Tag Archives: short story

“Honorable Discharge” by Cindy Betsinger – a short story

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Cindy Betsinger graciously allowed me to re-post her story here.  “Honorable Discharge” was first published in 5th Story Review.  Enjoy.


HONORABLE DISCHARGE

I only had three more days to spend with them, my son, Jeremy, and his family, when he received orders for deployment.  It wasn’t that unexpected, but the timing could have been better.

Livvy was only two and had just gotten to know her daddy since he returned from the Army’s basic training six months prior.  Living on base at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, was all she knew, really.   Now he was packing his duffle bag and preparing for the Middle East; Iraq, maybe Kuwait – he didn’t know for sure – they didn’t tell him, or so he said. Livvy had no idea he’d be a stranger once again when he came home. Almost a third of her life will have passed by then.

“Can I help you, honey?” I asked him as he carefully placed his fatigues and equipment in the bag.

“Nothing to help with, mom,” Jeremy replied. “You can see if Sheila could use you in the kitchen, though.” He didn’t look up.

I rose from the couch and walked across the living room’s tan, blasé carpeting. The two-bedroom house on base had seen better days, but Sheila had done a nice job with the place. Her natural-born talent for decorating was obvious. The silver-framed family photos on the wall complimented the refinished oak end table and wrought iron lamp she had found at a rummage sale. Potpourri-filled mason jars covered in seersucker fabric and satin ribbons were strategically placed among the house. Even the mounted head of Jeremy’s first deer kill when he was sixteen was tastefully hung on the far wall, the offending arrow strewn across its eight-point rack.

“What time do we have to leave?” I asked Sheila as I entered the kitchen.

“Well, it’s about a half hour ride to the airfield. He’s supposed to be there and ready by nine tonight, so I suppose we should take off by eight, just to be sure.”

I nodded my head as I watched her carefully chop the carrots for Jeremy’s last dinner at home.

“Can I help with anything?”

“Um, sure . . . I still need to peel potatoes and get them on the stove. They’re in the pantry.”

Livvy was busy exploring the Tupperware drawer at the other end of the counter. I picked her up under her arms and gave her an unexpected kiss on the cheek before she cried “No” and wriggled out of my grasp.

“Awww, Livvy . . . grandma just wants some lovin’,” Sheila said as she slid the carrots from the cutting board into a waiting saucepan.

“How many? Five? Six?” I asked as I began peeling.

“Better make it six. Jeremy loves mashed potatoes with his meatloaf.”

I heard a slight sizzle on the stove and looked up to see Sheila wiping her eyes with her apron.

***

The ride to the airfield was somber and with little conversation. I rode in the back with Livvy and observed Sheila rubbing the back of Jeremy’s shaved head as she gazed out the passenger window.

I unbuckled Livvy from her car seat when we arrived. As I carried her over to the hangar, Jeremy and Sheila walked arm-in-arm behind us. The interior of the shelter was huge and a hundred or more people were milling around; some in uniform, others obviously civilian family and friends. Soldiers were posing for pictures and children were running and playing.

Nine o’clock came and went and, in pure military style, notice was given that their ride would be delayed another two hours. By then, I had Livvy propped up on my shoulder and she was starting to doze, thumb in her mouth.

“Jeremy, why don’t I take Livvy back to your place and put her to bed,” I suggested.

“Okay, mom. That’s probably a good idea.”

I reached up and gave him a squeeze around his neck and a kiss on the cheek. “Take care, honey. I love you.”

“Love you, too, mom. Thanks.” He put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a hug. He planted a long kiss on the top of Livvy’s head and stroked her soft red curls.

“Can you get back okay, Sheila?” I asked.

“I’ll get a ride with Keith’s wife,” she said, nodding toward the couple across the room.

“They don’t live far from us.”

“Okay then. I’ll see you when you get home.”

