By The Beautiful Sea: A Short Story By Aaron Zacharias

Gentle Reader, tomorrow I will be either on airplanes or in airports so please allow me to present you this evening with tomorrow's post.

peace, love and blessing

Aaron

I am well now.  My speech still slurs a little, but only if I feel tired or self-conscious.  Otherwise I can walk, talk, feed myself,  dress myself, shower, go to the toilet unassisted, and do all the other things unaided that I used to take for granted.  I can walk without getting  tired.  I still have a little trouble on the stairs but even this is beginning to mend.  I could even go dancing if I had someone to take me.  The ocean is calm today, like a sheet of molten platinum with a brilliant horizon line of light from the sun that has courteously broken through the cloud mantel.  Even with this lovely view of  the ocean and the snowy mountains of Washington State they are letting me have this place for a song.  The apartment isn't the greatest.  The walls are a slightly dingy coral pink colour, like a tacky  Mexican resort, with the poster print of a cedar tree painting by that famous B.C. artist as the only wall adornment in the living room.  There is another one in the bedroom, a tall gangly fir tree surrounded by turquoise and cobalt blue sky and bright white and yellow clouds dancing magically in the background.  The coral pink wall and the malachite cedar and the magical blue sky go together well, I think.  When I was a kid growing up our bathroom was painted the exact same shade of coral.   I  still love this  colour.         I might have lost Sarah to government care had she still been a child.  She found  us as she described to the courtroom lying on the floor, our limbs entangled, as though we had only just had violent sex, both of us covered in my husband's blood.  There was a little bleeding from the gash in my skull, courtesy of the tire iron he ambushed me with.   I was in the kitchen, chopping stewing meat for dinner.  I must have moved away just in time because on the first blow he only grazed me.  When I figured out what was happening I grabbed the butcher knife. Just as it went into his heart he hit me again and then I remembered nothing.  I was still in the wheelchair during the final session in court.  Sarah wheeled me out of the courtroom and we both tried to conceal our weeping from each other.  I still need sedatives in order to sleep.        The air is warmer now that the sun is out.  I am the only one walking along the cliff top.  The wild broom and gorse are in bright yellow bloom and the ocean is gentle with slow lapping silver waves.  The gorse and broom are very similar, with bright yellow pea shaped flowers that have hearts of bleeding crimson.  The gorse, which I like slightly better, contains thorns.  This is my second day here.  Sarah will be here tonight, for the weekend, and then she returns to her university studies across the water.  The cool wind undercuts the warmth and I suddenly miss my sweater which I left draped on a chair but it is too far to walk back for it.  I never used to leave my clothes out like that, but I've become a bit lazy since my recovery.   I rather enjoy leaving things out now.  I haven't seen my daughter since Christmas.  She says she misses the house but seems to understand that I had to sell it, that I can no longer live there.  We haven't discussed it.  We have maintained, like a cobra sealed in an iron casket, a mutual silence about her father's death.  She hugs me now.  Before she hardly ever, simply accepting from me the occasional shy half-embrace and timid kiss on the forehead.  Now, when she sees me, she runs and dives into my arms and smothers her face in me, as though to find refuge from the outer harm that threatens.  I will never be able to console her for the loss of her father.  I know that she misses him and that she loved him, even when she sided with me against him and against his beatings.  One day I will have to tell her this.  Maybe tonight after dinner.  Or tomorrow morning at breakfast.  Odd how these family confessions always seem best reserved for mealtimes.  Seagulls wheel in the sky above me like white and grey portents and there are crows everywhere. The crashing surf below seems to sound a warning with each kelp infested wave.  The clouds have lifted from the mountains across the water and now they gleam blue and white, dwarfed by distance in a foreign land.    A young man in black shorts and T-shirt jogs past me and, thinking that he could be Bob, I nearly smile back at him. This has happened a few times as though he has sprung back to life and now wants to taunt me.  I still don't know why seeing my dead husband's doppelgangers makes me want to smile.  But I do.       This cafe is large and airy with big windows and a wide bright open space.  Today it is surprisingly busy, since today for most people is a workday.  I must be the only person here who is older than forty, and the only one sitting alone without a laptop computer.  There are even two couples sharing tables each  focussed on his or her laptop.  They likely haven't spoken in hours.  Perhaps had Bob and I had this technology he never would have hit me.  He would still be alive.  We would still be married, sort of, sharing the same house and the same daughter,  perhaps even sleeping together from time to time.  Bed death happened early in our marriage, not long after the first time he hit me.  He soon  moved into the guest room, not wanting to sleep beside damaged goods.  This happened soon after Sarah was born.  The staff here seem nice.  The young lady behind the counter smiled and asked how my morning is going.  She reminds me of Sarah, but today, every young woman I see reminds me of my daughter.        I still refuse to talk to journalists.  They already know what they need to.  Sarah might want to come here with me tomorrow.  She works in a cafe on campus.  I'm sure she's doing well.  My daughter is very good with people.  She still looks like a young female incarnation of her father.  She doesn't know how she frightens me sometimes.       I can't return to work, not with my husband's blood so famously staining my hands. I have already accepted that I will never again work as a psychiatric nurse, nor in any capacity as a health care professional.  I am here for one month.  No one seems to recognize or remember me from TV or the newspapers.  In my own city, I couldn't go anywhere without feeling noticed, or observed.  Often some stranger would stop me, ask questions, assure me of their full support, ask about Sarah.  Last year I moved, and now here in this city, maybe one person, a hotel guest in the lobby, looked at me for just a little bit longer than what felt comfortable.  It was a woman near my age, waiting for her husband.  I returned her discreet gaze, and stared hard at her.  She looked away.  I asked if she thought it might rain.  She shuffled with a newspaper, but didn't look up, pretending, quite badly, that she didn't hear or see me.  She had a gentle soft face, just succumbing to the gravity of the years, and hard metallic little eyes that never missed anything.  I wanted to slap her.       This city isn't new, or strange to me.  It is postcard lovely with a nasty underseam of sleaze.  Stepping over homeless beggars sleeping on pavement and dodging drug peddlers while on one's way to enjoy high tea in a fancy hotel has become the stuff of cocktail chatter.  The buildings are all old and lovely and exquisitely crafted and sculpted, bravely propped up like aging starlets showing off their most recent cosmetic surgery.  For now I am a tourist. A month by the beautiful sea.  A month of sightseeing and enjoying long and healthful walks among the famous oak groves in the park by the beautiful sea.  A month of reading magazines and cheap paperback novels, on nice days seated on green wooden benches by the beautful sea.       A deal is being negotiated to help me resettle, to re-establish my life, to start over.  I could stay here in this country under a new name and my face made unrecognizable by plastic surgery.  They could make me look fifteen years younger and then I could hook me a fancy man to take me out dancing.  Or I could settle in a Latin American country where I could live off the generous proceeds of the settlement while dodging sleek and oily gigolos.  I will never work again as a nurse, nor in any position in the health care system, not with my notoriety, with the entire country knowing what I look like, not with Bob Galloway's red streaming blood dripping warm from my fingers.  I still wear his wedding band, and the diamond engagemeent ring rides just above it like a hula-hoop being flaunted by a shameless mistress.       He didn't really formally propose to me thirty years ago.  Following our second night together, we'd gone out for brunch and while we were on our way back to his little apartment for an afternoon of lovemaking, he stopped in a jewelry store.  I shyly followed him in.  Which one do you like, he asked me, as we stared at the silken pallet of sparkling diamonds.  I pointed to one on the left, one finely cut large stone, radiant with the colours of the day.  Try it on, he told me.  I asked him why.  We are getting married, he replied, and I, still delirious from the cocktail of happy hormones he had unleashed in my bloodstream, and drowsy and sluggish from the eggs benedict and toast, replied, sure, why not.       He worked for the government, fundraising for a political party whose policies I still hate, whom I blame for our current epidemic of homelessness and high housing costs.  I was burnt-out from politics when we met.  He was sexy and attentive and rather nice in bed.  Following the honeymoon, the reality of his rancid morning breath and chronic snoring helped reawaken me politically and we soon became silent enemies, long before he began sneaking in and out of the beds of other women.  Because of his high position the media couldn't shut up about the knife I had plunged inside him.  Quite simply, I was the wicked black widow who had brazenly slaughtered her doting husband who had done so much for big business and the creation of underpaying jobs in this province, that I had cruelly deprived the neo-liberal right of one of their most glowing fiscal puppet-masters.       Every day I will have to work at keeping myself entertained here, distracted and engaged with the faux-English quaintess of this tawdry provincial capital.  Better that he'd succeeded in killing me, better that I'd been rendered a vegetable quadriplegic incapable of speech, thought or feeding myself.  But I suppose that my life, in some form, has to continue, and I find the idea of suicide both repugnant and terrifying.  Perhaps because I'm a coward.  Or maybe because I always want to know what is going to happen next.  I don`t want to miss anything.  I was like that even as a little girl, when I would crouch on the stairs long after I'd been put to bed to catch a glimpse of whatever Mom and Dad were watching on TV.  One night I saw them kissing, another time they were wrapped in each other's arms and legs and moving like two rhythmic entwined serpents.  I knew not to keep looking and quietly fled back to the protective chaste darkness of my little bedroom.  Now they are both dead.       The tea here is perfect, if a little stong and the scone drips fresh strawberry jam and clotted cream streaming over my fingers in hues of blood and milk to the strains of Mozart, Vivaldi, and Chopin. On my left, ensconced in the same high-backed upholstered chairs sit an old couple, perhaps eighty or so, and behind them, a young couple no older than thirty, likely honey-mooners.  Across the way from me a large Asian family, probably Chinese, gorge on cucumber sandwiches.  The high tea is expensive, but worth every dime for the pleasure of sitting like a grand faux-bourgeois.  Bourgeois is a word I haven't thought of using in many years, not since my brief foray into student activism, while rallying with the crowds of trade-unionists, church groups and students, when we tried to bring this government down, here in this same city noted for its musty charm, on the expansive lawn of the legislative building less than half a kilometre away from here.  Bob and I had been married less than a year and he was wroth with humiliation over my activism.  This was after all a government that he supported and endorsed and that employed him and generously paid our mortgage.  It wasn't long after, when over an argument that began over the correct way to hang a roll of toilet paper, that he hit me for the first time.  Not hard.  It was rather a light tap on the cheek.  He was saving the worst for later.     A final swallow of tea washes down the chocolate ganache that cloys on my tongue.  The only patron seated alone here I am the first to get up and leave. The street is filled with tourists.  The beautiful provincial legislature sprawls like a pampered courtesan over the expansive lawn.  The rambling brownstone is covered with green domes and cupolas that gleam in the sun like the multitudinous breasts of a fertility goddess.  I am suddenly hungry again and resist an urge for ice cream.  I am moving in a large circle that is taking me back to the park, to the sea bluffs, and to the apartment.  Here is the house of the famous artist where she lived with her animals and boarders.  I mentioned that my leased apartment is adorned with two  poster prints of her paintings of evergreen trees.  The house wears Victorian propriety like a slightly loosened whalebone corset.  I have never worn one of those things, and the thought of my congenital chunkiness morphing into a top-heavy hourglass makes me break into a schoolgirl giggle.  The young man passing me smiles back at me and I recognize the clear blue eyes of the jogger in black, the blue eyes of my dead husband. And now I remember the dream.  I have had it many times, since my stay in the hospital.  For some reason I have kept forgetting it.  Why now do I remember it?  Bob and I hovering over our blood drenched bodies and I watch and listen while Sarah is shrieking in horror, a horrendous sobbing breaking out of her wide open  mouth.  And there is Bob reaching towards her, then reaching towards me, his blue eyes widening in horror as he is sucked, swallowed and subsumed into the unseen.  I also know that before I can tell it to Sarah I will have forgotten this dream though I will never forget my husband's look of absolute terror.    In the corner store that opens the ground floor of an old wooden building I am lured by a small bag of cashews.  Their rich sweetness almost melts in my mouth and I slowly chew one nut at a time, protectively coddling it on my gratified tongue like a sacred morsel of holy bread.  The sun is out and the sky is blue and the radiant colours of the day that surround me hurt my eyes.  I step back into the park and the protective shade of the malachite forest and a raven begins to croak.       When Sarah my daughter, my only child comes  I shall invite her here, down by the beautiful sea.  We will walk through the famous grove of gnarled and twisted garry-oak trees, then through the field of tall grass, radiant yellow buttercups and shining purple camas lilies.  Together we will take the long wooden staircase down to the smooth rocks below where we shall sit and look in shallow little pools for greenish turquoise sea anemones.  We will watch for whales.  They are sometimes seen here.  Black and white and splendid like giant savage porpoises swimming and diving and dancing in the platinum water, killing and eating fish and young seals and any small creature that gets in their way.  She will mention Bob her father, Bob my husband, Bob the man I murdered whose red blood stains now the satin these rings once sat in and now flows into this tidal pool in a torrent gush where it will stain the water red and poison the ocean.  I will offer Sarah the rings and if she will not have them  I will throw them into the deepest part of the water.  I have forgotten the dream.  Perhaps I should carry with me a pen and notebook, because one day I will remember again the dream and then I can write it down to tell her.

