Interesting choice....

for FX and the BBC to make "A Christmas Carol" that is more... naturalistic.(Can't quite say "realistic" with the ghosts and all, but I didn't resent Tiny Tim in this one, either.) Much more grounded in time and space and less snow-globe-looking(although I have, at times, enjoyed the pretty, musical, George C. Scott version and some of the parodies, such as "Scrooged"

When I take a contrarian view...

it's amazing how powerful people treat me like I am.

In A Slightly Different Form...(part 3)

When the ride ended, she was lifted again. The kid slid her body onto a soft pile of clothing among the boxes in the garage. He pulled an old coat over the top, creating a cave that emanated the sweetness of old ladies who frequently powdered themselves—a light rose motif that played ironically well in the deep recesses of Rainbow’s ancestral brain. The pizza kid lifted her head to help her lap water from a hubcap. He broke bits of pepperoni and crust into bite-sized pieces and left them where her tongue could reach them. Much later, she heard him practicing his orations like songs. Like monks chanting in the distance, they were a comfort.

Soon, I knew everyone would be going back to their lives on this sunny Saturday. I could hear the chanting was beginning to break up, but I could hear some leftover “Ollie, Ollie, oxen free,” in the background. From her nest, Rainbow smiled in her sleep, despite her pink cheeks and sweaty forehead. I did what I always did to prolong human contact: asked questions.  “What do you believe?’ I asked, in a library voice, even though it seemed the spiritualist could not be disturbed. As someone who’d always slept restlessly, I watched with a pang of envy.

“About her?” He reminded me of one of Apatow’s goofy buddies, but in a sweet-enough way that I bit back the smart remark, say, “No, about the climate crisis!” that my brain, let alone my mouth, hadn’t started forming. I noticed his eyes had warm hazel glints. I reminded myself that I couldn’t just climb into someone else’s life, not unless I could rouse the half-formed characters on my hard drive at home.  Tony warmed to being consulted and rubbed his chin thoughtfully.  ” Now, I’m no scientist, but it seems to me that nobody ever went wrong backing up his girlfriend. Right? If she thinks she’s magic, then fine…she’s magics to me.”

Damn, that did it.  My vision swam in front of me as my eyes flooded and I was suddenly grateful I didn’t have to account for my softness in print, though I stopped short of calling it a weakness, as I imagined an editor might if it saw print. Rather than fish my handkerchief out of my stuffed bag, I wiped my eyes with a brown paper napkin that smelled like pizza. I bit my lip, snuffled and shuddered, reminding myself of my last day at the newsroom the month before. I’d injured my lip biting it so I wouldn’t howl like a dog at what still felt like the loss of my life. I hadn’t even unpacked the box from my desk, aside from moving the coleus cutting in a bottle I’d brought to brighten the place and water it. Putting the photos and knickknacks back in my place made it all seem too real and too obvious that I wasn’t a fresh-faced graduate “ going places”, though I told myself I was saving time on moving to my next office, which, thankfully, I stopped short of calling my “next challenge” but I thought it once or twice.  At least, the plant was still doing well.

 I even told the same lie about the heat, just beginning then, and my allergies. There seemed to be a greater chance that Tony and his friends might have believed me, or maybe they were just nice. “I’m kind of a wreck,” I admitted.  “I lost my job and I don’t know what to do next.  This is the first day in a week that I haven’t worn something with a drawstring in it.” Maybe young men did not understand how far of a fall that was.  Maybe Rainbow would.  Tony wet a napkin and dabbed it on her face, but she finally stirred when the sun went behind a cloud.

“it will be okay,” Tony said, as I babbled some more about allergies and give him his second unneeded earful of the afternoon.  I only believed him for a moment, but suddenly it seemed like enough. “If it’s not better by Monday, I’ll make a doctor’s appointment.” I may not be able to commit to much more than a vanishing writing style, but I held my allergic schtick like a lost lover.   I was just about to tell myself to shut up and worried I had spoken, when something clapped me on the back so hard, I might have died if I still chewed gum like in college.

“Hey,” Andrea said.  “I thought that was you…getting everything you need?” One day I hoped she would have learned her own strength.  It would leave a more feminine impression than the blouse she wore with the unnatural nosegays of blue flowers printed on a black background and frilly details on the sleeves. She looked past Tony in his olive-green shirt and pizza nametag like he wasn’t there.  I pretended I had telepathy and tried to tell him not to say anything as she offered him a polite hello devoid of interest. I didn’t have powers, I felt sure, but something worked because Tony just kept cleaning up, quietly and surprisingly efficiently. I felt as proud as if I’d taught him to read, but all the same I waited until he went off to chase down some litter before I replied.

