Read by Paul Clarke
He hears something about a mind going south. He and his wife used to drive south, to Florida, every year. They would stay a week, visit a nearby Christmas shop, stroll along the beach. One September he found a baby turtle stranded during low tide. He took it to a lifeguard. It was an endangered species. He hoped he’d given the turtle a new chance at life, that it was as big as a kitchen table now, safe in the ocean.
He’s in an unfamiliar room, where everyone is dressed as if they’re at church. He glances down and sees he’s wearing his brown suit. He feels his head. Wearing his hat indoors would be unforgivable. Someone should have told him. But his head is bare. Was there a hat rack in the hallway?
His son was in the Navy. One of his sons. His other son was in the Merchant Marine.
“I found a turtle,” he says. Perhaps she could tell the lifeguard.
“I remember. Daddy sent me pictures.” She doesn’t get up.
He wonders why her father had photographs of the turtle. Is he wearing his hat? He feels his head again.
“Can I get you anything?” the girl asks.
Her hand is tiny. Weightless. He used to lift weights, could bench-press his weight, 220 pounds. He was retired and tuning pianos at a high school when he bench-pressed his weight on a dare. The boys never called him an old man again.
He is still holding the girl’s hand. “Have you known Christine long?” he asks.
She looks at him, and he sees the same green and wide-set eyes that his granddaughter has.
“Yes,” she says simply.
His sons were boys went they went to war. One was stationed in the Pacific, the other in the Atlantic. “Going across,” they called it. He had to give permission for the one in the Pacific to go to war. Signing his name that spring day was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. His youngest son was only seventeen.
“Is there something I need to sign?” he asks.
The girl seems puzzled. She glances around the room. “I don’t think so,” she says. “We can ask Christine later.”
There are stands of flowers around the room, mostly roses. His wife’s favorite flower.
“My wife grows roses,” he tells the girl.
She nods and clears her throat.
“She gives every rosebush a name. Flower names.”
“Yes. Violet, Camellia …” Her voice trails off.
“You know my wife?”
The girl looks at her lap, picks a piece of lint from her skirt. She is wearing black. She seems to be having trouble swallowing. In church he once helped a woman who had fainted. He’ll get up now and help this girl.
She squeezes his hand. “Are you OK? Do you need something?”
He senses a change in the feel of the room, something crackling through it like static. When he was a safety engineer, he taught the linemen the dangers of electricity. “It won’t respect you, but you have to respect it,” he cautioned. He glances around, sees too many people in the room. When did it become so crowded? There is distant music, too. A piano, unaccompanied.
“I play the piano,” he says.
“That’s you,” the girl says. “A recording of you playing.”
“I taught myself by ear."
She nods again. “My father recorded you a few years ago.”
Her nose has turned pink, like one of his wife’s roses. The one she calls Peony, he thinks. Her eyes are pink at the corners, too.
“Fire Marshall,” he says. “Too many people.”
“It’s OK,” she tells him.
Everyone is wearing black, blue, or brown, except for one person, an old man, in a gray suit, with sleeves that are too long.
“Pennies from Heaven,” he says.
*
A different room now, large and high-ceilinged. How did he get here? He can’t remember. Church. He is definitely in church. On the front pew, sitting between Christine and the girl.
“When I visited her, she always knew more church gossip than I did,” Rev. Benson is saying.
A few chuckles drift through the room.
Someone has died. There’s a coffin near the altar. A spray of red roses spills over the top. They’re the color of his wife’s Firefighter hybrid-tea rose, the one she calls Amaryllis.
“She was a live wire,” Rev. Benson says. “She was twice my age and had twice my energy.”
He remembers attending the funeral of a lineman who stepped on a live wire during a snow storm. Corley Newsome.
“You can’t see electricity, but it can see you,” he’d tell his men. Before the utility company had a full-fledged safety program, he headed its first-aid team. When he got to Corley, Corley was already gone. He had to find something non-conductive to move the lineman. If he touched Corley directly, the shock would pass through his body, too.
Christine has a hand on one of his arms, the girl has a hand on the other. Laughter. He didn’t hear what was said.
“… worried about Blackspot on her roses, but they always looked beautiful to me. I asked her once if they were using performance-enhancing drugs.”
Performing. As a young man, he could juggle, do handstands, back flips. He formed a circus with three of his brothers and traveled through the Virginia foothills with two horses. His specialty was balancing one foot on the back of each horse as they trotted in a circle.
Respect. You had to respect yourself, the horses, electricity. Electricity. When he was born, it hadn’t yet made its way to the countryside. Then it became one more thing you could die of.
Christine and the girl are dabbing at their eyes. He hears sniffles behind him. His wife always cried when a letter arrived from one of their sons serving overseas. The Air Mail stamp was the color of blood, featured a plane that didn’t actually exist. A phantom plane.
