(First published in 2015)

It’s three feet farther to hell for people who jump off Torqwamni Bridge. The City of Charleston has recently installed an eighteen-inch extension to the span’s rail. In my opinion, the city has wasted its money. The Torqwamni goes up to a fatal height almost immediately, and at its middle it stands better than ten stories above the churning and hungry Port Washington Narrows. Only Serious People go over that bridge; less than serious types, those who need just a little attention to feel better inside, never go to Torqwamni Bridge to perform on the off-chance that they might fall off. No, I don’t see a foot-and-a-half—in both directions—getting in the way of a well prepared and dedicated serious person.

Such ran through my mind as I drove Gram to yet another doctor’s appointment. At the age of twenty, I was getting awfully familiar with doctors’ clinics and the technologies designed to prevent, for as long as possible, what I had once heard described as an “end of life event.” Nobody speaks frankly about anything at doctors’ clinics after the insurance is settled. In a decrepit and mournful sort of way, visiting any of Gram’s phalanx of medicos was like going to Neverland; but instead of recapturing the spirit of youth, we found Tinkerbell in bifocals and Peter Pan attached to a colostomy bag.

It was a typical Pacific Northwest March morning. The bipolar weather changed its mood every ten minutes or so. Wind driven slaps of rain, hail, and perhaps, locusts, would suddenly stop and give over to sunshine so cheery that I was certain that it had to be up to something. Sure enough, the lovely light soon faltered and the whole evil process began again from the top.

“Reena?” Gram said, not at all sounding like the mindless old woman who had earlier killed a half hour whining like a two-year-old because she couldn’t find the hideous “rose” blouse she that she already had on.

“Hmmm?” At that time I was struggling with the wind as to hold my lane on the bridge.

“Tell me we’re goin to VIP’s for bloody Marys; tell me we’re goin for butts—Tell me anything but Group Death.”

“I thought you were dead,” danced on the tip of my tongue. But as I looked over at Gram, I saw the woman I had known and loved for life. It broke my heart knowing that her soul was still in there; trapped like a miner given up for dead; unrescuable; a flickering flame eating the last of the oxygen.

Gram and my late Grandpa Henry had raised me after my mother, their daughter, had abandoned me in my infancy. They were in their late middle-years at the time, and both were hard working sorts who never let the drudgery of their menial jobs get in the way of having fun. This fun included booze. So what? They had loved me and had gone out of their way to see to my happiness.

Not long after Grandpa Henry had died from a mercifully swift heart attack, Gram had suffered the first in a series of small strokes. For five snarly and prideful years, Gram had fought back while keeping her dignity. Even though death had meant to take her one piece at a time, Gram had kept her sense of humor. I remember the morning when Gram had to weigh herself to see if she had accrued fluid due to her failing kidneys. “Christ, I’m getting fat,” she had mumbled through a Winston. Upon seeing that she had lost three pounds, Gram winked and said: “Probably cancer.”

But even the best of us have only so much good dying in our souls. And on the afternoon Gram had to endure another stroke that wouldn’t kill her, by itself, she knew that the game was up. “Reena, honey,” Gram had whispered as the ambulance took its customary route to our house across the street from the Ivy Green Cemetery, “I’m so sorry about this…There’s still time…Time to get the Demerol…”

Dear God, how it used to be: The laughter; the living and dying for the Seattle Mariners; the childlike looking forward to payday; ashtrays which resembled beaver dams; last night loganberry flip glasses left on the “occasional” table; watching Thin Man marathons on TCM over popcorn. Those, and more, yes, were the backdrop of my happy childhood. But, at twenty, the roles of adult and child had been swapped around. This was a poor trade because I couldn’t provide Gram with happy memories; that part of her life was over. Gram wasn’t going to get better because the ravages of time and choice had ensured that there was no level of better for Gram to get back to. Still, within it all, I had learned something of value: The worst universe possible is a godless void in which a sentient chemical accident know as humankind is the sole inhabitant. Yet here, even here, especially here, if an otherwise meaningless being does right by a fellow meaningless being minus the promise of heaven or the threat of hell, as my grandparents had done for me, life has a meaning, and it should be wailed for upon its diminishing, more so than upon its passing.

I had time to think all this because whatever appropriately snarky remark I had shot back at Gram after her “Group Death” comment had landed on a mind that changed even more rapidly than the weather.

“Hmmm?” Gram replied vacantly, very much sounding like the mindless old woman who had whined about the rose blouse.

“Nothing…Nothing at all.”