I rubbed Sheila’s arm and headed out to the car. By this time, Livvy was sound asleep and totally oblivious to the fact that she may never see her daddy again.   I gently put her in the carseat, strapped her in and wrapped her blanket around her, pausing to look at her sweet innocent face. “Dear God, please bring him home safe and sound,” I whispered.

I ended my visit the next day.  American Airline’s return trip to Wisconsin was uneventful and, remarkably, on schedule.  For the next sixth months, it was my job to send weekly care packages to Jeremy and reassure his wife that I was only a moment’s notice away if she needed me.

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I was numb the entire flight back to Ft. Bragg.  As I peered out the window before landing, I couldn’t help but think that twenty-six years is not enough time to spend with your only child before he goes off to war. It’s not enough time to prepare you for his unnatural death at the hands of an unseen enemy. And, twenty-six more years will never be enough time to explain to a little girl that the daddy she doesn’t remember is a hero.

Short story Sunday

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Seasonal Tourists

They came in from the cold shaking snow from heavy winter jackets, most of them thick, bright, and down-filled. The tourists to the ski town wore their colors like peacock feathers, lures drawing mates to the café at the bottom of the slopes for a cup of coffee, hot chocolate, or a promise to return, together, for breakfast.

The hotel was tucked in a cluster of evergreens at the end of a narrow, well-plowed road, the road itself a hidden turnoff from the main highway and marked only by a wooden sign knocked aslant one dead, hot summer by restless teenage locals.

The first person they saw when they came to town was the girl behind the counter. Dying neon bulbs flicked and buzzed over her station. Her hair hung dark and straight down her back. The men found her attractive and smiled at her and invited her to ski with them.

She handed them their keys and told them checkout was at noon. Now and then, her fingertips would brush theirs.

One or two a day would ask about the yellow ribbon stapled to the counter’s front panel and she would tell them it was for her manager’s son.

His name was Kyle, and this was the name she would call out at night when her shift was long over and curtains hid wide windows and another bright coat draped over a chair dripped a day’s worth of melted snow onto her carpet.

["Seasonal Tourists" originally published in Right Hand Pointing and is included in Carol's Aquarium]

Lost and found.

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According to Microsoft Word, I wrote this in 2004 and titled it “True Intimacy.”

Can I ask you a question, he says, and I tell him he can as long as it isn’t personal, and as long as it doesn’t require more than a one-word answer.  He’s asked me enough and I’ve told him enough, and at this point he knows me better than I know him.

So he says, “Do you think two people—”

I stop him right there with a hand in the air between our faces, inches apart.  Both of us try not to blink, because that’s part of what we do. We try not to blink when we look at each other.  I read somewhere once that one way to gain true intimacy is to look ‘into’ each other, to stare at each other’s eyes without looking away, for as long as we can.  But we can’t just look – we have to search. I made up the blinking rule because when I get uncomfortable with eye contact, I blink.  So, I thought, maybe he does that, too, and I decided it would be best if both of us try not to.  But I haven’t blinked for at least thirty seconds, so I let a quick one get by before I ask him,  “Two men or two women?”

He blinks, too, and I think he really needs it.  His lids squint, like they’re trying to pull moisture from his tear ducts.  “One of each.”

“Okay.”

“So, if two people were—”

“Wait,” I say.  “That’s not what you said.”  I notice he has a clump of hair sticking straight up on the top of his head.  I smooth it down and pull a piece of dandruff from a thick strand.  It’s a perfect white square, and it clings to the tip of my finger.

He runs his own hand over his hair and the clump springs back up.  “What did I say?”

“You said, ‘Do you think two people’.”

“The first time?”

“Yes.” I blow at the fleck of dandruff, but it won’t come off my finger.

“What’s the difference?”

