The Flight of the Valkyrie

As we reached the bridge that foggy night,

A mournful gull cried out across the bight.

And when you paused and turned to look,

I saw my chance; a good push was all it took.      

And over you went, like a harpy taking flight.

I won’t shed a single tear as I stand and watch you go.

This happy smile upon my face is all I have to show.

All these years, you’ve made my life a painful living hell.

So long, you wretched hag. Goodbye and fare thee well.

You’ll soon be singing halleluiah with the choir down below.

Under Windsor Bridge, 1912, by Adolphe Valette

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Linked to The Mag 131.

The Final Ride

 

One day at ten, you climb aboard.

The hill thrills you to your core.

A running start and off you go.

Whee! Into the wind you soar.

You hold on tight and rocket down.

The ride is wild; it gives you quite a rush.

All too soon, the bottom’s reached.

So back to the top, and again a mighty push.

Whee! Down and up and down again;

You ride so many days away,

Until, “oh, please, not any more," 

You hear your sore joints say.

One day at “old,” whenever that day arrives,

You climb off your sled, and leave the hill behind.

But at the end you remember, those wildly thrilling rides,

And you ride the hill just one more time, if only in your mind.

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Written for Magpie Tales.

An Apple a Day

"An apple a day keeps the doctor away."

He can't decide if it is this bizarre and totally annoying trend toward vegetarianism and getting more roughage or an increase in the number of people living without health insurance, but he does know it is wreaking havoc with his diet. Don't these prats know that man is a carnivore, perfectly designed for the consumption of meat? Why else have canine teeth and incisors, if not to rend and tear flesh?  Were people intended to eat weeds, they'd be built like cows.  OK, so some of them were built like cows, but that's beside the point.

In days gone by, there were more hunters than gatherers. Man went out, slayed the fatted calf and gored the ox, and brought the meat back to feed the family. Even the women bragged about "bringing home the bacon and frying it up in the pan." Bacon! Now, that's what he's talking about!  Nothing like a little saturated fat to guarantee a delicious meal.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

Bugger!  A bloke could starve to death.

Jack decides he is going to have to start making house calls again.

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This was written for Magpie Tales, where the delicious-looking apple pictured above was the prompt.

A Wee Cottage in the Wood

She tripped lightly down the pine needle-strewn path, her footsteps swallowed by the silence of the forest. She stopped here and there to pick the ripe blackberries growing along the path and dropped them into the battered pail she’d brought with her for just such a purpose. Tonight there would be pie, but she would have to stop her one-for-me, one-for-the-pail approach to berry-picking if she were ever to gather enough.

Passing though bright motes of dapple painted by sunlight through leafy boughs of green canopy, deeper and deeper into wood she traveled. Then far ahead in a small clearing, nearly swallowed by foliage, a wee cottage appeared, spot-lit by sun but all darkness within. To many, it might be forbidding, but not to a young girl who had lived in fairy tales all her life. She had outwitted wolves and wicked stepmothers. She had vanquished many an evil gnome, troll and elf. She’d laughed at orcs, goblins and gollums, and had escaped towers, hot ovens and never-ending sleep. And through it all, she’d always believed in good witches and handsome princes, though she’d never actually met one herself.

Nay, a wee cottage in the wood was no match for this girl. And so she skipped up to the cottage, climbed the steps to the its porch, and gave a small knock on the door. When there was no answer, she gently pushed the door open on its squeaky hinges and stepped inside. As the sun followed her in, she saw an old bird cage standing in the corner. She walked over, and as she approached, a very bedraggled bird lifted its head and looked at her forlornly.

“Hello,” she said brightly. “I’m Lucinda. What’s your name? What are you doing here all alone?”

The bird said not a word. Not too many birds can talk, after all. He just continued to gaze at her. Now, probably birds can’t get expressions on their faces, but she saw great sadness in this bird’s eyes. Her own eyes filling with tears, she pried open the rusty latch on the cage and opened the door.

