One Woman’s Trash

When I was little, I was going to be a ballerina. This was a strange ambition for a five year old who could trip over both feet at the same time while standing still. As soon as that tragic fact dawned on me, I settled on the more attainable ambition of becoming a lion tamer. This, at least, seemed perfectly within my reach, since my cat always did exactly what I wanted her to – well, except when she balked at jumping through the lighted hoop. Which is just as well, since Mom didn’t exactly approve of my setting fire to her quilting frame. With the quilt in it.

In the aftermath of the fire-in-the-living-room incident and subsequent grounding, I’d regretfully dropped the lion taming ambition – probably good, since Fluffy wouldn’t come near me any more, though her fur did grow back – and with it all my hopes of a career in the performing arts.

A failure at the age of six, my ego crushed, I’d actually been weak enough to consider dad’s life-long ambition of having me grow up to become a private eye. Except that I wasn’t absolutely sure what a private eye was – it seemed to me you’d have to go around with your hands over your eyes to prevent anyone seeing them and...

Well, that also didn’t go well. And My Little Investigator’s Kit which Dad bought me, didn’t provide me with many clues. I spread the fingerprint powder over the cat, finger painted with the inking pad and used the magnifying lens to start a fire in the leaf pile in the backyard.

After the fire department had been by and we’d found Fluffy cowering under the azalea bushes at the far end, I thought that this private eye thing was by far too hazardous.

And this is how I never quite figured out what to be when I grew up.

Which probably explained why, at twenty nine years of age, I had parked at the edge of Goldport college campus and was rummaging through a dumpster.

Okay, it wasn’t exactly as dire as Mom had always said it would be. I wasn’t living on the streets. I still had all my teeth – even if there had been some doubt about that when I went flying from my bike at the age of eight, after riding down suicide hill with no hands – and I wasn’t looking for food.

Well, at least I wasn’t exactly looking for food, only for the stuff that allowed me to make a living. Because, after waffling through two years as an English major – until the words post modernism could put me to sleep like hypnotic suggestion – and a year as a teaching major – before I remembered another name for hell was school room full of kids – and a year in pre law, before I realized I just didn’t have the required forked tongue, I’d left college with a Mrs. degree.

And when that exploded in my face – worse than the quilting frame – I’d found myself as at a loss for what I wanted to do with my life as I had been at six, when my hopes of lion taming had been so cruelly dashed.

Only it no longer was a career a matter of keeping myself amused, or even of feeling I was a productive member of a society. No. My marriage with Alex – All-ex, completely ex, he couldn’t be more ex if I killed him, something I was tempted to do twice a week and four times on Sundays or whenever we had any interaction – Mahr while otherwise completely unproductive, had left me with a child.

Enoch – his father had chosen the name because he thought it sounded solid. I called him E because I hoped to save on therapy bills when he grew up -- had been one when his father and I got divorced. His primary interests in life had been attempting to stuff all his fingers in his mouth at once and finding ever more interesting bugs to eat.

He was still interested in gastronomic entomology at two and a half. But he didn’t look at all like All-ex – or like me, though he had the blond hair and blue eyes I’d had till three, before both had turned pitch black – and he showed some signs of, through some amazing genetic mutation, growing up to be someone worthwhile. Which would be thwarted if I let him starve to death or even – forbid the thought – if I allowed his father full custody.

My working retail would have supported us – sort of – but I’d have had to leave E with someone. Mom and Dad weren’t an option. They worked all day in Remembered Murder, the mystery bookstore they owned and where Fluffy – whom I believed remained alive on the hopes I’d die first – was store cat. And Fluffy started twitching whenever she saw me, or E.

This left me with the one skill I’d more or less inadvertently picked up while furnishing my first home. I’d taken a course in furniture restoration and refinishing at the community college. Back then I’d done it to fit furnishing a house within the scant budget All-ex would allot to it.

On my own -- after some experimentation -- I found that picking up old, beat up and abused furniture, refinishing it or fixing it or giving it a total make over, and selling it – under the business name of Daring Finds -- made just about enough money to keep me and E in three meals a day and a roof over our heads.

Said roof was rented and in an area of town that made my friend Ben cringe and the meals might run to pancakes a lot, but it beat the alternative. Homeless shelters struck me as a terrible place to take a kid who liked to sample bugs.

And so I was at the corner of the college, on a bright Saturday in late May, looking at a bulky green dumpster.

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I

One

I never wanted to go to space. Never wanted see the eerie glow of the Powerpods. Never wanted to visit Circum Terra. Never had any interest in discovering the truth about the darkships. You always get what you don’t ask for.

Which was why I woke up in the dark of shipnight, within the greater night of space in my father’s space cruiser.

