Soul's Road: A Fiction Collection Read online

  Soul's Road

  Forward by Ryan Boudinot

  Edited by Cody T Luff

  Copyright © 2011

  Contents

  Forward by Ryan Boudinot

  Editor's Note by Cody T Luff

  John Schimmel. Chimera

  Natasha Oliver. Tax Collector

  Isla McKetta. Empirical Facts

  Karen K. Hugg. The Heap

  Phil Paddock. Confluence

  Sidney Williams. Telephone

  Deborah Grace Staley. That Girl

  Ann Keeling. The Singing of the Sun

  Peter McMinn. Sanctum

  Paula Altschuler. And You're Okay With That?

  Joseph Pierce. Some Kind of Apocalypse

  Icess Fernandez Rojas. Of Love, Death and Marriage: The Fabled Reputation of Don Armando Mejia

  Nathan Chang. On the Campaign Trail

  Contributor's Notes

  Forward

  Not long ago I was in the mountains with the editor of this anthology. It was one of those clear Spring afternoons when the North Cascades test one’s sense of awe, rising up so jaggedly new-- geologically-speaking--and yet so eternal. We were two puny little writers, primates, climbing up a hill. I’d been Cody’s teacher once, in Goddard College’s Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program, and now he was growing into a trusted friend. Cody was always the guy you wanted in a workshop—patient, generous with his encouragement to other students, master of arcane information (you really want him in the room when you’re discussing Viking lore in relation to Wells Tower’s “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned”), and one hell of a storyteller on top of it all. As we looked down on a little river and the valley beyond, I felt myself at a pivot point. I had one novel in the bag, set for publication, and the next project slowly trickling its way into a notebook. I had essays to write and a presentation to prepare for. Cody asked for some advice on his work, and whatever words I offered him felt not quite inconsequential but perhaps a bit worn-out, career counseling for a vocation that is part demonic possession, part cocktail party. But what Cody offered in return, just the fact of him listening as I expressed all the typical elations and doubts of writing life, seemed to me the best gift.

  Listen, we all want to get published. We all want to reach an audience. Where the wires get crossed, it seems to me, is when we use what we publish as bait for praise, for accolades, for the pat on the back. We all want to be loved. We all want someone to tell us that we’re the coolest person in the world. But if that’s the main reason why you’re writing, you’re bound to be disappointed. You’ll build up a resistance to praise. You’ll need higher and higher doses of it. And this will start affecting your aesthetic decisions. Pynchon seems to understand this. Maybe Salinger did, too.

  What’s the alternative, then? If we’re not to write for ourselves, if we shouldn’t seek after awards for the years-long toil we put into our novels, then why write them in the first place? I think the answer has something to do with community. If we provide our works in the spirit of unconditional giving, if we offer what we write to our readers out of love, without asking them any favors in return, then I believe the work will rise. Writing selflessly is an ideal I only occasionally achieve, but it’s an ideal I find worth pursuing. I’m a human being and I fail and fumble and doubt myself, but sometimes, fleetingly, the words come out as an expression of humility for belonging to this human race. Paradoxically, it’s in this state of feeling small and inconsequential when my work feels most alive to me.

  What the writers in this anthology all have in common is that in a very real sense, they’re writing for each other. I’ve had the pleasure of having a number of them in workshops and advising sessions, and marveled as their community has deepened and grown. They send one another their work, they keep in touch from various places around the globe, and their encouraging notes to one another pop up on Facebook several times a day. What’s beautiful about this, which you’ll see as you dip into their individual pieces, is that this supportive web of friendships exists while each writer is bunkered down in his or her own voice, his or her private set of obsessions. Because they’re so devoted to their singular voices, there’s very little competition among them. There’s room for everyone. And they’ve taken care to make room, dear reader, for you.

  RYAN BOUDINOT

  Editor's Note

  As a boy, I would walk with my parents every weekend. My father loved the wilderness and we would find ourselves deep in pine trees, along river banks or in high meadows listening to ravens and the wind coming down the mountains. One particular walk, I remember my father holding my mother’s hand most of the day. I remember this because when he held her hand, I could hold her other hand and we became a chain. We were far in the trees that day, far from the road and into places where all the footprints were ours and the deer were too busy eating summer growth to care as we made our way past.

  I remember the sound of our shoes along the river bank, the crack of twigs and pinecones and the scuff of sand. The wind was hard, pushing back on us as we picked our way along, hand in hand in hand. I don’t remember speaking, I am sure we did but in this memory I hear only the sounds of the river, the wind and the sound it made through the pines. It wasn’t a real trail we were on, not the kind other hikers had blazed. It was a road used by the deer, the elk and the coyotes that lived that deep in the hills. My father avoided those places where he could identify the tread of a hiking boot in the sand. He preferred unspoiled ground.

  We stopped in a little open space, populated with wild juniper and thick Russian thistle. Dad settled us down in a stand of grass he said deer had used for bedding the night before. My parents still holding hands. I remember watching the mountains gather storm clouds and the sound of thunder far away. It was raining upstream, a dark rain, lightning cutting little blue threads through the clouds.