“Come out,” she cried. “I’ve set you free!”

The bird just pulled its pale blue feathers tighter against its thin body and backed into the far corner of the cage, its expression changing from sad to wary. She stood and talked gently to the frightened bird, but nothing she said could lure it from the cage.

Finally, she realized it was hopeless and besides, the sun was going down and soon it would be dark in the forest.

“I must go if I’m to find my way home," she told the bird. “”But I will leave the door open so that you may leave too if you want. Goodbye!”

She turned and started moving toward the door of the cottage, but half-way there she stopped and turned.

“There are plenty of berries outside and I can tell you, they are very good. But you look hungry now and my waistline doesn’t need pie anyway.”

She returned to the cage, and put all of the berries from her pail just inside the door of the cage. Then she ran from the cottage and made her way quickly out of the forest and home, arriving just before the sun dropped below the horizon.

That night, she was barely able to sleep, worrying about the poor bird cowering alone in the cottage in the wood. Her concern stayed with her the next day, causing her boss to chastise her for daydreaming instead of attending to her filing. As she tried to focus on her work, she vowed to return to the cottage that evening and make sure the poor bird was okay.

Right after work, she rushed home and changed her clothes. Taking no time to trip lightly through the wood or pause to enjoy the succulent blackberries growing beside the pine needle-strewn path, she hurried toward the cottage. When the wee cottage came into view in the small clearing ahead, she saw the door was standing open as she left it. But instead of darkness inside, the cottage seemed filled with sunlight.

She ran to the door and stepped inside, anxiously looking at the old cage standing in the corner. To her surprise, it was empty! She went over to it, and confirmed that the bird and all of the berries were gone.

As she was standing looking at the cage, her emotions swinging between joy that the bird had flown free and disappointment at not seeing him again, she heard a footstep on the tiny porch out front. Turning, she saw a handsome young man in a pale blue sweater framed in the doorway.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m Marcus. What’s your name? What are you doing here all alone?”

See? she thought. I knew fairy tales really can come true!

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This was written for Magpie Tales.

The Next Thing

She takes up the battered old watering can and rains love down upon her thirsty family.  They nod with gratitude as she quenches their thirst, and stand a little straighter, refreshed.

She loves to putter in her garden, but she isn’t very good at it, especially since she’s often too drunk to practice.  But occasionally, still flush with the fervor of her last drink, she sees a picture of a beautiful flower in one of her magazines, and thinks, Oh, how darling. That would look lovely in my garden. 

So she goes out and buys a packet of seeds.  At first, she follows the instructions very carefully.  She prepares a fertile spot for the new addition, and then seed by seed, places them in the ground at just the right depth with just the right spacing. And then she doesn’t. Because, you see, she also has a very short attention span, and she’s out of interest before she’s out of seeds.  She tosses the last handful of seeds willy-nilly at the turned earth, and she’s on to the next thing. 

The next thing might be a pitcher of martinis, or it might be the strawberry seedlings she got from Jackson & Perkins, seduced by the colorfully illustrated and strawberry-scented sales pitch she received in the mail.

And so it goes.

Because flowers and plants are eager to please, they forgive their sloppy beginnings.  They bloom and grow and are swept the mob scene of color and scent that crowds her yard. Pushing and shoving, they riot for her attention.  And when she’s sober and remembers, she gives it, taking up her battered old watering can and raining love down upon them before she’s on to the next thing. 

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Written for Magpie Tales.

Chiyoko's Thank You Gift

I’m a very old man now.  Nearly all who were important to me are gone, leaving before me to find out if everything "they" said was true.  But I’ve always been a stubborn old coot.  I suspect it’s all a pack of shit designed to keep some kind of order in society.  I’m in no hurry to check out my theory, though, so I’m sticking around.  The downside of this, of course, is that there’s no one left to debate the subject with.  Not anyone who gives a rat’s ass what I have to say, anyway.

