Monica lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two foster dogs. She taught parents how to raise their toddlers for twenty-five years before retiring in 2015 to write. The secret to toddlers is to make sure you get enough sleep. Monica hasn't found the secret to writing, yet, but is diligently working at it. See links to her on-line stories on the publications page.
Markus had read something about depression and psychedelics. He was depressed. Still, I couldn’t imagine him taking psilocybin. A guy who drives a truck with a gun rack and operates power tools for a living doesn’t seem like the right demographic. I said I’d watch. I had my notebook ready. I could write something. The ravings of a man high on drugs would do.
He was quiet, calmer then I’d ever seen him. He opened a sketch pad and started painting with water colors. I wished I’d joined him when he offered.
Tunnel Vision for a relaxed viewing experience. It’s an app. Easily available for download from the not-evil-less-good purveyor of such things. Said app is guaranteed to shield your eyes from unwanted images of, among other perfidities: measles, ecoli, drought, floods, and politically apocalyptic weather conditions. Also: locusts, wildfires, and plagues of hailstorms as revealed in Revelations.
We
never saw it coming and, once we did, we took it as God’s will.
Surely the End Times. Most definitely nothing to do but pray. Pray or
prey on. Better not to look. They say death by freezing is rather
like falling asleep.
Snow symbolizes death. Check out twentieth century fiction. I’m living in twenty-first century America, looking out the window at snow in June. Banks of it cover the summer ground. Carbon flecked flakes fall from the sky. Opening the door of my isolated cabin, where it’s safe to stay for now, I look out on the garden. Poles push out of the white landscape. They have labels: potatoes, carrots, turnips. Shriveled apples hang from a tree. Inside the house, basil and thyme grow fragrant, adding their flavors to the root vegetable stews that make up my post climate change diet. L’chiam.
The Pineapple Express thundered in last night, dark, weighty, pouring rain into soggy ground late into summer. In the morning, you pull on yellow boots, a raincoat, grab an umbrella, and step outside. Splashing through small puddles, avoiding big ones, your legs pump, hoping to reach the station between outbursts.
A lush jungle, California’s changed. Waiting at a light, feeling the air blow warm through your hair, you remember the cool contrast of Midwest rainstorms and muggy summer days. You think California could get used to April showers in August. You know the climate is evolving. Here comes the train.
All of this is true. I wore a forty
year old skirt I’d made when I was fifteen. I’d lost some weight. I
brought my teenagers to the party. While eating appetizers, the
hostess gushed and I blushed. Rhyme intended. All I could think about
at dinner was how much I wanted to be sitting with the teens, talking
about horror flicks. I have no interest in expensive wine.
Segue to the kid’s table. I’m patched in. The one upping seems more honest, until it seems more pointed. “You sew. How retro.” The daughter glibly changes the subject to France.
Heels, flashing at silver speed, step to the beat of a brassy swing band. It seems effortless. A shoulder shrug here, a dip of the hips as she circles in a tight twirl, sliding under her partner’s arm. She vamps, he poses. Their faces are flushed with exertion. The music, a seductive lover, gets what it wants. He smiles and smirks and waves his glad hand in a shimmy. She moves away and rounds back, moves away and rounds back. They say nothing. There’s no need. Everything is there in the rhythm, in the moves, in the love of dance.
It’s an old chair. A well-used chair. In the dining room, it seated its share of guests and heard a quota of secrets, while providing measured comfort. The chair occupied the nursery for decades, a cushy seat for the nursemaid when she wasn’t walking the floor with a colicky infant.
That was you.
After the nursery became a study, the chair had a grand refurbishing in burgundy velvet. It sat under a bright lamp, digesting scholarly papers while your father snored. Trapped in the attic, there’s a mouse nesting in its seat.
Recover it. For the baby’s room. It’s yours.
Published online in The Dribble Drabble Review, Second Issue October 2020
Bert’s Berth, in Sleepy Hollow, is where Ichabod Crane bunks between late night rides. It’s quiet, since Bert’s doesn’t have much in the way of a lunch crowd. Around three in the afternoon, the pub scene starts. There’s beer, stout and ale on tap. Twenty four different kinds of quench, all told. Half are bottled and a third are obscure. Ichabod takes dinner in his room. At ten pm, he slips out. He stops in for a hot toddy around four am. It’s a small group by then. Most of the guys are off their heads. Ichabod fits right in.
Beats and Barts are both slangy guys. Beats hang in coffee houses reading obscure poems. They wear black jeans, and turtlenecks, and maybe berets.
Barts are regular Joes. Not the coffee kind of joe. They dress
casual, cool, and colorful. They’re likely to play pick-up basketball
and treat everyone to ice cream afterwards.
How can these two men intersect? They’re father and son. Or a woman is involved, one who time travels from the fifties to now. A feminist before feminism found itself. Imagine, she realizes that her poet isn’t woke. She walks into another dimension. There’s conflict either way.
Word Ladder, Death and Taxes, will continue next week.
We left Paris on Easter of 2015, after ten days of being tourists.
Though we hadn’t intended to, we witnessed the veneration of relics
from the passion of Christ ̶
the crown of thorns, a piece of wood and a nail from the cross ̶
at Notre Dame Cathedral. This is how that happened. My husband and I
were standing in an apse, whispering about how difficult it would be
for photo recognition software to distinguish between the apostles
pictured in the stained glass ̶
their faces are virtually the same ̶
when a deacon indicated we should move and shushed us with a finger
to the lip. A little puzzled, we complied. Looking around, we saw a
procession moving along the aisle. A priest (most likely the bishop)
held aloft a reliquary containing the glinting gold crown. Assistants
on either side held the other relics. For about twenty minutes, they
moved slowly through the church as people crossed themselves and
bowed their heads.
It is this scene that came to mind when I heard on the radio a few
days ago that Notre Dame was burning. My first thought was to hope
that it was not the result of a terrorist attack. Following the story
in the news during the next few days, I was relieved to hear that the
fire was accidental. As information has come in, it seems that
someone miscalculated. Things got out of control. Often they do. This
might be true for political conflagrations as well. If so, let’s hope
that we can get those under control and that a respect for the
accomplishments of the past can rescue the future. Notre Dame has
been rescued and rebuilt several times.
The Easter Week commemorations for Good Friday and Holy Saturday
will be held at Sainte Sulpice and Easter Mass will be celebrated at
Sainte Eustache. Sunday organ concerts are held each week at Sainte
Sulpice, though I’ve never been. The organ at Sainte Eustache is is
quite powerful. I’ve heard it. The seating is spartan, consisting of
folding chairs. But this is true of most churches we visited in
Paris.
The organ at Notre Dame was spared from fire by a stone roof. When we were there in 2015, a sign was posted on a collection box requesting donations to make a few repairs to that organ. Perhaps now that people have opened their pocketbooks to rebuild the cathedral, the organ can be restored completely. This is how things progress, in fits and starts, forwards and backwards, with a crisis often required to concentrate the mind.
Monica's Monday Morning Flash 