Magpie Tales 62, 'The Guest Twin'

Meg first slept in the guest bedroom when Rocky came home sans left leg. It made better sense then for Rocky to convalesce in the marital Sleep Number California Queen. He consumed most of any bed: his three remaining limbs spread wide to displace his weight or, possibly, to achieve some sort of buoyancy that might lift his needled hide from the sheets. Meg had even thought (then), that Rocky deserved the better bed, ‘for all that he had been through’. Of course there was also the fear of bumping the raucous stump.

     Meg’s opinion however, of what Rocky had ‘been through’, changed dramatically by the time the prosthetic had arrived. His morphine induced prattle leaching through the baby monitor Meg had purchased and placed on the nightstand beside the Guest Twin, ‘for emergencies’, had kept her awake for nearly two weeks, giving her plenty of time to re-evaluate Rocky's state.

     Meg’s sleep deprived mind made no attempt to gloss the truth: Stupidity had cost Rocky his leg. Rocky's mother and brother both lost limbs (and subsequently their lives), to diabetes. He knew full well how to avoid the same fate and had ignored everything the doctors instructed, choosing instead to pray and expect a miracle.

     Meg brought Rocky his breakfast in bed until he was able to crutch himself to the table, the blank in his pajama bottoms sewn up and out of the way. She watched him eat eggs over-easy and spread the jam on his white bread toast that he refused to go without; spoon pure sugar into his coffee. He needed a couple vices, he told her.

     It was at the breakfast table that Meg began to notice Rocky’s eccentricities, the odd smackings and grindings that had never made her skin crawl before. It was at the breakfast table, too, after hobbling out on his titanium replacement, that Rocky had asked her when she was coming back to the Sleep Number.

     Meg was kind enough to tell Rocky that she had come to enjoy the Guest Twin, the smallness of the bedroom. In truth though, Meg saw Rocky with the remainder of his extremities shed, one for each dollop of jam he ate on his white bread toast. He was a freak, an ignorant pink lump. She could never sleep beside him again.

     A week later, Meg boxed up Rocky’s left shoes and took them to the Diabetes Center. She learned with the donation that not everyone lost limbs to diabetes because of ignorance, like her husband had. She had begun to think that, begun to put all diabetic amputees into Rocky's shoes. Rocky's shoe. The knowledge helped. Some. Though nothing would stop her from picking away at what remained of Rocky, until finally, he vanished entirely and Meg slept like a baby in the Guest Twin.

Magpie Tales, 60

Magpie Tales

Midday, the muck of low clouds became a steady, gentle rain.

   On the thatch roof, its murmuring reminded Anna of breezes that once ran through her father’s fields of ripened wheat. In the heat of those younger summers, the sound had been a comfort, drawing out the poison of loss like loving fingertips.

   Anna let some of her worry fall with the tender patter. Maybe they wouldn’t search in the rain—question.

   She let drift her focus,  from the gateway she had been watching, to the beads of rain gathered on the window pane. In the tiny convexes she found  gap-toothed smiles, Mayan ruins.

   Anna wondered what Maria would see in the droplets:  lovers entangled, a bandersnatch. Maria had the imagination, the dreams. Anna's head had always been full of numbers and useless facts.

   She took her father’s watch from her dress pocket. Two-thirty. Maria was late. She looked back at the gateway anxiously.

   Anna had been instucted to leave at three ‘o clock, regardless. But how on earth was she supposed to do that, when Maria had the change of clothing, the food, the names, the route. This was her dream. All Anna had was the money. Same as ever.

   ‘Just go!’ Maria would say. ‘Try! Live!’

   Anna left the window. She found a knife and cut the star from her dress. It's dark image remained above her breast, a brand, she was sure, her money couldn't erase if she was captured.

   Maria would have gone anyway; taken the risk. But she wasn’t Maria. Hope had always been harder for Anna to find.

   Dusk followed the rain. Under its cover, Anna went to the well behind the farmhouse, a waste-high ring of stone under a limed shed. She took the coil of rope from its peg and fed the bucket down into the well's mouth.

   Anna washed her face in the icy water she had drawn. Maria was gone. They had her. She was certain of that now. She wanted to cry, but couldn’t. Hatred and atrocities had worn that ability thin. She looked out over the fading landscape. Even if she could reach the border and cross, would she be free, carrying this loss?  