An Afternoon In April, A Short Story By Aaron Zacharias

Here is another story I've written that touches on mental illness.  It isn't my best effort but I still hope you will enjoy it Gentle Reader.  And keep lobbying Ottawa to not facilitate euthanasia, not for seniors, nor for the terminally ill, and certainly not for mental health consumers and children.  If you like the story then please share it with others.

We hadn't seen each other in years, then last year we were working together in the same supportive housing facility and here he is, looking inside the restaurant.  His gaze lingers on the art on the wall, for this establishment offers wall space to local painters.  His glance passes over us but he doesn't  seem to recognize me.  I almost call him over then he sees me, smiles and waves.  I ask him if he'd like to join us but Adam is very savvy to situations outside of his own and seems to know that this affair  should remain in the family.  We still work together once a week, though my practice is beginning to build and soon full time I will be counselling the troubled and the chronically disturbed.  In the nineties, soon after we had children he painted our portrait as a family  and his meticulous brushstrokes still adorn the dining room of the old house. Yes I did feel sorry for him and also guilty because his work is so beautiful and he was asking so little for it and knowing that I had a family to support refused to accept more than the agreed upon fee. I have since offered to commission new work from him but he says he is too busy.  He is doing much better now.  He has a place to live, government subsidized housing but it's better than couch-surfing he says, and the part time hours he works as a housing support worker he says keep him alive and comfortable.  Even though we've had coffee together many times he still hasn't revealed anything about his life.  I know that he has been very poor, at times very frightened and now things have improved.  I will phone him soon, invite him for a meal, then test on him my entire laundry list of questions.  He has always been too polite to ask me if I really appreciate how easy my life is,
a question that scares the crap out of me.  I know how expensive it is to live in this city and I also know that had it not been for the big house and Nana's generosity... but I am a coward and I refuse to think of the possible outcomes.  I have been very lucky, despite all the surprise pregnancies and perhaps even because of them.

We are all here.  Five of us present.  Almost all of us.  My son couldn't make it.  Five generations of one family at the same restaurant table. This doesn't happen every day. My famous grandmother whose ninety-fifth birthday is being celebrated today, her short white hair resplendant and platinum in the spring sunshine.  Her smile is still radiant and her teeth and eyes still shine like burnished steel.  My twenty-two year old daughter has kept her two year old daughter quiet and now she is curled up like a sleepy cat in her mother's lap.  I am the only male.  The man in the middle.  My son didn't want to come.  He still hasn't met his great grandmother.  I probably really wanted his support more than anything, being surrounded by women.  Megan my wife is busy with a client today.  Her massage therapy practice is beginning to take off. My mother, sitting next to her mother, is calm for a change.  They have changed her medication. She appears quiet and self-assured without taking orders from her the way she talks and listens to Nana  who is cutting her veal with such surgical precision that she could just as easily be holding the knife to her throat. 

Last year when he was seventeen Josh told me he is gay.  One offspring less to surprise me with an unexpected pregnancy.   At eighteen my daughter made off to Quebec where she joined the circus, and became famous for a year.  She returned pregnant and now they are living with us in the old house which was built before the First World War by my great grandfather, Nana's father.  It has all the proportions if none of the elegance of a sprawling mansion.  The house was built with size and function and economy in mind. There are no adornments of mouldings or stain glass or fancy woodwork. Coralee my daughter came home pregnant, by whom she never said. She insisted on keeping what has grown into an achingly beautiful little girl. When Megan and I asked if she was still pro-choice she replied "I am choosing to have this baby and raise it, aren't I?"

My own mother, whenever she wasn't well, often reminded me that I had never been planned, or wanted, that I was the product of a five minute union with another patient in the mental hospital just before her meds were changed.  She would harangue me with this, standing in the middle of the living room, ranting and yelling that I was a little bastard that nature had foisted on her and she would climb up the stairs after me as I escaped to my bedroom carrying on with her tirade until I acquired the adolescent good sense of getting out of the house and  staying away for as long as I could.  At the end of her episodes she would collapse into an exhaustion of weeping, then smother me in unwanted embraces, squeezing my fourteen year old hand between both of hers while begging for forgiveness, reassuring me over and over of her undying love. Her close proximity still repulses me and even now the memory of her wet cheek pressing into my face prevents me from allowing her to embrace me.  Fortunately she quit trying a long time ago.  I'm still thinking of seeing a psychiatrist.