How I hate doctors’ clinics: decor that is offensive because it is designed to be the opposite; pushcart muzak around only to stave off silence; fellow wranglers tending their charges; Everest College-types behind counters secretly texting their boy friends. But, mostly, its the walkers I hate most. There’s something about a cane that allows its user to retain his or her independence; walkers are cribs on wheels. You can smack someone with your cane if that someone offends you. All you can do in a walker is shuffle forward, head down, as though you now weigh more on Earth than you would on Jupiter.

Sometime during my brief life, civility, actual and feigned, has been, as Gram would’ve said, before the loss of her mind, “shitcanned.” Once upon a time strangers used to speak to other strangers by formal address until they were given permission to do otherwise. Perhaps I’m proof that even a twenty-year-old girl can have a lot of humbugging fogy in her; still, there’s nothing more irritating than have someone unknown to you call you by your first name as though you are a dog or a toddler.

“Has Elizabeth fasted?” The Everest College-type asked me upon check-in.

“How should I know what Elizabeth is up to?” I said cheerfully. “She could be off waxing her tramp-stamp, for all I know. Mrs. Allison, Mrs. Elsbeth Allison has fasted.”

Surprise! My little remark pissed the Everest College-type off something awful. Unless I was horribly mistaken, the evil light that shone through her previously bored expression communicated her desire to watch me starve slowly in a sealed room.

“Have a seat,” the E.C.-type said through clenched teeth. “The nurse will be with you.”

“Why thank you, um, Misty,” I said after I made a big show of reading her name badge. “I’m sure it won’t take too long for that to happen—even though it will give you and I less time together.”

Dante would lose his mind if he could see that humankind hasn’t taken The Inferno as a cautionary tale, but has used it as a blueprint from which to devise smaller hells on Earth.

Call this an overreaction, if you must, but I have spied concentric circles of increasing misery inside every doctors’ clinic I’ve ever been to. The first circle has to be the waiting room; which is guarded (as you already know) disinterested E.C.-types who wear pastel scrubs and too much makeup. The second circle involves a mute tech who points at an old timey scale better suited for weighing livestock than humorous human beings. The Nurse (who is likely the brains of the outfit) inhabits the third circle. Every The Nurse is an intimidating and omniscient person who has learned her (never his) skills from repeated watchings of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and/or Godzilla.

The fourth circle is excruciating. This si where you cool your heels in a cruddy cubicle waiting for the doctor to come talk at you as if you have the IQ of a pineapple. Old Gram (the person whom I knew and loved, not her insufficient doppleganger) used to go to special pains to make herself unendurable for the doctor whenever she felt she had waited too long: “There’s dustbunnies ‘neath that table—Hope y’all wipe better than that.” That sort of unendurable.

I heard muffled chatter, hard by. I imagined the doctor reading (probably for the first time) the results of Gram’s last blood draw (she’d have another on the way out; think circle five). I imagined him being able to give names to each of her few remaining red cells as though they were a box of kittens. I imagined nothing good. Instead, I loaded my mind with unendurable remarks enough for two.

Dr. Zale made his entrance. Though I had been taking Gram to see this particular physician for over a year, I always got the impression that every time Dr. Zale saw Gram was like the first time. To be fair, Gram 2.0 has never been all that memorable. If she and Dr. Zale had known each other a bit longer, as little as three or four months, he would have brought a whip and a chair.

Dr. Zale, however, remembered me. Not by name, but by sight. It did my heart good to have his confident I Am The Scientist, You Are The Zombie demeanor slink off and get replaced with an “Oh, no, not her again,” expression—which, to be frank, I get a lot of.

He smiled weakly. “How are we, this morning?”

“I suppose that depends on what the test results have to say,” I said.

Dr. Zale shrugged and held his weak smile and went over to where Gram was seated, but he never took his eyes off Yours Truly. “How are you today, Mrs. Allison?” he asked, still looking me in the eye.

For our miserable year or so together, I had been struggling to develop an actual opinion about Dr. Zale. His use of Gram as a prop to deliver sarcasm my way ended the struggle.

Something along the line of “Listen, fuckstick, eyes on to whom you’re speaking,” had entered my mouth like a shell slammed into the chamber of a shotgun. And I would have said it too, if a voice hadn’t called out from below the insurmountable slag that over-topped it.

“It’s three feet further to hell for folks who’d jump off the bridge, Dr. Zale,” Gram said. “On the drive over this mornin’, I noticed that the dumbass city put an extension on the Torqwamni’s rail.”

I could actually feel my eyes dilate, and a weird tingling erupted in both my hands and thighs. I sat down heavily on a nearby stool, and I wondered if I was not too young to suffer a stroke of my own.

