Defenestrationism.net

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Anne Waldron Neumann teaches creative writing to adults and has completed a collection of literary folktales, Bedtime Stories for Mothers.  She is currently working on a book, Reading and Writing with Jane Austen, that combines an appreciation of Austen’s novels with a fiction-writing handbook.

Decisions

They have some big decisions ahead of them.
Well, I said to them, you have to decide
one way or the other,
don’t you?
It doesn’t really matter how they decide,
does it?
She’s not going to know
either way.
Just make that decision, I told them.
Just put it behind you.

Some Issues

We’re going up for the weekend.
Pop has been having some issues.
The weekend.  We’ll be at the hotel.
Not with Pop.
As I said, he has
some issues.
We may have to bring him home
with us.  Unless
we get those issues addressed.

The Problem

They’ve been having problems with her.
She’s been having problems.
She was always a problem.
She’s fine now.
She’ll be staying there for a while,
just until they see.  No, she’s fine
now.  Really.
No problem.

A Blow

Well, I said, that must have been quite a blow.
A terrible blow.
She feels terrible, of course.
Understandable.
It’s the sort of blow a person might
never
get over.
Time is the great healer, I told her.
But nobody really believes that.
At first.

The Thing

Here’s
the thing.
I don’t give a damn what
he thinks.
He can do what he likes.
And here’s the thing.
He always did.
Even then.
That’s the thing of it.  He never gave a damn what anyone else
thinks.
That was always his thing.
He did
his thing.
Now I do mine.

A Solution

So what’s the solution? he says,
What do you think the solution is?
I can think of lots of solutions,
I say,
but they won’t solve anything.
I don’t know,
he says,
There must be some solution
somewhere.

copyright by author, defenestrationism.net: 2013

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Barry Basden lives in the Texas hill country with his wife and two yellow Labs. He edits Camroc Press Review and is coauthor of CRACK! AND THUMP: WITH A COMBAT INFANTRY OFFICER IN WORLD WAR II. His shorter work has been published in Atticus Review, decomP, Matter Press, Northville Review, PANK, Prick of the Spindle, Thrush, and many other fine journals. He is currently working on a collection of compressed pieces related to war.

We Are Frantic in Baton Rouge

When I get to the docks, the negroes are burning the cotton. They cut open the bales and pour buckets of liquor over them. They set them ablaze and push them into the river. The bales, puffing like little steamboats, float off into darkness. The owners stand in the torchlight watching their livelihood, their way of life, drift away. When it’s over they order the rest of the whiskey dumped in the gutters to frustrate Yankee thirst.

I feel the house shake from cannons firing down by the library. I go to the piano in my nightgown and play some of the old hymns. It is a comfort. In the afternoon a Yankee ship sails into view around the bend. Men scurry across the decks. Its guns belch smoke and flame. Shells scream overhead to fall on the unfortunate.

I hide in the root cellar. I pray. When the city surrenders, I have only cornmeal and marmalade in my cupboards. I run to the market. The doors are thrown open, the shelves empty.

I pack a running bag and leave the house after midnight, aiming to sneak through the lines into the interior. Old Mr. Sarter stops me at the corner. It’s impossible, he says. They hanged three guerrillas yesterday, just schoolboys they were. Nothing to do but go home.

Today, a new proclamation. Henceforth I will need a pass signed by the commanding general to leave my house. Imagine that. The same kind of pass we give our negroes. Rumors are flying that the Federals will soon arm them against us.

Yankees are everywhere, marching up and down, sleeping on the sidewalks, gambling, swearing dreadfully. At the commons, in front of a line of tents, a bluecoat officer comes up to me with two negroes I do not recognize. Both are wearing colorful head scarves tied Creole style to celebrate the occasion.

The one with green eyes steps closer. She touches my necklace, smiles, lifts it gently over my head.

===

After the Colonel Was Shot

Me and a bunch of the boys broke into a secesh woman’s house looking for the sharpshooter. We checked every room, even under the beds, but we didn’t find nobody. Then we went on a rampage. Bill split open the sideboard with an axe and threw china at mirrors and pictures, laughing at all the broken glass flying around. Tommy pulled dresses from an armoire and stomped them with his muddy boots. Then he unsheathed his sword and slashed furniture until there was stuffing everywhere.

