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

TIME TRAVEL

I wrote the following story in first person, present tense, even though it happened nearly fifty years ago.  It’s supposed to give readers a more immediate perspective, as if they are actually right there.  Time travel, anyone?    

A FREE FOR ALL

The sleet is slanting at me out of the black night like white arrows.  The arrows explode on my windshield as I drive the curves of Old Yale Road at the base of Sumas Mountain, east of Abbotsford.  Allan, my date, holds his hand over his bleeding nose as I cautiously maneuver my ‘65 Nova through the slick slush that tries to slide me off the side of the road into the unknown bush or a hidden ravine.

“Take the driveway on the right after the next bend,” he mumbles, before he snorts up more blood.

“Yeah, next driveway,” snort three more drunks in the back seat.  Two of them are Villeneuve twins, the other is another friend of Allan’s.  And Allan is a Zomar twin.  Zomars and Villeneuves.  Double trouble doubled.  They are twenty, and I am eighteen.  It is January,1970 and we are leaving the scene before the cops arrive.

The next driveway angles up at forty-five degrees, but since it is gravel my snow tires find traction and at the top of the drive there is lots of room to park.  The guys spill out of the car, clutching their illicit bottles of booze.  We are all underage.

The Villeneuve house is an old wood farmhouse perched on the side of Sumas Mountain.  Big kitchen, big table, lots of wooden chairs.  Full of relatives jabbering in French.  I don’t understand a word.  The raucous clamour mostly ignores me.  The guys wash up at a utility sink by the back door, wiping blood from face and hands.  The mother shakes her head and waggles a finger at them, then pours herself a drink and makes popcorn for everybody.  Smiles and laughter from faces turning black and blue with eyes swelling shut.

It is 2:00 a.m., and I feel the need to return home, but am scared because I don’t know where I am in this countryside.  I am new to the Valley, raised in Surrey suburbs until last summer.  My family moved out here right after I graduated and Allan is the first friend I’ve met in a long and lonely winter far from all my city friends.  He likes to dance as much as I do, and he knows how to lead in a waltz or a polka.

I whisper to Allan that I have to go home, that I have a curfew, even though I don’t, and never have.  He finishes his rum and coke and we don our jackets to leave.  Nobody sees us out.  They are too inebriated to notice.  But the sleet has now changed to fat and fluffy snow, and blankets everything softly.  I shiver in my miniskirt and heels.  We brush the windows of the car clear.  Allan says he’ll drive, but I say no, it’s my car and I haven’t been drinking.  He argues, but I hold my ground, even though I don’t know him very well.  He isn’t any taller than I am, so I am not afraid.  I am determined on female equality.  He gives in.  Slowly I turn the car around and head back down the drive.  With Allan directing, I take the roads very carefully back to the Zomar home, almost downtown Abbotsford. 

His mother, Peggy, and his dad, Big Mike, are still up, just back from a dance at the Legion.  And Allan’s sister Sandy is there with her boyfriend, Dave.  She is the same age as I am.

Peggy wants to know how Allan got his black eye and swollen nose.

“We went to the dance up at Straighten Hall, and I had to back up the Villeneuves when a fight started,” he laughs.

It sounds so innocuous as he tells it, while I remember angry words inside the Quonset hut, benches pushed back from tables, fists starting to swing, glasses breaking and the melee spilling out the door into a gravel parking lot under a farm light.  And then the mad scramble to get into cars and leave when someone in the band yells that the cops have been called.  

“Is that where the sirens were headed, then?” his mother asks, seemingly unconcerned.  My mother’s response would be so much harsher.

“Probably, but we got out of there before they arrived.  The hall was pretty empty by then anyhow,” he tells her.

“Can I see your car keys?” Big Mike suddenly booms at me.

Unknowingly, I hand him my keys and he pockets them.  I’m shocked, but before I can object he says, “You’re not driving out to Mt. Lehman tonight.  The roads are slick.  You and Sandy can sleep upstairs.”

I am dwarfed by this man who looms over me with his barrel chest and deep voice.  But there is kindness in his smile, and I do not argue.

Sandy and I each use the bathroom and then head up the stairs to unheated rooms in the attic of this very old house.  As we climb the stairs, we hear the click of a lock on the door behind us.  “What’s happening?” I ask of Sandra.

“Dad’s locked us in,” she says, “So the boys can’t get to us and we won’t get pregnant.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I whisper in horror.

“No.  He always does that when there are boyfriends and girlfriends overnight.  My oldest brother had to get married when he got his girlfriend pregnant, so now Dad says not under his roof with five more kids to raise!”

Shivering, I snuggle under an old quilt on a lumpy bed, feeling oddly safe in spite of the night’s events.  But I do wonder how I’m going to explain any of this tomorrow, as I watch the snow feather down outside the window, until my eyelids finally droop.