  When it was time to head back, the river had swollen and our crossing was gone. Dad picked me up and onto his shoulders, took my mother’s hand and waded into the heavy current. The river nearly pulled him down, nearly pulled all of us down but at the worst of it, near the middle of the run off rapids, a duck with a string of ducklings flashed by. They were moving so quickly that I almost missed them, just a blur of feathers in a perfect line. Even with the current pressing into him, my father stopped and we watched them disappear down the river. I was terrified for them. I begged my mother to tell me they would be okay. She reached up, water foaming around her waist and smiled, taking my hand.

  “It’s their road. They know how to travel it,” she said and dad moved on, leading us to the far bank.

  So many years later and I understand now just how deeply my mother’s philosophy goes. Finding ourselves traveling down that road, the Soul’s Road, is a terrifying thing. We are drawn to that discovery, the discovery of self, of passion, of muse, of all the things that create the light and the dark inside those spaces our souls reside. This collection of stories is the exploration of that philosophy, my mother’s philosophy of the Soul’s Road. Thirteen writers telling thirteen unique stories of what it’s like to travel that road. Stories that explore what it is to feel love, to be man or woman or something beyond, of the loss of family, the loss of innocence, or the loss of society as a whole. From fiction to memoir to comedic irony, these stories travel that road with grace and power and most importantly, with truth.

  I am so proud to be a part of this project, to have seen each story grow. I am proud too at how deeply these stories sing to the reader, how they have become a whole, together. Soul’s Road is more than a simple collection of stories; it is a journey inside, through the heart, the mind, the body and, of course the soul itself.

/>   I will always remember that flash of feathers, the feeling of my mother’s hand on my own. I know now that the ducks had their road to travel and that we have ours. I invite you, dear reader, to walk a while on this road, to listen to these stories and find those truths that speak to your heart. We all have our road and I hope you’ll enjoy walking ours.

  CODY T LUFF

  JOHN SCHIMMEL

  Chimera

  MARY WAS IN AFRICA when she discovered her husband wanted to be a woman. This was right before she learned for certain she was pregnant with his child.

  The sex-change news came in the form of an actual, handwritten letter. Jim wrote that the anachronism was his way of giving her a piece of him to hold while she digested the news, but to her it seemed a passive-aggressive gut-punch that almost overshadowed the news itself.

  “I’ve felt for the longest time like something was wrong with me,” he typed when she finally reached him by Skype on the computer with the broken microphone. “I don’t have to feel that way anymore.”

  “Don’t you think when you proposed you should have mentioned you had this one little issue?” she typed. It was ten o’clock on a beautiful Ugandan morning, three lengthening days after she’d received the letter. She was sitting at a wooden table outside the tiny hospital, an extension cord running from an ancient generator powered by gasoline they syphoned from the Jeep that had carried her to the village. Kids of all ages played soccer nearby with the ball she’d thought to bring with her, a cool invention that harvested the energy of the kid’s kicks and stored it as electricity they could use at night to power a reading lamp. She watched as they laughed like they weren’t living under a curse until she was drawn back to the screen by Skype’s alien beep.

  “I hoped it was something I could cure,” he’d typed.

  “But you’ve spent your life feeling like a woman trapped in a man’s body?” she typed. “Isn’t that what they say?”

  “There’s a reason we all say that,” he typed.

  “Don’t you think I deserved to be let in on the secret?”

  “I was scared you wouldn’t understand.”

  “I don’t,” she typed.

  “I should have told you,” he typed. “My shrink told me to wait until I was sure.”

  An over-enthusiastic kick sent the ball winging past her head. It bounced off the hospital wall and ricocheted over her other shoulder. The kids acted like her flinch was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. Normally, she’d have joined in the laughter.

  “Your shrink told you to lie?” she typed.

  “I wasn’t lying.”

  “Every time I asked you how you were,” she said. “Every day. For a year. More than a year.”

  “That was a mistake,” he typed. “I’m sorry.”

  “I wouldn’t have come here if you’d told me not to,” she said.

  “Are you telling me not to do this?” he asked.

  “I thought you loved me,” she said.

  “I do love you,” said Jim.

  Mary, who’d convinced herself the letter was some kind of impossible prank, collapsed onto the keyboard and wept with such abandon that her drool short-circuited the village’s only working computer. The computer happened to belong to the flirtatious, preposterously sexy African doctor she might have contemplated revenge-fucking if she hadn’t asked him for a pregnancy test earlier that day.

  ***

  Mary was working at a ragged camp for children endangered by every cruelty man or nature could concoct, a hodgepodge of structures on land borrowed from the jungle. The only color came from the kids’ donated clothing and from the smiles they incredibly managed to wear. She refused to teach English, insisting instead on learning the local dialect, partly because she didn’t want to be a missionary of any sort and partly because her accent made the children laugh.