Dr. Zale became nonplussed; he had never heard Gram speak before, save for yes and no and general gibberish.

Gram looked at me. Though her pallor remained that of old paper, the lightning blue I had always remembered being in her eyes was fully charged. A wicked, lovely, vicious, warm grin had broken out in her face. “We think a lot alike, don’t we Reena baby?”

“Ye-yes, Gram, we sure do,” I replied. I wanted that moment to last forever. But, already, the befuddled fog again gathered between reality and the survivor.

(Published by Literally Stories UK in 2021)

Gram and I used to watch Jeopardy together almost every weeknight. Our little “must see” TV date began at the dawn of my memory and ended with Gram’s death shortly after my twenty-second birthday; it’s already ten years gone by.

Of course (as Gram still says somewhere in my heart), we weren’t “married to the goddam thing.” Certainly not. When I got older I’d occasionally “get a life,” and If the Mariners or Seahawks were on that night, that’s where the TV would be, Gram and Grandpa Henry both cussing and cheering, she, loopy off loganberry flips, him and his endless cases of Lucky lager stacked in the garage (which he cut with V-8 and tabasco), both spreading cigarette ashes everywhere, all of us pretending not to notice our little terri-poo Figaro filching potato chips straight out of the bag, despite what the vet had said about it.

Seems to me that the best times in life aren’t the planned big moments, like a wedding or a graduation. Those events require a degree of suffering to give them value, and they seldom yield a satisfactory return on the investment. Maybe everything is as good as it gets when everybody’s all happily Chatty-Cathy and offering vacant observations about nothing at the same time and nobody says stupid shit like “let’s appreciate the moment.”

We weren’t sentimental people. Some folks get awkward about happiness; they cream and cherry-top its passing with goo and imprecise adjectives. Seems to me a very hard way to live your life, this–always with the one teary eye on the rearview mirror, this–reaching back and back and back and coming up with hands filled with empty. That was a big saying of Gram’s, hands filled with empty.

Grandpa Henry died when I was seventeen; chip sneak Figaro eventually fell off a little later. Gram never did say anything about the somehow still (albeit much more slowly) dwindling cases of Lucky out in the garage (she disliked the taste of beer), but she approved when I suddenly acquired a taste for V-8. “Glad to see that drinkin’ vegetables makes you good company, Rena.”

Even when I attended the nearby Community College I still got home in time for Jeopardy, four times in five. Sometimes my smart-ass best pal Wren would come by and truly astound Gram with her vast store of stultifyingly unnecessary knowledge–for despite Gram’s profound common sense and street smarts, and despite the fact she watched Jeopardy for something close to a quarter century, she was as rotten at the game as the dimmest celebrity contestant. But, mostly, we watched together, alone; loganberry flips and ashes.

Gram’s first stroke cut down on the ashes; her second eliminated them. Between the second and the whopper third stroke that landed her at the Torqwamni County Convalescent Center (“T-3C”) for keeps, I’d make her flips for her in the kitchen, just adding a splash of wine to the 7-Up at the end, for taste and old time’s sake.

Although her speech wasn’t affected until the third “event” (I noticed that doctors are loath to call strokes by name), some of Gram’s mentality was scrambled by the second stroke and she’d make slightly to wildly off-target statements or ask bizarre questions, which would just hang there and cause her frustration. But I found a way to burn them to nothing the way the atmosphere vaporizes most meteors before they can land and cause harm.

“Rena, I didn’t know Argentina was in Mars.”

“The Brazillians wouldn’t have it any other way, Gram.”

The last three weeks of our long standing Jeopardy date was held at the T3C. Loganberry flips had gone to ashes. So had Gram’s ability to speak. But her mind was still online enough to communicate through her eyes.

Two days before she slipped off into a mercifully short lasting morphine-drip coma, both of us exquisitely aware that she wouldn’t be getting better because there was nothing left of her that could be improved, I finally gave voice to an open secret that had been known to all, and I suspect even to larcenous Figaro, for years and years. But as it was our way, I came up on it from the side.

“Gram,” I said, smiling salaciously, first making eye contact with her, then looking directly at Alex Trebek on the TV mounted above and beyond her bed, and back at her again–doing it twice so she’d get my drift. “Did Grandpa ever suspect the two of you?”

She gazed at me a long time and winked.

