Fiction Attic

She had beautiful furniture and a number of fancy rugs. There was a bed, of course, with several well-worn quilts, a large comforter, and hundreds of pillows. On a cold day in Timisoara, it would lure you in and not let go. If the curtain was pulled back, you could lay there in luxury and warmth, and see all the way down Podul Decebal, over the river, and out past the bus stop where less fortunate people huddled together in ice and snow, waiting for a bus that might never arrive.

Mirceau Doviescue (1934-1992), The Girl From Arad

Raven Archives

photo courtesy of the Library of Congress

Just as I’m filling my mother’s glass with more wine, she tells me she doesn’t love my father.

Don’t say that, I tell her.

You don’t know me, she says.

She takes another drink of her wine and returns the glass to the table. We have just finished eating dinner. My husband is away and she says so is hers, but she does not mean it in the same way I do. My husband is fighting a war in Iraq and her husband is asleep on their twenty-year-old couch. It’s like we are living in two different worlds, my mother says. I wash the remains of our dinner into the sink and flick the switch for the disposal.

We have dinner together in silence, she says.

But my mother and father have always been silent with one another, even among words.

Behind my mother, on the buffet my husband and I bought together with our wedding money, there is a picture of my grandmother on Ellis Island. She is only eight years old in the photo, strapped to her uncle’s side like paste. I found the picture in my ninth grade history textbook, in a chapter called The American Dream, and despite the years I recognized her immediately. I showed my grandmother the book and she couldn’t stop touching the glossy pages.

Maybe you just don’t want to love him anymore, I say to my mother. She doesn’t answer. She picks her glasses up from the table and begins rubbing the lenses with her napkin. My napkin.

The day after my grandmother saw herself in my book she decided to take me to Ellis Island. You are a woman now, she said, and ready to know about struggle, the inevitabilities of life.

The American Dream, I said, remembering all I’d learned in school.

Genocide, she said, also remembering.

She had only been back there twice: once with my grandfather, and once with my mother. We walked through the building and said nothing to each other. Outside, between the East River and the Atlantic Ocean, between Brooklyn and Manhattan, between Manhattan and New Jersey, between New Jersey and Staten Island, between so much world and us, my grandmother said this: The worst was leaving my mother in Armenia. She kissed me and I knew we wouldn’t see each other again.

My mother puts her glasses back on. I should have known you wouldn’t understand, she says. She gets up from the table and walks into the bathroom. She turns the light on, stares into the mirror, looks back at me, and then closes the door. She does not come out for almost fifteen minutes.

When I first brought my husband home to meet my family, my grandmother didn’t like him because he said something about how Armenia and America are almost the same but with just a few letters in different places. She smiled to be polite and then left the table.

Come out of the bathroom, I say to my mother. It’s time for dessert. I can see her feet under my newly painted bathroom door, so clean and bright in its whiteness, just as I had wanted it to be. I walk back into the dining room and hear the handle turning and the bathroom door opening, and soon we are both back in our places at the table, eating dessert.

I’m leaving him, she says, her mouth full of chocolate cake. She has icing on her chin and I want to say something to her, but all I can do is hand her a napkin.

It’s not fair that they will take your husband like that, my grandmother said when I told her he was being sent to Iraq. There was a hummingbird feeding on sugar water outside her kitchen window.

Mom, I say and she stops thinking about whatever it is she is thinking about and turns to me. What did you feel when Grandma took you to Ellis Island? I have been wanting to ask her this for thirteen years.

Loneliness, she says. The tablecloth is worn and dirty and unsuitable for use anymore. And also anger and sadness. For her. What about hope, I say. I thought it was supposed to be a place of hope.

My mother leans back in her chair. I guess you know what everything is supposed to be, she says. She is moving the stem of her near-empty wine glass in circles on the tablecloth as though she is getting ready to drink the first sip and not the last.

It was not an easy life, my grandmother said on the ferry ride home from Ellis Island. I was never American.

You could have been, I said.