“I’m not working today,” I said, lightly, like a woman used to enjoying life. “You know freelancing, though…it never stops. You have to take your breaks when you can. “I was completely bored by my own triteness. I might as well have asked her about her haircut, though she’d worn the same severe and possibly dyed bob since we were competitive as wide-eyed freshmen. I hated that she’d thought she’d won since she’d switched from print to broadcast. Probably for some other reasons, too, though life had not helped matters by making sure I saw her often when I felt at my worst. I patted my hair and pretended that I beautified something.

“Yeah, I heard about The Gazette…tough break.” Maybe she was sincere, but I never trusted it so I noted her spreading pit-stains with a tiny satisfaction.  We exchanged industry horror stories/ news of classmates for a while, before I noticed Rainbow waking up or coming to. She smiled and I got a sense for what she’d be like in happier times. “She’s not back yet, is she?” Young as she was, she was too old to sag with a Christmas-morning kind of disappointment so I kept my answer brief.  “Your sister? No.” I wondered what Andrea was thinking and said “Well,” and brushed my hands on my pants several times.   I couldn’t make my frenemy disappear.

“It’s going around,” I replied to Andrea, after perhaps a beat too long after Rainbow said “My vision felt so real!” For once I felt a flicker of irritation and had a sense of what it would be like befriending someone so impervious to time and space, even if I should be glad to have an excuse not to do the whole “It’s tough out there, but I’m strong,” song and dance with a former(current?) rival.

                                     Andrea tucked a piece of hair behind her ear and said “I hate it when that happens!” in a voice so loaded with snark it felt like she’d elbowed me in the ribs.   It seemed hard to believe then, but I’d once found Andrea so hilarious that we even found stuff to laugh about during a “Reporting On Public Affairs” class that met at 8 AM on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, even without being part of the rowdy contingent that might have shown up altered from the night before. A few times, we sat in the hall to we could collect ourselves and think about the Corporation Commission or whatever serious project we sacrificed mornings to. Those times had not been significant in one way, yet I looked back on them fondly. Now, I wondered how much of that good-natured humor had been littered with potshots…there was some reason why I felt small around her at more at ease looking back over our relationship.

Rainbow and Tony both thanked me for coming and I felt like a kid at the end of an animated movie when the lights came up, knowing I had to let our shared imaginary world go, but not wanting to. Rainbow’s hand was clammy as she shook mine. “Good luck finding your sister,” I said. Andrea snorted. “You don’t believe all that nonsense, do you?” People were sure asking me that a lot lately and I didn’t have a good answer anymore. “I could ask you the same question.” I straightened up, hoping that good posture would help her not notice that my voice sounded tiny and the response itself had an “I’m rubber, you’re glue” quality at best.

Even as I said it, I knew it was a lie anyway.  Andrea was a cynic about everything except her charming ne-er-do-well father and all of the alcoholics she dated to recreate his unpredictable magic.  I wondered if she remembered how often she had confided in me in ladies ‘rooms about them and then decided she wouldn’t. “Me?” Andrea asked, with a laugh that was more like a brushoff.  “Nah, I’m just on the local freak beat.  Although it’s very sad about the sister of course.” She exaggerated a serious face and the hate in love/hate overwhelmed the old love. It was just a moment, but the clarity of my anger felt welcome. “I think you’re the one who needs to be careful.  Boundaries are so important when you’re…in distress.”

Consider the source, I reminded myself, then wondered if that thought ever calmed anyone.  “I’m not in distress. I have irons in the fire.” I wondered when I started sounding like my father and forced myself to think about what my “irons” really were. I could wear a tight green t-shirt and bartend at the Irish pub near my house…I could compete for jobs with people half my age as well as other laid-off reporters, or tutoring? Some irons.  I tried to look competent and maybe like I was going to put some samples together that very night, and then sort out my closet.