(First published by Literally Stories UK, ages ago)

And the name of the star is called Wormwood…

–Revelation 8:11

Pus star Wormwood glowered ceaselessly in the cigarette sky. Although it was only midday,

Wormwood pulled long shadows from the sour crabapple trees, whose fruit not even the crows will eat. Embittered little trees, Scotch broom, feral blackberries and scrub grass are all that grow in the brief ridges and ravines and knolls that serve as the community “backyard” throughout the valley. During wildfire season the broom pods burst and the smoky wind disperses their dusty spore. During wildfire season it’s easy to believe in hell.

At sixteen, Claire has spent her entire life at one of the sturdy white farmhouses so dominant in the valley. Unless you count the people who grow weed under artificial Wormwoods in their attics and basements, there isn’t a single farmer in the valley, yet everybody lives in a farmhouse nonetheless. Local farming began its long dwindle into obsolescence when the interstate arrived in the 1960s; money could be made easier elsewhere then brought home. Times change.

Still, the few hundred residents of the valley and the nearby village are reluctant to let go of the past. This is mainly due to the influence of the Evangelical Christian Church on the citizenry. Currently, Pastor Mentor Trout III guides the flock, as had his father and grandfather before him. Despite his haughty name, the modern day Trout is a slight and bespectacled comb-over of a man married to a silly tanning-booth addict with cornbread colored skin.

Claire’s home is by far the most secluded in the valley. There isn’t a neighbor within a mile in any direction. Her father owns ninety acres of rough, topsy-turvy land that has never been suitable for farming and is unfit for anything other than allowing him to truthfully state “I own ninety acres of land.” Any image sent home by the Mars Rovers resembles any one of several “bald spots” in her father’s land–where not even the Scotch broom can take root. For the record the land had been sold to Claire’s great grandfather by the original Pastor Mentor Trout.

Yet it seems if you must live someplace long enough you will find something special about it, no matter how useless it may be otherwise. Sudden high banks of clay terminating table top-flat stretches of a couple hundred yards or more make Claire’s father’s land an excellent shooting range. That’s Father’s Big Dream: “When I retire I’m gonna sell her for a shooting range.” He used to say that to Mom who in turn gently scoffed at the notion because he had said it just to get her to gently scoff at the notion. Father no longer says anything to Mom because she died eighteen months back from ovarian cancer. And Claire would be a poor substitute for her mother’s part for she has come to hate her father.

Yesterday, Claire exited the farmhouse and walked purposefully under Wormwood carrying a metal briefcase in one hand and a large plaster statue of Jesus Christ in the other. Upon arriving at a spot three-hundred yards behind the house, where, in happier times, she and her father often blasted various objects into smithereens, Claire lay the statue on a stump and walked to a small wood table, about a hundred feet from the stump. She lay the case on the table, turned to face the image of Christ she had purchased online because the Church frowned on anything that smacked of idolatry.

Claire is five-five, blonde and blue-eyed. She used to be a skinny tomboy, but since her mother’s death she has “bloomed” as far as the common standards of sexual attractiveness go; let’s just say she has nothing where nothing is best and plenty where she ought, and let it go at that, save for she’s the kind of girl who turns boys into fools and men into creeps.

Claire has a peculiar voice. It’s somewhat high and small, yet there’s a comely raspy hitch to be found in it. Her voice began to sound that way after a routine tonsillectomy when she was twelve, and has changed little since. Although she speaks the modern tongue in which phrases that could be taken wrong are seemingly vocally italicized–as to lay a distance between the speaker and the potentially objectionable idea spoken–and partakes in the annoying habit of saying “Nice” and “Right” and “Okay” when she should be silently listening, she has not only her own distinct sound, but has also developed her own private idiom to match it.

She smiled at the statue of Christ and began to sing: “‘In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,’ Know that one, Jesus? My father does. It’s his dumbass pin for everything. Computer, ATM, VISA, library card, and this lockbox. In fact 1492 showed up three times when I placed my order in for you. I suppose there was a chance he would have been here for your delivery, but I knew, we as in you and I knew that wouldn’t happen.” She opened the lid and extracted a .38 Colt snub-nosed revolver, which she set carefully on the table. “There’s no such thing as an unloaded gun,” she said as she walked toward the statue. “You’re not supposed to leave one lying around on a table, either, but I think it will be okay this time.”

Patio chairs have always had a way of migrating to the little shooting range, even when Claire’s tidy mother had been alive. Claire made a half-assed effort to dust one off, shrugged “oh well,” carried it over to the stump and sat down in front of the representation of the Savior.

“Chipped,” she growled upon seeing a ding in the foot of the image. “Guess that what’s sixteen bucks will getcha anymore.”

She looked away and glanced briefly at Wormwood then back at Jesus. “What’s that fucking thing about, Jesus?” Claire asked, pointing at the pus star. “It took over the sun’s job before Mama died and hasn’t gone away since. Only I know the difference. Yet everything that has happened since tells of it.”