She looked at me, cold and foreign, and said: You think everything is so easy.

My mother gets up from the table and goes to the closet for her coat. I want to offer her something else but there is nothing left: the wine bottle is empty, our plates are bare and there are no words left for us to say. The night before my husband left, he asked me how to fight for things you’re not sure you believe in. We had just finished making love and his chest was still heaving under the sheet. I reached to the nightstand and turned the light out, because it was all I could think of doing.

I can’t stand the way he breathes, my mother says at the door, one more grievance to add to the list, as if she is still required to convince. He pushes the air out of his lungs so forcefully, like he’s disturbing it, making it do something it doesn’t want to do.

You have a choice, I say, because I still want to believe in something.

Kelly Lundgren Pietrucha holds a Masters in Fiction from Temple University, where she now teaches creative writing and literature. She also teach at Rutgers University and Camden County College in New Jersey. Her fiction has appeared in Pindeldyboz.

Fussy, a few things:

1. I want acknowledgment that I was the one who named you Fussy (full name, “Little Miss Fussybritches”) way back when in Arkansas. It’s turning out to be my only claim to fame.

2. Why beat up on poor old Garrison Keillor? I got a soft spot for the guy. Prairie Home Companion is generally a snooze but it sounds good in our sixties house on a Saturday afternoon when the light through the door into the backyard is just right and if you turn the radio down just low enough that you can’t hear it and you drink yourself into a whiskey stupor, and his Writer’s Almanac takes a beating (some poet really railed on him in Poetry magazine recently) but it’s interesting to know when writer’s birthdays are (I guess), and I haven’t read any of his books, but every now and then he publishes a little essay in The Nation exhalting democracy that will bring tears to your eyes. Yes, his lawsuit against that guy for dissing Prairie Home Companion is kind of lame, but sometimes you just gotta let the old guys stand outside and yell at the kids to get out of their yards.

3. David Koen was going to come stay in our house (which we haven’t sold yet) until all that New Orleans crap gets sorted out, but he can’t get Kittie to move to Houston.

4. Whatever happened to the Suite? I bet Kevin published it for a million dollars and didn’t give us our cut.

5. I’ll be your literary executor if you’ll be mine. I think I’d be an awesome literary executor. You would be too. We’d both be good ones.

6. Remember that song “It’s just you and me and we just disagree?” For awhile there was a guy who worked here named Dwayne Mason, which is what I thought the name of the singer of that song was, and I was always making little jokes when I ran into him in the elevator about how he just had that one hit back in the seventies and now look what happened to him. That sort of thing. Anyway, I found out the singer’s name was Dave Mason, not Dwayne, so no wonder that guy never had any idea what I was talking about.

7. Our weird little neighborhood has its own monthly newsletter called the Shepherd Park Plaza Pulse. It reminds you when heavy trash pickup is and includes a few daffynitions, points to ponder, that sort of thing. It also lists the residents who have birthdays that month. Janet was excited when we got our first issue and saw the birthday listings. “Wow, it’s a really young neighborhood. Nobody here is over 31 years old!” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that those numbers were the birthdates of the people, not their ages.

8. I’ll send you some pictures of our old house. Maybe somebody in San Francisco wants to buy it just for the novelty of owning a house in Houston. That’s why we bought it and we’ve never regretted it.

Love, Wade

photo courtesy of Jerry Lodriguss

Every time Donald saw a UFO, he got an erection. The problem, of course, was that UFO’s didn’t seem to be quite as common a phenomenon as they’d been in his youth. Dr. Collins smiled politely, in appreciation, and studied the holes in the tops of his loafers.

“So what you need then . . . ” Dr. Collins said, narrowing his eyes to keep up, to record all this for his wife, “what you need is some way of bringing the aliens back, yes?”

Donald didn’t have to look away to answer. There was never any eye contact during the examinations. Dr. Collins had given up on that years ago; it was why he’d had the large window cut into the room - to give his patients trees to study, birds, squirrels, life. Anything but the fourteen -thousand dollar chair in the corner, the tile around it splashed with iodine.