   Anna fussed with the rope’s knot, slick and swollen tight to the bucket’s handle. When it wouldn't come loose, she placed the bucket over her head, handle under her chin. Tipping the brim back enough to see, she swung her legs over the edge of the well. She glanced once more at the empty gateway, then fell into the dark mouth of the well.

Magpie Tales 59, 'The Backdrop Painter'

Magpie Tales 59

My name won’t ring any bells.

There’s no face to it.

In a crowd of heavies
only the keenest minglers
note my signature spears of juniper,
my wilting inlets,
draping the sallow masonry
that would otherwise grace porcelain shoulders.

I suppose I could brag.
Frankly,
where would they be without me?
The Plains? Another blazing sunrise?

I prefer though, to remain the bright glade in passing,
turning the occasional head,
whose accolades never loose their savor,
fading in mass, until unnoticed
like valleys, bridged behind a masterpiece.

Mag 58: 'War of Five'



Photo Prompt Magpie Tales



Against pumiced curb

We wet Popsicle sticks keen

And dove into the fray headlong,

The few,

The brave,

Mercenaries and crusaders,

Avengers of the down-trod and weak-kneed,

Until Mother,

In divine wisdom, intervened,

Confiscating arms, ‘Before someone,’ she said,

‘Poked an eye out…

Or worse.’

Mag 57: 'Violets'

She had just settled in when the violets began to arrive.

   The gifting women, in various shades of gray, introduced themselves as so-and-so’s wife, from this farm or that.

   ‘Here’s a little something for the house,’ each told her, forwarding the tiny potted plants, like casserole dishes in the wake of a grave loss.

     She accepted the gifts graciously; coaxing the women, one by one, off of the June porch and into the parlor.

     The wives were never able to stay more than a minute or two, and gravitated toward the kitchen in search of an eastward window. 'African violets aren't true violets,' they explained, 'and do best in the morning sun.'

     'Is that chiffon you're wearing dear?’ the wives had asked, remembering their own first years—how things were for ‘new couples’—exclaiming that it looked like the Welcome Wagon had already been there, when they saw the crowd of mock-violets growing on the sill, above the sink.

     She ended up with an even dozen and questioned her husband about the gifts, clearly a tradition.

     For his lifetime of living there, he couldn’t explain the plants. ‘Women around here do things different,’ he had told her. ‘That’s why I went to town for you.’

     It was enough.

     She cared for them, as the wives had instructed and the little plants thrived in the warmth of the deep sill.

     When the first dead foliage appeared, she realized that she had yet to touch the velveteen leaves or lush purple flowers. Frank hostilities were all she knew of Africa. She had half-expected to be stung by the plants.

     She had laughed though, at her racing heart, when finally, she held the dry leaves in her palm. She had stood down the lion.

     Alone that summer, as long as daylight remained, she discovered Britannica’s in the attic.

     Waiting for the growing season to pass, she explored the book's glossy worlds, learning of an Africa, tender and tropical enough to nurture her violets.

     When winter set in though, she found she would be alone, regardless the light.

     Day after day, she watched her husband over the violets, driving up the lane for his dinner, his supper. As the years passed, it became harder and harder for her to distinguish the man from the machines and the redundant landscape, until finally, she no longer noticed him returning at all.

     Now, in the glass of the new bride’s front door, she could see herself on the porch, holding the tiny potted plant: another gray tradition, bearing flowers to an early grave.

     She left without knocking.

     At the end of the drive, she nosed the car toward her home town—toward something chiffon. Silk maybe... violet.

Mag 56, 'Still Fallen'

Photo: Tess Kincaid

Carry your saplings
back down the mountain,
your tubers and your seed.
I have penance yet,
for the Edens I scorned in youth,
for the garlic that I let grow
under my left heel,
and the onion, under my right.

Blood Brothers

photo by: Tess Kincaid

We split the last of the Lemonheads
at the river's bank
and pricked our fingertips
with a sewing needle -
too young, then, for pocket knives.

We were suddenly brothers.
And I've wondered,
many times,
driving through the California groves that grew up between us,
if it was just you,
or all of Iowa
flowing in my blood.