askew at some point during the flight. It was a long trip. It took over eight hours.

Gathering Her Around Me

There is a staggering amount of things here. Her apartment- my apartment, for now, logically if not literally- is full of things that she liked and stuff she used and stuff she didn't use, crammed into the apartment's closets. Mom and Dad spent years driving a motor home all over America and into Mexico. They knew how to keep things simple, only minimally cluttered and in tiny amounts because of the lack of household surfaces. But here: her apartment, the one she bought after she lost Dad, is full, and we'll have the regular amount of purging to do before we can sell it. It keeps surprising me.

I keep thinking about comforting. Everyone wants to help me and my sister: there's pie and unasked-for prayers and offers of company. If I accept one of these, I'm afraid I'm doing it more for the sweet person offering it than for myself- it's a bit painful to think of these sincere well-wishers being left holding a rejected offering. Sometimes I want something and sometimes I don't. Ninety-five percent of the time when I do, I feel comforted.

There's one thing that bothers me: the offer of fantasy. People have said- via the usual social media channels- that she's an angel or in Heaven or that it's ok because she's with Dad, her husband, her best friend for 44 years. That last one...slays me. To think of her with her husband, together and (why not) young and healthy again, looking at each other with laughing fondness as in many of the pictures we have of them together before we were born and they got busy. My sister and I grew up with them looking at each other like that, so we know that was the tenor of their relationship even if there aren't as many like pictures from the family years. It...kills me, to think it, because I don't know for certain that's what is happening.

We tell each other those stories to comfort ourselves, of course, not because we have any real knowledge; yet I keep wanting to ask anyone who provides that particular vision for proof. There must be proof, I want there to be proof! The thought of them together at last and happy as they were and unconcerned because they either understand everything now or because they don't care, they did a good job in life, a good job as parents and they're done...is so lovely and so weighty that it feels dangerous to me. I'll believe it when there is some proof, and I'll give forty gold pieces to anyone who can find it for me.

The need for some real, almost-tangible foundation for that belief is a legacy of Mom's, ha ha ha! She was a rational woman and didn't stand for much of that spirit-talk in her lifetime. She was a Quaker, semi-devout, doing good deeds and joining committees when asked, yet when we talked about God she always said she had no words: it was too big a concept, too unknowable to express. She confessed she had barely an idea that God was there, and she practiced listening every Sunday she could. So this skepticism is bred into me by the very woman who's death is the source of all this fantasy-talk about posthumous reunion. That small irony makes me smile, now, because I know that Mom would have laughed at it.

She raised me. I know what made her laugh. She was my mother for forty-six years, and there's my proof.

Hazeldene

There's a place up the road from where I am now- a beautiful land called Hazeldene. I'm assuming it's called Hazeldene because there's a cast iron plaque on the ancient-stone-and-masonry wall that holds the gates that allow you onto the property, and that that plaque is on the set of gates that appears to lead to the drive that takes you to the stables behind the Big House. To be honest I'm not sure it there's a Small House, but the one evident house is large enough to be referred to as the Big House all on its' own. It appears to have gigantism. To be more accurate, it appears to have been built expressly for people who are afflicted with gigantism- from the outside, it looks as if it has only two floors but that these floors were each made twenty feet high.

I keep walking by this thing on my way down to the local village. There's a busy county road that runs right next to the sidewalk outside the semi-ancient stone wall, and should you be willing to risk some light jaywalking (even though I moved from Brooklyn NY to Bumblefuck NJ when I was young, I lived in the city long enough to absorb the lesson that any jaywalking that ended without the need of a tourniquet is much closer in spirit to crossing with the school crossing guard, sissy) you can feast your eyes on the horsies that belong to the possibly humongous owners of Hazeldene. They are pretty, pretty ponies indeed, and their blankets for the winter months are much better than the best comforter in my own house. That's fair, given that I couldn't even recoup the traveling expenses of putting myself out to stud, much less the vet's bills, but still it's the principle of the thing. What thing? I have no idea, but I had to see for myself just what it was like inside this grand mansion of the Fens.

 I made a whopping big casserole dish of my sister's crisp recipe to bring to Hazeldene, because I have yet to meet a person who can't be won over with the right amount of brown sugar. There are some apples here that are just wrong, too-close-to-an-industrial-accident kind of wrong, and with strange lumps that almost cry out for a session with a  master phrenologist ("phren" from the Latin meaning "head-bump"; "-ologist" from the Greek meaning "gasbag.") They are lumpy and frightening and the size of medium cabbages, and they're perfect for a delightful crisp. Only you don't want to call it a crisp, because that says to the British listener that you've just made a delightful potato chip and they become confused when asked if they would like a share of it. One can see the British listener's imagination trying to figure out how they are going to receive some of the potato chip- on a plate? As crumbs, served with a tiny broom so that you can just sweep them into your mouth? One can usually see the British listener's polite refusal already well formed in their eyes before one remembers to call the crisp a crumble. Or at least I do, because I can be slow on the uptake.