“Maybe if they could just do a flyby once a week or something,” Donald said, smiling. “Flash their lights a little for the wife, y’know?”

The wife. Dr. Collins filed that one away too, crossed the floor to the side counter, for the prescription tablet he had to keep locked in the drawer now. The reason for Donald’s visit, according to the chart he’d filled out in the waiting room, was prostate, which he’d spelled prostrate. It meant to throw oneself facedown on the ground in humility.

Without looking up from his tablet, Dr. Collins asked, “Is that all you need, then? Some more, um . . . close encounters?”

“You can arrange them?” Donald said, his voice rising, incredulous, his hands gripping the examination table.

Dr. Collins signed his name with a flourish, letting the s trail out longer than usual - a comet tail, he thought - and shrugged for Donald, said, “You still have to provide the candles, I guess.”

Donald laughed with him, and for a moment they were just two gentlemen from different generations, each raised well enough to know how to discuss delicate subject matter. The way Dr. Collins would tell it to his wife, he knew, would involve some of the things he should have said, about implants, maybe, about how the discs they were both talking about were essentially the same, it was just a matter of scale, of provenance: one came glittering down from the sky, the other across the counter of a pharmacy. But then Donald stepped down, took the prescription Dr. Collins was offering. He looked from it up to Dr. Collins, then out the window again.

“I assure you -” Dr. Collins started, trying not to smile.

Donald didn’t let him finish, interrupted not so much with words but by centering Dr. Collins in his old man eyes, his face still angled slightly away, as if he were embarrassed.

“I think you maybe misunderstand, Doc,” he said, still picking through his words in a way that Dr. Collins could tell there were a lot not being said. “I didn’t get the hard - I didn’t get excited about the UFO’s myself, see. No, no. They never were much but a bother to me, with what they did to the corn and all.”

Now he was handing the prescription back. Dr. Collins looked at it between them like it was from another planet, and from it up to Donald, just as alien now.

“Then . . . what?” he said, not sure if he should be ready to smile or not.

Donald shrugged, rubbed his rough chin with the side of his hand in a way that Dr. Collins couldn’t tell if it was the hand itching or the chin.”The wife, I mean, y’know?” he said finally, looking outside now, but up, too. Dr Collins looked with him. “Every time they buzzed our house back then, me, I’d go for the barn, to keep the horses from kicking their stall doors out. But the wife, she’d run out after them, see? Then come back - God - come back to the porch an hour or two later, corn silk in her hair, spider web trailing off thesleeves of her dress like a shawl I guess, her chest just rising and . . .”

Dr. Collins studied the sky long after Donald was gone, his new prescription not a prescription at all, but a referral, for his prostate, spelled without the r. That’s what he had really been there for. Dr. Collins didn’t tell his wife about that part of it, though. Instead, the next morning, Saturday, he found himself awake in the house earlier than usual. No coffee in the air, no cars outside. Just dawn, seeping in through the blinds over the kitchen window in beams that, for a moment, seemed to be feeling, scanning.

Dr. Collins - Stan on the weekends - walked through the beams to the front door, and out onto the different world of the porch, the automatic sprinklers flowing up into silvery mushrooms, the whole landscape of the neighborhood suddenly alien, so that, until his wife came gasping up from the street, her morning run complete, he knew he believed.

“Getting too old for this,” his wife said when she could, her hands made into fists around the knees of her sweatpants, her lungs trying to wring all the oxygen they could from Earth’s thin atmosphere, and Dr. Collins shook his head no about that. She wasn’t.

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of three novels: The Fast Red Road-A Plainsong, All the Beautiful Sinners, and The Bird is Gone: A Manifesto. His first book of stories, Bleed into Me, was recently published by University of Nebraska Press. His latest novel, Demon Song, is forthcoming from MacAdam/Cage. An Assistant Professor of English at Texas Tech University, Jones is really, really into Elvis.