Mom's birth was perhaps the most accidental of our lineage.  Nana, an internationally renouned journalist, experienced her first labour pains while documenting the violent and bloody birth of the modern state of Israel.  To this day she
claims that Mom's birth father, my biological grandfather was the twenty-year old son (Nana was over thirty then) of an Arab farmer she was interviewing.  He was blown to bits by a land mine just minutes following my mother's conception.  That's all we were supposed to know.

Nana has just asked me about my practice these days, and I have replied that they always manage to keep me busy with new patients, or clients as we call them now in our professional efforts to crown our clinical interactions and deliberations with human dignity and respect for the vulnerable population in our care.  It seemed logical that growing up with a mother living with voices in her head and subject to frequent breakdowns that I would eventually want to study to be a psychologist.  I also know better than anyone that I need help myself and one day I will go out and find it.  My wife was five months pregnant with Coralee when we tied the knot.  We were both twenty-one. Her parents were strict  Catholics and even though she was liberal and prepared to get rid of it she had waited too long and her daddy was holding the purse strings. I had to do something to keep us all alive so I left university and got a job as a bus driver, decent union pay with benefits and we struggled along in a rented house.  Mom wasn't doing well.  My step-father, sick of coping with her psychotic breaks and illness, left her for a younger woman.  Nana suggested, rather ordered us all to move into the big house to look after her.  She bribed me, promising to bankroll my education if I returned to university.  She didn't live there herself.  To this day she insists that she hates that house and only set foot in there last Christmas.  Josh was away in Mexico with his boyfriend who is almost thirty.  Coralee met her for the first time and now her great Nana is the love of her life.

She rises up unassisted to make her way to the Ladies'.  It would be a lie to suggest that age hasn't slowed her but it is still clear that Nana and old age are slugging it out.  She doesn't care if she is losing the battle, she will continue to fight til she's pushing up clover.  She has said often that she does not fear death, only that she will give ground to nothing that would try to steal from her her vitality, rob her of her life-force.  Even when she began to show gray she never dyed her hair, unlike my mother who has worn on her head the same synthetically coloured bronze helmet. Only now can I see the gray finally pushing the colour out.  She mentioned recently that she already decided to do this during her last stay in hospital two months ago.  The staff were concerned that by not dying her hair or wearing make up that she wasn't showing any signs of recovery.  But today, with her lined sagging face free from make-up or greasy embellishment and almost the entire top of her head gleaming silver above the dead flat bronze colour she already commands in me a respect that never existed before.  She is poised and unmoved by Nana's demands.  I've even heard her laugh a couple of times.  Nana as always appears cool and detached towards her, as though not wanting to be seen and known as this woman's mother.  In her brief absence we have all come to life and everyone is chatting.

She hobbles back to the table.  She refuses to get a walker and still has to be reminded to take her cane with her on her many neighbourhood walks. Her hair still gleams like a white precious metal, her clear blue eyes and aquiline profile as frightening as ever, hovering over us like an ancient hawk-goddess.  She has acquired a pronouned stoop though she can still move like a cracking whip.  She glares suddenly at Coralee, whose little girl Selena sleeps curled in her lap.  Coralee is texting on her i-phone.  Nana turns to my mother and says, "Helen, could you please tell your granddaughter to put down her toy and start behaving as though she is among people?" In the fifties, when Mom was a little girl being raised by grandparents, Nana was conducting a series of interviews with Carl Jung, which she always claimed to be a pivotal moment in her life.

"I'll shut it off in a second," Coralee says.  "I'm just tweeting some friends right now."

"Coralee." Nana says, "I mean right now."

"In a sec' Nan.  I want them to know what's happening is all.  It's a special occasion you know."

Nana backs down.  Unlike her.  Coralee's voice contains none of the defensive defiance I am used to hearing in her.  She puts the phone down and smiles at her great Nana, their eyes flashing the same shining steel across the chasm of more than seven decades.

"I am going to buy one of those phones with the gift card you guys have all given me for my birthday," says Nana.  "And Coralee is going to show me how to use it."

"You bet, Nan!"  She gently strokes Selena's sleeping head and carefully adjusts her sweater.

"If she wasn't sleeping so peacefully I'd ask if I could hold her", Nana says, smiling again.

I say, "Just before we go let's have a group picture, Nana.  You could hold her then."

I have never seen her show warmth or affection towards children.  Throughout my childhood she ignored and avoided us and only after I got married and she offered me the house and my mom to care for did she begin to warm towards me.  I have mentioned that she still hasn't met my son Josh.  She has never asked about him. Recently she has been talking to me about her acquaintance with Jung.  The series of interviews she did with him for a magazine more than a decade before I was born and her subsequent therapeutic adventure in the care of one of his assistants.  For me, Nana is the Twentieth Century because she has seen and been touched and has touched so much of what has come to mark us as a world: the Second World War where she was an on the ground reporter during the bombing of London; the partition of India and Pakistan when she met and interviewed Gandhi, the Naqba and the rise of the modern state of Israel, Jung, Martin Luther King, the October Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall and then she finally retired to write her memoirs.  She has not mentioned them since, her memoirs, and I still don't know when or if ever she is going to get them published.  She is a living legend and we have all lived out our small little lives beneath her shadow.  She has never openly told us what a complete disappointment she must find us.  That she could spawn into existence such a festering mass of mediocrity, such a brood of sullen bastards as all of us present.  There is no choice but to live in awe of her.  Only my mother, just in these last two months, appears to have broken free from her.



Nana is back in her little apartment.  She refuses to move into seniors' housing and doesn't see why she should.  She still looks after herself.  Against her will we hired her a house cleaner, who has so far survived four years with her..  She still does what she can to keep her place spotless and feeds herself well.  She did give up driving ten years ago.  Not because she had to but because she said she was sick of fighting idiots for road space and at her age she wants above everything the kind of serenity that befits her years.  The spring sun has given way to rain and the afternoon has turned the fresh green into a sad and dismal gray.  Megan is still with her client and I have accepted my daughter's offer of a cup of tea.  Selena is playing in the living room.  At the table she pours for both of us, tears open a crumpet and spreads butter and marmelade then offers me half.  She has never said anything about her year in the circus.  I read some lovely reviews about her performance and to this day have not mustered the courage to tell her how proud I am. Saying things somehow cheapens them and this treasure I mean to cherish quietly in the secret place with the love I still have not admitted to her.  Helen my mother appears in the room, and Coralee gets up to find her a cup.  We sip and chew in silence while the falling rain brings rhythm to our thoughts.  I notice as though for the first time really the dark beauty of the original wood panelling and ceiling beams of the dining room, the only room of the house where my great grandfather indulged in the luxury of hardwood trim, and feel almost overwhelmed by a pang of gratitude.  Just above where my daughter is seated on a rare white patch of wall smiles our family portrait, the young selves of Megan and me and the small child selves of our children. A thin dark frame completes the effect.  I still intend to invite Adam over to see it.

"I am reading them, you know." Helen says between mouthfuls of crumpet.

"Reading what?"

"Mother's memoirs."

"I didn't know she had them published."

"She kept it quiet.  You know what she's like."

"How far along are you?" Coralee asks.

"The part about my father."

"Ah, the mystery man," I say smiling.

"She was raped."

"What?"

"It was always so obvious, wasn't it?  Yet I never guessed.  None of us guessed.  Of course not.  Who would want to suspect anything so horrible?"  My mother struggles to compose herself. "Especially of her!" She is on the verge of tears.  Coralee reaches across and takes her hand in hers and she gratefully lets her hold it.
"By that filthy young little Arab.  That ungrateful little Palestinian scum.  After all she tried to do for his sorry ass and his people.  That is how he thanked her.  My father.  Your grandfather, Doug.  After the  deed and Mom lay in the hut in the dark, too shocked to scream or cry, not even knowing that the very beginning of me was already taking form inside her, and she told my father, the scum who raped her, that if he went back to his compound towards the south he would evade the Zionist snipers who were after him.  He didn't know that she had just sent him through a mine field to his death."

The rain falls outside and here inside the safe dark dining room the amber light makes the wood warm and friendly while my mother weeps silently and elegantly, so different from the psychotic break histrionics of years ago and I know there is nothing in the world that can ever console her.
I feel suddenly nauseous and my daughter wipes tears from her eyes and my mother continues to silently weep and the rain continues to fall on the roof and we all sit huddled together like stone age cave dwellers waiting for the first thunderclap to sound.

Duende: A Short Story By Aaron Zacharias

Gentle Reader, here is another one of my short stories that touches on the theme of mental illness.  Please forward this and my other stories to as many people as you can think of and with a message that our elected idiots in Ottawa must think twice before including on their euthanasia hit list people who suffer from mental health disorders.