  The same heart that missed Jim with every beat had told Mary she might die if she didn’t embark upon this adventure. She had no more of an explanation for the urge than she’d had a way to resist it. Her presence there was nearly as unlikely as the possibility that she’d actually have had sex with the exquisite doctor. It made no sense at all that someone as happily married as she was could have felt such yearning to be surrounded by lions and elephants that were the least of what was lethal in Uganda, running a kitchen where she turned meager supplies into tiny feasts the kids who survived HIV and the soul-stealing war would never forget.

  Mary had grown up in Scottsdale, Arizona. Her family had no money but bequeathed to her a genetic cocktail that left her unreasonably attractive if not classically beautiful. She was not above using this to her advantage during her cooking school years when she wanted to crash the Arizona Biltmore’s pool. The hotel, a semi-Mayan temple to luxury built in 1929 and often wrongly attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright, had played host to the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Martha Raye, but even long-time guests had never in all those years seen anything quite like what they believed they saw in Mary. She was not that kind of a girl, though. The building’s serenity and elegance were the turn-ons. The part of her willing to don the French-cut camouflage so she could bask in the architecture was at war with the part who loathed the attention her red-headed radiance drew.

  There was plenty of collateral damage. In a single week, one zillionaire fell into the pool pretending not to notice her; another got pushed in trying too hard to get noticed. When Mary fell, it was for the guy who cleaned the pool. Muscular tanned, manly Jim. It was his hands. Everything he did with them he did with precision and delicacy, like he felt the things he touched were alive and the way he approached them mattered. The idea of being on the receiving end of that kept her up nights.

  Jim was a walking oxymoron, a lead guitarist with an aversion to groupies. The way he played made women swoon. He was expected to take advantage of that. Had, for a while. He’d been raised by a homophobic father, though, so as he came to terms with the female presence he carried inside him the rock-god/groupie rituals became increasingly uncomfortable.

  With Mary, it was something else altogether. She had a runner’s derriere, a dancer’s perfect posture and a face full of exotic angles Picasso would have loved cubing. None of that was what first moved Jim. He was a synesthete, except instead of letters or tones turning into colors in his mind, motion turned to music that flowed in a torrent down into his fingers and out through his guitar. When Mary moved, he heard her walk as a touch of Clapton mixed with a bit of Dylan’s you-know-it’s-happening-but-you-don’t-know-what-it-is poetry.

  Jim had been trained by the hotel management to never make eye contact with the guests. His job was to just do his job and leave. Mary was under no such compunctions, though it took her awhile to work up the nerve to approach him. Her heart pounded when she finally did - from nerves, she thought

  “I’m not a guest here,” she told him. “You won’t get into trouble if we talk.”

  “God, I hope that’s not true,” he said, surprising both of them.

  Mary could have made a fortune getting painted into Guess Jeans or Victoria’s underwear, but she had a passion for pastry and little proclivity to strut, party or travel. She loved the early morning kitchens she learned and then worked in as much for the silence they allowed her as for the confections she manufactured, though she loved neither as much as she loved her pool-sweeping guitarist.

  Jim moved his guitars and t-shirts into Mary’s minimalist one bedroom. He spent all of his chlorine-free hours running scales, writing almost-hits about longing and alienation, and having the sex she couldn’t get enough of and enabled for him by her complete lack of expectations. She’d never before been obsessed in that way, but there was something about those hands that erased time.

  Their life together might have been made complicated by her having to leave for work about the time he came home from a gig, except his recent inclination to bolt the moment a set was finished meant he didn’t have that many gigs, itself a potential complication while Mary became l
ocally famous. The rivalry was mitigated by their absolute devotion to one another. On the occasions when Jim did perform, Mary would nap so she could be present at the clubs where he could make other women nuts by focusing on her alone. Jim, for his part, made Mary sunrise breakfast and kissed her goodbye every day at the door, no matter how late he’d come in.

  Jim proposed marriage wearing his only suit to dinner at the Biltmore. Mary said yes with the inevitability of an airplane touching the runway, but in the morning she woke up with a palpitating heart and a panicked sense that something was trying to escape from her.

  “Wedding jitters,” Jim said, and they both went along with that. He needed an antidote to his terror that some instinct had alerted her to the inner torment he was enduring. He needn’t have worried. As far as she was concerned, the only thing she ever said with more certainty than, “Yes,” was when, a few months later, she said, “I do.”

  Mary made their wedding cake, of course. It had such a powerful effect on the guests that in a different era she might have been accused of witchcraft. Three people met their future spouses after dessert. Not all of them were single.

  Mary only nibbled. Jim assumed it was because she’d tasted her way through baking, frosting and decorating. But for Mary, her pounding literal heart was increasingly at odds with its swooning metaphoric twin. The happier she was, the more it rebelled.

  Mary saw anyone who might have a cure. Doctors gave her medications she abandoned when they only proved effective at making her sleepy or nauseous. Shrinks, no matter how hard they tried, could not get her to admit to a realization that her marriage had been an impetuous error in judgment. She went so far as to overpay the most renowned astrologer in Phoenix to create an opening in her famously overbooked calendar. Evelyn told her she was living exactly the life she was born to. It was like Jim was everything she’d ever wanted or needed, except he turned out to be wrapped around a core of Kryptonite.