So I set off for that glorious one-and-a-half acre estate, muttering "Crumble. Crumble. Apple Crumble" to myself and smiling broadly at anyone I saw walking along the way. I swiveled my head sharply to smile broadly at people if I had to (and I don't mind telling you that I got  even broader smiles in return, and widened eyes that burned with something that probably wasn't fear!) I marched up to the massive front door- I'd been tempted to go around the side and look for the service entrance, but I'm An American, so I wouldn't even know what one looked like if I found it, like are the doors round like Hobbit-house doors- which reminded me that I should ask the person who answered something about Hobbits, because all British people love being compared with them, am I right?- but I marched up to that massive front door, and I rang the bell. I made sure to run right over to the window so that I could witness the butler or goblin or Edwardian ghost answer it. It was hard to stand in the elephantine shrubbery and stand on tiptoe and balance my crisp (sorry: crumble!) but I did it, for I was the intrepid explorer, dammit, and if there was genteel freakishness to be witnessed, I was going to witness it, all right.

She must have come up from the other side of the house or wing or flown to the door on her broomstick or something, because I didn't see the lady of the house open the door- I only became aware of someone making gentle retching noises to my left after a period of about three minutes. I looked: she was amazing, standing there in her regular clothes (jeans even!) as if she hadn't been left at the altar decades earlier and been waiting around for her fiance in her decaying wedding dress ever since. There wasn't even a bonnet, which was a disappointment, but I figured there must be more artifacts in the house. "May I help you?" said the Lady.

"Hey, hi, I'm Jennifer and I'm the American from up the road a ways- your house is really enormous. It's just as enormous as it can be on the outside!" I said the last bit with a Louisiana accent, just to drive home the point that I'm American and that makes me cool, because accents are cool. I knew I wasn't going to get closer to any of the inherent fun-ness of this actual British Lady without providing some weirdness of my own: Louisiana Bayou Talk would be my ticket inside! The Lady just stood there in her not-at-all creepy jeans, squinting lightly at me, smiling lightly too. I noticed that she was large but in a regular way. "Are you-all gonna invite me in or do I haf ta stand here lookin' pathetic until even the mosquitoes don't wanna take a sip of me?" I asked.

The Lady blinked a fair amount during the pause that followed. "...mosquitoes?" she said, and I waltzed past her into the foyer, because that was close enough to an invitation for me....the place was huge, but a huge you could get used to: the ceilings were really high, and must have been made that way during WWII so that the patriotic owner could hide a Spitfire attack plane in it, just in case the countryside needed a Spitfire to roar out of the second-story window during a German raid, scaring the pants off The Fuhrer and smashing all the windows and brickwork. "You had a Spitfire in here. Wow." I said, still looking up.  "...Pardon?" the Lady asked. She was being coy, but I wasn't to be put off. I decided to be un-coy (in retrospect, it's been suggested that what I was being was Rude. I didn't care for the suggestion.) I looked for the giant marble staircase that led to the landing that would naturally have as much floor space as my dining room, to better afford the necessary gawping space for the ancient familial crest that would assuredly be in stained glass above it. There was no such window. I took the still damn big mahogany staircase upstairs, turning to hand over the dessert halfway up.

"This here is a crisp! It's just like a crumble, but it's real easy to say because there's only one syllable. Y'all got too many syllables over here, I'll say that. Darlin'." I said this to the Lady as she took the casserole dish. She surprised me by answering: "I concur." She sounded posh ("posh" is British for Real Fancy-Like.)

"See, now you coulda just said Yeah. Or Ayuh, if the New England thang would feel more comfortable comin' out of your mouth." I was having trouble keeping track of which accent was most effective on her...perspective? Mood? I wasn't sure, but I'd found what I was looking for: A bedroom. A wardrobe- no closet for the Lady, and it made me instantly sad to think of rich people not having a closet. Not even the rich people. In America, rich people had closets as big as a small stable. It was pitiful. The wardrobe did contain a fair amount  of clothes that we could use (my very first job was as a costumer's assistant at a small, threadbare theater, and I learned that one can always find a way to make any kind of fabric into a costume: blazers and ballgowns may be desirable, but no piece of clothing could ever be more glorious than when it transforms into a sequined tunic for Mustardseed's only scene in A Midsummer Night's Dream.) I threw a long dress at the Lady, and tied a ribbon around her torso just beneath the bust.