“Know what a dum-dum round is, Jesus? I bet the Romans would have used them if they had them. There’s one in the gun on the table. Just one. That leaves five empty chambers. Hollow point bullets are as illegal as marrying your sister in this state…if you had a sister, that is…But we got a dum-dum. And with it you or I will be going away and taking that evil black star with us. Only you or I will be here in a couple of minutes. Wormwood will be finished no matter what.”

Claire rose and strode back to the table. She reached for the weapon but hesitated. “It hardly seems fair to do this before explaining the whole thing to you,” she said, her rasp seemed to have the power to carry throughout the valley. “You see it all began with all that goddam praying that a-hole Trout and his weird looking wife arranged for Mama. The fuckers convinced her that a prayer circle could do more for her than one more round of chemo. Mama was probably already as good as dead at the time, but who’s to say. Not God, sure as fuck not Trout. I don’t recall seeing you comin round, either.”

Her blue gaze measured the statue, she smiled and continued. “Mama and Daddy–when he was ‘Daddy’–were so good to me. I remember loving it here…never wanting to go. Then I got tits and a butt after Mama died…I catch him leering at me when he thinks I can’t see him. It’s the kind of look that makes me lock the bathroom door whenever I take a shower.

“He hasn’t done anything much yet–unless you count holding on too long after a hug–back when we did that–and coming up from behind and stroking my hair and ‘accidentally’ brushing his hard on against my butt in the kitchen–no big ticket items–yet. Know how it feels to have your Daddy want to fuck you?” Then she laughed, it was an ironic, cynical laugh that should never come out of a sixteen-year-old’s mouth. “Sorry about that, boss, I guess your old man kinda sorta fucked you over pretty good atop Calvary Hill.

“Here’s another big secret–one which would put me at the center of a fucking prayer circle if it gets out. I’m a virgin–that isn’t the secret, by the way–I don’t like guys, I want girls, the way my father wants me. That’s the killer part. Round here homos are sick in the head and need to be saved.”

For a moment, tears threatened to well in Claire’s eyes. But she pushed that mood aside. “I don’t have anybody to talk to about any of this,” she said, her voice small and lost. “Except Aunt Rae, Mama’s big sister–but she lives in the city and never comes round because she and my father hate each other’s guts. Still, I think she’d understand, ‘All you gotta do is call,’ she has told me on social more than once. She seems to know but is waiting for me to say it…Maybe, maybe not. Maybe wishful thinking.”

Claire reached for the gun, this time without hesitation. She kept it pointed at the ground as she had been taught, years ago when the world was safe and Wormwood but a Biblical metaphor. “Trout was right about one thing, even though he had meant it the wrong way,” she said. “He said that you’ve got to take control of your relationship with you, the Lord. Of course he had meant that in the ass-kissy way people speak to you and God around here. Gotta think good thoughts around Jesus or else, sort of thing.”

Claire fell silent, her head bowed for a long moment. She saw the shadow of an overhead circling crow on the ground. It was a distorted and sickening shadow, as were all caused by Wormwood.

Then with startling clarity the moment arrived. Claire whirled the revolver and fired and vaporized the graven image of Jesus Christ in one motion. The gunshot echoed throughout the valley, and when it died out it was replaced by Claire’s joyous laughter.

“OH!!! OH MY GOD!!! YOU BLEW UP REAL GOOD, JESUS, REAL GOOD!!!” Claire yelled between body shaking spasms of laughter. The “blew up real good” thing was something her father used to say back when things were good. Claire had always assumed that he had got it off one old time TV show or another.

She managed to return the weapon to its case and tucked it in. Then she fell to her knees laughing, tears streaming down her cheeks. Upon composing herself to some degree, she went to the stump and found that the chipped base had somehow remained in place, but nothing else. She imagined that the base must have become airborne and landed where it had been before. Instead of interpreting that as an omen, Claire began to laugh even harder. When she finally gathered herself, she figured that she owed the departed Lord an explanation.

“I had to break up with you, Jesus,” she said. “Sorry I made it sound like we were playing Russian roulette, but I figured I owed you that for all the shit you’ve me through. The dum-dum was in the breech, right where I placed it while in the house. To be fair, I did think about turning it on myself, but I got over that when I realized that the only part of this situation that is my fault is letting it continue without my trying to do anything about it.”

“But maybe you’ll rate a second chance down the line,” she said. “Got me a bus ticket to the city–1492, you know? Aunt Rae, right? If you really are, you’ll know where to find me.”