But I do have my stuff.  All these years, I’ve been hauling around the stuff that has meaning for me, adding to it as new things come along.  My kids called it “Pa’s junk,” and I know they were dreading the day when I was gone and they’d have to go through it all.  I guess Fate relieved them of that worry by hustling them off before the old man.

Now that all my friends and family have left me behind, the things I’ve collected through these many years are my friends.  We share many memories, and we frequently sit together, as very old friends do, and reminisce.

My best friend is this pack of papers, bound together by an odd homemade rope, woven of cloth strips and twine.  The papers are beautiful, pink and green, yellow and blue, printed with an ink I have never seen before or since.  I’ve been told that the paper is called Katazome-shi paper, and that it was printed using stencils and an ancient Japanese technique.  How it came to be isn’t important, though.  It’s how it came to me that matters.

Her name was Chiyoko and she may have been the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.  Well, I call her a woman, but she was really just a girl, probably no more that 17 or 18.  I was just a young buck myself in those days, and she was like a rare exotic bird to me.

But I get ahead of myself.

I was working at the US Immigration Station on Angel Island.  I was with the Quarantine Station run by the US Public Health Service.  The station was separated from the main processing facility, and we were responsible for treating any immigrant passengers suspected of illness, whether they were sick or not.

Chiyoko had arrived with her family.  Later that year, Japanese immigration all but stopped with the passage of the 1924 National Origins Act.  Had her family waited even a few months, they would have no doubt been turned away at our border.  But arrive they did, on a ship that was infected with small pox.

All the passengers were off-loaded, and the ship was fumigated with sulphur. As the passengers stepped of the bus at the Quarantine Station, the docs examined them, and then they were separated: the obviously sick this way, those showing no symptoms that way.  (Yeah, in later years, I saw the parallels.)  We scrubbed them down with carbolic soap and gave them overalls to wear.  They looked like the prisoners that they would be for the next two weeks.  Their clothing and baggage were sent through large metal cylinders where it was disinfected with steam under pressure.  They lived in barracks while with us, and the barracks were fumigated every morning.

The whole process was horrible.  We tried to be humane, but the passengers were still terrified, and who could blame them?  It was like a meat processing plant!  Very few had any English at all, what little they did have was so basic as to be useless in communicating with the others.  Some were crying; some were shocked into terrified silence.  Chiyoko was one of the latter.  Her parents had been infected with small pox, and so were shuttled off to a different quarantine barracks than she.  She was essentially alone.

One day shortly after she had arrived, I was working in Chiyoko’s barracks and found her in tears.  She had just been told that her parents had died of small pox.  Now she was literally alone, and in a foreign country.  She sat clutching a bundle of papers, which were soggy and stinking of ammonia and formaldehyde from the disinfecting process.  Holding the bundle like an infant, she rocked back and forth, sobbing her eyes out. It broke my heart.  I gathered her in my arms, and awkwardly patted her back while murmuring what I hoped were soothing sounds to her.

Chiyoko never got sick.  She had somehow escaped the small pox infection that claimed so many from the ship that brought her to the United States.  I sat with her every day, bringing photographs of places in the US to show her, and I told her about them.  I never really knew if she understood, but she seemed to enjoy my visits.  And I certainly enjoyed looking at her.

Once I realized that Chiyoko would be released, I set about finding somewhere for her to go.  Through my church, I was put in touch with a Japanese immigrant community in San Francisco, and a couple there offered to take Chiyoko in.  They would meet her at the disembarkation point.

Before she boarded the ferry that would take her to the mainland, Chiyoko turned to me, and shyly gave me a hug, whispering, “arigato.”

I never saw her again.