"There. Now you're Eliza Bennett, before she's met her Darcy. Sorry- I mean y'all are Eliza Bennett." I said, and the Lady was smiling oh so gently now.

"That is a funny accent." she said.

"Thanks- yours is funny, too. It's real funny-like." I replied, and she giggled. "Here." The Lady pulled an aviator's helmet and goggles from the back of her wardrobe. A bit of snow fell out with it, and though my brain screamed with the need to burrow into the back of that wardrobe and bring back a satyr, I stopped myself. Next time. In the meanwhile, the Lady had beckoned me downstairs. We went back down the giant staircase and into the huge living room, and the Lady set up chairs, one right behind another.

"You can be the brash, inexperienced Yankee pilot, and I'll be the long-suffering British co-pilot." she said, and pulled up the dress around her knees as she sat down so that she had room for her invisible machine gun. I clapped my hands.

"You are fun! That's a relief- for a second I thought that you'd want to talk about gardening."

"Isn't it 'y'all are fun'?" she asked. There was mischief in her eyes. It was such a welcoming look that I forgot all about my disappointment at the lack of a house ghost.

"Yes ma'am, it sure is: y'all are real fun." I said, and sat down in the seat she's set for me, prepared to take down as many German planes as a fake Southerner and a Lady in Edwardian costuming could manage.

Curiosity

When I was home visiting a week ago I stayed at a loved one's house, and watched them suffer. There was a lot of time to think: there were treatments, and rides to treatments, and a doctor and many nurses and meals to cook and then ignore. There were pies and cookies and I had a birthday right in the middle of it. So I ate, and I cooked and all that shit, but there was suffering and going to bed. It leaves gaps of time that are perfect for some choice self-recrimination. And boredom. I kept thinking about how I, too, was suffering and then berating myself for many tedious afternoons, tasking myself for being a selfish shit (and I know you can relate: you're human, and you've probably been around/not been around someone whom you love who's having a really hard time, and you've felt like a selfish little shit for thinking about what their suffering means for your general level of satisfaction with things. If you haven't been to that particular road yet, disregard everything I just wrote- no need to get there any sooner than you're called.) I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me through my loved one's suffering is to get so bored that I just slide sideways into the despondency that's outside the rooms with the screens.

Fortunatley, there's television. The walls in the rooms that adjoin the abyss are covered in screens, but as long as you can find something on them that will hold your interest in an amused, possibly even charmed way, you can just stay in the rooms forever. That is the hope. The quality of your distraction has to be just right: intense about the right things (The Practice of Law! The Meaning of Familial Loyalty! Profiting Mightily from Property Re-sales!) but not too intense (lovers can always find other beds, for example.) There are eighty quidrillion choices out there, eighty quidrillion shows; I've seen maybe ten of them. The show that has me moderately curious right now is The Good Wife.

I think you know it. There's a bunch of good actors in it and a handful of mediocre ones (unfortunately, the lead role is occupied by one of the mediocre ones; she does a small amount of emotions well, but other than that, she's kind of blank. The fact that the pivotal performer is just meh is interesting, almost very interesting, to me: how did the producers know that I, in my sniveling angst, needed an untalented lead to bring me back to it, eternally curious about how the good cast members would dance around the bland one, holding my BFA in acting & directing crumpled into a metaphorical ball in my lap and willing the lead to wake the fuck up already...how did they know??) It's like a glass of warm milk, that show. It's so gently comforting that I'll watch three of them in a row when I might be doing all kinds of other things like working on some play or story or even a blog post. I could be out walking. I could be  washing the walls before the wall inspector gets here or whatever it is that compels us to clean walls. Ditto mopping, or just taking care of myself and not getting up too many times to begin a task and then walk away from it for a moment, never to return. I could save myself some really sore hips (moving too much can put some extra funk in my Sacroiliac Joint Dysfunction.) But The Good Wife is my friend, and never judges. She does not act (at least, not well) and she does not judge. I can watch as many episodes as I want and I get to stay in a room next to the big pit of boredom-induced self-loathing. I'm not sure what's going to happen when I've watched every episode  available on our Netflix account- I suppose I'll have to find another slightly involving television show to watch. Nothing crazy- I wouldn't be able to take Breaking Bad right now, and I don't have tiny brushes to scrub my eyeballs with after the most violent chapters of that show- but something that arouses a manageable amount of curiosity.

Any suggestions? It could be about anything. I just need a fall-back, now. I just need some unspooling fiction, something with lots of back story, something with a good cast and maybe one or two bad actors, for contrast. I'm petrified that I'm going to have to think hard about what it means that there's a person that I love who's suffering.