We broke open a locked desk looking for silver but found only papers and a bottle of ink, which got poured over everything. Bill pushed the piano into the middle of the room and took a swing at it with the axe. It sure didn’t sound like music. In the library I found $420 of secesh money in a book of poems. Wouldn’t buy a biscuit.

After our bile was spent, not much was left intact, though Tommy came downstairs wearing a bonnet and twirling a fancy cane that had somehow survived. Looking at the mess we made, I thought it fortunate we didn’t find that secesh woman, or there’d likely have been even more shameful doings. Made me think about my wife back home in Cincinnati.

That brought me up some and the things we done began to pain me. On the way out, I picked up a Bible off the floor and placed that good book back on a shelf where it belonged.

===

W.P.A.

A white man stopped by today. Said the government hired him to talk to us ex-slaves about those times way back when. With so many out of work in this here Depression, a job’s a job, I reckon. Sat on my porch and wanted me to tell him all about them terrible days, get it recollected down on paper while there’s still time, he said. Like I would tell some white man the truth about slavery. Could’ve been Jim Crow hisself sitting there for all I know.

No, I didn’t say much about the pattyrollers and they dogs chasing runaways around the countryside, or overseers with whips and chains, or the way mothers out in the fields keep they heads down and pray not to be separated from they children when speculators come round buying us up by the wagon load.

No, but I did tell him a little bit. How, after my mama’d been sold off, Master Jim’s daddy gave me to him when he was only three and I was but five. My job from then on was to watch after him and be his companion, except of course I couldn’t go to school with him. They didn’t want none of us to learn to read and write, but Master Jim took me out in the woods on Sundays after church and taught me anyways. Then he give me a little Bible to read, but it got away from me a long time ago.

Later, when the war for emancipation came, his company voted him captain, though he was still just a boy. I went with him and cooked and kept his camp and tended the wounded.

After about a year, the Johnny Rebs got so wore down, I knew the South was done for. Finally, one sunny day over in Louisiana, I looked down the valley and saw more Yankees coming than I ever knew existed. I heard the drums and then the Yankee bugles sounded and they come screaming and running straight toward our rifle pits half a mile down the hill from me. Guns fired all along the line and our cavalry swept in from the side but they got swallowed up. The Yankees just kept coming until men was killing each other in the pits.

By late afternoon, bodies were laid out all over the field, and two soldiers brought Master Jim up the hill out of the smoke and haze, shot through both lungs. There wasn’t nothing I could do but hold his head in my lap and try to keep him from strangling hisself while he wheezed and moaned. It was a mercy when he finally stopped breathing. I prayed for the South to lose but, Lord, not for Master Jim’s terrible death.

That day marked the end of the Southerners. They had no real army afterwards, just small bands of men trying to keep alive, and soon as I could, I headed home to my so-called freedom.

Right after the war the Ku Klux started up and things was real bad for a long while, what with the lynchings and the fiery crosses and all. Still bad today, truth be told, all these many years later. But I knew no white man wanted to hear me complain about my troubles today, so I didn’t say nothing about that. Nary a word.

copyright by author, defenestrationism.net: 2013

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Jenean McBrearty is a graduate of San Diego State University, a former community college instructor who taught Political Science and Sociology, and is finishing a certificate in Veteran Studies. Her fiction has been published in a slew of print and on-line journals including Cigale Literary Magazine, 100 Doors to Madness Anthology, Mad Swirl and The Moon, and her poetry has been accepted by Van Gogh’s Ear and Page & Spine. Her photographs have appeared in Foliate Oak Literary Journal and Off the Coast Magazine among others.  Her novel, The 9th Circle was published by Barbarian Books.

Growing Up

Donna Weatherly was often awakened in the early hours when the bars closed and the half-drunk dogs would come sniffing around the bedroom window of the house at the corner of Alexia Place and E. Mountain View Drive. They’d stand outside on the old crushed gravel drive-way—mostly college boys and sailors—whispering dares, hoping to get a whiff of estrus.

“Chase them off, God” Deanna would pray, while Donna lay still, clutching a knife under the pillow, one finger lodged in the phone’s “Operator” hole. The plan was to hold the knife straight so, if the guy got on top of her, he’d be stabbed once, as she dialed the operator and yell, “Get the police to 3609 Alexia Place!”

