[Margo has escaped her former life as a killer nurse and is now a tame library clerk; she’s mad that she finished the first book that she really enjoyed reading] ” ‘Oh Constance. We are so happy.’
What about the rest of us?!
I pick up the book and hurl it against the living room wall. It flops to the floor.
Later, when it’s fully dark, I make my way to the woods. I’m holding the book improperly, by one corner of the spine, so it flaps open in the wind. I ignore the noise the pages make. Like a complaining mouth, that book, but I know how to handle complainers. I know you don’t want to take these pills, but the doctor says you have to.
I say to my book: I know you don’t want to burn up in the fire, but the doctor says you have to.”
Today I was driving to work on a little country road that leads to the freeway, and from a distance I saw a flock of sizable birds just chilling in the street. The car coming from the opposite direction honked, and they grudgingly shuffled out of the way.
This road here, but daytime. I took this picture on my way home from work (after parking, of course).
I think all of my knowledge of vultures comes from The Jungle Book adaptation by Disney, but they really do move like this:
Minus the moptop and Liverpudlian accent
I dismissed it at the time, but later on my break I googled whether Kentucky has vultures. Okay ya’ll, we got vultures, and they are sick fucks, picking on baby animals and eating their eyes. To quote our local newspaper, the Courier Journal:
“[Herdsman Derek] Lawson said he’s noticed more vultures since 2009, when he thinks they started nesting near Foxhollow Farm. He plans his year around the predatory habits of the vultures, which circle the skies in wait of anything dead or vulnerable.
He remembers one eerie morning when he saw a flock of 60 vultures perched on adjacent gates in one of his fields. He mainly worries about them during calving season, when they like to feast on easy marks.”
Not only are they sadistic and numerous, they’re bloody smart:
“But lately, farmers say they have seen black and turkey vultures work together in uncharacteristic attacks on live animals. Turkey vultures hunt by smell and black vultures hunt by eyesight, making them an effective team. The black vultures can spot the turkey vultures circling above prey and can join them.”
Oh and by the way, it’s illegal to kill them.
Sooooo if my articles should suddenly drop off, definitely assume the vultures got me.
*Feature image belongs to Reisegraf, Getty Images/iStockphoto
I had the stupidest dream last night. In it, I was the mother of a manipulative, evil kid with supernatural powers. It’s an overdone subgenre already, and my subconscious was also busily stealing plotlines such as a woman being coerced into eating glass, like in Choose or Die or Oculus. The resulting solution was that David Tennant shows up, because the day before I saw him on the cover of a Doctor Who DVD at work, and proposes we send the kid to space. Space?! That kind of flaccid, sloppy writing is reserved for at least two sequels into the franchise!
Silliness aside, I did once write fiction. When I was eleven, my classmates and I were prompted to write short stories, and I wrote about a murderous ventriloquist’s dummy. I got in trouble, but I continued to write other, terribly unoriginal bits of rubbish: a woman is obsessed with an actor, so she kidnaps him; a kid moves to a town where once a year everyone turns into monsters; a girl is jealous of her older sisters, who have the ability to make men fall in love with them. The ones I can remember are all thinly veiled dramatizations of my various tween neuroses. I wrote a novel when I was a young teen, including my sisters and friends as characters. It was so, so bad. When I was twenty I was still at it, and still struggling with including enough detail and possessing a tin ear for dialogue. That’s why I enjoy the occasional microfiction, and why I haven’t deleted the ones on my site–stories that are 50 words long aren’t supposed to have details, and no one has to say anything.
All told, I don’t miss writing fiction. What a relief to wake up in a world where I dole out criticism instead of rightfully earning it.
“But the only difference between her and a mother who leaves, if there’s much of a difference at all, is that Whitney already knows there’s no relief in having left. Not if her son is in the world, existing without her. He will never not be wrapped around her conscience, infiltrating her dreams, an endless feed of shame. Instead, she’s learned to be absent when she is near. She has the ability to stare through the children, see their lips move while she nods her head, she can be elsewhere and she can be there. She is an illusion. But she has never left.
She should tell him she didn’t mean it, she thinks, she should go back in to comfort him before he falls asleep. She is tired of failing him. The cruelest part of motherhood is that she has made him the way he is, every frustrating part of him. She is the source of everything that troubles him, she is the reason he’s lonely even when she’s there. She presses her hands to her cheeks. She doesn’t want to be crying.
This is a piece I’ve been working on since my teenager was a newborn. I’ve struggled with the format, the length, and especially the tone; generally I go for light and fun, but then my undergraduate training in analysis comes out and it gets way too serious and pretentious. I’ve got this pretty much the way I want it, and it’s the best it’ll be, and I’m actually pretty proud of it. It’s long, so here it is in pieces:
Introduction: 2010
I’m jolted awake from a sound sleep by a sharp ringing noise: my daughter Layla’s baby monitor. She has an electronic pad under her mattress that tracks her movement and shrieks like a smoke detector if there isn’t any. I run to her room, my heart beating hard, and I burst in. She had been fine, but now, having been woken up by the light, is screaming louder than the distress signal. The pad had just moved too far away from her. It was a false alarm. This time.