My frenemy had her own bull to sling.  “Y

Part Two

The guy I’d given my mini-sermon on public ritual reappeared and nodded at me in recognition, although definitely not acknowledgement of my half-assed wisdom.  He kissed the top of Rainbow’s head and said “My ears are burning, ladies. I hope there’s not a problem here,” almost at the same instant that I said “Missing people come back sometimes…you don’t know it was the last time.” I wanted to pat her shoulder, but I wasn’t a patter. It didn’t matter, though…she saved all her feeling for her boyfriend.   “Haven’t you done enough? I mean, for once. “That was mean.  If there were a spiritualists’ union, I’d have reported her for that, but Tony gave no sign that he heard but a pained flicker in his eyes. “I thought I told you to leave,” she said coldly.

He gestured across the lot and later I spotted a motorbike with pizza boxes tied onto it with bungee cords.  “I did, but your dad ordered pizza.  A lot of pizza.”  He smiled, but doused it in the face of Rainbow’s immobile silence.  “You know these people are hungry…” He pointed at me.  “She asked me about McDonald’s like an hour ago.” Part of me wanted to argue, but the sun was high in the sky and I was suddenly aware that all of the hollow feeling in my chest wasn’t from not knowing where to go next, nor a clean feeling from getting something of my chest. “Yeah, that’s right. I did. More about a tragedy that happened that he didn’t remember…” Nobody paid any attention, in a quick rebuke to the fantasy that I could make up for not having children by advising these people. I took the hint and shut my trap.  I moved aside so people could place more offerings. And they did. Figures of Lisa Simpson, Snoopy and Woodstock, and newer characters I didn’t know.  A few asked me if I knew the family, but nobody thought it was weird when I said I was in the neighborhood, even though I would have, in their place, perhaps.

Rainbow didn’t move.  “I don’t care… it makes me sick how he thinks he could just buy everyone.  Maybe she’s not even kidnapped at all.  Maybe my father sold her. He sure would take any trade-in he could get for me! You know I’m right, Tony.” She took off across the parking lot, not looking where she was going and threatening to send votives and plastic ponies flying as a rag doll smiled emptily up at us. I still couldn’t decide if the overall effect was touching or eerie, and for the thousandth time in a month, decided not to decide. It was one thing I’d shocked myself by becoming good at in my time off, though I still got through a few chapters of neglected Great Books before turning on the TV or pulling up something online to fill the condo with voices.

 Tony followed, his big-footed, puppyish gait more respectful of the displays than  I might have predicted “Ramona…I mean, Rainbow, it was your idea to have a ritual tonight and you told me yourself you can’t do that on an empty stomach…just have a few bites..” He grabbed a piece of pizza and broke it into bites with his big hand.  She pushed him away twice, before finally eating a bite or two, as if she were taking a pill, or granting a huge favor.  “I suppose you can stay for the ritual. Make yourself useful, since you are part of the reason, we’re all here right now.” Love may have been blind for a flamingo man like Tony, but it wasn’t deaf. On some level, it cheered me to see him stand up for himself. “What makes you say that?”

“If you hadn’t been there that night…maybe I’d have been on guard,” she said, so softly, only years as a seasoned eavesdropper made me catch it.  The black woman from earlier was at my elbow. She nodded a greeting, reminding me of my cat, not seeming to mind that I was one of the oldest people present. “The microphones and stuff are here,” she told Rainbow.  “Are you okay to set up now?” There was a silence that felt like indecision as the little spiritualist clutched shedding pages torn from a spiral notebook. As she flipped through, I could see that her knuckles were white and she cursed under her breath. I decided to be the helpful stranger for her like she had been for me, but as my lips shaped something like “problem?” or “can I help?” Tony came so close that I could almost smell the combination of pizza spices and sweat.  “On-guard? What does that mean?’ he demanded.  “You weigh eighty pounds…do you know karate as well as magic?”

He’d made her smile, but she struggled to hide it by lifting her chin defiantly.  “I weigh a hundred and three pounds, but I always thought I’d have untold strength in a crisis…that I’d have all kinds of buried wisdom to connect with…maybe adrenaline…you know, mothers lift their cars of babies…” she looked at the sheets of paper, written in a wild scrawl with lots of cross-outs. “I can’t use these rituals, either. They’re all about death. I know that as time goes on… well, I know certain things. But I can’t face it now.”