 

Para cantar flamenco hay que tener duende.  (One must possess the magic in order to sing flamenco)

 

    Buying the pills was easy.  So was swallowing them.  He sat on the front steps of the welfare office, waiting for oblivion.  This would make Derek a media event.  He wasn't thinking of media.  He had already had his fifteen minutes, many times over, as front man for a punk band, then as a slam poet, then as a community activist for the homeless.  He was already famous.  His lack of post-secondary schooling made it

difficult for him to secure decent employment.  His parents divorced and frittered away on legal fees the money that should have supported him in university and when he finished high school there was no longer a family home.  His father had gone off with his mistress with whom he lived happily ever after between time-shares in Grand Cayman and the Mayan Riviera.  His mother, always prone to depression, took an overdose of pills just before he graduated from high school.  He was on his own.  Throughout his twenties he lived in shared apartments and houses with band mates and drinking partners.  In his thirties he lived with Vanessa, his only real girl friend.  For five years he enjoyed his only stable employment working in the post office.  Soon depression and bouts of alcoholism made it impossible for him to hold a job.  Then Vanessa revealed she was a lesbian and left him for a woman.  Ten years later, both his parents now dead and no other family remaining to care about him Derek had come to rely on a shrinking circle of friends.  Out of work and broke he was evicted from his apartment with no one to offer him a couch to sleep on.  The shelters were full and for two nights he slept outside on his own sofa where it adorned the back alley next to the pale blue dumpster.  Then the rain came.  No one at the welfare office was willing to hear him much less help him.  With his remaining few dollars he bought a mickey of scotch and extra strength painkillers.

 

    Just as he downed the last pill and the final remaining mouthful of harsh liquor the security guard tried to get him to leave as he was talking to a reporter from one of the local weeklies, struggling to maintain consciousness while answering questions about systemic economic injustice and the hidden agenda of neo-liberal governments to starve the poor out of existence.  She  arrived just after he'd swallowed the pills and had no idea that he was in the process of killing himself.  Word had leaked out that he would be performing an "action" on the front steps of the welfare office.  The last thing he felt was the guard's hand on his shoulder.  A week later, he woke in a hospital bed.

 

    There remained the possibility of slight brain damage, but so far Derek was showing excellent rehab prospects.  After two months in hospital he was transferred to a care facility for people with mental health disorders.  He was diagnosed with severe episodic depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.  They still hadn't found him a place to live.  Journalists were still pestering him for interviews, unaware or unconcerned that he might be too ill to talk to anyone.  He lost his capacity for saying no, and they became as regular and annoying to him as fruit flies on a mound of putrefying mangoes.  Having nothing to say, he let them ask the questions, and so the reporters all asked and assumed whatever they wanted.  He was so drugged and medicated that he no longer cared.  He also enjoyed the attention.  He had become something of a folk hero to anti-homelessness and anti-poverty activists everywhere.  When it was suggested that keeping his name in print could also help pressure governments to start acting on providing housing and other services to the homeless he complied and continued to grant interviews.  He was glad to feel useful.

 

He soon picked up the guitar again.  Then he met Rene.

 

    Rene was Spanish, from Madrid, an accomplished singer of flamenco.  He had immigrated from Spain by way of the British Isles where he lived for twenty years as a professor of philosophy and Spanish history.  His family was persecuted by the Franco regime.  He was older than Derek, a lean vital man bristling with manic energy.  He taught Derek flamenco.  Soon staff and clients and visitors were sitting in on their concerts.  Derek moved into his new subsidized apartment and they continued to perform and practice together.    

 

    In a popular cafe they soon became a fixture in the shadow of the swaying arms of women dancing the duende in long floral dresses.  It all got to be too much for Derek.  Not even his meds could cushion him.  Rene became his only friend, and visited him daily at Balsam House, where they continued to practice together. Then Rene was readmitted. 

 

   For a while the music died for them.  To cope with their depression they were heavily medicated.  They could hardly function.  Balsam House was pleasant, more like a boutique hotel than a hospital.  The professional staff were kind and attentive.  When Maritza came they knew it was Tuesday. 

Phil was there Fridays.  The two peer support workers never came on the same day and they seemed unaware of each other's existence.   Derek found  Maritza unprofessional and deplorable but she made Rene's heart beat faster.  She was from Spain.  She was Andalusian, from the heart of the land of Flamenco.  Rene had found his muse.  They had both lived under El Generalisimo.  Maritsa confessed to hating flamenco while loving Franco.  She was the only person from Spain born after the Second world War, to Rene's knowledge, who had anything good to say about the deceased dictator.  In the dining room of Balsam House she was heard complaining loudly about the moral state of post-Franco Spain, the social disorder, women no longer knowing their place in society, and the rampant homosexuality.  "It's impossible to find a man or a husband in that country anymore", she was heard yelling--she always yelled--"All the men are turning gay!"  One of the clients, a young gay man, ratted on her and Maritza was soon fired.

 

    Maritza was short and broadly built, with enormous breasts, and wild frizzy hair that framed an unremarkable face but for the enormous hooked nose and black-frame glasses.  Her brown eyes were small and narrowly set in her face, eyes that suggested nothing but a medicated blank.  Derek thought of her as a fat ugly Aphrodite, a Venus of Willendorf with chronic bad hair.  She had an affinity for gold chains and cheap gaudy costume jewelry.  The only makeup she wore was lipstick, and it made her mouth into a bloody red gash that adorned like a single brushstroke her pale indifferent face.

 

    They sat at a table in the dining room, waiting for the Friday peer support worker to invite them out for coffee.  But Rene would only reluctantly follow along as Phil led Derek and one or two others to the cafe down the street.  He said he found him boring, flaccid and passionless with his slightly worn and chronicly tired look. For Maritza  Rene would sit by the front door every Tuesday waiting for his weekly trip to the Dairy Queen with her.  Derek never joined them, knowing that this was for Rene alone.   Maritza always tried to hug him.  Derek hated being hugged.

 

    A year later Derek and Rene were back in Balsam House.  Their synchronized periods of illness had become between them a shared joke.  It was Tuesday and Maritsa wasn't there.  Questions were asked and they were merely informed that she was no longer at Balsam House.  Phil said he knew nothing.  Maritza, despite her avowed dislike of flamenco, had been their most appreciative fan.  Once she even got up to dance, staggering and tottering on her three inch heels, just balancing her swaying bulk while she awkwardly swayed her fat arms, waving them like the stubby branches of a fat denuded oak tree in a winter gale,  her gold chains jingling like cheap garland and tinsel over her heaving and swaying breasts, her bracelets and bangles tinkling like dollar store Christmas tree ornaments.

 

    Two years passed.  They had both succeeded in staying out of Balsam House.  Derek had found himself a girlfriend, a maternal woman in her fifties.   It didn't last and Derek found that he both missed and had no time for passion.   

    One day, late in the afternoon, they were in the cafe nursing a beer together. There was a bus stop in front  where Phil was standing, 

slightly rumpled, balding with greying hair and a carriage of silent and tired dignity.  Once, Rene looked at Derek and a sinister smile twisted his thin lips and distorted the odd symmetry of his narrow face. "I'll bet he's queer," he said.  Derek didn't reply at first, but stared quietly at his friend with cold detachment.  "Better be careful, Rene," he said after a while.  "I might be queer."  Phil returned to the table before Rene could answer and in less than a minute they got up and went for a walk together in the cold November rain.  Renee never mentioned it again.

 

    Just before Derek could signal to Rene, Maritza appeared at the same stop, next to Phil.  The door of the cafe was open and they could hear her yelling at him. 

 

    "What's the idea of not talking to me.  What?  Am I a leper?"

 

    "Excuse me?" Phil replied.

 

    "And you call yourself a peer support worker!" she screamed, wagging in his face a red taloned forefinger.

 

    "All I want to do is get on the bus and get the fuck out of here."

 

    "Don't you swear at me like that!  You're not even fit for your job.  And to think that you stole my job."

 

    As the bus pulled up she was shouting, "You stole my job!  You stole my job! You stole my

job!  You stole my job!  You stole my job!" she boarded the bus, still shouting, "You stole my job!  You stole my job!  You stole my job!"  Derek and Rene both watched, transfixed like two young campesinos attending a cockfight, as the bus drove away, then looked at each other.  Each drank a little more beer then resumed looking out the window at the empty space left by the departing bus.  It was a cool afternoon in May.  It had rained during the morning and now the sun sparkled across the newly cleansed earth.

 

    Phil came in.  He didn't appear to see Derek or Rene as he went to the bar.

He carried a glass of beer towards a table at the other side of the empty cafe.

 

    "What!  Are we invisible! shouted Rene, suddenly.  Phil saw them and carried his beer over.

 

    They mentioned neither Maritza, or Balsam House.  Together the three single men drank their beer in silence.  They were the only patrons inside the cafe and the sun shone outside promising hours yet of blessed daylight. Phil quaffed his beer and got up.