I shake my bangs out of my eyes and look at him.  He takes a breath and raises his hand to my hair, parts it on the side, and looks at my scalp.  Hair touching is personal, too – intimate.  I read somewhere once that the scalp is so sensitive that touching it is like reaching into the emotional core of the person being touched.  So we do that, too – touch each other’s heads.  Finding something like dandruff or an under-the-hair zit is a bonus, because it’s a flaw we ‘acknowledge and appreciate rather than tolerate and try to ignore.’

“It’s different,” I say, “because when you change the phrasing of your question, you’re changing the question entirely.   ‘If two people were’ is very different from ‘do you think two people.’”

“Not if I go on to say, ‘Do you think two people, if they were…’.”  He pulls his hand away from my head and rests it in his lap.

“Telephone,” I say.

“What?”

He’s exasperated now, I can tell.  He’s trying not to be – he’s so good to me – but I can always tell when I’m getting to him because his eyes get more steady.  He focuses.  No part of him moves.  It’s like his whole body is concentrating on not rolling his eyes at me.  Eye rolls, I read somewhere, are the quintessential sign of disrespect.  I never told him what I read about that, but I did get upset once when he rolled his eyes at me, so now he tries not to.

“What do you mean, ‘telephone’?”

“It’s just like the game of Telephone,” I say.  “You know – the sentence starts out one way, then ends up being something completely different.  ‘I want some pea pods’ becomes ‘I haunt some bea bops.’”

He smiles at me.  Sometimes I wish I could read his mind because  I’d like to know what’s behind that smile, and  I know if I ask he’ll give me some kind of answer, but I’ll never know whether it’s true.  But then, almost instantly, I’m glad I have no access to his thoughts.  If I could read his mind, couldn’t he as easily read mine?  I read somewhere once that animals communicate telepathically, which means they each have to have something in their brains that allows for that type of sixth-sense brain-wave transfer.  One couldn’t possibly have it and not the other, because that wouldn’t work.  It would be like picking up a telephone with a disconnected cord and expecting to place a call.

“Why are you smiling?” I say.

He shakes his head and rests his chin in his hand.

I wouldn’t want him to know what I think about.  One day, sometime last week, I looked at him and thought,  I don’t really like you very much.

A short story to suck up space for a few days

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Another piece that originally appeared at Six Sentences:

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“Killing people is an art, he said”

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DSCF1810Jenny, drunk, slid to her knees and clutched and groped at his thighs, her chin raised so that she could look up into his face. “You’re embarrassing me,” he said, and he apologized to the other couple still sitting at the table with half-formed game clay molded around their fingers. “Aw, c’mon,” Jenny said, her hand sliding toward his zipper. “This is why you love me, ’cause I’m crazy, remember?” She curled herself around his legs and whispered, Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, I know you’re leaving me. He used her shoulder to shove her away, onto her back, where she flailed like a toppled beetle.

Short Story Saturday

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In the spirit of this month and all of its Halloween-y-ness, I thought I’d post the story that, thus far, has given me the most writing fun. (It’s quite possible I’ll post it every year, unless I write something else having anything to do with Halloween.)

“Becoming an Oates Girl,” 599 words and one of the stories in Carol’s Aquarium, was the winner of an Edifice Wrecked short fiction competition judged by Ellen Meister.

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Becoming an Oates Girl

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snowy outsideLunelle had spent her life a buttercup, slender and bright and cheerful and light, her happiness smudging the men who held her.  They reveled in her gaiety, smiled “I’ve-found-her!” sighs at her movie-girl mood that never changed and ever pleased, at her baby lotion soft (and deceptively youthful) skin.  They, the men, licked her buttercup dust from their fingers until even their nails were clean.

