A SAD ENDING

The following story was published in 2014 by Polar Expressions in the anthology “That Golden Summer”.

The Memory Of White Wine

            I haven’t had white wine since that night.  The sight of it, the scent of it, the taste of it are unbearable.  It’s the memory of that night, you see.

            It was 1984 and I was thirty-three years old.  That night ended my naiveté and my belief in impossible miracles.

            Dennis handed me a glass of white wine.  “What happened?” he asked, as he sat on a stool in front of me in our living room.

            So I told him.  “I’ve been unfaithful to you.  I want a divorce,” I said, and then gulped the wine.

            As he sat in silence, I poured myself more wine.

            “You were supposed to be working with David, not sleeping with him,” he said, looking at me with tragic eyes.

            I drank more wine.

            “But you gave me to him, Den.  You told me to go away with him to work, that you’d be home with our children.”

            “You’re right.  I did,” he said, with sagging shoulders.  “I never thought we would end this way, though.”

            “What do you mean?  That you had the right to cheat whenever you wanted but I couldn’t?” I asked softly, guzzling my wine and pouring more.

            “But that’s different,” he said.  “You’re not another man.  You can’t give me what I want, you don’t have the right body.  But you’re not gay, so I can satisfy you.  You don’t need another man.”

            The tears were streaming down his face.  If I left, both of us would have to accept the truth of our own desires.  I drank more wine.

            “But, Den, you know you don’t want to make love to me.  It’s not what you want for you.  I’m your cover in a homophobic world.  I want more than that for myself.  And you want more, too,” I said, as my own tears dripped into my wine.

            Our pain was naked.  There would be no understanding from others for either one of us.  The world still judged too harshly those not yet explained by science.  He would be shunned for being homosexual.  And I would be ostracized for having been married to him.  I swigged more wine.

            We understood each other’s pain.  After eleven years of marriage, we finally knew that our love and compassion for each other weren’t enough to keep us together, even for our children.  We’d both be forced out of the closet.

            I finished the bottle of wine.  For the first time I was the one who was drunk.  He picked me up and carried me to our bed for the last time.

            I haven’t had white wine since.

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By Lisa A. Hatton

U-turn In My Thinking

Life doesn’t always comply with the assumptions we’ve made.

A CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVE

With our two year old son fast asleep in his own room on a cold and rainy New Year’s Eve, Dennis and I were young and lustful in front of the roaring fire in our living room.  Stretched out on the new carpet, undressing each other to loud music on our stereo, we were unconcerned about privacy.  Our suite in the fourplex was on the top floor on one side, and there were no buildings across the street.  Lovemaking progressed, hot and heavy, until the loud rapping on the living room patio door.  Through the sheer curtain, we saw the outline of a male body on the other side of the window.  I screamed, grabbed my clothes and ran for the bedroom as Dennis pulled up his pants and yanked the curtain aside.

The intruder was the next door neighbour, Henry, who had climbed over the railing, looking for another couple to help ring in the New Year.  He and his wife, Sharon, were middle aged and, like us, new to the area and lonely.  Dennis invited them over to join us in the count-down to midnight.  Because they liked to drink, and so did Den, that was the first of several drunken evenings.

By then, in 1978, Henry and Sharon had been married twenty years but had no children.  He was slim and about five feet, ten inches tall.  She was a little stockier, with long blond hair, and about the same height.  He worked in construction and she worked in an office.  I never did learn much more about them or their background.

Den and I rented both suites, up and down, on the west side of the building in Surrey.  We lived in the upstairs three bedroom suite, while using the downstairs suite as office space for our contract flooring business.  Henry and Sharon had only the upstairs suite on the other side of the building.  Travel between our place and theirs meant traversing down and then up two very long staircases.  Henry had taken a shortcut New Year’s Eve, over the balcony railings, which I strongly discouraged as a continued practice.

Except that Den and Sharon and Henry liked alcohol far more than I did, there wasn’t much else a young couple in their twenties, with one child, had in common with an older couple in their forties who were childless.  Interaction with them became infrequent.  Den and I both had family living further out the valley, and I was in no way desperate for drinking companions.   I had enough to contend with, chasing a two year old and helping with our business.  I just sort of ignored their existence until that one day when I slammed up against my own misconceptions.

