The Confusion of Betrayal

(NSFK)

This is my featured post from last month at Studio Thirty Plus, The Confusion of Betrayal. It's short and not sweet.



Her voice was strained and remarkably unpleasant at first, something in her current situation made her angry at everyone, even people completely unrelated to it. I gulped her words down and let the anger roll over me and behind me, felt it’s heat retreating away like a winding trail into the distance.
Angel sighed and over the miles and miles of electronic waves I felt her pain and sadness.
“I’m so sorry.” She began to weep in thick snotty gurgles, the sick kind that get stuck in your throat and make you feel like a child, looking to wipe your face on anything and anyone near you. I imagined her blonde hair sticking in thick swathes to her face, weaving knots in her already unmanageable mane.
“Angel you have nothing to apologize for, none of this is your fault.” I felt the words pouring like waste out of my mouth, how pointless to parrot the cliche words meant to comfort in times like these. Couldn’t I think of something more original, more beneficial?
The sobbing continued and I could think of nothing to say. My flight instinct made me want to just hang up the phone, walk away from her and her situation, pretend like it never happened. Because the one thing about situations like Angel’s that would really get to you; once you examined them you realized that it could happen to you just as easily. I hung on and gave small sentences of encouragement, I tried to be as forthright and strong as she was weak and cowardly.
“Listen to me. I will come to you, just let me finish up my work here and I’ll just pack everything else up and come to you.” I had made a decision, that was a start.
“No! Oh God. What if he comes back?” The sobbing turned into deep and sharp intakes of breath, caught in Angel’s chest like heaving hurricanes of hysteria. She hung up the phone.
I called her back immediately and there was no answer.
I called her husband’s cell phone and there was no answer. The anger that I had dealt with so very well just a few short minutes ago now welled up in me like a surge of bitter bile.
“You fucking worthless piece of shit. You mother fucking dumb ass idiot. I wish your drunk ass didn’t have the excuse of your disease to fall back on. You knew what you were doing and I wish you would have killed the bitch you did it with, in the car that you fucked her in, while you were supposedly blacked out. I wish you were dead too.”
How very sad I was, how low I felt at this moment. I meant the words I said, I did wish he were dead for a minute, but I also wished that Angel and I were dead too. And that had nothing to do with a drunken child cheating on his lovely and perfect wife. It was about the sadness in the world and the strength and possession it takes to live with the bleakness of existing.
I called into work, rescheduling all of my clients and appointments. I felt a chill and an ache like the phantom impending flu I knew I did not have creeping up my spine and laying itself down in the base of my skull. The tears came as I packed up my stuff and continued to the car, in the car, on the drive and up Angel’s driveway. They were dried up by the time I parked the car, took notice of her husband’s car and crept around the house to the back deck, up the stairs and to the outside door to Angel’s bedroom.
I listened guiltily, almost afraid that I was in the midst of some sordid crime TV show, about to become the second victim of a husband’s rage. Instead of fear or panic I heard soft moans and sighs, something I knew from sharing a room with Angel for four years of college meant that she was being screwed by her husband, the only man she’s ever been with.

Instead of hearing her delicate pleas for more of his dick and more of his mouth from across an attic dorm room, her sighs and pants bouncing off wooden rafters in our ancient space, I was now hearing them from outside her grown up home, her house with her husband who had just betrayed her as horrifically as one could betray another. I fled their home and flew back out of the driveway and on to the road.
The tears came once more but this time they were for me alone.

I'll Prove I'm not Dead with a Couple Photos

I'm not dead and although I've been consistently depressing and morose here at Blogging is for Dorks and over at Studio Thirty Plus I also have been quite busy with the oh so very bright lights of my life.


Olive, this sweet little beast...



dropped my camera last month on concrete two seconds after this photo was taken...



and it shattered all over the ground in dozens of pieces.

Rosey, this dear little girl had four adult teeth removed one day and the stomach flu the next...

she is still pretty gorgeous regardless...

and she took this photo of me that my Mom says makes me look like I have a piggy nose...



Speaking of taking photos and my Momma, she took this photo of my baby sister in the patio of my childhood domicile. I love it...



Jeremiah channeled Luke and Max channeled Yoda...both pretty successfully...



...Elijah was Spiderman for Halloween and also obviously a freaking giant, he's half as tall as me...



and this girl who's name is Maxine Jane...



...makes me proud everyday not only with her consistently excellent straight A work at school but also with the fact she no longer shits her pants and throws fits that cause me physical harm in grocery stores...

Featured Post at Studio Thirty Plus

Although my blog is much, much less popular than the good old days (damn you work!) I still have a real life freelancing job and also still get the chance from time to time to write some fiction.

The Confusion of Betrayal is a short piece I wrote for Studio Thirty Plus and I'd like you to check it out and tell me what you think, if you have the time of course.

And my Keurig broke and they're sending me a new one but I have to wait three to seven days! OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! French presses every day are a pain in the ass. A delicious pain in the ass though.

Sisters

They were an odd pair, the two of them. Familial circumstance had joined them in blood but their affections joined them in their hearts. And their hearts had been full.

She missed her sister. She cried at night, swallowing thick gobs of sadness with each deep breath.

She was old and weak. She didn't want to be alone anymore. She didn't want to gather the strength up each day to to pull her body out of bed.

She walked out into her yard with every inch of dignity she could muster in her flowered night gown. She fell to the ground and died with a violent spasm.

Her children mourned and her friends hoped they wouldn't die lying in their front yards dressed in an old pair of pajamas.

She walked with a proud, straight back for the first time in decades across her yard, not even stealing one glance at the sad lump in the distance behind her. She kept strong, quick strides up to the point of the vista in front of her and met her sister in a warm embrace.

