red writing hood link-up — core

Today, I’m linking up with Write on Edge and responding to the following prompt:

For this week, I’m giving you the word “Core.” You have 450 words to explore any meaning of the word in a work of creative non-fiction/memoir or fiction. Link up your responses on Friday’s post, and have fun!

Today, operating on the advice of a writer friend, I decided to delve into the annals of work I’ve previously written and dismissed.  “Time is your best editor,” he said.  Thus, I found a brief piece I wrote in a writing workshop in 1998 — a lifetime ago — and edited it a bit to meet the prompt’s word count guidelines.  I chose this piece because it is about love and death; “core” if ever I heard it.  Anyway, I welcome your feedback — it may be destined for the trash pile or it may take on another life… so to speak.  Either way, it’s fine.

*****

When Sheila first learned of Marco’s plans, she calmly picked up near-lying scissors (previously sharpened for some chicken breasts she’d planned to cut up for dinner) and slit her wrists the good way – no horizontal ineffectuality across white flesh, no scars she’d be telling stories about in group therapy at the state hospital, but long and gaping slashes from wrist to elbow.  Smiling at her work, she crawled into the bathtub, ran the water, and died with thoughts wiling through her head.

On the brink of death we have visions, the mystics say.  On the edge of a new reality we can see what’s to come or what has passed.  Life’s film reel is a notion that everyone, including Sheila, has accepted and envisioned.  Still, Sheila wondered why anyone would want to see a life, lived probably half-blind, lived in monochrome and fear, as a movie.  Boring, she’d thought.  Indeed, in the early days of their courtship, lying damp in their afternoon bed, she remembered one of those dreamy, love-drunk conversations she’d shared with Marco.  He’d said, “I’ll see the future, babe,” stroking heavily the small of her back, his graying hair dark at the temples.  Back then, she doubted his words.

Now, looking towards death in the peeling-painted bathroom of this studio never shared with Marco, Sheila saw the future.  It was clear-clawed, scratching her temples in unanticipated pain.  She saw the purpling dusk along Fourth Street, steam rising up from asphalt toward Marco’s new-shined shoes.  Steam bathed the cuffs of his trousers in iridescence and then, like a blow to the head, she saw Laura in his arms wearing a wide-brimmed hat.  They were dancing, Marco and his wife, just as Sheila had been told they would; dancing though she was dead, as if she’d never been there at all.  Sure, Sheila’s friends always told her, lips pursed, “Girl, he’s never going to leave that wife!”  But Marco’s cool face against her knee, his earnest eyes repeating, “I love you.  Laura and me… we’re over” was enough to keep her head on crooked.

She saw the future: their smiles and dancing shoulders, the hat, Fourth Street.  Maybe a band was playing, but Sheila couldn’t hear it.  Though twilight faded, the couple whirled unsteadily.  Sheila could clearly make out a shape – one red-heeled pump, wet-glossed and still, attached to a leg in nude-tan panty hose.  Sliding her eyes admiringly up the leg, a dress she’d once loved – red satin, evening, sleeveless to the pale-fleshed tree limb arms.  Shrouded by the steam, her corpse unmistakable: “I’m never coming back.”

*****

Sometimes the wind blows and, POOF, it’s 1998.  Other times, there’s no looking forward or back, so entrenched are you in the richness of the moment.  I don’t know where you are today, but I hope you are fully alive.  Thanks, as always, for showing up.