Many years later, there was a knock on my door.  An elderly woman was standing on my doorstep, holding a bundle.  Handing it carefully to me, she identified herself as Mary Jackson, and told me that Chiyoko was her daughter-in-law.  Her son, who was a seaman aboard the Arizona, had been killed at Pearl Harbor, and Chiyoko had come back to San Francisco to live with her.  Soon after arriving back in San Francisco, Chiyoko was one of thousands identified as being "totally unassimilable," and she was relocated to the Manzanar War Relocation Camp.  It must have seemed very familiar to her. Mrs. Jackson argued that Chiyoko had been married to an American, but her pleas fell on deaf ears.   After a year of living in the internment camp, Chiyoko fell ill with pneumonia and died.

Before she was taken away, Mrs. Jackson told me, Chiyoko had told her about the first American friend she had after arriving in the United States.  She had copied my name from my name tag, and kept it all these years.  She asked her mother-in-law to find me, give me the bundle she’d just handed me, and to tell me, “Arigato.”

After she left, I gingerly unwrapped the delicate tissue surrounding the bundle.  Inside, I found the papers I remembered from Angel Island, brittle with age and still smelling slightly of ammonia and formaldehyde.

“Arigato, Chiyoko,” I whispered.

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To read more stories and poems about the photo above, visit Magpie Tales.

This is also my submission to the Tenth Daughter of Memory.
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Lost in the Mists of Yesterday

I see her there every afternoon

As I walk home from the bus stop.

She sits in her rocking chair

Behind the glass of the big bay window,

Gazing out at something only she can see.

Cast in bronze by the late afternoon sun,

She doesn’t move or return my wave.

But a gentle smile graces her lips,

As she wanders though the mists of yesterday,

Visiting moments more joyful than this one.

The Actress

I’d watched her work her magic many times, and was always enthralled by her talent . She was the consummate actress. Her every performance brought the audience to a new place, brought them to tears, brought them to their feet. The many awards on her mantle attested to her skill and popularity.

But most of all, I was enthralled by the way she looked on stage. Every detail was always perfect. My appreciation is no surprise, of course. It’s what I do. I'm a dresser  For decades, it’s been my job and my honor to dress her, and I humbly take some credit for that perfection.

And now it was time to dress her for her final performance. I slipped the gown over her head. It was one of the most beautiful she’d ever worn. After cloaking her shoulders to protect the creamy satin and lace, I gently stoked her face with foundation and fluffed some powder over it. A little eye shadow, mascara, and a touch of lipstick finished the job. I ran the soft bristle brush through her silver hair, and we were done. Perfection!  She was ready to meet her public.

“There you are, my dear. You’ve never looked lovelier.” 

Reverently, I wheeled the casket on its gurney into the viewing room.  

“It’s show time!”

This was written for Magpie Tales. For more, go here.

Magpie Tales: une femme d’un certain âge

This my first entry for Magpie Tales, hosted here by Willow.  Go visit and and you’ll find the work of some very creative people.

une femme d’un certain âge

All eyes were drawn to the lusty laugh ringing out from across the room. I was instantly reminded of that voice you so often “hear” in literature and music. She had a deep, throaty, whiskey-and-cigarettes voice that said “I’ve been there.” The sound of that voice laughing, sexy and uninhibited, invited the listener to go there too.

The surprise came when she turned around. She was somewhere north of eighty, with snow white hair swept back into a haphazard chignon of sorts, fastened with a big barrette. Her glasses were set in unremarkable silver frames and her lips were colored a deep burgundy, neither of which did much to add color to her wrinkled face. She wore black trousers and a black silk blouse, the somber effect relieved only by a tumble of brightly colored necklaces cascading from her neck. She was shod in simple shoes, and carried a handbag that looked as if she could produce anything you needed from its depths.

In short, she looked like somebody’s grandmother, and probably was.

But there was that laugh! There was nothing grandmotherly about that. Unable to help myself, I went to her, curious to resolve my confusion with the whole Kathleen Turner-Helen Hayes thing. As I reached her side, she turned to look at me. Peering out from behind her aged face was the sexy young woman she had once been. Her lively eyes pierced me like shards of arctic blue ice twinkling in the sunlight, and I was smitten.