They spoke no words and shed no tears. They held hands and walked into the abyss.

I Went into the Wilderness and Survived.

Packing for a trip is always stressful for me. The promise just over the horizon of whatever relaxing destination awaits me is never enough to assuage the bile of tension that is rising like butterflies soaked in syrup and then put on a rickety conveyer belt that stretches from my pussy to my throat, the butterflies able to move in the confines of the syrup but only in tortured twitches and sticky thrusts.

Yep. It's that bad.

Regardless Jeremiah and I took Elijah on a weekend trip to the mountains. It was mainly uneventful, generally wonderful and very much needed. Jeremiah conquered his fear of horses (somewhat) and befriended a very old horse named Toro that wandered free around the vast acreage of our 140 year old farm house. We fished in a pond and didn't catch anything, had to drive for thirty minutes just to find a farmer's market, hiked through woods along a creek and marveled at the fact that people actually live an every day existence out there away from everything with horses and turtles and strangely the sound of non-stop gunfire all night long.

We cooked out on a bonfire and I was so proud and impressed by Jeremiah's fire building skills, we watched movies by the wood burning pot stove/fireplace thingy and I was again impressed by Jeremiah's fire building skills and we ate apple cider donuts and talked about how very dark it was outside.

At some point something magical happened in my stomach. Right after we put Elijah to bed, after I turned off most of the lights and after Jeremiah made room for me on the couch something went pop in my tummy and the grinding rickety conveyer belt with the sickly, sticky butterflies stopped. I felt Jeremiah's warmth behind me and we watched Pacific Heights on HBO and laughed at the silliness of it. We brushed our teeth together and went to bed together. We made love in the ancient bedroom of this ancient house where generations of love had been made, babies had been born, people had died.

Jeremiah went to sleep and despite the chill I went outside and sat in the pitch dark just to revel in the amazing life I have been granted and the gifts I have been given. Trials and tribulations have come my way but there is always good that comes out of the bad. I sat there contemplating these things until the gun shots resumed again in the distance and I high tailed it inside, locked all the doors and woke up Jeremiah just to be sure that he was aware of my frightening experience.

Love Makes You Crazy in the Head (thus spaketh the six year old)

And now on to something completely different...

If you've read my blog from time to time you might notice a reoccurring "I have a hard time with Maxine Jane" theme. She's is my six year old daughter, the sometimes bane of my existence, always the love of my life but most often difficult and precocious.

The other day she got in trouble and wasn't allowed to go somewhere with Jeremiah, Elijah and Olivia while Rose was at soccer. She had to stay home with me which is tantamount to being gravely punished. I decided to take her for a walk just the two of us and five blocks away she said she had to pee. We turned around and walked back to the house.

"Maxine Jane, sometimes you make my head spin like crazy." I looked at her and smiled goofily to let her know I wasn't mad, just crazy.

"Hmmm, that just means you love me a lot." She's crazy smiling now too.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yep and that means you must really, really love Jeremiah because he makes you the craziest in your head."

Six years old and wiser than I am. I wonder when that wisdom starts fading? I'm guessing 11 because when Max recounted the story to Rosey she just rolled her eyes.

"Making someone crazy in the head isn't going to make anyone like you more ever. They're just going to be annoyed and nobody likes someone who is annoying." Rose speaks these words with the emphasis on words like AN-NOY-ing and NO-body.

Is Rosey more or less wise than Max? Or is it just dependent on personality? It is a dichotomy and maybe even a mystery.

Grief

The sun glared through the windows and into my eyes but I did not look away. I did not close my eyes. They watered and even hurt a bit and I still did not care. The spots formed and I felt nauseous and faint.

I finally closed my eyes and sat down on the pale yellow window seat, the cool painted wood under me woke me a bit from my state and I tried to form thoughts.

Nothing came.

The days' consistencies meant nothing to me. I spoke words to concerned people and did not know what I was saying or remember why I was saying them. I went to bed, got up and vomited in the toilet and got back into bed over and over again for days on end.

Or at least it felt like days, it could have very well been moments, seconds, fleeting incalculable snippets of time flying over my head like electric beams of fast moving nothingness.

When this melancholy lifted I began to see small random things in focus. The water I drank for sustenance seemed so much better when I mixed orange juice and lime juice in with it, I remembered I loved that so much.

I changed my clothes and got in the shower, used the kids coconut shampoo and scrubbed and scrubbed my body with Dove soap over and over again until the water started to turn cold. Dove soap reminded me of being in the hospital after giving birth. That first tender shower with a nurse outside your door and your mother just beyond her, making sure you were OK. The sweat and the medicinal smells of labor and delivery wash over you and are replaced with Dove soap. Your breasts ache and your asshole aches and you feel like you might just pass out. Thinking the posted nurse outside your door wasn't such a bad idea, gingerly stepping out of the thickly tiled shower without lifting one leg too high.

After the shower things were clearer. I turned on the small cream lamp on a very short table next to my bed and laid myself down. The sheets smelled of spit and greasy hair. I got up, stripped the bed and put new sheets on, took a basket of clothes to the basement and began to do laundry.

The sun outside had turned to clouds and rain in an opposite rendering of my present state of mind. The clouds in my head were clearing, but I was not sure of the weather that would present itself once they did.

I went back to my room and laid in bed once more. I smelled nothing but coconut and Dove soap. The tears came again but this time I did not vomit. I sobbed gently and fell asleep.

When I awoke the sun was again in my face, but this time I looked away. I turned my back to the window and stripped off my clothes, let the warmth play across my naked back. I took another shower, brushed my teeth and drank more orange juice with lime. The bitterness of the first few sips mixed with the remnants of tooth paste made me aware suddenly of the day and the time.

I made phone calls and plans to begin my life over again. I never felt the same again.