Stephanie Online

Conversations with a Flame

She held the match to the candle and waited. Slowly the wick caught and flared up, sucking and wavering, burning her fingers. She dropped the match and stamped on it with bare feet. She looked into the flame.

"He's gone," she told it.

It puffed and stretched.

"When will I see him again? When will I hear from him? He won't write to me, he doesn't know I exist. I'll never find out what becomes of him, and I can't stand it. Forever. He's gone forever now."

"Don't tell me about it," the flame said in a dry, light, crackling voice. It darted like a snake's tongue.

"I have to tell somebody. "I've never loved anyone before, an dhe doesn't even know I love him and he's going away. Oh God, what can I do?"

Happiness

All the mourners had left. The casket stood in obstinate, definite silence, like a shut-in turtle, not giving anything of itself. Tiny lacy patterns swirled in silver paint around the bottom and the top rim, and the black wood shone. In Marcia's brown eyes the room blurred and dulled, and she half tripped down the two steps into the parlor. She drew a breath to avoid sobbing aloud, walking slowly toward the black box. She carried flowers, a bunch of hovering baby's breath; and as she came close, she drew up the long, badly fitting dress to her knees, kneeling on white tile. Her eyes would not lift from the floor. She felt she must say something to her mother, say anything, pretend for a moment that she was alive again. Too much weight, Marcia thought, all at once, I can't take it all at once, I can't, mom, I need one more minute of you, I didn't have long enough, let me tell you something. You don't have to talk back, just pretend you're listening, let me sit you up and talk like you can hear me. I want to tell you what I did in school, what I want for supper, what my teacher said, and that I can't take it all at once, it's too much.

The Magic Flute Player

"You sure you want to hear this story?" the old man asked, smiling at the young children sitting near him. They giggled and nodded, fidgeting in anticipation.

"Might give you nightmares, this one. 'S about dragons!" The children begged him to go on, to tell the story. He sat back, relaxed, and began.

The Talking Oak

"That Louisa's really strange."

"You're telling me! I don't know how Anne can like her. And when she looks at you ..."

"What?"

"She hasn't done it to you yet?"

"What? What?"

Mary was getting a little irritated by this time.

"When you make her mad, she looks at you ... her eyes get all bright, and afterward something happens. Like I bumped into her in the hall. I said 'excuse me' but she looked at me, her eyes all bright and sort of yellow and I hadn't walked ten steps before my books fell. That isn't all. She's done other things."

See No Evil

On Friday Nicole's conscience left her and she was invisible. She was quite surprised by this, although she had never taken very good care of her conscience. She called after it to explain but all it said when it turned to her, thin and shining, was, "You are free now."

Marie

A quiet smile moved across Ellen's pale lips. She stood, hips resting against the cupboard, slicing a yellow onion on the counter. At each slice a tiny spray of oily onion juice misted upwards. Translucent concentric rings of onion lay on the chopping board, leaning on each other.

As she cut the last slice from the papery yellow skin she was blinking frantically; she stepped back and rinsed off her hands under the kitchen faucet. She was remembering the look on Jay Leed's face when he passed by their room in the teachers' dorm. She and Cal had been given the octagonal room in the center of the second floor and they had painted each wall a different color. Jane, who was just learning to talk, was delighted.

"Jane, this is red." And Ellen would point to the red wall.

"Red, ed!!" Jane would say gleefully, sticking out her belly.

Construction paper cut-outs of the alphabet were Scotch-taped to the walls, Mother Goose illustrations, magazine pages, origami birds with their wings extended, pictures of whales and posters showing the plants of the solar system in their repetitive journeys through starry blackness. Jay Leed, the headmaster of the boarding school, had peered in at the chaos, his face stuck for a moment in appalled indecision, shook his head and walked on. Twenty years later the memory still made Ellen smile a private smile of mischief.

She dried her hands on the faded dishtowel, feeling her swollen knuckles. Arthritis at forty-five. In the old days she had had suchlovely fingers, long, thin and delicate, bare of rings, fingernails unpainted and cut close like a man's. Clasping her hands, she had felt beautiful.

The End of a Dream

Awareness crept under Zee's eyelids. Perhaps also it came through her nose and ears. She sighed deeply, stretched out her legs, and lay with one hand across her face, fingers spread through light brown hair.