 

    "What!  You're not going now?" protested Rene.

 

    "Gotta.  Man I am so bagged."

 

    "What have you got to be tired about?  You're still young."

 

    "Today is Friday and I have to get home and rest."

 

    "You're not coming down with something?"

 

    "After five days at work I need my rest.  You know I never go out any more?  I'm too tired from work."

 

    "Did I tell you I'm taking the peer support training soon?" Derek said.

 

     Phil replied, "Just do it part time, dude."

 

    The two men sat quietly with their beer.  The sun shining through the window was almost blinding and they changed tables to settle in the safe comfort of the shadows.  They were on their fourth beer and tonight they would be performing just a little bit drunk.  They talked a bit about the music they'd be performing, but otherwise said nothing.  A young woman came in, wearing jeans and a black pullover sweater, her flamenco dress concealed in the green carry-all she had with her.  She was tall, slender and very beautiful.  Her black hair was gathered in a perfectly round knot worn just at her nape.  For Derek, at that moment, she represented the perfection of young womanhood.  He had never seen her dance, and longed already to see her move to his playing, to see her arms sway like a willow on a windy spring day, and to feel the angry passion of her heels pounding defiantly into the wood.  She smiled at them, and stood patiently as Rene got up, cradled his arms around her slender neck and planted a kiss on her cheek, then sent her on her way, like a fond grandfather dispatching his little granddaughter to go play with her friends.  She went into the back to change into her dancing dress and the two aging men picked up their guitars to begin to rehearse for the evening's show.   

This music of resistance had become their healing. Flamenco had become their nectar and divine ambrosia. The Duende was their liberator and the Flamenco their liberation. The dancing, the subtle then violent swirling of ruffled skirts, the waving of pale gleaming arms and the violent swoops of defiance, the machine gun fire of staccato heels pounding like jackhammers on the wooden stage. Rene's sensuous voice would descend to a lion's growl then burst out like an explosion of multi-coloured flames into a sweet and sonorous shriek, angels and demons dancing together in celebration of the Duende to the Belgian lace accompaniment of Derek's guitar and the rhythmic clapping of hands. The Duende had healed them and the Duende empowered and made them strong again, as now for the first time today they smiled and laughed and sneered in the face of the death that awaited them.

 

Someone had turned the music off.  Derek took his guitar out of its case and Rene as though preparing to utter a public prayer began to clear his throat.

The Promised Land, A Story By Aaron Zacharias

Gentle Reader, you might have noticed that I have been posting some of my short stories recently.  There are reasons for this: I am getting ready for a trip and don't have much to write about anything these days; I am hoping that some well-connected literary agent will read these stories and sign me up for a gold-plated publication deal; and I am also hoping that while waiting for those idiots in Ottawa to come to their senses about why euthanasia should not be on the table for anyone, especially for people with mental health issues, that some of my literary treatment of the theme will also inspire and rouse people to action.

"There is no need to dust today, Soni," says Bella.

 

    "It isn't one of my duties."

 

    "Yeah, I know, I know, but I'm just tellin' ya," she slurs.  "Let's sit out in the garden."

 

    "Maybe we could go for a walk, instead?"

 

    "Aw, I'm tired today and my feet hurt."

 

    "We're supposed to go out.  My supervisor was reminding me yesterday."

 

    "Are you here for me or are you here for your supervisor?"

 

    She is wearing black and white, a black sleeveless top and a flaring white pleated skirt with a broad-rimmed

 

white sunhat adorning her head.  She wears her hair in pageboy style, and it is bleached the usual shade of light

 

brassy blonde and her lips painted a brilliant fire engine red.

 

Soni thinks she looks like an obese magpie devouring a cherry.  The garden is huge, with meticulously trimmed

 

grass, rose bushes coming into bloom and

 

vibrant azaleas and rhododendrons, the handiwork of her Chinese gardeners.  The air is full of fragrance and

 

birdsong and the warm sun and cool shade

 

leave one feeling a little bit stirred and a bit drowsy.

 

    "You know this is our last day," Soni says.  She feels slim and elegant today in her belted magenta shirt and

 

rolled up blue jeans and golden goddess sandals.

 

    "Yeah, you've been telling me this for weeks."

 

    "It's to get you used to the idea," she says, sipping her tall glass of ice tea.

 

    "Yeah, like my life's going to come to an end once you're gone."  She looks up and lifts her sunglasses as

 

though to see her better, "Not that I haven't appreciated

 

you.  No, don't take it like that at all."

   
    Soni is not merely a paid companion for Bella.  She is her peer support worker.  Both women share in

 

common a history of mental illness.  Soni is well

 

recovered from the post-traumatic stress disorder that has plagued her since before she and her family left as

 

refugees the Palestinian Territories.  She

 

speaks nearly unaccented English and Bella still hasn't guessed where she is from, nor has she troubled to ask

 

her.  Bella is a Jew.  She is very wealthy and also

 

a fervent Zionist although she has never been to Israel.

 

    "Where you from, Soni?  You still haven't told me."

 

    "You've never asked me."

 

    "You're Canadian, aren't you?"

 

    "Now I am."

 

    "It's too easy to become a Canadian," says Bella.  "My grandparents, well, I already told you they survived the

 

Shoah, they arrived in Montreal in 1946 and this

 

country still wasn't too fond of Jews, you know.   They really had to prove their worth.  They worked hard for

 

this country and they had to earn their citizenship.

 

Not like all these Chinese and Filipinos and God knows who else who come here now. And they don't even

 

bother to learn English.  Not the Chinese anyway."

 

    "Most Filipinos are already fluent when they get here.  And the ESL classes, I understand, are overflowing

 

with Chinese students."

 

    "Don't bore me with facts," she drawls, emptying her ice tea into her generous maw.  She reaches for a piece

 

of chocolate cake.  "Have some cake, Soni.  It's 

 

delicious.  Elvira just made it yesterday."

 

    "Elvira?"

  

    "My Filipino cook."

 

    "I'm from Bethlehem," she says.

   

    "In the States?"

 

    "No, not the States."

 

    "You want to say that you're, you're from Israel?" 

    

    "Not Israel.  I'm Palestinian."

 

    "More ice tea?"  Soni is seated straddling sun and shade in her deck chair.  A freshly leafed elm tree towers

 

over her.  Her black hair is swept back in a poney-

 

tail and her eyelids obscure her brown eyes as she stares helplessly into her lap.  For two years she has worked

 

with this difficult woman, and she has mostly

 

succeeded in working well with her.  Since the winter she has not been able to get her to leave the house.  Bella

 

has become obsessed with her home, a sumptuous

 

twenty room house in a tony neighbourhood.  Her husband was a bank CEO, much older than her and confined

 

now to a ritzy nursing home.  She still can't bring

 

herself to sell the house.

 

    "What are you going to do when I'm gone?" Soni asks.

 

    "I'll be okay."

 

    "Have you thought of the social club?"

   

    "That's full of sick people."

 

    Soni bites her tongue.

   

    "They're sicker than I am anyway.  I got friends already."

   

    "How often do you see them?"

 

    "How often can you come over?"

 

    "I can't.  You know, we've discussed this, already.  Several times."

 

    "Yeah, I know, I know.  But you can't break the rules?"

 

    "I would like to keep my job."

 

    "They can't pay you very much."

 

    "I get by."

 

    "Come work for me privately.  I'll give you what you're worth."

 

    Soni again bites her tongue.

 

    "I couldn't.  I'm sorry."

 

    "How about some more cake.  You're so skinny, you could use a bit of padding."

 

    "Sure."

   

    "So, you're, you're," she can't bring herself to say the word.

 

    "Palestinian."

 

    "How come you're not wearing a veil?"

 

    "You mean hijab or niqab?"

 

    "Anything."

 

    "I'm not Muslim.  I'm Christian."

 

    "There are no Christians over there."

   

    "Yes there are."

 

    "They're all Muslims.  They hate us.  They want to drive us all into the ocean."

 

    "We are not all Muslims and we would like our country back."

 

    "Where are we going to go?"

 

    "Have you people ever thought of sharing?"

 

    "It's our land.  God promised it to us."

 

    "And then He evicted you."

 

    "And now He's brought us back.  So deal with it."

 

    "Are you sure we can't go for a walk."

 

    "I'm too tired.  Maybe you`d like to leave early?"

 

    "We still have an hour together."

 

    "What?  Are you being metered?"

 

    Soni brushes a fly away and stands up.

 

    "You're not going are you?"

 

    "You're welcome to join me."

 

    "Where you going?"

 

    "Back to the office.  I'm walking.  You can come partway if you want."

 

    "Why not all the way? Then I can have a little chat with your supervisor."

 

    "You're always welcome to."