 Tony used his own latest-model phone to scroll through some Wiccan sites. “You can do this,” he offered. “Just stand next to the pictures of Kelli and invite her to be with us…it would be sick if she showed up, but nobody is really expecting that—like, nobody plans to lift a truck off their kid, Rain. Like a lot of things, it happens or it doesn’t. “Rainbow thrust aside the sheets of paper and I put them in my purse. I don’t know why I wanted them; I hadn’t come as a professional witness, just as an amateur one, but sometimes even a handwritten page provided a buffer between me and the world that I found myself craving.  Even the crackle as my purse settled comforted me. Rainbow finally ascended the makeshift podium and made a joke about “Magic People Time” which I wasn’t sure was a thing, but once the feedback stopped from her putting her face too close to the microphone, the crowd laughed so maybe it was.

 There was an expectant rumble from the young crowd and I finally saw some broadcast folks I knew: Andrea Something with her professional-looking bob and amateur-looking camera crew.  I found myself hoping that nobody talked. I wanted to say something, but Rainbow did first. “I had something else prepared today, but on closer reflection, that is a death ritual, and I haven’t given up hope that Kelli is alive. I’d like to say I miss her and I want her to come home. Before my grandma died a few years ago, we played a lot of games, and in some of the ones with hiding, there was a thing that she taught me to say. “Ollie, Olly, oxen free…come out come out wherever you are!” There are few positive things I will remember as well as that sea of young voices, coming from people with tears on their cheeks, calling out that childhood chant.   I joined in, as if I were still hopeful and not self-conscious, not even wondering what my voice sounded like. For a moment, I think we all waited, as if there were some literal magic that would put Kelli here in front of us.  It felt great not to know better, but in the end, there were no miracles here. At least at that precise, camera-ready instant, we were all disappointed. I wrote some notes in pink ink and mingled them with Rainbow’s “Four Elements” rituals. In a ridiculous burst of positive thinking, I was convinced that mingling my half-formed thoughts with all that ancient wisdom would protect Kelli Watson, at least for that day. Later on, I was grateful that the writing’s amulet status was not based on the article I was able to write from my impressions, because I couldn’t read very much of my

Not a Fiction Contest Winner, So I'll Post Part of it...

Not bad for being based on someone else's prompt...

Beyond the cracked sidewalk, and the telephone pole with layers of flyers in a rainbow of colors, and the patch of dry brown grass there stood a ten-foot high concrete block wall, caked with dozens of coats of paint. There was a small shrine at the foot of it, with burnt out candles and dead flowers and a few soggy teddy bears. One word of graffiti filled the wall, red letters on a gold background: Rejoice!

“When did we start doing this?” I asked as if someone paid me to wonder why Americans were so foolish.  “At some point when I was in middle school, we just started leaving physical tributes and nobody told me!” I went on, citing some tragedies I remembered mostly for the makeshift memorials that had sprung up.  Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I could feel the crowd shifting away from me the way my friends and family were beginning to when I answered “How’s the job search going?” honestly. Nobody wanted to pay anything, that’s how it was going, but even in the grip of what was becoming an obsession, I knew I couldn’t talk about it here. Maybe that escape from my own problems even more than the hopes of cotton candy from a street carnival, was what brought me out here today. Also, I didn’t want to think about the almost-famous site I’d had a virtual interview with and how they wanted to take my ten best ideas without so much as an acknowledgement.  I wasn’t exactly proud that I’d faked a technical issue and logged off instead of continuing with the sample pitch, but I’d do it again if I had to.  Still, I wondered if the story was circulating in our small world, making the nibbles even smaller than they might be.  Then I blushed because it was sure to help my odds declaiming like a street-corner crazy person.   The wisdom, if that’s what it was, would keep. There were a few older cops providing some security, which I took comfort in, not because I thought something ugly would happen, but because we could be the only people in this crowd old enough to not have Instagram accounts.  

I stood next to a gangly guy with a nose-ring who wasn’t born when I was in middle school. Time was passing faster and I didn’t want to think about it, for me or for missing ten-year-old Kelli Watson, whom the shrine commemorated. Days slipping past were dangerous for her, but merely slightly tragic for me.  Still, I felt maybe neither of us could come back to what she had been, though I hoped I was wrong.  That was another thought I couldn’t share on the message boards and social networking groups where formerly hard-bitten city editors shared affirmations and yoga poses. I sighed.  Even without my experiencing real tragedy, it still seemed as though every day had been worse than the day before. My heart felt heavy as I took refuge in people-watching the young, milling crowds.  At least, these people were more interesting than the same old Saturday afternoon movies with their rivers of commercials. Plenty of piercings and tattoos were on display, but it still seemed like a well-behaved group

