Bourbon. Shannon Lee
Dedication
I dedicate this little book to my childhood self.
You taught me the bravery of daring to love life even when
circumstances are difficult and unkind.
Keep inspiring me with your passionate spirit
and I will forever provide you with a voice.
~~~
~~~
Inspiration is the effect, not the cause.
~~~
Peaches
If death is inevitable, then the great end really isn’t as big a deal as everyone makes it out to be. That being said, some of the changes are irksome. For example, it’s difficult to find fruit that isn’t rotted through at the core. It’s broken-heart-disease, Mama used to say. As if fruit have a heart.
“Do you have a heart, Gemma?”
“Of course I do, Mama, you know it. What’s that gotta do with the rotten fruit?”
“Everything in life has a heart, baby. Don’t go ‘round thinking humans have the monopoly on living.”
I watch Mama slice into a peach with a dull kitchen knife, meticulously moving around the rotting pit while harvesting small bits of flesh suitable for eating. Juice drips down through her fingers and lazily puddles onto the broken, peeling steps of our front porch. I note that there is something striking in the quiet grace of her amongst all that decay, something ethereal, something I know will continue on long after everything has gone.
“Don’t call me baby. I’m fifteen Mama. Christ, I hate when you do that.”
I stand up and away from her indignantly, afraid to take in too much of her affections. For all I know her kindness might be contagious. She says nothing more as I step ‘round her and rocket myself down our dirt driveway in a storm of inconsolable rage. We have an unspoken agreement that so long as I am home for supper, on time, and in a respectable mood, that she will not ask after my whereabouts. Whether she knows what I do with my time concerns me not.
I turn my head back as I near the edge of our property line to look at her. She is sitting low down on the step, watching me with complete love, total faith. Why must she be so good?
It wasn’t long after the fruit started rotting that the animals got sick. Not a few select weak species - not a dog here in this town, and a cat in that there other town - all the land animals. People spend a lot of time trying to understand why, but no one can figure it out for certain. As if it matters. Stupid people.
Mama says the world started changing beyond doubt when she was in grade school. She said she felt the wind change direction, that it came straight up from the ground and worked its way furiously up and up, fighting to breathe and escape. On Sundays when I was younger she would drive us in the truck out of town to a high mountain valley to stretch our arms out wide underneath oceans of open sky so bright and blue it hurt my eyes. Mama would spin us until we felt nauseous. I knew Mama could read the wind. She had a way of making me think she was capable of mighty magic in the way she would talk to me with her voice of milk and honey, “It’s not a small change that’s coming my girl, it’s a big change. The kind the Universe orchestrates for thousands of years.”
Bewitched by my mother’s endearing eccentricities, I’d show up Monday morning’s at school with a head full of fairie dust and ask my friends if they wanted to spin in the wind, “Gemma don’t be retarded.”
~~~
I cannot remember for the life of me how I met Frankel. What I do recall is that my mother told me he emitted an energy of vengeance, which admittedly inspired me to seek him out. “Watch the company you keep, Gemma.”
“You don’t keep no company, Mama.”
“I am my own company. The best kind.”
Mama and I had gone into town to trade for turnips one evening following a day wrought with low rolling thunderstorms that spit fat flakes of translucent blue snow. Frankel had been detained in an abandoned parking lot with his face down on the hood of an undercover LEO sedan, hands cuffed behind his back. People were passing by, sticking their noses up in the air, pretending he wasn’t the kid they had abandoned after his mother died and his father fell so far into depression that he’d forget to trade for food, or care for Frankel.
“Well what do you expect? The boy is not right in the head, hasn’t had care or attention. Can’t blame him of course, but who can possibly afford to take care of him now?” They’d say.
Frankel and I locked eyes as I walked by that day; his were wide and stretched open in a way that looked like he never slept, like he didn’t know the peace of rest. As I said, I don’t recall when after that day we first spoke, but the result of it all was a swift and certain connection, like an exclamation point at the end of a sentence about destiny composed with absolute confidence.
Frankel is the most beautiful human being I ever want to know. Sometimes having only one truly beautiful person to care about is all you need to survive in this life. I don’t understand what I feel for Frankel when I use my mind to contemplate him. Moreso, I can feel my ache for him tingling up through my flesh. It is a simple desire - touch me, I will touch you back. Simple, uncomplicated. Except that it is because he isn’t interested. “Pleasure isn’t important right now, Gemma.”
Seems to me pleasure should always be important.
We started to meet every other day last year at high noon on the southernmost point of the bay to look for sea animals off the coast. Unlike land animals, ocean life is prospering, mainly because they are feasting on the bodies of people that walk into the sea. Lonely souls, unequipped in one fashion or another to deal with the great end. At first it was one or two people, somewhere distant, that sent a statement on the radio wires blabbing they wanted to have control over their personal exits - wouldn’t you know it caught on like wildfire, and people started walking into the sea with their families. There have been times when the wind is soft and sleepy, and the night is heavy with silence, when I can hear the sound of small children screaming, and elders weeping.
In the wicked hot days of the Indian summer, Frankel and I stumbled across a small hidden cove looking for shade. We found several dead bodies of children on the beach of that cove. Wave-walking children. All ages of them. Bizarre as it may be, the bodies were posthumously untouched. No mangled limbs, no evidence of sharks and parasites, they were just… dead. We returned several days later to find more bodies, new bodies, the previous ones having been swallowed by something mysterious and unknown. “Do you think we should tell somebody?”
“No Gemma. There are few small mysteries left.”
“You sound dead already.”
I ventured to the cove on my own, at random times, looking for patterns to the apparitions of the untouched dead bodies. I like patterns. When I was real young Mama said I would make patterns with silverware. Fascinated, she started leaving piles around the house with different themes: clothes, colors, blocks, fabrics, and I would create patterns with her offerings in each room of the house. “Most folks thought you were touched in the head.”
“Well, am I?”
“Likely we both are.”
I recorded the days and times of my visits to the bay with the number of bodies, along with any other significant observations that might give me pause. For the first several months I couldn’t figure on a pattern, hell, I couldn’t even discern how the sea was coughing up the bodies. It eventually occurred to me that I had only ever visited the cove during the day, so I started sneaking out at night. I’d take my leave for bed earlier than normal, telling Mama that I must be growing and needed more rest. She seemed pacified, and I thought I had her fixed, until I came home before dawn one morn to find her sitting in my room with a cup of hot tea held out for me. “What’s the story, my girl?”
“You won’t believe me, Mama.”
Visiting