 

    Bella trails Soni through the house, from the terrace, through the warmly tinted breakfast room, the cool,

 

Wedgwood blue elegance of the dining room, the oak

 

panelled splendour of the living room into the foyer.  Bella stands awkwardly as Soni reaches for the door,

 

pausing to examine the green, blue and gold stain glass

 

panels.

 

    I'm sorry, I didn't mean to go on like that," Soni says.

 

    "Think nothing of it dear."

 

    "Are you sure you wouldn't like to come out with me, even for a little while?"

 

    "I don't like it out there."

 

    "But you live in such a beautiful neighbourhood.  It's safe, and lovely with all the trees and gardens."

 

    "This is where I live. I got everything I need here. I only have to pick up the phone or log onto the computer,

 

or ask Elvira or one of the maids to go shopping."

 

    "It's not good for you to isolate."

 

    "I didn't know that was a verb!  Hey, Soni, before you go, I want to show you something."  Bella gestures to

 

the side table.  It is draped in a blue and white

 

Israeli flag, adorned with a menorah, a vase full of red roses and the photograph of a young man. 

 

    "Have I ever told you about this?" 

 

    "No."

 

    "You know who this is, this picture of the handsome young man?"  Her voice rises with emotion.  "Do you

 

know who this is?"

 

    "Your son?"

 

    "He died in Israel.  Fifteen years ago.  Twenty years old.  Blown to smithereens by a goddamn suicide bomber

 

over there.  One of your people.  A... a

 

Palestinian.  What do you think of that, Soni?  Tell me, dear, what do you think of that?  When I heard the news I

 

had a complete and total breakdown.

 

I was too sick to travel to attend his funeral.  My own son, Soni.  Killed by one of your people, one of you

 

bloody Arabs.  Maybe a relative of yours.  And you

 

know something, Soni, I was doing really good before that happened.  It was the best I'd been in years, and now

 

look at me.  I can't even leave my own

 

property.  My son, Soni.  My only child.  What do you think of that?   Tell me, dear, what do you think of that?"

 

    "I didn't know.  You never said anything.  Bella, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry to hear this. 

 

    "What?  Sorry that it happened or sorry that I told you about it?"

 

    "What was his name?"  She feels stupid and inert as she says this.  She knows she should have left already.

   

    "Seth."  Bella glares at her, then bursts into tears.  "Now please go."

 

    Walking down the hill of the winding street of mansions, big leafy trees, ample lawns and fragrant gardens

 

Soni reaches for her cell phone.  She calls her office,

 

asks for Bella's case manager, then for her own supervisor, leaving messages on their voice mail.  She feels like

 

a machine, or an animated doll.  In less than forty 

 

minutes she is at the office, seated in the staff room,  at the table, trying to finish her paperwork.  She knows

 

what she has to do.  Having banked a lot of hours

 

she is set to take time off, perhaps a couple of weeks. She could not deal with all this and still continue to

 

do well in

 

her job. Soni loves what she does, but accepts

 

that there are limits.  She didn't know that seeing that picture of Bella's son, Seth, would set her off like this.  She

 

knows the pattern well, this sudden numb

 

detachment, with the clear, inalterable knowledge that she has just been horribly violated.  It is happening again

 

and she knows that she is going to have to hole

 

herself up in a safe place.  Fortunately she has an understanding and supportive husband.  He always knows

 

when to leave her alone...and when not to.

 

    It was during the military occupation and already her family was preparing to get out. They were moving

 

to London, where she would attend university classes

 

part time while recovering from the incident.  Fifteen years ago it happened.  She was walking home from a

 

Christmas Eve mass in the Church of the Nativity

 

where her father served as a priest.  There were Israeli soldiers everywhere, and there he was.  The streetlight

 

was bright enough so she could see his face clearly. 

 

Seth. Yes, who else could it have been?  Even then she knew his accent to be Canadian, or British, but certainly

 

not Israeli.  He demanded to see her papers, only

 

hers, as he waved away with his AK-47 her sister, father and brother.  He didn't say why he wanted to detain

 

her, a shy fifteen-year-old girl, while sending off

 

the rest of the family.  Then he grabbed her by the arm and dragged her, forcefully into an empty building.  It was

 

over very quickly and she was too paralyzed to

 

do anything.  What she remembered most was the weight of his body pressing her down, his hot rancid breath

 

and the sense that now and forever her life had

 

come to an end.  To this day she does not remember how she got home.

 

    The next day she saw her father weep as she told him and her mother what had been done to her.  She was

 

very fortunate.  They loved and protected her all the

 

more  They were not like the Muslims, nor like many of the other Christians.  They would not be hobbled by

 

shame, nor by embarrasment, they would not accuse

 

their child of the atrocity that had just been inflicted on her.  They were soon in London, where she was

 

delivered of her child of rape.  A boy.  Stillborn, and no

 

longer a problem for her.  When later that day, news was broadcast about a suicide bombing and a young

 

Canadian-Israel soldier named Seth being among

 

the dead, Soni broke down and wept in the dark privacy of her bedroom.  For days she couldn't stop weeping. 

 

She knew she was ill.  In the hospital she met her

 

husband, a Canadian medical student recovering from a psychotic episode.  They were soon marrried and have

 

lived in Canada now for most of the six years of

 

their marriage.

 

    Now she sits at their kitchen table, waiting for her husband to come home.  She is drinking a cup of tea and has

 

no appetite for the slice of toast with melted

 

butter and honey growing cold in the small white plate.  She hasn't the energy for reading or watching TV, nor for

 

going on the Internet. The apartment is silent.

 

A breeze carries a fragrance of lilacs through the open window.  She would lie down if she could.  But she feels

 

best right now seated at the table doing nothing. 

 

She only wishes that she had had the opportunity, that she had taken the time to tell Bella about the grandmothers

 

in Jerusalem whom lately have been clandestinely

 

smuggling Palestinian families past the wall on day trips to befriend and show them the city, their own city that

 

they are not permitted to enter.  But Bella doesn't

 

believe that there are any Palestinians.  To her they are all dirty, uneducated Arabs.  Jew haters.  She has lost

 

count of the number of times she has had to hear this

 

from this fat miserable Jewish woman, and hold her breath, count to ten, grit her teeth and clench her fists till

 

she's overcome the desire to defend, to attack, or

 

retaliate.

 

 

 

    Bella has returned outside carrying a flask of Bourbon that she pours into her half-empty glass of ice tea.  She

 

has carried the rest of the chocolate cake with her,

 

which she has set on the table and has begun to cut into generous rectangles, stuffing one after another into her

 

mouth.  She takes another swallow of Bourbon then

 

realizes she feels hot and tired.  Then she shoves in another piece of cake, followed by another.  Soon she is

 

pouring more Bourbon into her glass.  She feels even

 

hotter now, so she removes her black sleeveless top.  her breasts are still round, and not very large.  A black

 

lacey bra holds them up.  Her dead husband Victor

 

used to love seeing her in black undergarments.  The fat woman with the ivory coloured skin slips from her chair

 

and lies down in the sun on the grass where she

 

slowly loses consciousness.  She lies there like a beached manatee sporting black lace and pleated white, a

 

large white sun hat covering her face.  She is soon

 

snoring.

 

    When she wakes she has no idea how long she's been there.  The shade has moved over to cover her just in

 

time to prevent the sunburn from getting worse. 

 

Shoving away the hat from her face she curses softly when she sees that her skin has turned pink.  With

 

tremendous effort she pulls herself up, sits on the chair in the

 

shade and has another swig of Bourbon.  Her head aches and she reaches for the chocolate cake.  Suddenly

 

disgusted with this excess, with her gluttony, she

 

returns inside to summon one of the maids to come clean up the mess.  She remembers that today is the servants'

 

day off.  this is the one-day of the week that she is

 

alone, that she has the house to herself.  Still drunk she walks with difficulty through the breakfast room, the

 

dining room, the living room and out to the foyer. 

 

Pausing in front of the makeshift altar she stares at her son's face.  With her blessing he went to Israel when he

 

was eighteen where he joined the army.  She does

 

not know that he raped a Palestinian girl and that her name is Soni.  Lifting the photo to her face, Bella kisses her

 

son's image, leaving superimposed on his

 

handsome young face a wet smear of red lipstick and brown chocolate.  Drunken tears begin to stream down her

 

face as she mutters,

 

"My son, my son, my precious

 

precious Seth...my son...my beautiful son..."     

 

    A yellowjacket wasp has flown in attracted by the chocolate smear on the Plexiglas.  Bella is severely

 

allergic to wasp venom. Clinging to the photo like a dying

 

nun to a rosary she tries to shoo the hornet away with it but it lands on her fat naked stomach.  Her son's

 

photograph slips from her hands and the Plexiglas shatters

 

on the terracotta tiles.  Somehow the wasp flies off without stinging her.  The fat Jewish woman, barefoot and

 

naked but for her stained pleated white skirt and her

 

black lacey bra, sinks down to the red floor, sits cross legged on the terracotta tiles and continues to weep in the

 

presence of her dead child while a shard of broken

 

glass pierces her white thigh.  The little trickle of blood shows invisible against the terracotta tile as Bella

 

weeps and kisses her son's mangled photo again and again

 

and again.  Outside a soft wind blows filling the garden with the spiced fragrance of the bright yellow azaleas. 