She, Lunelle, was the kind of girl (before him) who—in the meat-freezer cold of Fargo winters—refused to ride in a car or a bus from the college where she taught compassion for Oates’s broken Beasts and Solstice women. She walked, thighs flaming fire-cold, without complaining or grumbling or cursing the goddamn Midwestern winters the way the others did.  She, Lunelle, ran ahead—skipped, even—and giggled, swinging her hair around to smile and rub-rub-rub her silly-cold thighs and say, “Brrr!”  She, Lunelle, picked up snow and tossed it high, raised her face, closed her eyes, and collected soft powder on her lashes.  She laughed, then, and skipped back to him (more specifically, to him) and took his hands and led him forward and onward, saying, “Oh, grumpy-grump!” when he complained he couldn’t feel his toes.  Once inside her cozy and well-lit apartment (sunlight hit her hair just so in the afternoons), she offered hot chocolate and peeled off their clothes and sat naked atop of him while water heated on the stove.

He was the dashing dapper-doll she’d spotted one fall crossing the street with a parrot on his shoulder, its feathers boasting vibrant rainbow shades.  He—he—wore a sleeveless t-shirt and handed sunflower seeds to the beak hovering cheekside.  Lunelle had waved from her side of the street and said, “Hi, there!” Giggling, she’d asked the parrot’s name, and from then and on they were together.  For their one-year—her first long-term—he’d planted a patch of sunflowers in the soil under her kitchen window and she’d clapped her hands and kissed the air.

Today, now, the sunflowers peak, now in full autumn, Gillian’s season since three years before when, parrot shouldered halloween stoopand one uprooted sunflower dragging, he—he—left under a ghost sheet.  “Getting candy corn,” he lied.

He left, he later sighed, because she was too perfect. (She didn’t argue the impossibility of being “too” perfect.) He flipped her hair, said, “Thick and bouncy!”  He spat in her eyes. “They sparkle, for Christ’s sake!”  But also, she was too optimistic, too chipper about “goddamn everything.”  To prove him wrong she, Lunelle, had said, “No, it’s not true, baby blue.   Listen to this, to what I was thinking, and you’ll see I, too, am some days sinking into the depths of sadness and gloom, and that I am—hardly!—like a…flower…in…in…bloom!  Listen,” she said. “Sometimes?  Sometimes I think my heart could just break from autumnal beauty that’s too much to take, the rusts on brown trees—I could fall to my knees!”  But she knew.  That was too beautiful, too.  “You make me fucking crazy,” he said.

So she, once Lunelle, became an Oates woman, because they—damaged, imperfect—are loveable, sickly adored the translated world over.

She, Gillian, breasts shaved to Beasts nubs and hair permed curly, buys lipsticks called Tangerine Tango and Mazetlan. Her students snicker at the bold smears coloring her teeth and at her pronunciation of “Rastafarian” (Ra-sti-fay-rien), roll their eyes when she uses words like “stichomythia” and “brackish” for their ugliness.

She is Lunelle only on Halloween nights when, gold-lit under the porchlight, she drops dried buttercup buds in children’s cheap plastic pumpkin buckets.

A Tuesday short.

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[The following originally appeared in Six Sentences]

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THERAPEUTIC WRITING IS FOR JOURNALS

I certainly don’t like the stories about the critically ill, no – not in the New Yorker or the Sun Magazine, not in the web ‘zines you find on the internet, not in Reader’s Digest.

Trite, the descriptions of tubes and programmable beds and all the words never said still locked in the lungs of visitors standing bedside, or stuck in the sputum sliming a trach balloon. I don’t care what anyone learns or doesn’t learn, who is sad or who isn’t and why, what the needle sores look like on the arm that was once flesh-healthy. At the first mention of “feeding tube” or “bright, sterile hospital,” I flip or scroll or click forward – those stories tire me. They always have, yes, as have the Diseased Children and Cancer Women movies on Lifetime.

Even now, I won’t read one of those hospital stories, because even now, I’d be insufferably bored, but I do, now, understand the compulsion to write one.

Just don’t expect me to want you to read it.

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[*Note: this isn't based on anything currently happening in my life, or in the life of anyone I know.]

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Coming soon to Backword Books and an internet near you: Carol’s Aquarium

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CAROLS AQUARIUM COVER MCM small

I have a feeling there’ll be some disagreement from the Editor community that a collection of short stories should be a haphazard free-for-all, but that’s why indie publishing is so great.

(Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t not jump all over a traditional publishing deal and all of its benefits. But, if indie publishing has any benefits, the primary one is that it’s all D-I-Y. It’s a thrill to choose/design your own cover, decide on your own title, etc.)

I do plan to eventually write a collection that has a connecting thread, and I hope to publish it traditionally. But Carol’s Aquarium is exactly what I want it to be–a mishmash.

The mishmash doesn’t end with the writing, either.  The publishing history of the pieces is just as varied. Most of the stories are previously published, but some can no longer be found online–this is the only place you’ll see them. Others are prize/award-winning, and two are previously unpublished.

I’ve been meaning to put together this collection for some time. I’ve tossed stories in, taken them out. Put them back in, taken them back out. Arranged and rearranged. All that regular stuff. Finally, though–after a last minute elimination of a story that simply shouldn’t be there (some nonfiction is best left unpublished, yes?)–it’s just about ready to go.

My favorite thing about it? The collection is absolutely (mostly) unpredictable. Drama leads to magical realism jumps to humor bleeds into emotional terror blasts into war.

Early in my writing life, I knew the one thing I wanted to do, if I were “allowed,” was to create a short fiction collection  in which no one story was very comparable to the next. I considered it a shame that many collections had themes, a consistent tone, a voice with no inflection. It disappointed me to read collections and know what to expect from one story to the next. I might not know the ending, I might not know the plot, but the rest would often fail to intrigue. (I don’t get bored easily, but I do thrive on variety. That’s why I end up with so much food I don’t eat at restaurants–I must have the options!) Writing is the thrill it is because it’s–I imagine–like acting. The actor, when not acting, is always herself, but as soon as she steps in front of the camera, she becomes someone else whose way of speaking, moving, behaving, and reacting will change with every story.

So it should be (I believe) in a fiction  collection. A novel is largely consistent from the first page until the last. Readers will pick up the novel, read it, and think they know how the writer writes. But what if that’s just how the writer wrote that particular story?

It is only in a collection where a writer can, in one place, jump from world to world and immerse readers in each world fully and completely with the use of a wide range of styles and voices.

Coming soon!

Short story Saturday

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[This story originally appeared online at Six Sentences under the pseudonym Troy Wallace]

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Night SecretsIMG_1006

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She was wearing a sweater – I don’t know the color, but I know it narrowed at her waist and spread at her hips – when I finally saw her, and it was perfect that she should be wearing one, because we’d always been the kind of people who come together when it’s cold, who respond to fall the way animals respond to spring. Cracking leaves and chimney smoke had always made us want to kiss, would lure us outdoors to meet someplace and walk with our arms linked and our bodies huddled together.

Her hair was shorter now, but the smile was the one I remembered from high school, the same one that made me fall in love with her before I could really have known what love was. She welcomed my wife first with a hug and a nice to finally meet you! before I got myself close enough for that touch. Her head rested lower on my chest than my wife’s did, I noticed, and I restrained myself from touching her hair. She waited with us in baggage claim and drove us to her small apartment, spent the day guiding us around her Christmas-decorated and snow-frozen town, and told me while my wife slept soundly that she was happy to see me so happy.

Short Story Saturday

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(the following first published online at Six Sentences)

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Killing People is an Art, he Said

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cranium clayJenny, drunk, slid to her knees and clutched and groped at his thighs, her chin raised so that she could look up into his face. “You’re embarrassing me,” he said, and he apologized to the other couple still sitting at the table with half-formed game clay molded around their fingers. “Aw, c’mon,” Jenny said, her hand sliding toward his zipper. “This is why you love me, ’cause I’m crazy, remember?” She curled herself around his legs and whispered, Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, I know you’re leaving me. He used her shoulder to shove her away, onto her back, where she flailed like a toppled beetle.