Was he supposed to sign something? Had he signed his younger son’s death sentence? He and another man had had to drag Corley’s body through the snow. Corley, with two children and a wife at home. Who would tell them? The snow crunched beneath Corley’s weight. It was a sound that had haunted him since.
Two children. During the war, his wife spread playing cards on the kitchen table each morning, trying to read the fate of each son. The Jack of Hearts stood for their older, fairer son. The Jack of Clubs was a reference to their younger, dark-haired son. All of the cards had meanings, she said. He never paid much attention but knew that the eight and nine of spades represented accidents, misfortunes, bad luck.
Did he say something? You’re not supposed to talk in church. He looks at Christine, then at the other girl. Christine is listening to the minister. The other girl is looking into her lap, rubbing her thumbnail with her index finger. He remembers his youngest son doing the same thing. He must not have spoken. At Corley’s, the words wouldn’t come. Corley’s wife stood with the screen door against her back, gripping her apron. Her face was white. Gardenia. She knew. Felt the words that crackled in the silence.
What was the problem with Gardenia? He remembered. Gardenia was the white rose, the rose that reminded him of the snow.
*
Church has ended, and two men are helping him navigate some icy steps. He hears Corley’s body being dragged. Electricity was hiding there, in the snow.
Behind him, he hears Christine talking to the girl.
“He has good days and bad days,” Christine is saying. She has a cold, he thinks.
“Bundle up,” he says.
Christine pats his back. “You’re fine, Granddaddy,” she says “You have your overcoat, and this nice man is letting you wear his hat.”
“A man needs a hat,” he agrees.
The men walk him to a car that heads a line of cars. He sits between them in the front seat. Christine and the girl take places in the back. The driver turns the engine on, but they don’t move for a long time. He remembers a neighbor dying of carbon-monoxide poisoning when her car’s exhaust system malfunctioned. She belonged to the same garden club as his wife did, had given his wife a yellow rosebush one Easter.
“Daffodil,” he whispers.
*
The boulevard. He hadn’t realized they were already moving. He sees a red light at the intersection, but the driver runs it. A police car is positioned at a diagonal as they pass. Maybe the policeman will pull the driver over. Respect. You had to respect the rules of the road, horses, electricity.
Their home was wired for electricity the summer his youngest son was born. He remembers that they could turn on only one light at a time. In the early days, his wife feared there would be a fire. “In case of fire, get the children to safety and don’t go back,” he told her. “Do your best not to get disoriented.”
Horses would do that, become disoriented and return to a burning barn.
“I explained to him that your father was ill and couldn’t come, but I’m not sure he understood,” Christine is saying.
He feels bad. He didn’t know the girl’s father was ill. No wonder her nose and eyes were pink. Should he say something now, or wait until they get where they’re going?
“Nine of spades,” he says.
“Granddaddy always liked to play cards, remember?” Christine says.
The man to the right of him is wearing a leather overcoat that crackles every time he shifts position. Was there something about a fire? They approach another intersection, another police car. The driver sails past.
“Another red light,” he says.
“He knows where he is,” Christine’s friend says. “He understands.”
He wonders what there is to understand. You don’t run a red light. It’s a basic rule of defensive driving.
*
They are under a tent, with the coffin in front of them. A cold wind shakes the poles holding up the tent. He is between Christine and the girl again, holding their hands. They are all wearing gloves. When did he put on his gloves? Is his hat on? He hopes he has removed it. Beneath their feet is a thick green outdoor carpet covering the snow. It would be easy to trip on it, he thinks. Gardenia.
“… and recite the 23rd Psalm,” Rev. Benson instructs.
Did the girl’s father die? Christine had said he was ill. When the service is over, he’ll have to ask.
“He leadeth me beside the still waters,” the crowd is saying.
Still waters run deep. There was a lake near their home, a lake his sons passed as they walked to school every day. He taught both of them to swim at an early age. Respect. Respect for electricity, respect for the water. One summer, a friend of theirs drowned while trying to save another boy. The friend waded in, couldn’t swim. The drowning boy grabbed him in panic, wouldn’t let go.
He is still holding the girls’ hands. He won’t let them drown.
(c) C. G. Thompson, 2021
C.G. Thompson lives in the US and writes both fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in FlashBack Fiction, Yalobusha Review, little somethings press, Flash Frontier, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and Fictive Dream, among others. One of her stories was featured during a Liars' League Hong Kong event in December 2019.
Paul Clarke trained at the Central School and always got cast as a baddie or a monster. Or, for variety, a bad monster. Now a photographer and occasional performer, he finds the League's stories islands of relative sanity in his life.
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