Before full consciousness, I knew there was an intruder in my cabin. Once awake, I couldn’t figure out how I knew it. The air smelled as it always did on shipboard, as it had for the week I’d spent here – stale, with the odd tang given by the recycling.

The engines, below me, hummed steadily. We had just detached from Circum Terra – a maneuver that involved some effort, to avoid accidentally ramming the station or the ship. Shortly we’d be Earth bound, though slowing down and reentry let alone landing, for a ship this size, would take close to a week.

My head felt a little light, my stomach a little queasy, from the artificial grav. Yes, I know. Scientists say that’s impossible. They say artificial gravity is just like true gravity to the senses. You don’t feel a thing. They are wrong. Artificial grav always made me feel a little out of balance, like a couple of shots of whiskey on an empty stomach.

Even before waking fully, I’d tallied all this. There was nothing out of the ordinary. And yet there was a stranger in my cabin.

Years in reformatories, boarding schools and mental hospitals, had taught me that the feeling I woke up with was often the right one. Something had awakened me – a door closing, a step on the polished floor.

Now, why? Knowing the why determined how I dealt with it.

Three reasons that came to mind immediately. Theft, rape, murder.

Father’s Daughter

You Might Be A Writer If...

...you have knock-down, drag-out arguments with your significant other over verb tenses.

...you pay big bucks for a babysitter so you can go out on a date ... in order to have some time to plot a story.

...revelatory conversations that start with "That's it; I know exactly what to do with Lord Raven!" don't mean you're having an affair.

...you find nothing wrong with foregoing food, sleep and sanitary facilities for three days running in order to get those last three chapters done.

...you talk to walls on a regular basis, but only because your characters refuse to come out into the middle of the big, unprotected room where their enemies might make an attempt on their lives.

...you talk to yourself. Do not! Do too! Do not! Don't listen to him; he doesn't even know how to hold a sword properly!

... conversations that start, "Have you decided how to kill him yet?" don't indicate that you are about to become a felon.

... hearing that you have no clue isn't necessarily a personal remark.

... if a story isn’t accepted, happiness is a detailed personal rejection.

... and then you brag to all your friends about being rejected.

... your computer is three generations old, but your printer is a top of the line, twenty pages per minute model.

... you have to think to remember which of your friends are real, and which are characters in your stories.

... your characters have definite opinions about your friends, hairdos and sex life.

... while plotting a novel you drive your car across a median, barely avoid a stream of oncoming traffic, climb the berm, cross a parking lot, stop against a small tree, and don’t realize you’ve done anything out of the ordinary.

... You ever pumped a total stranger for details of his last illness, so you could use it in a book.

... Often have trouble remembering what day, week, month, year or century you live in.

... Are afraid to park a large car but routinely discuss the mechanics of space travel.

... you have definite opinions about the merits of historical personages so obscure no one else ever heard of them.

... Read Machiavelli’s The Prince on an interstate flight.

... Your four-year-old thinks "editor" is a bad swear word.

... in highschool you used to wander off from parties to research a plot point in the nearest library.

... your writing has ruined more than two serious relationships.

... Your prayers often involve a critique of the divine plot.

... Cleaning is what you do while suffering from the block. And only then.

... Some of the leftovers in your refrigerator have acquired life and are on the verge of sentience. You can’t wait to write about it.

... you have to be a writer, otherwise someone would realize you’re insane.

... you think coffee, donuts and pizza are a complete diet.

... when you were little, your main contribution to the playgroup was making up the "scripts" for playtime.

... your kids talk in hushed tones about your "coming down with a novel."

... Don’t know what the nearest crossroad to your house is, but can tell with certainty what type of carriage was used in 1456 in Wales.

... When a friend asks "what’s new" you give him a synopsis of your latest book.

... Have one or more times scared a late-night diner waitress with a conversation that started with: "now I need to figure out where to hide the body."

... A social life is another name for getting together with other writers and discussing plots.

... While being administered the last rites you think, "dang, I’m too woozy to remember this, and I need it for my mystery novel."

... Love to write, but hate every minute of the writing business.

The Fast And the Electrically Furious

We were thirty years old – and, in his case, a couple of months -- when I came to the sad conclusion that I would have to murder my friend Benedict Colm.

This was as sad as it was necessary, but there was no getting from the fact as my son, Enoch – whom I called E in an attempt to save him therapy bills as he got older – came speeding into the living room, atop Ben’s Christmas gift to him.

The gift was an electric toy motorcycle with a top speed of ten miles per hour, an acceleration that might seem impossible for a small boy to achieve in a home that was less than seventy feet in either direction, but which E managed, quite often.

I heard the horn blare a moment before E came riding in and, with the practice born of two weeks of terror, dove behind the sofa, while Ben, who stood square in the middle of the living room, his arms crossed on his chest, became an impromptu traffic circle.

E sped around him once, twice, then headed the other way, at an increased velocity.