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By Lisa A. Hatton

BE YOURSELF

Sometimes I need a reminder just to be myself.

INJUNCTION OF THE SOUL

Let not the whining wind

Of unhappy people

Extinguish your flame

Let not the temper

Of angry hearts

Spark an anger in you

Let not the fear

Of fearful minds

Weaken your own resolve

Let not blinded souls

Hide you in their shadow

Let not the drudgery

Of daily tasks

Make you forget to dream

Let not another’s answer

Keep you from questing your own

Let not the loveless

Prevent you from loving

Stand alone if you must

The glorious being that you are.

by Lisa A. Hatton

CHARACTER IN THE MAKING

The following piece of writing is not a story, but just a bit of character development.  I haven’t done anything else with it, but may still use it for a longer story at a later date.

HE HAUNTED THE NIGHT

He haunted the night in search of excitement like a raccoon in search of food for survival.  Six feet tall and husky, with a baseball cap on his head and a jacket too light for the cold, and his hands shoved into his pockets to keep them warm, he sauntered through the downtown core of Langley City each night after dark.  Thoughts and ideas, hopes and fears churned too fast in his head to let him stay inside.  He needed his outside world to match the one inside him.  There was a deep craving inside commanding him to find the fast, furious, eddying ferment of someone else’s frustration.

Each night he followed the same trail.  First a fast food outlet for sustenance.  Then a pub to see if someone he knew would buy him a beer.  Then the Legion for the same reason.  Or maybe he could score some cash by offering to sell somebody something.  Used CDs.  Battery chargers.  A used ebike he knew someone wanted to sell.  He’d take a cut.  Unable to sit still, his prowl was never ending.

He walked the streets and stalked the alleys, looking into doorways and peering through beckoning windows.  He needed the excitement of danger, distress or disaster, but not to be the cause of it.  Yearning to witness the eye of the storm, he scoured the town like the raccoon scenting garbage to feed on.  Anything would do.  A cash grab at the convenience store.  Someone stealing a car.  A break and enter.  A beating.  A rape.  Anything to match the turmoil inside him.

When the night betrayed him with only silence, he’d slink home at dawn and sleep and hide through the day, just like the raccoon in waiting.

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By Lisa A. Hatton

STAND DOWN

Some battles never actually happen.  The following tale speaks for itself.  (I think I wrote this around 2009 or 2010, before my previous computer died.  Thank goodness I still had my printout.)

TOUGH OLD FARTS

            Waiting for my husband at the pub, I sat at a table with my club soda and lime, playing trivia with three keyboards, one using my name and two using my husbands’.  I wasn’t scoring very many points as I seldom guessed the correct answer.  The next question appeared on the large screen TV, asking in which war was the battle of Ap Bac.

            “Two,” said the man at the table next to me.  “The answer is number two, Vietnam.  I was there,” he said.

            I punched the number ‘two’ on my keyboard, and it was the correct answer, worth one thousand points.  Then came a break in the game.

            “Are you American?” I asked.

            “No.  I’m from here.  I went over with the Americans as a volunteer.  You could do that back then,” he said, as the waitress brought four glasses of beer he’d ordered.  “Hope my friend remembers we were meeting here,” he said.

            “My son’s a major in the army,” I said.

            “Canadian or American?” he asked.

            “Canadian.”

            “Has he been deployed out of country?” he wanted to know.

            “Yes.  Bosnia and Afghanistan.”

            He solemnly nodded his head that sported precisely trimmed silver hair and a goatee on his chin.  “It’s tough in Afghanistan,” he said.  And then his friend arrived.

            They started drinking their two beers each.  The friend began telling the soldier how angry he was with his wife because she hadn’t saved her gas receipts for their income tax return.  He ranted through his first beer and started slowing down somewhat over the second.  They then discussed the folly of living with a woman.  The next topic was how a mutual friend was being taken to the cleaners getting his divorce.

            The waitress returned and they each ordered another two glasses of beer.  The conversation turned briefly to gardening and then meandered back to the subject of their wives.

            “I’ve been married over almost forty years,” said the soldier.  “It’s not so bad.  At least Barbara keeps the paperwork straight.”

            The friend belched, and said, “I guess I could have done worse.  At least she does make sure the bills get paid.”  Then his cell phone rang and he answered after checking the number calling and telling the soldier it was his wife.

            “I’m just having a drink with Mark at the Dodger.  I’ll be home in half an hour, Sweetheart,” he told her, with a smile.

            Mellowed by their four beers each, they paid their bill and on their way out I heard the friend say to the soldier, “I sure hope she enjoys the vacation I’m taking her on next month.”

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By Lisa A. Hatton