“You need to talk to Rainbow,” a short black woman with a voice like melted ice cream told me.  “She’s a priestess.” She waited for me to be impressed, while I reminded myself I was not reporting and didn’t have to be cynical or track down the kinds of parents who might put “Rainbow” on a birth certificate. I could stay or I could go, live this experience or filter it out. The freedom felt staggering; the way kids imagine being an adult.  Eventually, I’d know better, the way I had then, but for now, it seemed great to ask questions without checking spellings or vital statistics.  So, why wasn’t I chattering away like the curious preteen that had written a neighborhood paper the summer she was ten? Kelli’s picture reminded me of some of mine, but it wasn’t until days after that I permitted myself to notice the resemblance, which humbled me and made me feel that I was already at a funeral. It felt like one, too, as I had no offering, except for a peppermint I’d gotten from an Italian restaurant the night before. I took it out of my purse and laid it next to one of the dolls as reverently as someone might move a Communion wafer, but it only sat on the ground for a moment before it was crunched by a neighbor pushing a small child in a stroller.   I took the tiny defeat as another lesson in not being something I wasn’t.

I had nothing to do that Saturday but console my journalist friends through another round of layoffs, and I wished more than anything I were writing instead, but when I tried for myself the words wouldn’t come. I wondered if I would have felt better or worse during those breaks in city council meetings, daydreaming of literary success, if I’d imagined that, instead of a muse, my talent came from a coin-operated vending machine, another depressing thought to bury. Maybe suppression, or trying to look forward on pain of being punished for negative thoughts, was killing my creative vision.

Whether she had magic or not, Rainbow was tiny. And while her hair had enough shades in it to make the name a natural, she looked as wholesome as the little sister on a sitcom, complete with her tiny freckled nose. “You were looking for me?” she asked in a husky adult voice that seemed not to match her fairy’s body.

I couldn’t speak so it was lucky her friend came back.  “I told her to find you, but I don’t think she believes…I think we are all just entertainment to her.” If it hadn’t been a little bit true, I’d have something in response but flaming cheeks, I was sure of it, but in a moment, I regained composure. “Right now,” I explained, looking up and feeling like I was catching Kelli’s eye in the posters of her.  “I don’t know what to believe.” 

Rainbow quoted something, trying to make her voice mysterious as the followers fell silent, but then she said “I can’t do this anymore, I just feel too guilty.  Kelli is my sister and she’d be with us right now if I’d been the good babysitter I know how to be. I was mean to her…that last day. She wanted to play a game on my phone and I wouldn’t let her.  Instead, I got mad, threw my phone, and cracked the screen.” She showed me the phone and the screen did have a spiderweb of cracks in the corner.

“All we can do is our best,” I counseled, wondering why I couldn’t take my own advice. I wondered if I overstepped, but was rewarded with Rainbow’s tremulous-yet-bright smile.  I could feel the energy of the crowd warming toward me and it felt better than my bylines or my collegiate journalism award. “All the same,” I suggested, trying to keep my tone casual. “If you end up talking to a reporter about this…which I wouldn’t advise by the way.  Above your pay grade, you know?” I tried to laugh, but it sounded crazy in my head.  “I wouldn’t tell them about that.” They were still my colleagues, even if I never got another reporting gig again, but that’s why I knew how much they liked having characters their viewers and readers could follow, and maybe even learn to love and hate, in some realm beyond facts. I wasn’t sure if there was any chance for a rebellious street-corner “priestess” to be a hero, but if she looked petty, there was a pretty big shot at “Brat we love to hate,” and I hated to see that.

“If you were right, and I didn’t do anything wrong, why shouldn’t I say anything? But it gets worse…maybe I could have saved her, if Tony and I weren’t back in my step monster’s dressing room…” She blushed like a gardenia and looked no older than thirteen, but she’d just had her eighteenth birthday “doing stuff. I really lost touch with my Athena side that night.” Part of me just wanted to follow Rainbow around with a signboard that said “Don’t say anything,” but I’d never laid much claim to critiques from the Goddess of Wisdom.  “Happens to the best of us,” I lied. It hadn’t. My relationships so far had been as dependable and lacking in romance as the plain little Timex ticking away the unemployed hours on my wrist. Friends, mostly, not looking for anything complicated, but not wanting to go home alone.  It could be sloppy at times, but not messy. What a bad