Wittle baby Layla!
Before having Layla, I had been a hardcore horror fan for two thirds of my life. I never looked away from the screen, no matter what. And even when I was pregnant and experiencing severe morning sickness—strike that, severe all times of the day sickness, because morning sickness is a misnomer—gore never bothered me. As far along as my ninth month, I watched Saw VI with no problems, even though it shows a lady chopping off her own arm as well as a guy getting pumped so full of sulfuric acid that his torso melts. (Somehow the scene of a pregnant woman getting slammed in the stomach by a door and having a miscarriage didn’t faze me; during my second pregnancy with my son Orion I happened to watch the movie again, and it became my worst nightmare—my job at the time required me to frequent a lot of stairwells with metal doors.) I still love horror movies, but after having kids, I don’t have the same tolerance for the genre that I used to. The violence turns my stomach. Not long after having Layla, I saw Cabin Fever II, which involves high school students contracting a flesh-eating virus. I was doing fairly well until a pregnant girl’s unborn fetus falls out of her in a bloody clump. I felt nauseated for the rest of the night.
*author’s note from present day–no longer as much of an issue–gimme that gore!!!
I’m also much more vulnerable emotionally. I’ve always hated romantic comedies, but while watching Up in the Air (for a job as a teaching assistant, I swear), a scene when a groom with cold feet reconciles with his bride had me crying. Any movie that places a child in a dangerous situation is bound to trigger me. In The Joy Luck Club, when a sick and dying woman leaves her babies behind in the hopes that someone will find and raise them, I was bawling uncontrollably. I wanted to stop—I couldn’t. Even a segment from the sitcom Modern Family when an overachieving teenage girl starts sobbing when she realizes the pressure she’s under made me sniff. But besides the nausea and sensitivity, horror films affect me in a whole new way: they actually scare me, because as a parent I have worries I never dreamed of before.
Like Orion eating his father’s nose
As a single person and as a newlywed, I lived for myself. I walked where I wanted alone at night; I ate what I wanted without concern for calories or cholesterol. Then I became a baby house. Suddenly being reckless endangered not just me, but also my defenseless unborn child. I had to change everything. And even though my children aren’t physically attached to me anymore, I’m still unable to relax, because now I have the lifelong obligation to protect them. In addition, besides the practical anxieties of a parent (rashes, constipation, normal development) I now have multiple phantom worries about things that could happen, like the kids falling or choking or breaking bones.
See? It never ends!
Heather B. Armstrong’s book It Sucked and Then I Cried illustrates how irrational but compelling the urge to worry about our children is: “When Leta was born all sorts of maternal instincts were slammed into the ON position—the instinct to protect, to nourish, to comfort […] I had to retrain my body to sleep. My instincts were telling me that when I slept Unknown Things happened […] I was unconsciously listening to the sound of her breathing or swallowing, and if those noises sounded okay then I’d listen to the sounds of the house to make sure monsters didn’t crawl out of the house to hurt her” (102).
Watching horror movies doesn’t help with these fears at all because I’m presented with awful, implausible-but-still-somehow-believable things to be afraid of. The genre is rife with children in danger. They highlight in so many different ways how helpless parents can be. We work around the clock to ensure our childrens’ safety, but at any moment something could come along and destroy our dreams.
Our adorable, adorable dreams
I never knew real fear until I became a mother.
Heather B. Armstrong (2009). It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita. NY: Simon Spotlight Entertainment.
“Mummer would tell us these tales over the dinner table without a flicker of doubt that God’s hand was at work in the world, as it had been in the time of the saints and martyrs, the violent deaths of whom were regularly inflicted upon us as exempla of not only the unconditional oath we had to make to the service of the Lord, but of the necessity of suffering.
The worse the torment, the more God was able to make Himself known, Mummer said, invoking the same branch of esoteric mathematics Father Wilfred used in his sermons to explain why the world was full of war and murder–a formula by which cruelty could be shown to be inversely proportionate to mercy. The more inhumane the misery we could inflict upon one another, the more compassionate God seemed as a counterpoint to us. It was through pain that we would know how far we still had to go to be perfect in His eyes. And so, unless one suffered, Father Wilfred was wont to remind us, one could not be a true Christian.”
“Old shelters–television, magazines, movies–won’t protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That’s when you’ll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you’ve walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much, deeper.
You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You’ll care only about the darkness and you’ll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you’re some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you’ll be afraid to look away, you’ll be afraid to sleep.
Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you’ll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You’ll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you’ll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you’ve got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
“Apologies are lovely when they happen. But they change nothing. They do not reverse actions or correct damage. They are merely nice to hear. The truth is that life is brutally, obscenely unfair […] Fairness is not among the laws of the universe. This means, if somebody runs over your foot in a car and they don’t stop, that’s just too bad and it totally sucks and you better bust your ass to the hospital right now so they can save the foot.”
GhoulieJoe 