Prayers and pans were all the protection they had because Mama didn’t believe them. It was a tale they told to get her to quit her grave-yard shift at Aunt Emma’s Pancake House, the one that paid more in tips than wages, a fanciful tale like all the others they told to get attention.

It was 1960. The shadows on the shade were still too scared to try the window. After a while, the boys would leave, mumbling about snipes and kickin’ somebody’s ass, not knowing the lock was broken.

Growing Cold
A man of God s still a man, and a young priest is the worst of men. He’s fighting a battle of the flesh the faithful believe he’s already won. His white plastic collar proves it. Only the young guys understood, the ones he met in the bar on Friday nights when Father Sinnic took off his medal and joined the trench troops in the pussy war. Like Jesus preaching to the Samaritans on a midnight mission.

The studs would tease him, but they shut up the night he told them his medal got him a glimpse of the ‘little girls who liked sex’ . It’d been easy. He’d walked up on the porch in afternoon light when Mama wasn’t home, and they’d said, “Come in Father.” One after another, they made their confessions in the bedroom where it was quiet and private, so he’d seen the inside of their window shaded-room. There were two beds and a black phone on a table between them. Nothing else. Except one of them had two small pictures taped on the wall, above her bed: a holy card of the Sacred Heart and a magazine photo of a horse.

But they were little girls. Twelve and Fourteen. Their sins were little sins, like not bringing the laundry in off the clothesline before the air turned dewy.

It was alright. He hadn’t broken the seal of the confession, just cracked it. He hadn’t told them the younger one confessed mama had a boyfriend who visited when she was home alone, and the older one that she’d met a senior boy at Hoover High who had a car and had gone for a ride with him without asking Mama’s permission. The Catholic school uniform must belong to the younger one, then. He’d seen in laying on the ironing board,  ready for pressing. A freshly pressed white blouse was on a hangar hanging from the kitchen door jamb.

Growing Hot
“Is Summer Weatherly your real name?” The University of Kentucky advisor had underlined her name in red ink. Summer could see it from across the table, and wondered why it mattered. The issue they were supposed to address was whether she qualified for a minority for a scholarship, not whether she lied about her name.

“My mother was a quasi-hippie. What can I say?” She gave Mizz Shannomi a laughing eye roll. “Ya’ gotta love those crazy late-blooming Boomers.” It was a well studied response she’d perfected over the twenty-some years since she learned her real name, one designed to elicit instant camaraderie in people who thought parents were passé’.

But Shannomi’s face remained bureaucratically inscrutable.  “You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

Confessing California heritage would be tantamount to confessing she WAS the daughter of the notorious Donna Weatherly, although why the sins of the mother should be visited on the daughter she’d never fathomed.  With a full-ride gift-horse staring her in the face, a pity-plea was worth a shot. “Id. rather not go into that part of my life,” she said through crocodile tears and a well-practiced half-sob.

The bureaucratic facade became benevolent. “I understand.” Summer watched her scrawl a large O.K. next to her name in blue ink. “Well, we can’t qualify you by race. There’s no way you can pass for even mulotto. ”

Just give me the money. There are other things other than race that can qualify me. I know that. Like I know the value of a petition. Read the pro se ones I wrote. To the California court demanding it open my adoption records so I could learn about Donna Weatherly—the youngest girl on record to have given birth.  To the California Department of Corrections  for a DNA test on behalf of an admitted child molester who served twenty-five years for a rape he didn’t commit. UK Law would be lucky to have me as a student. So what if I’m old. Shades of Erin Brockovich!

“But age is a protected category. Let me talk to the Dean,” Mizz Shannomi said, “I’ll mail you his decision.”

The mailman came late. 2:10. Thank God the kids were still in school when Summer opened the letter and read she’d been denied admission. She’d have a good cry before they came home with their homework and soccer practice. She got her grieving paraphernalia ready—latte from Starbucks, chocolate bar, string cheese, raspberries, an Oldies of the 60’s CD—and reread the rejection words…unable to admit you at this time…apply again next fall…signed Dean Sinnic…

Did he figure she’d seen the name in Donna’s diary and tried to find him? Father Sinnic is no longer with the Church, the Bishop’s letter read. We do not know his whereabouts.

copyright by author, defenestrationism.net: 2013

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