World, world, she thought, oh, I just had a dream about you. Sleepily she opened an eye that lay under a finger and saw a hazy shape across her vision. The finger, fuzzy around the edges, slid off her face and Zee opened the other eye. Something was different about the color of her room, the shade of the ceiling, or the lighting, and Zee thought for a second that she might be sleeping at someone else's house. She propped herself up on both elbows.

Dizziness swept up through her spine and sprayed at the backs of her eyes, hit the top of her skull and rained down again, turning everything dark for a second, leaving trails of fuzz behind. Snails' trails, Zee thought absently, blinking them away. Her eyes cleared and she looked.

Strange, she thought, my first dream ever to come true.

Iridescence

Iridescence is in the feathers of a starling, is on an old penny, on the frosting of a lightbulb, soap bubbles, puddles of rain on black tar, fingerprints on a crystal vase, powder on moth wings. Rare occurrence in a dramatic world, the subtlety of shifting blues and greens, a swirl that changes with your breath across a dome of water stretched through air. The eyes of a fly, fractured into geometric specks, like atoms of a molecule, are iridescent, and never close. Ringed snake scales become green and red above the black, iridescent. The back of a flea, the humped brown shell around a universe of hairy mouths and legs, the oily smooth body designed for flight through air, head down, across furless space ...

A Story About Drugs

Across the street in the phone booth surrounded by a vibrant smell of piss I punch the numbers, "uno medio," I tell him in pidgin Spanish and he sends out the runner, brown kid no more than nine with eyes like a rabbit, I eyeball the block and cop the half and get back on the bus sweating but it's all clear, it's another day of freedom.

City city. All of downtown rising surreal around me, the city is my box of chocolate, squares of chocolate sprinkled with windows, dribbled with columns, long caramels down by the water, I want to open my mouth over the city and swallow it whole but it's already inside of me - at night all night I feel it like constellations in my bones. The bus lurches down Haight Street through the Filmore, the street signs a song of names as familiar as my fingers, Filmore, Steiner, Pierce, Scott and in a grey mist with whispers of sun, black children chase cats, orange workmen stand by vats of evil smelling tar, paint peels everywhere, Do not park in driveway sign, an incredible tattered woman in an army blanket, three punks skateboarding through traffic like crumpled Christmas wrappers blowing.

Sergio and I nodding out in Buena Vista Park can see over the web of bus cables over the houses the drift of fog rolling and breathing, Eugene a street nut passes down the clover hill giving us a snot symphony all the sounds that can be made with mucus, and the turning earth lies under me like a lover, mysterious and infinite and precious, waiting for me.

The Voice of Conscience

Mr. Berry reclined in his chair behind his desk. It was one of those metal chairs with a lot of padding and a base that allowed the seat to swivel and lean backward. He had fought with the company over getting it, and every time he sat down, the padding yielded with a self-congratulatory sigh of air escaping through stitching holes in the vinyl.

Here I am, he thought.

Mr. Berry tapped the top of his varnished desk and smiled a slight smile. The new secretary had dusted it for him. Lori was her name.

I think there's something about me that attracts women, he thought, although I don't know what it could be. I'm just an ordinary good looking guy. The way she smiles when I come in, and those low-cut dresses, that perfume ....

He flicked on the answering machine.

"John Berry's office. Mr. Berry isn't in at the moment; at the tone, please leave your message and the number at which you can be reached. Thank you."

Yes, there's the tone.

"Hi, this is Alan Adams from the Westport Aluminum Siding Company with a recorded message of great interest to homeowners. If you own your own home, this is the time to take advantage of our special Spurce Up For Spring offer."

Mr. Berry wasn't listening to the round, hearty voice of Alan Adams. It was the kind of voice Mr. Berry had always wanted for his own, and when he heard it from someone else, he immediately closed his ears. Those people don't deserve to be listened to, he thought. He beeped the secretary.

"Yes, Mr. Berry?"

"Coffee, light, please, and when you get a chance would you make another copy of this? I want to change the sentence, umm ..." He ran his finger over the lines. "Because the annual income is subject to tourist ... OK, I'd like that to read, 'The annual income, being subject to the seasonality of the tourist trade, is,' etc."

"Very good, I'll change it for you."

She brought his coffee with a smile Mr. Berry liked to believe she saved for him. He smiled back, filling his lungs with air to make his chest broad, and patting the chair arms contentedly. She left, closing the door softly behind her.

***

Walter sat in the dark apartment and looked at the parrot.