 

As the disconsolate mother quietens she hears the

 

singing of birds, rises up and walks out of the foyer, carrying her son's photo.  She is unaware of the blood that

 

she has stepped in and is now tracking through the

 

beautiful rooms of this elegant house.  In the kitchen she pours a glass of water and takes it ouside where she

 

discovers her black sleeveless top draped on the

 

chair where Soni was sitting.  She puts it back on, breathing in the fragrant spice of the yellow azalea, then turns

 

around and sees for the first time her bloody

 

footprints on the pavement.  Looking down she pulls the glass shard from her thigh, then she faints, slumped into

 

the chair in the cool shade and hopes bitterly that

 

soon she will die there.  She doesn't stay there long.  Feeling suddenly and unexpectedly sobre Bella heaves

 

herself from the chair and cleans the mess from the

 

table.  She carries the glasses, pitcher, leftover cake and half empty Bourbon bottle into the kitchen.  She cannot

 

remember when she last loaded the

 

dishwasher.  She turns it on and while the dishes are cleaned to a danceable rhythm of water crashing against

 

glass, metal and porcelain, she walks not slowly but in

 

a measured pace up the winding staircase. undresses in the bathroom and takes a long hot and renewing shower. 

 

Drying herself and dressing in a white cotton

 

blouse and bluejeans, she carefully locks every window and door in the big sprawling house, and finally the

 

door that she shuts behind her like an unpleasant

 

memory.  She leaves the property and takes her first walk in many many months, knowing that she might be out

 

until late this evening.   Already the sun is beginning to set and while a robin sings and a crow drowns

 

the music in raucous cawing the newly green leaves are caught with the yellow gold fire and the trunk and soil

 

beneath are stained red in the dying day.  She is the only person out on the sidewalk and wishes that for the rest

 

of eternity she might walk like this alone into the consuming light of the dying sun. In the round park empty but for

 

the blazing trees and the flowering bushes she sits on a bench bathed in the golden and fading light.  She closes

 

her eyes and just wishes she could strip naked and lie down in the cool green grass and the tiny white and

 

yellow daisies and there die with the fading light, completely unaware of the existence of Soni who has been

 

weeping in the protective arms of her gentle and frightened husband.  The sun has set and the light fades from the

 

park and from the earth.  As the first street lights come on the weary Bella rises up from the bench and begins her

 

slow and uncertain return to her home.  She already knows that the first thing she is going to do is dismantle the

 

altar of her dead son.  She has no idea of what she will do after.  She wonders if she will ever see Soni again.

 

The birds have stopped singing and the city is silent.

Rite Of Spring, A Short Story By Aaron Zacharias

It was her favourite coffee shop and she sat here every morning watching the neighbourhood wake up and the day unfold before her.  This was one of the oldest establishments in the area, the unofficial community centre, the neighbourhood livingroom.   Alice glanced furtively at the newspaper on her table.  The headlines about the troubled global economy distressed and bored her.  She looked in the back for the horoscope, which promised her nothing special outside of a warning not to overdo it with loved ones today.   She was the only patron present for a change and rather enjoyed having the place to herself.  They had a new server, a handsome young man sitting on a barstool absent-mindedly staring at an open newspaper.  She liked everything about this little diner.  It was small and what she called authentically vintage: eight roomy green vinyl upholstered booths and a white counter with matching stools.  The music, never too loud, was mostly pop hits of the eighties.  The big window she always atried to sit by looked onto the park.  It was a spring day, late in May and the fresh green of the trees seemed to almost smile in through the window. 

She wanted a cigarette, then remembered that she had quit last year, the last of her bad habits to break.  The air was still cool in the morning and she kept her sweater on, her favourite cardigan that hung like a loose turquoise curtain over her sumptuous body.  This café had been here even longer than the park.  Forty years ago, when Alice was a young woman fresh out of high school and newly arrived in the big city this café was the first place where she ate a huge plate of ham, eggs and greasy fried potatoes washed down with cup after free refill of turbo-charged coffee.  She went afterward to rent a room in the hotel across the street, which stood right where the park now blazed with the green fire of High Spring.  She suddenly felt hungry, which was unusual, given that she usually didn’t have breakfast these days, and felt a strange whim of wanting to talk to the waiter, who was really doing nothing to earn his money this morning. 

“Excuse me,” she said abruptly, almost appalled at how rude she must sound.

“Excuse me”, she repeated, when he seemed to not hear her.  He looked up, lazily pointing his dark eyes at her.  A gentle smile emerged from his young, fresh-shaven face.

“Could I have the ham and eggs, please?” She tried to soften her tone, afraid that she might scare him away, or that he might not even serve her.  She had been sitting here nearly an hour already, just drinking coffee.

“How do you like your eggs?”

“Fried.  Over medium.”

“White, brown toast or multi-grain?  Or would you prefer a bagel?  We have plain, sesame, poppy-seed and multi-grain.”

“White toast, please.”

“More coffee?”

“Yes please.”

The coffee was different from forty years ago.  Now they served espresso, which meant fancy drinks she could scarcely pronounce, along with a choice of light, medium, strong or decaffeinated, and the coffee tasted so good now.  Recently the handsome waiter explained that all the coffee is now organic fair trade, meaning that the farmers and the pickers in Colombia or Guatemala get a better deal for their labours and the birds are also happy because none of their trees get cut down.  Of course their prices had gone up as well.  Her first plate of ham and eggs had cost eighty cents.  Now it was six dollars. 

She thought of the day that lay ahead of her.  Her worker had been hectoring her lately to about structuring her time.  “I get up at six every morning, unlike a lot of people who don’t roll out of bed till one or two in the afternoon,” she had argued back.  “What more do you want?”  The worker read off a litany of possible volunteer positions she might want to fill as well as a couple of part-time jobs.  Alice was already sorting clothes for the free box twice a week at the Living Room Drop-In Centre, which had become for her her parlour and her salon.  Most of her favourite clothes, including her turquoise cardigan had come from the free box.  Even her bright saffron skirt and crimson blouse she was wearing, along with the bangles that clanged musically on her wrist.  She had always favoured bright, strong and bold colours, and now that she was feeling better again this is how she was going to dress.  She was keeping herself clean again having recently emerged out of many years of intentional self-neglect.  Even her hair, though it hung limp and leaden-grey over her shoulders, had a clean healthy sheen, despite the little care that she gave it.  She had no illusions about ever being beautiful.  Even on her first visit to this café forty years ago she was perhaps just passably pretty.  Even though nearly sixty she still had a figure, though she had put on a little weight over the years.  Had she taken better care of herself, had it not been for her damn illness and those pills that she had to take every day now she might even be, if not exactly beautiful then…maybe…striking?

Her favourite song came on the radio: “Just call me angel of the morning (Angel), Just touch my cheek before you leave me (Baby), Just call me angel of the morning (Angel)…Then slowly turn away.”  She had heard that song in it’s earlier version played here, in this same coffee shop while seated at this very same table by the window forty years ago while breakfasting on her first plate of eggs and ham and home-fried potatoes, just after disembarking from the Greyhound bus.  She rather preferred the new version of the song, and it thrilled through her along with the cool fragrant spring breeze blowing in from the park through the open door, the same park where once stood the hotel she was staying in.  The young waiter brought her her breakfast and Alice stared at the two eggs that stared back at her like two yellow eyes struggling to see through cataracts next to the pink circle of pig flesh.  When she was a young child she once asked her mother where ham came from.  “From pigs” she replied.  How do they get it from the pig? she asked.  “It’s from the pig’s thigh”, she replied evasively.  But what happens to the pig?  Does the pig just let us have the ham?  “Yes, I suppose so, dear,” her mother replied listlessly while wiping down the cupboard doors.  Alice nearly asked her to somehow assure her that nothing happened to the poor pig, that it didn’t get hurt or killed or anything, but before she could open her mouth again her mother sent her outside to play.  Alice still had not worked up the courage to become a vegetarian.  Trying not to think of the living creature that it once was she dug in her fork, knowing that tasting the tender pink meat would be tantamount again to forgetting.

“How old are you?” she asked the waiter as he came

“Nineteen.”

“You could be my grandson.”

“Do you have grandchildren?” he asked.

“I don’t even have children.”  How could she even begin to explain that for her, for someone like her, having children, being a mother, through much of her life, would have been a near impossibility.  Instead she said, “Are you a student?”

“Yes.  Classes are out for the summer.”

“You’ve only worked here for the last couple of weeks?”