It was late on a Sunday afternoon.  We had just returned from visiting family for the weekend.  We were tired and glad to be home.  Our son was still sleeping so we placed him on his bed and continued unpacking.  In the quiet of our home we became very aware of the loud banging next door.  We thought maybe they were doing some repair work.  The banging continued and then came the screaming.  We heard loud, anguished, female screams.  Den and I froze and looked at each other.

“Oh my God!  What do we do?  He’s beating her!”  I was terrified of the violence I saw in my head.

“I’ll see what’s up,” Den said, as he rushed down our stairs, out the door and over to their door.  I could still hear her screams.

Shortly, Den rushed back into our place and back up the stairs.  “They won’t answer their door and it’s locked!” he panted, as he made for the patio door in the living room.  He slid open the door, climbed over the railing, around the wooden partition between our units, and over the railing on their patio.  And I still heard heavy banging and screaming.

Then suddenly there was silence.  Den poked his head around the partition and told me to call an ambulance.  By then, our son was awake and wanting to follow his Daddy.  I retrieved our son, locked the patio door and called for an ambulance, wrought with concern for Sharon, my victimized neighbour.

From my living room, I first saw an ambulance arrive, and later a police car.  Then I changed and fed our son, and made dinner to eat when Dennis returned.  I needed to stay busy.  An hour later I heard Dennis enter down below and slowly climb our stairs.  He opened and closed the safety gate at the top while I silently watched.  Our son grinned from his highchair and threw his sippy cup on the carpet at his Daddy’s feet.

“Is she all right?” I asked.  “How badly injured was she?”

Den retrieved the sippy cup and handed it to our son, then looked at me over his glasses with a lopsided smile.  “Sharon wasn’t hurt.  She was on top of Henry pounding him with a pot when I got in their sliding door.  I grabbed the pot from her and she settled down, but there was blood all over Henry’s face and on the floor.”

“Sharon was beating up Henry?” I repeated, slow to turn my thinking in the opposite direction.

“Yeah.  I think he has a broken nose.  And he’ll have a couple of black eyes for sure.  He went in the ambulance and she was taken away in the cop car.”

“Oh,” I said, dumbfounded, as Dennis sat down at the table and started spooning out some casserole to eat.

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By Lisa A. Hatton

NAME THE GENRE

The following short story was published by Polar Expressions in the anthology “Setting The Scene” in 2012.  I leave it to the reader to decide its genre.

 

THE END

            I’ve reached the end of my days in this lifetime.  The goals that were set for me to accomplish have been realized and I have no further need of this physical body in this space-time continuum, and especially since the body was badly damaged 25 years ago.  How unfortunate that mobility in this 3-dimensional plane of expression had been so restricted.  But if a near fatal car accident was the most proficient manner in which a switch of souls could be executed without detection by the body’s nearest and dearest, then so be it.  The young female was released from a lifetime of obstacles she would not have overcome and I was afforded the opportunity of furthering the planned school of thought to be made manifest in this reality.

            Progress was initially impeded by my having to take control of the body and learn to think and communicate in a word pattern called English.  Preliminary lack of accumulated memory was attributed to the fractured skull without undue questioning.  However, after passage of one year’s time, I found it possible to channel enough of her stored memory from the oversoul and was consequently able to function more assuredly as her previous personality, although I believe her friends and relatives sensed that she had become a different person.  But it was not unreasonable to assume that suddenly handicapped people do become different.  So again, her contemporaries were not any the wiser.

            After gaining as much physical control of the body as possible, it then became paramount to free the personality from the stranglehold of an inappropriate marriage.  This was imperative to achieve soul-infused personality status and to gain control of the two offspring.  Both of those personalities required a more peaceful environment in order for them to learn to respond reliably to mental impression from planetary hierarchy.

            Both offspring can now be easily impressed by the esoteric side of reality and are fully able to communicate telepathically with other entities, although they are not always conscious of doing so.  I am of the belief their certitude could be assured by the removal of their mother from physical expression in this body.  Their confrontation with the assumed death of this loved one would precipitate their expansion of consciousness in order for them to continue contact with their “Mother”.  They would then be able to differentiate between their own thoughts and the thoughts of others.  This would be the patterned evolution desired for the offspring during their current incarnations.

            Consequently, the demise of this body is imminent.  The assigned mission of this incarnation has been completed.  I have, indeed, reached the end of my days.

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By Lisa A. Hatton