“My mom’s the owner.”

“Oh, you’re Nora’s boy?”

“Indeed I am.”

“So your mom has given you a job to help tide you over?”

“Actually I have another waitering job downtown.”

“Do you live at home

“Yeah,” he said, slowly backing away with her dirty plate and utensils, “I live with my mom.”

“Do you pay rent?”

“She wouldn’t hear of it.”  He nimbly retreated to the kitchen where he remained hidden for some time.  Alice opened the paper again and hunted for the crossword.  While trying to think of a five-letter word for “Voodoo” the waiter returned and sat again at the barstool.  He was looking at her, as though trying to think of something to say in order to revive their conversation.

“Are you from around her?” he asked.

“Not originally, no.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Since I got out of high school.”

“How do you like living here?”

She didn’t want to hear any more questions, but did not know how to shut him off.  She stared at the crossword without answering.  She looked up and said, “Can you think of a five letter word for ‘Voodoo’?”

“How about ‘Magic’?

“Thanks.”  He kept looking at her, hoping to hear more.  His gaze was not quite penetrating, nor really invasive, but curious and perhaps even friendly.  Still, Alice did not like being looked at.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Todd.”

“That’s a nice name.” 

Now she was trying to think of a nine-letter word for “children”.

“What’s your name?”

“Alice.”

“Do you live in the area?”

“Yes.”  Why did he want to know where she was living?  She really didn’t want to hear any more questions.  She was beginning to feel tired, tired and irritable.

“You know, Alice, I’ve always liked that park across the street.”

“There used to be a hotel there.”

“No kidding?”  Oh, why did she have to say it?  Why did she have to go and mention it?  He would, with his relentless curiosity, want to know all about the hotel, it’s name, the fact that she stayed there, and the fire that took the building and every human life inside it but her own.  She knew his kind only too well.  The good psychiatrist, the good case manager, the good occupational therapist, the benevolent social worker.  Each had had for Alice that same bland, kind, personally impersonal happy face that so many of them wore and turned on for her. It wasn’t because they actually liked her and certainly in most cases she did not like them, and not because they really wanted to know her in order to be her friend.  This was their way of getting information.  This was their way of controlling her. 

She certainly wasn’t going to flatter herself with any such nonsense that this boy, this child with body hair, might actually like her as a woman.  She still cringed whenever she thought about that ridiculous movie they had shown on a movie night from the distant past in a boarding home where she once lived.  It was about a love affair between an eccentric elderly woman and a boy the same age as this wildly handsome twit whose name rhymed with “God.”  What especially had made her flesh creep was that scene with the boy and the crone waking up in bed together, presumably naked but for the mercy of strategically arranged bed-sheets.  They were blowing bubbles.  Their faces were radiant with the delight of satiated lovers, and they were blowing bubbles!  How Alice had hated that movie.

While Alice struggled over the crossword and Todd read the newspaper at the barstool she had a fleeting curiosity of what his body was like.  Not from elderly lasciviousness, but a sort of clinical, esthetic curiosity.  Where were his blemishes?  Even a young Adonis must carry his flaws.  Then she remembered, last week, seeing him come into the café dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, to talk to his mother about something.  She noted his legs.  They were not perfectly formed, perhaps just a little bit spindly with an abundance of dark hair that sheathed them from thighs to ankles.  Funny looking goat legs.  The very idea of going to bed with something like that?  Without referring to herself as a lesbian Alice had long come to prefer the company of other women.  During her frequent stays in hospital, in transition houses, shelters, in boarding homes, if she had a romance on the stove it was always with one of the many other unfortunate women with whom she was stranded.  Nothing had ever come of these chaste little trysts, though there was a lot of sympathetic hand-holding and cuddling and weeping forlornly and desperately on one another’s shoulders.

Only once had she ever been to bed with a man.  They had met in the bar downstairs.  Alice was lonely, and broke, having exhausted her meagre savings.  She had just found a job as a store clerk, but she wasn’t going to get paid for a couple of weeks.  He was older, perhaps in his forties, a salesman with a family in Toronto.  He saw her at the bar and bought her a drink.  It was he who opened negotiations.  Alice, a virgin, had never done anything like this before, and now she was being offered money.  But she was hungry and already she had begun hearing voices.  It wasn’t as bad as she thought it would be, and once they had gotten through the clumsy maneuvres of sex between strangers, she did feel rather a maternal warmth towards this man who lay very still beside her.  Alarmingly still.  She listened carefully for breathing and heard nothing.  She put her fingers on his neck, then laid her hand on his chest.  The skin felt cool.  There was no heartbeat.  She called to him and there was no response.  His body lay there like a large naked wax figure.  His eyes were wide open.  Alice didn’t move.  She lay in the dark next to this dead man who had just paid her for sex, staring like the corpse next to her wide-eyed at the ceiling.

All this she had told the police, the firemen, the doctors, the psychiatrists, the case managers, everyone who had a legal entitlement to know.  What she had told no one, and held still as her secret was the appearance of the child in the room.  He was small, perhaps five or six years of age, with curly blond hair and wearing what appeared to be a white nightshirt.  Smiling, he held towards her a beckoning hand.  Alice climbed out of bed and got dressed and followed the child out of the room.  There was already smoke in the corridor.  The child led her down a flight of stairs she had never known about.  As she stepped out in the alley with him, the building was suddenly engulfed in flames.  The last thing she heard was the terrified screaming of people burning to death.  When Alice woke up she was for the first time in her life in the psychiatric wing of a hospital.

“What are you studying in university?” she asked the young waiter.

“Psychology.”

Alice said nothing.  Her suspicions were confirmed.

“Hey, Alice, I was wanting to ask you something.”

She was absorbed with summoning forth the six-letter equivalent for “Magus.”

“The Livingroom drop-in and resource centre.  You work there, right?”

“Twice a week.”

“Are they looking for volunteers?”

“Might be.  You want to talk to Moira.”

“I’m off at two after lunch

Could I go in with you?”

“Just come over.  I’ll be there.”

She was unsettled by the sudden smile of gratitude that seemed to brighten his face.  She had been sitting in here for almost two hours and surely she had better things to do than baby-sit a beguiling young faun.   She touched the amber beads that hung around her neck, and the dark sandalwood beads, and the blue and white rosary.  She never took them off, except for while bathing, or asleep.  She waited for Sammy, who owed her money, to push his overflowing shopping buggy past the café.  They had been friends in the Psychiatric Assessment Unit in one of the hospitals, as well as in a small psychiatric facility in a midtown neighbourhood.  He had been on the street for the last three or four years and had deteriorated badly.  One day she would muster the courage to tell him that she had forgiven him his debt.  It was only ten dollars.   It was Sammy who had given her the rosary.

The small park across the street was still ablaze with the fiery green of the May morning as lawn and trees and flowerbeds vibrated with the luminous colour of the season.  She sat on top of the granite memorial plaque in the cenre that commemorated the hotel that had burned there to the ground.  She could almost see the child in the white nightshirt waiting for her.  A luminous joy, like a flaming fire serpent swept suddenly through Alice and she leapt off the memorial plaque and began dancing around in circles, whirling in the soft brilliant spring sunshine.  Music she had never heard in her life pulsed inside her head as she danced and spun and leapt and laughed, like a dervish, like Salome, like an ancient temple dancer, a splendour of turquoise, crimson and saffron here where one night forty years ago her love had died and now here she was rising out of the ashes.

She soon felt tired and sat down in the still slightly damp grass.  A small dog, a beagle, ran towards Alice and leapt into her waiting arms.  While the dog licked her face and squirmed with delight in her lap, Alice, feeling the soft warmth of the sun all over her, began to weep, and vowed that she would go on weeping until every tear had washed away from her mind every bad memory of all the years of her life and bring her the joy she had always been deprived of.  While the dog settled and cuddled serenely against her breasts his owner, a young woman, came over.

            “He’s not always so friendly with people,” she said to Alice.  

            Alice smiled without speaking, gently gathered up the beagle and handed him over to the young woman.

“Have a nice day,” the girl said with a hint of a smile as she attached a leash to the beagle’s collar.  As though she had never spoken to her she walked away from Alice with her dog and she remained on the grass watching them slowly grow smaller till they disappeared around the corner forever from her sight. She got up.   Todd was standing in the doorway looking at her.  Her bum felt a little bit damp from the wet grass. She waved to him feebly and he waved back.  She smiled and walked away, leaving the park and the vanished hotel and its burning dead and walked the short distance home to her little subsidized apartment.  When she opened the door she went straight to the kitchen sink, ignoring the clutter of papers, books and scattered clothing on the floor.  She sneezed twice from the dust then stood waiting for the running water to get cold. Just before she reached for a clean glass, she gently caressed the body of Jesus on the white plastic crucifix of her rosary and was scarcely aware of the soft little smile that was only beginning to form on her face.